You Are Not in Love, You Have a Traumatic Attachment
(Trauma Bond)
165. You Are Not in Love, You Have a Traumatic Attachment (Trauma Bond)
You experience relationships intensely with a lot of highs and lows and you think that is the definition of love. You fall in love with Bad Boys or with people who make you suffer and not the nice ones who bore you like the famous canard or the golden retriever type of Michto. If there is not this intensity, you think it is not the right person, that you are not really in love or that the relationship is over. In this episode, I help you to distinguish the feeling of love from traumatic attachment (trauma bond). Having accompanied more than 600 people, this confusion is one of the most frequent and understanding the difference via the nervous system changes everything. If you want to learn more about the process of falling in love and what influences this process I invite you to listen to episode 29 of the podcast.
❤️ Watch my webinar on how to finally be happy in love!
The feeling of love
The feeling of love or the emotion of love is an emotion that can only exist in the state of security of your nervous system (the ventral vagal state). By definition in this state there is therefore no stake, no fears, no insecurity to fuel this feeling of love.
At the level of bodily sensations, this emotion corresponds more to an expansion, to a warmth at chest level, to a slowing down of the physiology in respiratory or cardiac terms. It can be gentle or intense if the attraction towards the other is strong (parallel activation of the sympathetic system).
The feeling of love has a form of constancy, it is predictable, it is safe, it is permanent.
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Traumatic attachment (trauma bound)
Traumatic attachment is born in a state of insecurity of your nervous system (the sympathetic state or the dorsal state) and it is guided by a stake, a fear or an insecurity.
After the lows (following intense emotions of fear of losing the other) come very strong highs that differ from love because the body is still bathing in that cortisol shot and is still like high, in a kind of euphoria that one can feel after a fright.
The bodily sensations are an acceleration of the heart rate and breathing, intense sensations below the diaphragm: the pit in the stomach, the knot in the solar plexus, the feeling of being grabbed in the gut, of losing your footing. And you can feel a lot of energy in your system as if it were giving you wings.
Traumatic attachment gives the feeling of being addicted to the relationship, of having difficulty separating from the other, of being addicted to chaos or to hyperstimulation. It is the complete opposite of stability, constancy, predictability. When one has traumatic attachment it can even be boring to have this predictable side.
The main difference between the feeling of love and traumatic attachment
Traumatic attachment makes you stay in toxic, dysfunctional relationships where you suffer, where you are not happy simply because it is the reference you know. This can even go so far as provoking the chaos yourself or self-sabotaging relationships when things are too stable.
The feeling of love on the contrary makes you leave a relationship that does not make you happy.
The origin of traumatic attachment
It clearly comes from the way in which you were loved in your childhood which constitutes the reference you know and which you unconsciously seek in your relationships even if you want something different. To learn more I invite you to watch my webinar “how to free yourself from love patterns to be happy in love?”
For you
FREE Webinar "HOW TO FREE OURSELVES FROM THE PATTERNS THAT PREVENT US FROM BEING HAPPY IN LOVE?"
Subscribe now to my newsletter and receive the replay of the webinar how a wound from the past is created ?
* Mandatory fields
If you register for this webinar, you will be subscribed to my newsletter and you will be able to receive offers from me. You can unsubscribe at any time. Please read my
privacy policy (german only), to see how I process the data.
How to get out of this traumatic attachment
- The first step is to identify the origin of this traumatic attachment by identifying your love patterns. From experience with the people I have accompanied, there is often the pattern of abuse, the fact of being unwanted or of parental neglect that we camouflage by denying reality.
- When the intensity ressenti in a relationship is so strong, working to deprogram love patterns through the body (the Journée Passée option in Opening Up to Love) is essential because the other is like a drug.
- Then it is about learning to distinguish what the emotion of love is from traumatic attachment. It is a learning process that takes time, that requires a great deal of regulation of your nervous system in order to be in a position to judge the situation and to systematically deconstruct your judgement. If I draw a parallel with people who have had eating disorders and who have difficulty seeing themselves as they are because they always have a discrepancy between their real weight and how they see themselves (dysmorphia) — when one has traumatic attachment, one also does not see the relationship as it really is, there is also this discrepancy.
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Going further
And if you would like to do the work on your love patterns through the body and transform your love life you have the programme Opening Up to Love and you can add the Day of the Past option as well.
Sandy Kaufmann
is a somatic therapist and coach, based in Switzerland. She is the author of two books published by Éditions Eyrolles and has accompanied more than 600 people. She is the creator of the Somatic Deprogramming method and hosts the podcast “S’ouvrir a l’amour“, ranked in the French top 50 in the relationships category.
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