Understanding for healing and healthy self and relationships
Trauma and manipulation create powerful emotional bonds that are hard to break, even when harm is involved. Terms like trauma bonding, gaslighting, and love bombing show how cycles of violence and kindness may trap victims in unhealthy relationships. Emotional responses such as fawning and Stockholm Syndrome demonstrate how people deal with fear and danger. One can better detect the hidden effects caused by trauma, and spot manipulation, and acquire strategies to escape toxic relationships and create healthier lives by better understanding through awareness.
Trauma bonding is a deep emotional connection formed between a victim and an abuser as a result of alternative cycles of violence and kindness, making it difficult to end the relationship.
Abuse is defined as deliberately injuring another person, whether physically, mentally, or sexually and which has long-term consequences on the victim’s self-esteem, physical and mental health.
Emotional abuse is defined as the use of non-physical behaviors to influence, threaten, or denigrate another person. This form of abuse is as harmful as physical violence, which makes victims develop a feeling of worthlessness and sadness.
A toxic relationship is defined as an unhealthy relationship where one or both individuals engage in behaviors that cause emotional, mental, or even physical harm. It often involves manipulation, control, constant criticism, guilt-tripping, jealousy, or passive aggression. All toxic relationships may not necessarily involve physical abuse, but the emotional damage can significantly harm one’s self-esteem, create stress, and negatively affect one’s well-being. Toxic relationships are not just limited to romantic relationships, they can also occur among friends, family, or even in the workplace.
Toxic positivity is defined as the excessive focus on staying positive while ignoring or dismissing negative emotions. It encourages people to suppress stress and negativity rather than acknowledging and processing their feelings. It often results in individuals minimizing their own struggles instead of working through them in a healthy way. Examples include telling someone to “just stay positive” after a loss, insisting that positive thinking alone will fix problems, or shaming someone for expressing sadness or frustration. This suppression of emotions is unhelpful and it makes the emotional recovery more difficult. Accepting and working through emotions is a healthier and more effective way to cope with challenges.
Gaslighting takes place when your feelings, words, and experiences are altered and used against you, to lead one to question their reality. This may be a very effective kind of emotional abuse because once an abusive spouse has undermined your capacity to believe in yourself, you may become more sensitive to the impacts of abuse, making it more difficult to leave the abusive relationship, and losing yourself in the process.
Love bombing is a term for overloading a person with excessive attention, affection, and gifts in an attempt to emotionally manipulate them into entering a relationship. This technique is frequently used at the beginning of a relationship to establish a false sense of closeness (Eleesha Lockett, MS, 2023).
Stockholm Syndrome occurs when a person who is kept as a prisoner or abused develops feelings of affection or devotion for their captor or abuser. This emotional reaction can occur under stressful and hazardous conditions, enabling the victim to sympathize with their abuser.
Co-dependency is a relationship pattern in which one person repeatedly sacrifices their needs to care for partners. This usually results in an imbalance, in which the caregiver becomes too focused on the other person’s emotions or concerns.
Fawning is a trauma reaction in which victims try to console or appease their abuser to prevent more conflict or pain. This is typically observed in circumstances when individuals feel intimidated or at risk, causing them to prioritize the abuser’s demands over their own.
(Dr. Caroline Fenkel, DSW, LCSW, 2023).
Trauma-Coercive Bond is a sort of emotional connection that occurs when a victim is isolated and exploited by an abuser. The connection is usually stronger than a trauma bond since it includes not only emotional attachment but also social isolation and a lack of perceived freedom.
Guilt-tripping is a manipulative technique in which one person makes another feel guilty about their choices or actions, and this may force the victim to comply with the abuser’s requests to prevent self-hatred.
Silent treatment is a passive-aggressive method of expressing anger, where one partner ignores the other. This action can be emotionally upsetting and is meant to control or punish the other person.
Victim blaming is the act of holding the victim responsible for the abuse they endured. The victim may feel more alone and ashamed as a result of this mindset.
Grey rocking, also referred to as the grey rock method, is a coping strategy used by individuals who have experienced abusive or manipulative conduct, to make the abuser lose interest in them. It involves the victim appearing as uninteresting and disengaged as possible. This method applies just to the relationship with the abuser.
Traumagenics refers to processes and dynamics by which traumatic experiences, such as abuse, neglect, or severe stress, cause long-term psychological and emotional suffering. The different aspects of trauma frequently include emotions such as anxiety, guilt, betrayal, or helplessness. This phrase is commonly used in research on childhood trauma to emphasize how negative early experiences influence results in later life.
Transference is a psychological phenomenon in which a person unconsciously redirects or creates new emotions, feelings, or attitudes from or based on previous relationships onto someone else. Transference can show up in everyday relationships, friendships, and in settings like therapy, education, law enforcement, social work, or in caregiving. For example, in shelter homes or rescue situations, a victim might transfer feelings from their past or develop new feelings of attachment onto a caregiver or rescuer without realizing it. It is important for people working in these spaces to be aware of this possibility, so that they can respond with understanding and care.
Counter transference is a psychological phenomenon in which a therapist/caregiver or others, unconsciously redirects their own emotions, feelings, or past experiences onto their client/individual. Recognising counter transference is important because it helps professionals stay objective, provide better care, and avoids letting their own feelings interfere with the clients’ needs.
Secondary trauma, also known as vicarious trauma or secondary traumatic stress, is a form of psychological distress that results from indirect exposure to trauma. It’s characterized by the development of symptoms similar to those experienced by someone directly exposed to a traumatic event, but in this case, the individual is affected by hearing about or witnessing the trauma of others, rather than experiencing it firsthand. It can be something close family or friends of victims can face; it is also something that the law enforcement and professionals working in the healthcare spaces and mental health spaces, among others could experience.
It takes more than knowledge or acquiring information for one to fully understand these dynamics; it also requires developing empathy and establishing supporting environments for survivors to open up about their experiences and for them to grow. However, the first step towards recovery and freedom from any abuse is awareness. It is important to recognize and openly discuss abuse, and the long-term impact of trauma to provide more understanding and to create understanding and an encouraging atmosphere for the victims. By bringing each term into light, we as a community can enhance our collective capacity to fight abuse, promote community and individual healing, and prevent trauma and abuse from affecting and occurring in new relationships.
REFERENCES
What is grey rocking? Zawn Villines (2023) MedicalNewsToday.
Traumagenic-definition., (2018), American Psychological Association (APA).
Childhood emotional neglect: Signs, effects, and how to heal. (2023).
Co-Dependency | Mental Health America. (2024).
Is Fawning a Trauma Response? What You Need to Know. (2023).
Stockholm syndrome(2018), American Psychological Association (APA).
Ronald Chambers, Matthew Gibson, Sarah Chaffin, Timothy Takagi, Nancy Nguyen & Toussaint Mears-Clark (2022): Trauma-coerced Attachment and Complex PTSD: Informed Care for Survivors of Human Trafficking, Journal of Human Trafficking, DOI: 10.1080/23322705.2021.2012386
Upadhyay, I. S., Srivatsa, K. A., & Mamidi, R. (2022). Towards Toxic Positivity Detection. Proceedings of the Tenth International Workshop on Natural Language Processing for Social Media, 75–82. https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2022.socialnlp-1.7
Transferance-definition., (2018), American Psychological Association (APA).
Prasko, J., Ociskova, M., Vanek, J., Burkauskas, J., Slepecky, M., Bite, I., Krone, I., Sollar, T., & Juskiene, A. (2022). Managing Transference and Countertransference in Cognitive Behavioral Supervision: Theoretical Framework and Clinical Application. Psychology research and behavior management, 15, 2129–2155. https://doi.org/10.2147/PRBM.S369294
R.S. Wallerstein, Transference in Psychoanalysis. (2001) Editor(s): Neil J. Smelser, Paul B. Baltes, International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences, Pergamon
Article by Anita Antony. With inputs from Team Bodhini