"What is trauma bonding?"

The concept of traumatic bonding was first articulated by the psychologists Don Dutton and Susan Painter in 1981, working with women who had stayed in or returned to relationships with men who had been violent toward them. They observed two structural features common across the accounts: a power imbalance in the relationship, and the intermittent nature of the abuse, with periods of frightening or violent behaviour alternating with periods of remorse, affection, and apparent change.

Their argument, supported by subsequent research, was that this combination produced a particularly strong attachment. The bond was not evidence of love or weakness. It was the predictable outcome of the structural conditions. Later research has used the term for similar dynamics in sex trafficking situations and high-control groups (Casassa et al., 2021).

The first condition is the power imbalance. One person has substantially more control than the other. The control can be physical, economic, immigration-related, social, or some combination. It is not the absence of all power that creates the bond. It is the structural asymmetry.

The second condition is the intermittent reinforcement. The abusive behaviour is not constant. It is unpredictable, alternating with repair, affection, remorse, or apparent commitment to change. The unpredictability is not incidental. Decades of behavioural research, in both human and animal studies, document that intermittently reinforced patterns are some of the hardest to extinguish. The system that learns associations cannot easily decouple the abuser from the relief that follows the abuse.

You will sometimes see this dynamic called Stockholm syndrome, after the 1973 Stockholm bank robbery. In the academic literature, Stockholm syndrome is poorly supported. It is not in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual or the International Classification of Diseases. Researchers in the field of intimate partner violence have largely moved away from the term in favour of the better-supported concepts of traumatic bonding and coercive control (Casassa et al., 2021; Stark, 2007). In Australia, coercive control is recognised in research and policy as a distinct form of harm.

The pattern does not mean the affection inside the relationship is fake. It does not mean the difficulty of leaving is a personal failing. It does not mean the person inside the relationship is co-dependent or weak. What it means is that the attachment is produced by structural conditions, and that those same conditions tend to produce escalating harm.