The Revolutionary Way to Break the Trauma bond

‘How can I possibly be pining for a person who has put me though absolute hell? I KNOW it’s a trauma bond but wow, this is so HARD!!! My anxiety level is off the charts. I am in agonising pain and on the verge of admitting myself to hospital because I just can’t cope. How can I stop this?’

That’s a message I received from one of my support group members recently and it’s very common to feel extreme anxiety when you've broken up with a narcissist. Others live in dread of bumping into the NEX (narcissist ex), or receiving a text from them out of the blue because just the thought of it sends them into a tailspin of angst and emotional turmoil.

When you think of the NEX with intense longing and desire to have them back, you're responding to a set of previously encoded images, thoughts and experiences that you keep reliving, over and over again in your mind. Even though one part of you KNOWS how damaging the NEX is for you, the other part just craves them back. It's actually cognitive dissonance, which goes hand in hand with trauma bonding. I'll have a post soon to explain cognitive dissonance. But, If you’re feeling this way - ie, confused, anxious, and thinking that you're going crazy, let me tell you you're NOT, but you are trauma bonded.

Trauma bonding is a recognized condition, one that keeps the person going back to their abuser over and over - in fact, the averge person who's broken up with a narcissist goes back to them - or get's 'hoovered' back, on average SEVEN times. But I have worked with clients who have gone back FIFTY times. Seriously! The term was first used by Patrick J Carnes, PH.D, founder of the International Institute for Trauma and Addiction Professionals.

He outlined how traumatic bonding occurs as the result of ongoing cycles of abuse in which intermittent reinforcement of reward and punishment creates powerful emotional bonds that are difficult to change. Trauma Bonding is also often referred to as Stockholm Syndrome, named after a very famous botched bank heist in Stockholm, where the hostages formed bonds with their captors and refused to testify against them in court.

The intermittent reinforcement Carnes talks about will be familiar to you as the love bombing and devaluing process that is so common with narcissists, ie, they pull you in, shower you with what you think is love and affection, then they push you away, then discard you like you're a worthless piece of trash - and then they have the audacity that only narcissists possess - to 'hoover' you back in and it starts all over again. It’s a yo-yo cycle that keeps you on an emotional rollercoaster, one that doesn’t stop, even when you get off and out of the relationship.

Research has shown that your brain establishes an intense bond to the narcissist, which means that leaving is not solely a cognitive decision (based on thinking), but one that is tied to neurochemical, psychological and emotional anchors. Your brain is firing up on serotonin, dopamine and oxytocin (aka the ‘Happy’ chemicals), leading you to crave the ‘fix’ you get (or got), from the narcissist. This ‘addiction’ is akin to alcohol or drug addiction. This means that you remain locked in an emotional prison, long after you’ve left the narcissist, or they have discarded you.

You will hear and read that it’s incredibly difficult to break the bond because that is the mainstream narrative. It’s hard even when you try all kinds of healing methods – willpower, keeping busy, meditation, even therapy. Most of the clients I’ve worked with had tried all these methods, and more, but it didn’t’ heal them. They were still stuck with this agonising pain that just wouldn’t go away.

Firstly, good question, glad you asked! So let me explain!

Breaking the trauma bond can be done in a similar way to how you’ve just changed the colour of your door! When you work with the memories of the person to whom you are trauma bonded, there will likely be a LOT of images/memories that you can call to mind. Some will be happy, others will be horrendous. These conflicting images zap across your mind’s eye, causing you to feel ongoing conflicting emotions, but most strongly, you feel the agony of wanting the glory days back so that you can feel good again. Even though you know that person is so very, very BAD for you.

But, using NLP (Neuro Linguistic Programming), it’s possible to create a new way of looking at those memories. You can change how they look in your mind: you can speed them up, change the colours, rewind them, change the sounds, move them away, make them tiny, blow them up, and, and infuse them with a new truth, and this can very often be enough to enable you to completely disconnect from the original feelings and emotions associated with those memories, so that they lose their power over you.

When this happens, it’s like a light-bulb going off in your head, as you realise that you can CHOOSE what shows up in your head. This process is complex in nature, but simple in execution and the results on your emotional well-being can be profound. It can clear flashbacks, triggers and traumatic memories in minutes. Yes, I said minutes.

This simple process is just one of many tools I use to help clients break the trauma bond in one session. It’s easy, painless and incredibly fast! So it absolutely DOES NOT need to take months and months of therapy to break and heal a trauma bond.

Of course, there is almost always more healing to do when you’ve been dealing with a narcissist. Low self-worth, anxiety, patterns of abuse, to name just a few, are often also present and need more complex healing processes. When I work with clients, we also examine those and work some more healing magic by incorporating inner child healing, spiritual connection, energy cleansing, and redefining your self-worth.

But often, breaking that trauma bond is the first step to take, which then allows you the emotional freedom to open up to deeper levels of healing.

So now, my plan WAS to give you the step-by-step instructions, and I did write them all out. But as I was reading through them, I realised there were two major problems with this:

1. The written instructions look way more complicated than they are when I guide my clients through them.

2. For you, trying to read the instructions AND implement the steps, would be really difficult and you likely wouldn't get the results I want for you.

So, I realised the only way to get those results for you would be show you exactly how it works, and as luck would have it, I did do a masterclass on this some time ago, (and trust me - and shame on me lol - I have done so many masterclasses and bootcamps over the years, it took me quite a while to find it - but I did eventually), and now I am making the replay available to you so you'll be able to understand all about trauma bonding, and how you can follow the process and break your trauma bond. In a way that is FAST, fun and painless!

In this Masterclass, I go into detail about why you're trauma bonded, and that takes a while to explain, but the actual breaking of said trauma bond takes a lot less time, and you'll be able to see just how effective my process is when you watch this class, and join in!

If so I have another post that outlines 9 practical tips you can take to immediately start taking control over the Trauma Bond, and get your life - and your sanity - back. And I'll be sharing another magical technique with you soon that is based on somatic healing, rather than this post, which is more focused on the cognitive aspects.

Click here to read: Why You Still Love the Narcissist: 9 Tips to Break the Trauma Bond.

And if you need more help with healing from the abuse, then I highly recommend you get my free eBook Bundle, below. There is simply no need to keep suffering when my resources can help! And it's totally FREE too.

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