You’ve probably heard about trauma bond relationships. You may even have used it yourself — or had someone use it on you. “You only stayed because of a trauma bond.” “She can’t leave because she’s trauma bonded to him.” It’s going around a lot these days, but there’s a lot of misinformation about it. So, let’s help set the record straight. Because as usual in abusive relationships, we’re blaming the wrong person.

Here’s the reality – the experience it describes is absolutely real. People in abusive relationships do form powerful, often confusing attachments to their abusers. They keep getting pulled back into the relationship. Then they miss the person who hurt them. And they defend the person who has caused them real harm. These responses are not imaginary — and most of all, they aren’t weakness.

But the term itself was coined by Patrick Carnes in 1997, primarily in the context of his work on sex addiction, so that context comes with baggage. Carnes’ model focuses on what’s happening inside the victim — their attachment patterns, their history, their psychology — giving short shrift to what the abuser is deliberately doing to create those conditions.

That’s a significant problem, because the moment we start explaining abuse through the lens of the victim’s psychology, we’re already in victim-blaming territory.

Nadine Macaluso: The Nervous System Knows

Dr. Nadine Macaluso — known to her community as Dr. Nae — is a licensed psychotherapist specializing in trauma bonds and narcissistic abuse. Visit her work at drnae.com. So she brings both clinical expertise and lived experience to the table, a rare combination. She was in a high-profile relationship that she describes as emotionally abusive and has spent years doing the deep work of understanding what happened to her — not just what was wrong with her.

Her contribution to the trauma bond conversation is significant because she grounds it in somatic trauma therapy — the idea that the body keeps score. So, the attachment isn’t just in your head, it also lives in your nervous system. So, your body itself associates this person with safety, even as they themselves were the one making you unsafe. It’s like a fire fighter arsonist setting a fire and then putting it out. The problem wouldn’t have been there in the first place without the gasoline and match.

Dr. Nae’s work is important because she emphasizes that this is something that was done to you, not a flaw you were born with or a pattern you consciously chose. The bonding happens because you are human, because your nervous system responds the way it does to constant cycles of fear and relief, punishment and reward. It isn’t a character defect — that’s exploitation of biology.

She also pushes back on the narrative that healing from a trauma bond means there’s something to fix inside the victim. The healing, she argues, is about reclaiming your own nervous system — specifically, learning to trust your own perceptions again after someone has spent considerable energy to make you doubt them.

Her book Run Like Hell brings her personal story and professional expertise together in an accessible, compassionate guide for women navigating abusive relationships and their aftermath.

The bonding happened because you are human — and because your nervous system was deliberately exploited.

Sandra L. Brown: You Were Targeted for Your Strengths

Sandra L. Brown, M.A., founder of The Institute for Relational Harm Reduction, approaches this from a slightly different angle. Her landmark work, Women Who Love Psychopaths, focuses not on what’s wrong with the women who end up in these relationships, but what’s wrong with the person they end up with.

Brown’s research has found that women in high-harm relationships with partners who have cluster B personality disorders — particularly psychopathy, narcissistic personality disorder, and antisocial personality disorder — often share certain positive traits: high empathy, high conscientiousness, high investment in relationships. In other words, the very qualities that make someone a wonderful human being also make them a more available target for a particular kind of predatory partner.

Her reframing of this is similar to the perspective of Don Hennessy, noted below. Brown isn’t saying these women have a wound that drew them to dangerous men. She’s saying they have strengths — and that those strengths were spotted and exploited by someone who knew exactly what to do with them.

Brown’s work is adjacent to the trauma bond conversation in a way that’s extremely crucial: she helps us understand why the bond forms so deeply. Echoing Dr. Nae, she notes that when someone with high empathy and high relational investment is subjected to intermittent reinforcement — love, then withdrawal, kindness, then cruelty — the bond that forms is not a sign of pathology. It’s a predictable neurological response to an expertly engineered relational environment.

Brown also documents the long-term impact of these relationships on the nervous system — symptoms that look like PTSD, difficulty trusting perception, chronic hypervigilance. Again: not pre-existing damage. Damage that was inflicted.

What Don Hennessy Adds That Everyone Else Is Missing

Here is where the work of Irish researcher and therapist Don Hennessy becomes essential.

Hennessy spent decades working clinically with over 1,000 abusive men and their partners for over thirty five years. He’s the only one who went straight to the source and compared their stories with those of the women that they abused. And he reveals the truth that so many have missed for decades: these men were not out of control. They were not just victims of addiction, childhood wounds, or anger management problems. They were skilled abusers, and they purposely practiced their tactics.

So, they knew exactly what they were doing. And they did it on purpose.

In his foundational book How He Gets Into Her Head, Hennessy describes what he calls a process of deliberate grooming — not just in the early stages of the relationship, but as an ongoing, adaptive strategy. The abuser learns what the target needs emotionally, then becomes the perfect provider of exactly that — until the bond is deep enough to exploit.

He identifies a specific pattern he calls “the selfish partner” aka the skilled abuser — someone who has decided that their own comfort, pleasure, and control are more important than their partner’s wellbeing, and who develops sophisticated skills to ensure they get what they want while keeping their partner compliant and confused.

Abusers are not out of control. They are skilled, because they practice— and they know they’re good at it.

– Don Hennessy

Again, when we talk about why a victim stays, we need to understand that these outcomes are engineered by the abuser. The confusion and self-doubt are not accidental. The exhaustion, the hope and the love and the fear — none of it is accidental.

In Steps to Freedom: Escaping Intimate Control, Hennessy focuses directly on the target woman who is currently being controlled, offering her practical steps to reclaim her own mind — and starting with the radical act of trusting her own intuition again. It is, in our opinion, essential reading. Because Hennessy’s research gives us the mechanism. The “trauma bond” that Carnes named, that Macaluso works to heal, that Brown’s research contextualizes — it exists because someone worked very hard to create it.

Why She Keeps Getting Pulled Back In: Re-Grooming

If you’ve ever watched someone leave an abusive relationship — or lived it yourself — you know the part that makes the least sense to outsiders. She left. She was safe. And then she went back.

This is the moment when friends and family lose patience. When even well-meaning advocates fall back on the trauma bond explanation and leave it there. She went back because she’s bonded to him. And while that’s not entirely wrong, it’s dangerously incomplete — because it still puts the explanation inside her.

Don Hennessy gives us something far more precise: re-grooming.

Re-grooming is not the abuser simply showing up with flowers and apologies. It is a deliberate, targeted campaign to regain access — and it is more sophisticated than the original grooming because he now knows her better than he did at the beginning. He has spent months or years learning exactly what she needs, what she fears, what she hopes for, and what she believes about herself. When she leaves, he doesn’t start over – he just refines his strategy from everything he’s already learned.

He knows which version of himself she fell in love with — then he becomes that person again, precisely and convincingly. He knows her deepest fears about the future — being alone, her children, financial survival — and he speaks directly to them. And, he knows the specific doubts she has about her own perception, because he installed many of them, and he uses them to make her question whether it was really as bad as she remembers.

Regrooming Can Deepen the Trauma Bond

Unfortunately, each cycle of re-grooming can deepen the bond rather than simply restore it. The relief of having him back, the hope that this time is different, the exhaustion of the fight — all of it is neurologically reinforcing. He is not repeating the same script. He is iterating on it, each time with more information about what works on her specifically.

There is also a safety dimension here that cannot be overstated: the period immediately following separation is when re-grooming is most intense — and most dangerous. This isn’t coincidence. It is strategy. The abuser knows that he has a small window of opportunity, that her determination may be strongest right after leaving, and that he needs to act quickly and effectively. The urgency you feel from him in those early days and weeks after separation is not love. It is a closing window. And critically, it is the most dangerous time for victims, as 77% of homicides occur after separation, when he realizes that he may lose his “possession.”

Understanding re-grooming does not mean a woman who returns is weak, broken, or hopeless. It means she encountered a skilled operator running a refined playbook specifically designed for her. The question was never really why does she keep going back. The right question has always been: what does he do to bring her back?

Putting It All Together: What a Trauma Bond Really Is

When we draw on the work of Macaluso, Brown, and Hennessy together, a much clearer picture emerges: a trauma bond is not a flaw in the victim. It is the predictable neurological and psychological result of being deliberately subjected to intermittent reinforcement, manufactured dependency, and emotional manipulation by a skilled, intentional abuser.

Your nervous system bonded because it was designed to bond. Your empathy and relational investment were targeted because they are valuable traits. And the person doing the targeting knew what they were doing.

Understanding this doesn’t make leaving easier overnight. The bond is real, the neurological impact is real, and healing takes time. But it does mean that if you have ever wondered “why can’t I just leave” or “why do I still love someone who hurt me” — the answer is not that something is wrong with you.

The answer is that something was done to you. And now you get to decide what to do next.

Quick Reference: Three Researchers, Three Lenses

Nadine Macaluso, Ph.D. (Dr. Nae)

Focus: Somatic trauma therapy and nervous system recovery. Key insight: The bond lives in the body, not just the mind. Healing means reclaiming your own nervous system and your trust in your own perceptions. Her personal experience as the real-life ex-wife of Jordan Belfort — the Wolf of Wall Street — gives her work unusual depth and credibility with survivors. Visit drnae.com.

Sandra L. Brown, M.A.

Focus: Pathological partners and their impact on high-empathy women. Key insight: The traits that made you a target are strengths, not wounds. Her research documents the specific psychological damage inflicted by partners with cluster B personality disorders, reframing the victim’s experience as injury, not predisposition. Visit sandralbrownma.com.

Don Hennessy

Focus: Perpetrator research and intentionality. Key insight: Abusers are skilled, strategic, and deliberate. The trauma bond was engineered. Understanding the abuser’s methods is as important as understanding the victim’s healing — and keeps accountability exactly where it belongs. His books How He Gets Into Her Head and Steps to Freedom are foundational reads for anyone doing this work.

The Bottom Line on “Trauma Bond”

The term is popular because it points to something real. But in the wrong hands — in pop psychology, IG reels, and in well-meaning but misguided advice — it quietly shifts the focus from the perpetrator’s strategy to the victim’s psychology.

Use the term if it’s helpful. But use it with this understanding: the bond exists because it was built, brick by brick, by someone who benefited from building it. That’s not your story of weakness. It’s their story of calculated harm.

And your story — the one where you start to understand what happened, reclaim your perceptions, and rebuild your life — that’s the one worth telling.

📖  Ready to Go Deeper?

If you found this article helpful, our book Street Smart Safety for Women: Your Guide to Defensive Living takes a deeper dive into how abusers operate, how to recognize coercive control before it takes hold, and how to build the kind of safety intelligence that protects you — inside and outside the home. Written by a retired deputy sheriff and a domestic violence educator, it’s practical, research-grounded, and written for women navigating a complicated world.

→ Get Street Smart Safety for Women on Amazon

Further Reading

By Don Hennessy

How He Gets Into Her Head: The Mind of the Male Intimate Abuser — Hennessy’s groundbreaking first book, exposing the deliberate tactics male abusers use to establish and maintain control. Essential for understanding why the trauma bond forms at all.

Steps to Freedom: Escaping Intimate Control (Kindle) — Written directly to the woman who is currently being controlled, this practical guide helps her begin to distinguish her own voice from the one that has been installed in her head. A companion to his first book.

By Nadine Macaluso, Ph.D.

Run Like Hell: A Therapist’s Guide to Recognizing, Escaping, and Healing from Trauma Bonds with Narcissists, Psychopaths, and Other Toxic Partners — Visit drnae.com for more on her work, her masterclass, and her community for survivors.

By Sandra L. Brown, M.A.

Women Who Love Psychopaths: Inside the Relationships of Inevitable Harm with Psychopaths, Sociopaths & Narcissists — Visit sandralbrownma.com for her full catalog, The Institute’s resources, and her training programs for survivors and clinicians.