The Worse He Treated Me, the Harder I Held On. | Trauma Bonding

SPEAKER_1 (0:00)

I kept a shoebox of apologies. That is the first thing I tell people when they ask why I stayed. It sat on the top shelf of my closet, a plain gray shoebox with a faded label. Inside were notes, cards, a dozen torn-out pages from a notebook. Each one in a hurried slanted hand said some version of the same thing. I am sorry. I will never do it again. You are the best thing that ever happened to me. There were forty-three of them. I counted. Once. His name was Rafael. We were together three years. He was a chef. And he was, I want to say clearly, wonderful. In the good times, he was the most tender person I have ever known. He cooked for me at midnight. He rubbed my feet. He said things so loving that I would feel myself soften, from the inside, like butter on a warm stove. And then there were the other times. I will not give you every detail. They were not always the same. A cold remark about my weight. A cruel joke at a dinner. A door slammed. And a silence that lasted two days. A night when he called me a name I will not repeat. And then slept. And in the morning stood in the kitchen doorway with tears in his eyes. He would say, I do not know what is wrong with me. He would say, You do not deserve that. He would say, please, please do not leave. And I would stay.

I want to explain this because the question I most often get and the one I asked myself for years is, why?

Why did you stay when it was so bad? And the honest answer is that it was never only bad. That was the whole mechanism. It was bad, and then it was wonderful, and then it was bad, and the wonderful was so powerful after the bad that it felt like a rescue. There is a term that people use for this, trauma bonding. It is not a formal diagnosis, but many clinicians and writers use it to describe a strong emotional attachment that can develop in relationships where there are cycles of mistreatment and reconciliation. The idea is that when someone alternates between harm and comfort, the comfort feels more intense, and the bond becomes harder to break. Some people compare it to the pattern of unpredictable rewards, where you never know when the good will come, and so you keep reaching. I did not know any of that when I was in it.

What I knew was a feeling in my body. After a fight, a low humming dread, as if the air in the apartment had thickened. Then, when he softened, a rush, almost physical, of relief. A flood of warmth. It felt like gratitude. It felt like love. It was so strong that in those moments I could not remember what had hurt.

My friends noticed. They said things carefully. My friend Delphine, who had known me since college, said once, over coffee, I do not want to tell you what to do.

But I have been counting how many times you have told me you are leaving. I said, he is going through a lot. She said, I know. I said, he really does love me. She said, I am sure he does. That is not the same as being good for you. I did not speak to her for three months. The thing I did not understand was how deeply the bond was woven into my sense of myself. I had started to organize my days around him, his mood in the morning, his text at lunch, a particular tone of voice in the evening. I was a barometer, always reading the pressure, and when it dropped, I would try instinctively to fix it.

I want to give you a few more of the quiet things, because they are what the shoebox does not show. There was the way I stopped saying certain things. I stopped telling Raphael about good news, because he would find a way to dim it.

A promotion at work was met with a long, careful silence, and then a sentence about how much pressure he was under. A compliment from a co-worker, repeated at dinner, led to a question about who the co-worker was.

I learned to bring only small, safe news home.

I started to live in two registers. There was the way I kept score. In the mornings, I would wake and read the room before I opened my eyes. Was he awake? Was the air warm? Did the coffee machine sound angry?

I had developed a kind of weather sense, and I used it every day without knowing. There was the way the good days felt. I want to say something about those because I think they are the key.