It's called being trauma bonded.

You can arrest the perpetrators, provide shelter to survivors, even provide services to these survivors; however, if you don’t know what you’re dealing with, your efforts will eventually fail. Survivors will go back to their old life, their perpetrators, and probably kill themselves or be killed. Stop fooling yourselves thinking you’re doing them a favor by helping them. Because you’re not. Setting a survivor up for success instead of failure takes more than shelter and services, or the removal of their perpetrator. If it were that easy, the number of survivors and their recidivism would be decreasing, not increasing.

It takes survivors holding themselves accountable to change. And it takes identifying what it is that is making them not only a victim, but also a survivor. And it’s called being trauma bonded. And to add to the complexity of this tragic situation, are most of the perpetrators who also suffer from being trauma bonded from a young age. So, the victims here are bi-relational. But the cause is the same – trauma bonding.?

Trauma bonding survivors experience several cognitive, emotional-social, physical, spiritual, societal, and financial complex symptomatology factors. For instance, cognitively, they have decreased executive functioning capacities, e.g., lack of concentration/focus, decreased problem-solving/decision-making skills; they can’t identify and react to danger cues; and they have distorted cognitions of love – usually caused by traumatic brain injuries suffered from physical beatings. Emotional-social factors include anxiety, posttraumatic stress, and dissociative disorders and complex PTSD; dysfunctional attachment styles; and a decreased self-esteem, self-identity, and life purpose; self-harming tendencies; and feeling unsafe and trapped. Spiritually, trauma bonding survivors experience a negative belief, trust, and love in God with questioning meaning and purpose. A societal factor includes systemic isolation, and financially, trauma bonding survivors experience a lack of economic independence and basic living necessities.

The problem is that trauma bonding, traumatic bonding, trauma-coerced attachment, and recidivism are not considered a separate diagnosable mental health disorder in the DSM-5-TR? or the ICD-11. While the American Psychological Association (APA) defined trauma, bond, bonding, and recidivism specific to repeat perpetrator criminal behavior, the APA does not include separate definitions for trauma bonding, trauma-coerced attachment, or recidivism specific to repeat victim dysfunctional attachment behavior. This means that there is no diagnostic criteria, diagnostic features, associated features, prevalence rates, or differential diagnoses available aside from associating trauma bonding with posttraumatic stress and dissociative disorders, complex PTSD, and self-harming tendencies.?

And if that isn’t frustrating enough, the APA defines the construct of bonding as a positive attachment that embodies trust, friendship, and a mutual alliance. Yet, Dr. Patrick J. Carnes considers the bonding attachment to be neutral, not negative or positive, and thinks the use of the attachment is what creates either a positive or negative bond. The negative use of a bonding attachment is considered a betrayal by the person, e.g., the abuser in the relationship, which breaks the trust and perceived positive mutual alliance that creates feelings of abandonment in the victim in the relationship. Even more frustrating is that trauma bonding lacks a standardized psychometric instrument by the APA that could be used in dysfunctional dyadic relationships to better identify and define its complex construct with eventually becoming a separate diagnosable cognitive/behavioral attachment disorder with a standardized treatment protocol and definition.?

So, do you see how removing the perpetrator and providing shelter and services isn’t enough??

If not, try this – imagine losing something precious to you, but you don’t know what that something precious is, but you try to locate it anyway; only to find yourself blindfolded, going in circles wondering why you can’t find that something precious with other people wanting to help find that something special, but you can’t even identify what that something special is. And now, you've got a whole community looking for that unidentified something special with blindfolds on too going around and around and around.

Unless you identify the object, you’ll never find it. And unless we scientifically identify, define, and diagnose trauma bonding, we will never successfully treat its condition on survivors or its perpetrators.

Learn about our research on trauma bonding in sex-trafficked women here –

doreyenterprises.com/research