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. Abusers try to convince us that they are our whole world — that the pain is a necessary part of being loved and cared for. But we can name that for what it is and focus on the things that bring us pleasure. 

So today, draw yourself surrounded by the people, things, and experiences in your life that nourish you and bring you joy. What communities or people care for you? What things do you enjoy in the world? What experiences, memories, sounds, sights, fill you up with joy? 

If you want to start this out as a list, feel free to. Then, you can draw it; draw yourself, and then draw your surroundings - the people you’re connected to, the natural talents you have, joys that you’ve created. Be nourished by the knowledge of the filling things you’ve cultivated in your life. If there aren’t that many things, that’s fine too! You’ll find them - remember, you’re wired for resilience. 

Feel free to make this art as simple or as elaborate as possible. This is your journey. You have permission to take up as much or as little space as you want.

Here is an article by Shahida Arabi on the psychology of ‘intermittent reinforcement’ or ‘intermittent reward schedules

, which we discuss in this session's video. She also has some great articles and books on surviving abuse, so do check her out! 

Abuse can happen to anyone — and it’s never our fault. In this course, we discuss abusive tactics, the cycle of coercive control, the science of trauma, and how abuse can affect our boundaries, relationships, and coping mechanisms. We empower ourselves to build positive self-esteem with tools such as journaling, somatic practice, and creating a sense of community. This course was recorded in 2021 and has been re-edited for release. Some of the video quality isn't up to our Bloom standard, but the course contains our usual high-quality, trauma-informed content to support your healing journey. 

Recovering from toxic and abusive relationships

Week 1: Anyone can be abused

Week 2: Why we stay — the mind and body in abuse

Week 3: Discovering our self

Week 4: What abuse is really about

Week 5: Difficult emotions

Week 6: Staying, leaving, coping, and what happens next

Week 7: Relationships and reflections

Overview

We explore the psychology of trauma bonding — how do abusers create the conditions that make us stay with them?

Trauma bonding is addictive 

Hello, it’s Dina and Zoë back today for the second session of Week 1. Welcome - it’s a longer session today, so let’s jump right in! 

But as always, we start with a grounding exercise. 

To ground ourselves in our environments, that can be really useful in moments where we feel an intrusive memory or flashback coming on. 

Let’s ground ourselves in touch. Find any object near to you. It can be smooth or rough or soft. Anything with texture works, even your own carpet! Focus on what this item feels like in your hands. How would you describe it? You can even talk out loud about what you are thinking or doing. Using our senses, whether it’s sight, touch, or sound, can remind us of where we are and what’s real.

Likewise, if you do find yourself dealing with a flashback say out loud, “I am safe”, and give yourself a little hug. Hear your voice and focus on the sensations of the present, not the flashback. Imagine the flashback is a TV screen - tell yourself that you have the control to turn the volume up or down, to focus on the screen or not. This is a tip we got from therapist Jahan Ara, whose Instagram @pakistanitherapist has a lot of useful, thoughtful information on recovery and mental health. It may not work the first time, but if we practice these behaviours, over time our minds learn new ways of processing these experiences and it becomes easier to tap into calm thinking in a moment of crisis. 

I used to like the rainy weather before I moved to the UK, and then after that I was really missed the sunny times. I really miss the time where I said "oh I would like to have rain I love rainy weather". What about you Zoë? Oh my gosh that's so funny! Yeah you'll love rain until you move to the UK that's that's our motto. Not the amount of rain that I imagined. Oh my gosh! I mean maybe this is a lot of people's favorite type of weather but I mean just sunny is so nice. Not too hot but sunny particularly a sunny evening it's just so gorgeous. But linking back to our last fun question, I also really love foggy weather because  in San Francisco it's very foggy like I was talking about in the last fun question. So if you also like fog or indeed any other kind of weather please do write in to us we'd love to know. 

 - that is, the effect that the trauma of abuse can have on us, and how we can begin our recovery work for this. 

But in our recovery, we may also need to understand a bit more about 

, that is, why and how abusers do what they do. 

So before we talk about how abuse develops over Weeks 3 and 4, it’s also useful for us to think about some of the typical behavioural traits that a predator or abuser might have.

There is no typical profile of an abuser, but they may share some common characteristics. Here are some common examples. They may not exhibit all of these and some are contradictory to others, but these are a starting point when we look at commonalities between the types of people who abuse. You can think of these as “red flags”. The more flags that you spot in these, the more you should be concerned about the person in question:

These traits may not be immediately obvious to us - and in fact, often one of the reasons abusers get away with doing what they do for so long is because they are able to show a different face to different people. So they may show these traits to us, but undermine our reality by being a completely different person to other people. Still, paying attention to these traits can be helpful in being able to identify how and why abusers do what they do. 

Now, we want to talk more about how abuse develops. 

Each relationship we humans have is unique; however, there are certain patterns in behaviour that are worth identifying, particularly when it comes to abuse. A lot of us feel guilt after abuse, placing blame on ourselves that it has happened. Understanding how abuse develops and learning about these patterns helps us in recognising and believing that what happened is not in fact our fault.

But there are very few types of behaviour that are fully automatic - like sneezing. We can’t control it, it just happens. But most behaviour requires a combination of conscious and unconscious thought - and can be changed through conscious mechanisms. 

So, we know that abuse will always have a degree of planning and premeditation. Abuse does not just happen and is not an uncontrollable reflex. The abuser will have created an opportunity or an environment for the abuse to have taken place.

The opportunity is created in a subtle way, so subtle that we may not even notice it’s happening. This is often because of the trust we give them - we enter a relationship with someone, giving them our trust and love and do not initially see danger. After all, why should you? It is not wrong or weak to be loving and believe in the love you receive. 

We do not expect to be abused - and, when it occurs, we find it hard to both spot and to speak up about it, as we have an emotional connection with the abuser - we often don’t want to cause them any pain.  

There are several tactics an abuser may use to build up this trust and ultimately manipulate and abuse us. 

As human beings we are pretty naturally wired to be social, and to look to others for help and sustenance. This all links back to our description of dependence in the very first session - as human beings, we are naturally dependent on others to fulfill our physical and emotional needs. 

So when someone enters our lives and offers us nourishment in the form of love, affection and attention, we form a strong emotional connection with that person. We may also be drawn to something in them that is familiar from our past - if our early family experiences of so-called “love” based in rejection, then that model of rejection and abusive behaviour may be familiar and therefore feel safer. We may even feel that we have to prove something to ourselves by “fixing” them. 

So through the meeting of our needs, a strong emotional connection can build up in this relationship; but then, our trust is manipulated over time. Often, an abuser will increase their social contact with the survivor and offer gifts, special attention, love and affection - in other words a kind of “nourishment” or social food we need to survive. They may also be meeting needs that aren’t our emotional needs - they may provide us with money if we’re in a financially unstable situation, or provide us with housing, or a variety of other needs. In any case, at this early stage, they build a bond with us. This may not be the exact pattern all survivors experience, but it is something that often happens. 

But gradually, as time goes on, the abuser’s behaviour changes; the nourishment decreases - and abusive behaviours increase, but we still have reason to celebrate the positive behaviour. Because as we receive less and less nourishment, attention, or love, we become even more starved - so, when we finally receive positive input we are instinctively more grateful, happier, and our bonds to our abusers strengthen. We become more grateful for the love we receive - these “crumbs” of affection.

This commonly happens through the tactic of “love bombing”, in which an abuser may shower us with affection when we first meet them, or when we behave how they want, but then they pull back or else punish us when we don’t appease them. We’ll be going into this further next week. 

An abuser may also, through their abusive behaviour, show flashes of anger or otherwise indicate they may be dangerous. In this way, the survivor becomes aware of the potential for violence. Which is, as you may remember from our first week, still a threat. This is called 

They may also use threats of rejection: suggesting they might leave us or icing us out and going silent to get their way, which can be terrifying if they represent the only close emotional bond we have. This is called 

- and is just as cruel as a punishment. 

Gradually the severity and frequency of this abuse increases, to the point we begin to doubt our experiences because of the severity, or else talk ourselves out of the abuse, because we still need the love and attention the abuser is providing. And why wouldn’t we? Love is like food - it is not conditional. As a human being, love is just as vital and necessary to keep us alive. Remember - some level of dependency is a natural part of being human, whether that’s for emotional, financial, or a variety of other needs. 

And, if we are made to believe we cannot receive love anywhere else, it’s no wonder that we’d become attached to where we have it, and cling to it, whatever other messages we might hear or receive. 

We hear a lot about Stockholm Syndrome, but this is actually an incorrect, oversimplified myth that was invented to discredit female victims of violence by a psychiatrist with a conflict of interest. He was part of the hostage negotiation team in the bank robbery where he had already drawn his conclusions and had refused to talk to the female “subject” he based his conclusions on.

Instead, what we’re discussing here is called  “traumatic bonding”, a much more in-depth, well-researched topic. Contrary to how it is used in a lot of public discourse, “traumatic bonding” is not bonding with someone who has experienced similar or shared trauma to us.

Instead, traumatic bonding is the kind of emotional bond we can develop with an abuse through the cycle of abuse. As a result of all this “traumatic bonding”, we survivors are likely to become more attached to the perpetrator and accept their behaviour. When we’re afraid, through whatever way our abuser is threatening or scaring us as we went over in the different types of abuse last week, we also seek out what is familiar - 

Because what we know is less daunting than seeking out something new. It’s easier to prepare for what we know already. It makes sense to engage in a familiar environment, where we accept the rules of how to behave. Also, the abuse is coming from the same source as the love and affection we’re receiving, so it can feel very confusing and difficult to make sense of these contradictory experiences. We naturally bond with those who provide for our positive emotional needs, even if they’re also causing abuse, stress, and fear. 

Actually, a classic study in the field of psychology provides a little bit of insight into this pattern. You may have heard of the psychologist, Frank Skinner, who conducted some very famous studies with rats in the 1940s and 50s. He is often called the father of ‘operant conditioning’, which is the study of how changing the reward and punishment associated with a behaviour is used by an organism - a person or animal - to learn, and change that behavior. 

Many of his studies involved placing a rat in a box, where the rat could press a lever for food - a rewarding behaviour. If pressing the lever is always associated with food being presented, unsurprisingly, the rats learned pretty quickly to press the lever a lot of times for food. But if pressing the lever stops being associated with food coming out, the rats learn pretty quickly to stop performing the behaviour. On the other hand, if getting a reward is NOT consistently linked with getting food, so the rats only get food 

of the time they press the lever, they still press the lever to get food. This is called an intermittent reward schedule (as opposed to the previous case, where rewards were given consistently in the first instance). And in this intermittent reward schedule, if you then change it so that pressing the lever no longer produces food, 

the rats take a much longer time to stop pressing the lever for food

. The unpredictability of getting a reward meant that it was a lot harder to unlearn the behaviour. Because how did the rats know that the reward wasn’t coming back? It could have just been taking longer than usual. 

And since then, neuroscientists have shown that the neurotransmitter dopamine has a role in how our brains respond to rewards. Basically, rewarding behaviours such as eating and other important, enjoyable activities trigger a release of dopamine sometimes called the “feel-good” chemical - meaning we learn to do these behaviours again. More recently, related to Skinner’s intermittent reward schedule findings, a few studies have shown that reward uncertainty in some cases INCREASES the dopamine response associated with a reward. This makes rewards in unpredictable scenarios even more rewarding.

So on a very broad, basic level, we can relate this to how abusers use traumatic bonding to coerce and manipulate; if nurturing or attachment behaviours are sometimes associated with a reward - care and attention from them - they can keep us guessing, and keep us in a cycle of trying our hardest not to get a punishment from them, but instead  a reward. And there may be powerful neurobiological mechanisms that keep us performing the behaviour in search of a reward, and make this cycle difficult to break free from. 

Of course, it’s crucial to acknowledge that Skinner’s original experiments were performed with rats, not humans, and that our understanding of the neurobiology of dopamine release, and the relationship between rewards, reward schedules, and dopamine has progressed a lot in the 70 years since Skinner’s work. We now know a lot more about how the timing of rewards alters the rate of firing of the neurons that produce dopamine, the kinds of risk-reward calculations are involved in deciding our behaviour. But also, we know so much more about how animals and humans are both incredible at adapting to changes in how rewarding a particular action is, and altering their behaviour as a result. 

Which actually provides us with a lot of hope - we are totally capable of forming new patterns. We are arming ourselves with information. 

And, we are wired for resilience. So we also know that responding to this cycle of deep emotional connection and manipulation isn’t silly. It’s smart. It is a survival tactic - and never something you should be ashamed of. It is another way you have been staying alive.

This is why, however, when we talk about coping with and healing from abuse, in Bloom, empowerment is just as important as information. 

Abusers are likely to target those vulnerable to this type of extreme and fluctuating attention - like people who have either been mistreated before and have come to accept ill-behaviours. Or, if not, they create the conditions needed for low self-esteem: by isolating their victims, by creating “crazy” and “chaotic” environments - using anger and fear to keep your focus on them at all times. They make sure you feel badly about yourself, to lessen your worth, and make you think you are alone: that this cycle of reward and punishment is the only way of having our needs met. Often, they convince us that other people are out to get us, and we can only trust them. Or, that no one will believe us if we leave - so we have to stay with them, or they’ll tell everyone else that it’s really us who is being abusive. We’ll understand a little bit more 

 they create these conditions of isolation in Week 4 when we look at abusive tactics and the cycle of coercive control. 

So when we’re MADE to have low self-esteem and do not believe we deserve unconditional love, we’re more grateful when we receive attention from someone even if there are strings attached, and we’re more scared to lose that person - they mean that much more to us.

This is not your fault. This is how we have adapted as humans to survive and meet our needs in adverse situations. It’s also how we’ve been trained to feel and act by society: to love, and be loved, and show love to the people we care for. 

So in talking about these topics, we hope to help you understand why and how abusive behaviours happen - including the research that backs up our understanding of how abuse happens - to gradually shift away any guilt you may be feeling. 

Understanding how low self-esteem can help us survive abusive situations can also help us understand many of the post-traumatic effects we might experience after abuse. We already started talking about some of them last session; we looked at how abuse can affect our body’s response to stress by triggering the fear response so often, and how to work with our bodies to reset the balance between our sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems. 

So understanding adaptive self-esteem can also help us understand a particular post-traumatic psychological disorder, called complex-PTSD, or C-PTSD. You might have heard of PTSD; it was originally documented in soldiers, but more recently has been expanded to include anyone who experiences a one-time trauma like violence, rape, accident, or medical emergency. People who experience PTSD show a lot of the signs and symptoms we went over last session of a hypervigilant stress response system.

But people who survive long-term traumas like abuse can also experience a post-traumatic stress disorder, but in a slightly different way to those who experience a single instance of trauma. Some clinicians refer to this disorder as complex PTSD, or C-PTSD. C-PTSD occurs when someone experiences repeated or long-term exposure to trauma, where there is no certain means of escape. So, this often applies in situations of abuse, where it is not so much one specific incident which is the basis of the trauma, but the long-term survival in a relationship which was harmful and abusive. 

This PTSD or complex PTSD which occurs after long-term traumas includes the main symptoms of PTSD, but it also alters self-perception as we cope with repeated abuse. How? People with C-PTSD often have trouble knowing who they are. They manage deep feelings of shame, helplessness, and often falsely believe they’re responsible for their mistreatment. 

Why? Well it all goes back to our explanation of adaptive self-esteem for surviving relationships in which we’re dependent on another person for our needs. 

For example, when you’re a child, you’re dependent. You rely on those around you to feed you, clothe you, to keep you safe - as you should. You don’t have the tools to protect yourself when you’re young - adults are the ones who make the decisions. Even when you are not a child, through abuse we are forced into a similar situation of dependency and control - for example, when an abuser or predator is in control of your movements in and out of the house, or controls your money, or controls your actions by threatening consequences - which is very difficult to escape.

It becomes easier to blame ourselves for the behaviours of others or our circumstances, because we’re in control of our actions. If “we” become the problem, it’s something we can fix. This is why survivors of abuse can struggle so much with shame, and how we feel about ourselves. We spent so long surviving by believing there was something wrong with us, that that is why something bad happened to us. 

But as always, we can return to the truth that it was not our fault - that abuse happens because of who abusers are, not because of who we are. We can also know that it makes sense for us to be feeling this way. Our bodies and minds have been doing everything they can to look after us. And we are no longer helpless - none of your feelings of shame are permanent. We can choose now who we are.

This is why caring for ourselves is so important, because building self-esteem is actually one of the most powerful tools to undermine abusive tactics. When we believe in ourselves and what we deserve, we cut off the conditions abusers need to control us. And the more we practice care for ourselves, or expose ourselves to communities who model real love, the easier it becomes to step back from their mistreatment. 

We aren’t like the rats in Skinner’s experiments. There are other places we can go to for love and support. We can adapt to new patterns. 

To everyone here today with us: you are worth more, have more, and ARE more than your abusers could ever be. 

After all, if we weren’t stronger than our abusers, they wouldn’t have to starve us in order to be full.

… another drawing. We are very into our drawings at Bloom! We’ve asked you to make stick figures and stars in a dark sky. Today, we want you to draw the ecosystem of your life. Abusers try to convince us that they are our whole world - that the pain is a necessary part of being loved and cared for. But we can name that for what it is and focus on the things that bring us pleasure. 

And continue on your thought diaries. Let us know what you are processing - and what you learned! You can continue to create “stars” in your sky as facts you want to remember, to guide you through. If you do, please share what you mark in our DMs! 

Please let us know if you have any concerns, questions, or feedback by messaging our live chat, we would love to hear from you. We are here to support you, so get in touch!

Thank you everyone for coming to this session and showing up for yourself and others who are here because they know they are not alone. We’re in this together. 