Hi Everyone,

Have you ever asked yourself questions like these?

• Why can’t I find my soul mate?
• How come I keep attracting the same type of person?
• Why do I run when things get too serious?
• Why am I afraid of sex?
• Why am I obsessed with sex?
• Where does my fear of intimacy come from?
• How do I get over this tendency to be in failed relationships?

Have you ever considered that the reason your relationships are not working is that they might be addictive relationships or even trauma bonds?

In past blog posts, I’ve raised the idea of the conscious and the unconscious relationship. Under the category of unconscious relationships, I want to pay particular attention here, to two genres: addictive relationships and trauma bonds. It is important to identify if you are, or have a tendency to form these types of relationships, as a way of knowing what you need to heal, in order to move into a conscious relationship.

What is an Addictive Relationship?

An addictive relationship is what’s known as a process addiction, as opposed to a substance addiction. It’s a mood-altering process that you are compelled to continue to engage in regardless of the serious negative consequences it has on your wellbeing or even, sanity. You can be addicted to particular types of people and particular types of dynamics, or emotionally – charged processes.

As with substance addictions, such as sugar, flour, alcohol, drugs; or process addictions, such as gambling, work or risk taking, there are certain characteristics that all addictions share, and if these are present, you can be pretty sure that you are in an addictive dynamic.

Three of these characteristics are what I call the 3D’s.

The 3 D’s:

1) Drug of Choice

To be addicted you need something or someone to be addicted to. This person is called your drug of choice and the drug of choice of the relationship addict is usually someone that creates intensity in their life and reproduces an unresolved childhood drama for them. To qualify as a drug of choice, the person and what they bring into your life must chemically alter your mood beyond just normal, in-love feelings.

2) Denial

The relationship you’re in is either unsatisfying or all consuming – but you pretend it’s just fine or that things aren’t that bad. This means you can run excuses in your head for being unavailable to other aspects of your life or if the relationship is unfulfilling, you can make excuses for being miserable. While many of your reasons and observations may be true, if you’re a relationship addict, then you will subjugate your own needs and rights in favour of understanding the wound of the person you are addicted to ,which is entirely different to healthy adult understanding.

3) Deception (of self and/or others)

You cover up, to friends or family, what’s really going on in the relationship and how you really feel. Lots of pretending, hiding, secrecy or selective sharing that’s all designed to keep the person you’re addicted to in your life. You lie to the person you are addicted to as well, about your real feelings, because you need to manage their reactions to you. Authenticity can be a threat to getting what you want from them, so you sacrifice being real, in favour of securing your drug of choice.

The other three characteristics they share are:

• Preoccupation

You lose focus on other things and lose interest in other activities. You constantly run over, in your head, what is and isn’t working with your relationship, or you incessantly talk about it to your friends to a point where they’re rolling their eyes with your obsessive, one subject repertoire. The irony is that you have to scheme to get that which a healthy relationship gives you, organically.

• Sourcing Supply and Protection of Supply

Every addict needs to source and protect supply of their drug of choice. The relationship addict is no different. So, behaviours like – stalking your partner, watching their every move, trying to work them out, are par for the course. This is vital to make sure they don’t leave you. The call cry here, being: “I’ll abandon me, so long as you don’t abandon me”.

• Attempts to control followed by loss of control leading to powerlessness and the inability to leave, despite negative consequences.

The addictive relationship usually has highs and lows, drama and conflict, ups and downs, like any other addiction. You get hooked then you go through withdrawal symptoms. You try and do anything to avoid the excruciating withdrawal pain by making them happy, placating them or even fighting with them, but the dynamic of ups and downs continues and intensity is substituted for intimacy.

Essentially, if the relationship you’re in, does you more harm (on any level) than good; and you can’t turn it around through reasonable negotiations, or you can’t leave it, then you’re likely to be in an addictive relationship.

What is a Trauma Bond?

What I’m about to discuss is based on the work of Dr. Patrick Carnes, a specialist in the field of sex addiction and trauma.

When people experience a trauma, and deep abandonment and neglect can be traumas as much as physical and sexual abuse, then a wound is caused. If this wound is deep enough and the terror around it, big enough, the body chemically alters. The system elevates into an alarm state, where it cannot feel safe, under similar conditions. In that state of hyper vigilance, the trauma sufferer doesn’t notice that a part of them has split off and a layer of numbness masks the underlying grief for that lost or traumatised part of themselves.

Exploitative relationships create trauma bonds. The victim bonds with someone who is destructive to them. Hostage situations, cults, Stockholm syndrome. Similarly, adult survivors of abusive and dysfunctional families struggle with bonds that are rooted in their own trauma experiences. To be loyal to that which does not work – or worse, to a person who is toxic, exploitative, or destructive, is an adaptation in an attempt to placate or win over the perpetrator so as to somehow feel safe in a highly intense and traumatic environment.

People who have trauma bonds from their past habitually trauma bond because it is familiar; it is intense; and at times, because they have a repetition compulsion. They imagine, this time they will conquer the perpetrator and win back their freedom or the disowned aspect of themselves. They’re too entranced, aroused, terrified or enmeshed to realise that engineering a way to leave or end the cycle of abuse might be possible. That is Trauma Repetition. It is, repeating behaviours and/or seeking situations or persons who recreate the trauma experience in an effort to resolve the past.

Some people will find themselves in the same situation with the same type of person over and over again in their lives. Yet they may never link it to the original traumatic experience. Some survivors repeat not only the same scenario but also the exact behavioural experience.

Please listen to the radio show link below to learn about the different traits that exist in people who usually end up in addictive relationships; how the wounds of trauma bonds can affect these relationships and what to do to end this dynamic and enter into conscious relationship.

Click here to listen