Stages of Trauma Bonding

What is a Trauma Bond? Feeling addicted to the bond. Why do people stay?

The first step is understanding how the trauma bond is formed and how to start moving away from them.

1. Love Bombing: They shower you love, make you feel enough and it feels like they are giving you everything you every wanted. But its strategic on their part. They know what they are doing by mirroring your needs. They tell you they will love your forever.
2. Trust and dependency: You begin to trust and build a dependency on the validation they are giving to you. It feels so good to get the validation and the love they are sharing. At this stage the validation begins to shift slowly, they respond when you do things for them, so you don’t notice they aren’t complimenting you otherwise. They are ‘training’ you to please them
3. Devalue: the love begins to diminish. Criticism begins. Now they are blaming, criticizing and become more demanding of you. But they are giving less and less. 
4. Gaslighting: Your gut is telling you something is wrong. But when you communicate it, they gaslight and let you take the blame. They tell you its your fault, you don’t trust them, you spend too much time with friends, they try to convince you that you have changed, getting you to accept their reality. 
5. Control is Established: You doubt yourself, and it;s hard to imagine this perfect person has bad intentions, so you begin to believe the other person more and more. Even though you do realize you are the one giving in, hiding your true feelings or doing things that make them angry. You want to get back to the early stage of love. You miss it. So you start doing things their way
6. Loss of Self: You follow the rules. You try to do things to please the other person or not do anything that will irritate them. But things keep getting worse. If you try to stand up for yourself or get them to see your side, it gets worse. So you try to keep things calm, but you feel broken and confused.
7. Addiction: You become addicted to the small signs of love any little sign they give you. You look forward to those little crumbs, so your brain and body chemical get charged by the feelings leaving you with toxic addiction.  All you think about is winning their love back.