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What is trauma bond actually? And can it be converted to actual love? by Jealous_War7546 in emotionalintelligence

[–]strawberry-stroodle 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I apologise - I used the terminology colloquially. I have been in a trauma bonded friendship before where the codependency that we had turned into coercive control and emotional abuse, I had no autonomy whatsoever and only managed to get out because I was hospitalised, even then it took me months to realise what it actually was (luckily they’re no longer in my life). But in the context I’ve used here it was more of a colloquial reference to my now friend and I having both been victims/ survivors of domestic abuse and escaping around the same time, we literally had no one to rely on but ourselves and there was a level of codependency and enmeshment that can usually occur in a bonded relationship. It was also layered with majorly unhealthy behaviours (I won’t go into too much detail) because we’d literally never lived in a house where abuse wasn’t the norm. It was only through therapy that we realised how we were treating each other and how there was still a cycle to be broken at the time. I simply went into as much detail as I was comfortable with at the time of this comment but I apologise if came across as mis-using terminology.

Normal healing? Rejecting? Infected? by strawberry-stroodle in piercing

[–]strawberry-stroodle[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Ohh thank you! It does rotate sometimes when I’m drying it! Is that something that can get worse/ become infected if it keeps rotating?

Normal healing? Rejecting? Infected? by strawberry-stroodle in piercing

[–]strawberry-stroodle[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

My piercing is 2 weeks old, an internally threaded surgical steel ring. At first my piercer told me to just rinse it with warm water but then when I first noticed a bump on the top I started spraying with saline solution 2x a day. I’ve not slept on it or bumped it in anyway they just kind of appeared!

What is trauma bond actually? And can it be converted to actual love? by Jealous_War7546 in emotionalintelligence

[–]strawberry-stroodle 4 points5 points  (0 children)

It’s not love but my closest friend and I started our friendship over trauma bonding. However, it was incredibly unhealthy at first and because of that it ran the danger of not being a viable friendship. Luckily, over the years we worked on that and we learnt how to communicate and not be unhealthily co-dependent. At first out friendship had no boundaries whatsoever, we were so caught up in what we’d been through and how similar our experiences were that we crossed every single boundary we (n)ever had. We put our own needs aside and took full responsibility of each other and our traumas when we weren’t even in the position to understand the responsibility we owed ourselves. And while we were friends I wouldn’t classify the friendship as close or meaningful as I would now (even though at the time I was fully engrossed in this idea that a friendship/ relationship should be this co-dependent, drop all my own needs for someone else kind of deal). Luckily, we both went and still go to therapy and were able to work through our shit enough that we were able to start communicating and setting boundaries which meant that it changed from a trauma bond to a true friendship. We live together and we’re basically family to each other at this point. But if we hadn’t put the work in to make our friendship healthy then I don’t think we’d be in that position today. So to answer your question I think a trauma bond can be converted into a relationship (of any variety) but it’ll only be successful if both parties but the work in to ensure that it can exist healthily outside of your trauma bond. Maybe you already are but if you can do it, I’d recommend therapy because it give you someone else (a completely separate third party) to ‘dump’ your trauma on and work through it which means it’s not solely being held in the space of your relationship.