Avoiding the Trap: The Dangers of Trauma Bonding with Unhealed Women
Photo by Jackie Parker on Unsplash
Unhealed friendships can be joyful and supportive, a mutual source of camaraderie, validation, and self-improvement. But if these friendships are forged by shared traumas or the need to manage other people’s pain, they are used like sponges, draining our energy and depleting our capacity for joy and growth. Trauma bonds often form these kinds of bonds, but they are just as likely to get stirred up in the vicissitudes of ‘normal life’ as our lives intersect with the lives of others. We will never escape each other.
I want to talk about the dark side of trauma bonds in friendships and why we should screen our friends as diligently as we screen romantic partners.
The Cons of Trauma Bonding in Friendships
Trauma bonding fosters strong bonds, even between people who share adverse events. Once trauma bonds form, they can lead to some remarkably negative consequences:
Energy drain: Unprocessed survivors can feel like beacons of dark energy being immersed in their shadows can drain your energy, thoroughly exhausting you and leaving you wrung out.
Growth block: If your relationships are defined by shared trauma, it’s more challenging to finish grieving or getting past those painful experiences. You’re bonded to – or at least to memories of experiencing – the same pain that defined so much of your lives.
Emotional instability: Trauma bonds show intense peaks and valleys. The emotional rollercoaster of a trauma bond sounds like a recipe for an extra-stressful friendship.
Perverse interdependence: Trauma bonding can lead to a perverse form of interdependence in which one or both partners rely on each other for emotional support in ways that are detrimental to each partner. This sense of interdependence makes establishing and maintaining proper boundaries difficult.
Compounding such negativity: The demands of these friendships often reinforce examples of how to interact with others in negative ways (e.g., through coping mechanisms or responses) and, through continual association, make it difficult to break a cycle of negativity.
5 Reasons Why Vetting Friendships is Important for Healthy Relationships
To avoid the dangers of trauma bonding with friends and create healthier, more optimistic, supportive relationships, you need to vet friends before you bond with them as much as you do a romantic partner. Five reasons why:
Energy alignment: Make sure your friends align with your energy; this allows you to have a giving relationship. Both parties in this relationship elevate and support each other.
Emotional benefit: Good friends are good for your mental health, emotional equilibrium, and self-concept. Vetting potential friends keeps unhealed issues out of your life.
Boundaries: Vetting friends is good because it helps you set limits you and others respect. Boundaries help with self-respect and respect for others. They make your relationships with others healthier, introducing more balance and less drama.
Pick your friends carefully: By choosing friends who are making steps in the right direction, your friends support your healing, too. This makes for a healthier relationship.
Positive reinforcement: Being with someone who has healthy habits and who encourages similar attitudes and behaviors in you will help reinforce good behavior. They provide the right type of support to help you sustain these feelings and avoid unhealthy moments.
It is in exploring and working in these areas that women will create and maintain healthy, nourishing, Divine Feminine friendships and avoid bonding with others who are trauma-bound.
Signs of Jealousy in Friendships
Jealousy is one of the most common dilemmas in friendship, especially when old, unhealed wounds or insecurities trigger it. Signs that it might be time to bring your toxic co-worker to the doctor’s office for the pox include:
Increased Comparisons: A jealous friend frequently compares herself to you, pointing out where she feels ‘worse or better’ in her misattribution of emotions toward you: feeling jealous because you’re happy, jealousy about more specific things, not just general and externally focused jealousy. Comparing herself to you in a jealous way and also comparing herself to others, jealousy is most extreme in newly formed/newly recognized relationships.
Attacking your successes: They might try to minimize accomplishments or dismiss their importance.
No legitimate support: Rather than congratulating you on your achievements, they can also look indifferent or upset when you reach a goal.
Backhanded compliments: Unlike the declaration of affection accompanying the improvement paradox, the backhanded compliment seems to be born of jealousy – as if the congratulator finds your success or beauty threatening and offers a compliment with a barb.
Spreading rumors: They might badmouth you to others, attempting to ruin your name.
Competitive tendencies: A jealous acquaintance will turn everything into a contest, striving to be better than you in every aspect of life.
Isolation tactics: Tactics to remove yourself from others or other social circles so that you won’t have other friends to support you and will be unavailable to them.
Mood swings: They regularly ride the ups and downs of your accomplishments and errors, demonstrating that their happiness mirrors yours.
Passive-aggressiveness: They might make passive-aggressive comments that indirectly express their hidden jealousy.
Withered communication: They’ll withdraw from talking with you because they can’t handle your success.
Personal Experience: Trust Issues Rooted in Past Friendships
I unknowingly befriended lots of unhealed women, which has always (yes, always) led to competition, particularly over the attention of the opposite sex. You can see how this has created many reasons for me not to trust other women, preventing me from wanting to get close to them.
Even those unhealed women who trauma bond over pain (particularly the kind of pain that comes from getting their hearts broken) will create toxic environments no matter the gender, whether that be impulsive violence or bullying. No matter how bad that environment gets, at some point, it starts becoming a need and an endless longing for getting help.
I went to therapy for my postpartum depression – I thought about going back just for this purpose – to heal enough to see the truth in the possibility of trusting another woman. This has taught me so much. I now vet because my energy and values are not something to mess with lightly. I want to build those things so that I’m building the relationships I desire and so that I have healthier and happier relationships.
In sum, avoiding the pitfall of creating a trauma bond and spotting the warning signs of jealousy are keys to forming thriving friendships. While it might be natural to assume that you don’t need to vet your friends as critically as you would a romantic partner, if you can do so, you’ll increase your chances of people contributing to your life rather than draining it.
