Transcript of Why is it so hard to leave when they hurt you? Trauma Bonding, Coercive Control & Abusive Relationships | Solo Episode with Lisa Lacy New

Phoenix has bizarre crime.

The canals of Phoenix, Arizona are hunted by a serial killer.

People are like, well, are we safe? He's a sexual sadist.

2 grisly homicides. I know I didn't kill anyone. But solving these murders is just the beginning.

That can't be his first rodeo.

This is season 6 of American Nightmares: The Canal Murders. Coming soon, wherever you get your podcasts.

Welcome to Notes from the Edge, where we have the conversations we should have been having all along. We talk about the things that we're not talking about. I'm your host, Lisa Lacey, writer, trauma educator, executive advisor, and author of the upcoming memoir Notes from a Certified Madwoman. Welcome to the Edge.

The first time somebody told me I was trauma bonded, I was 40 years old and sitting in inpatient rehabilitation for what I thought was a slight drinking problem and a bad marriage. One of the women on my clinical team was a brilliant professional, calm, direct. She told me I was trauma bonded to my second husband. My response? I'm too smart for that. I can laugh at that sentence now because trauma bonding has nothing to do with intelligence. You can be educated, successful, capable, and self-aware in 100 areas of your life and still feel unable to walk away from a relationship that is hurting you. I know because I did it. It took me 3 years after that conversation in rehab to finally go completely no contact with my ex-husband. 3 years. I left more times than I could count on 2 hands. I would leave, swear I was done, get angry enough to believe I meant it. Then we would talk, we would decide to be friends, then we became friends with benefits. Proximity became hope, hope became confusion, and before long I was right back inside the same emotional machinery I had fought so hard to escape.

And then for me, the drinking followed. Every time I went back into that relationship, I moved closer to the version of myself I tried desperately to stop being. People looking from the outside ask logical questions. Why doesn't she just leave? Why does she not answer the phone? Why does she keep going back? And those questions make sense if you assume the relationship is operating only at the level of conscious choice. It isn't. Trauma bonding is not simply loving somebody who treats you badly. It is a powerful attachment that can develop when affection, fear, control, rejection, relief, and then reconciliation become all tangled together. The classic theory of traumatic bonding focuses on 2 things: a power imbalance and intermittent treatment. One person is increasingly controlling the emotional climate while kindness, affection, remorse, or connection arrive unpredictably between periods of mistreatment. And that unpredictability matters. If somebody treated you horribly every minute from the first date forward, you would probably recognize the danger pretty quickly. But coercive and abusive relationships often do not begin that way. They can begin beautifully with attention and chemistry and intensity and long conversations and affection and good sex and promises and the feeling that you are finally seen by another human.

The person can become one of your greatest sources of comfort before becoming one of your greatest sources of distress and and pain. Then things begin to change, sometimes slowly enough that you barely notice. A criticism disguised as concern, jealousy described as, as love, a boundary pushed and explained away, questions about where you were, who you talked to, what you wore, what you spent. Why are you so sensitive? Why are you making such a big deal out of everything and nothing? And little by little, your world gets smaller and smaller while your nervous system gets louder and louder, and this is why people often describe trauma bonding as feeling like an addiction to another person, and I understand that language. I felt it in my bones, but I want to be scientifically careful. A trauma bond has not been proven to be literally identical to substance addiction. What we do know is that the systems involved in attachment, reward, stress, learning, and relief can become powerfully conditioned inside an unstable relationship. Dopamine is involved, involved in reward, motivation, and learning. When affection is unpredictable, the next moment of warmth can feel enormously significant. And that is intermittent reinforcement.

The apology after the cruelty, the loving text after the silent treatment, the embrace after rejection, the beautiful weekend after a terrible week. Each good moment can feel like evidence that the person you met at the beginning is back. You are no longer only attached to the person. You become attached to the possibility of relief. Oxytocin participates in bonding, attachment, and social connection. touch, affection, sex, and closeness can strengthen connection, but your body does not release attachment chemistry only when somebody is good for you. The same person who scares you may later hold you. The same person who humiliates you may later reassure you, and the person associated with the wound can also become associated with the temporary relief From the pain of the wound. And then there's adrenaline. When you live with unpredictability, conflict, or coercive control, your body may spend huge amounts of time preparing for what comes next. Your heart races, your muscles tense, your attention narrows. You become extraordinarily good at reading the room. You are constantly thinking about the relationship. What What did that tone mean? Is tonight going to be okay? How do I keep the peace? Cortisol is another major part of the stress response, and chronic interpersonal stress can disrupt cortisol regulation.

With prolonged trauma, stress systems can become dysregulated in different directions. The important point is this: your biology has been adapting to instability. You are not imagining the exhaustion. You are not weak because separation feels physically awful, sometimes like dying. Your body has learned the relationship. Serotonin is involved in mood, sleep, appetite, and emotional regulation, but trauma bonding cannot responsibly be reduced to your serotonin is low. Human neurobiology is not Chronic relational stress can affect sleep and mood and concentration and anxiety and emotional regulation through multiple interactions and systems. So when you try to leave, you are not simply arguing with a thought that says, maybe I should go back, maybe I should stay gone. You may be grieving, you may be terrified, you may be craving relief, you may be remembering the beginning. You may be financially entangled, you may have children, you may have lost friends, you may no longer trust your own perception because of all the gaslighting. Then the phone rings and for a moment the pain stops and that relief can feel like love. And I need people to understand that because shame keeps people stuck. Telling somebody you should know better does not make their nervous system safer.

Calling them stupid does not restore their judgment, and humiliation does not create readiness. I had to get my own stomach full, and that is the phrase I use. Every woman has to get her own stomach full. Every person does. And for some people, it takes one night. For somebody else, a year. For somebody else, 10. Me, 13. For somebody else, 20. I am not telling anyone to stay in danger. If you are in immediate danger, safety planning and professional domestic violence resources matter. I am saying that readiness is complicated. You may intellectually understand that a relationship is harming you long before your emotional life can tolerate leaving it. You may leave 7 times. You may leave 17 times. You may block the number and unblock it. You may swear you are finished and answer at 2 in the morning. That does not mean you are hopeless. It means change is often a process before it becomes a decision. For me, no contact was the turning point, not because no contact is magic and not because it is possible for everyone. Some people share children and homes and businesses or legal responsibilities, but for me, every contact restarted the cycle.

I thought I could be friends. I couldn't. I thought I could have one conversation. I couldn't. I thought I could separate sex from attachment. I could not. Every little doorway became the entrance back into the entire house. And when I finally stopped walking back through the door, something began to change. I felt horrible. I missed him. I was angry. I questioned myself. Some days I felt like I was dying. But slowly, my nervous system began receiving new information. The phone could stay silent and I survived it. I could feel lonely without returning. I could miss him. without contacting him, and I could remember the very few good parts without pretending the harmful parts had not happened. I could feel an emotion without obeying it, and that changed my life. Emotions are real. An urge is real. A craving for contact is real, but none of those things are commands. And no contact was not the end of my healing. It took another 3 years for me to move through the victim mentality, the anger, the resentment, about what I had lost and what I believed I had given up. There is a season for naming what happened.

There is a season for anger. There is a season for grieving what you lost, and do not let anybody rush you through that. Eventually, I had to ask, what am I going to do with the life that is left? Healing could not mean staying emotionally married to the person I had physically divorced. Freedom required more than leaving him. It required coming back to myself. I had to understand why chaos felt familiar, why intensity felt like intimacy, and why being chosen mattered more than being safe. And responsibility for my healing did not mean responsibility for his behavior. It meant saying, What happened mattered and what happens next belongs to me. If you are still in it, I won't shame you. Just pay attention. Tell yourself the truth in pieces. Write it down if you have to. Reconnect the people you've been isolated from. Get help. Learn about coercive control. Build options. Do not mistake not leaving today for never leaving. Maybe your stomach is not full yet, and if it takes a year, take the year. If it takes 10, keep moving forward for yourself. If it takes Your timeline still does not determine your worth.

I hope you get safe sooner. I hope you get free sooner, but beating yourself up will not get you there faster. The goal is not to become smart enough to stop loving someone. The goal is to become connected enough to yourself that you stop betraying yourself to keep them. Peace may feel boring after chaos. Let it. Consistency may feel unfamiliar. Give it time. You deserve love that does not require you to disappear. You were always the life you were trying to get back to. What did you perform in order to survive? And what might setting that role, that mask, or performance down do? To improve your life. I'm your host, Lisa Lacey. I get it more than most people do. Don't expect everyone to understand what you're going through. And when you find the answers to these questions, welcome to the edge.