These tips come from mindfulness (read our free Guide to Mindfulness if you are curious). How I am feeling in my skin? Do I feel tension, unease, fatigue? Where in my body do I feel unwell or tense? What is beneath the emotion? Sadness? Grief?). Set your alarm to go off several times a day then sit for a minute trying to notice what you feel.Ĭan you name the emotion? (Bored isn’t an emotion. Starting to feel what we have been repressing gives us a clearer picture of what we are really going through. Or emotional dysregulation, where you have wild fluctuating big emotions, but through the storm don’t know which ones are your real feelings. It leads to dissociation, where you feel you are floating out of your body. Put your focus on feeling.Ībuse is numbing. Whether it’s learning ballet, writing a novel, or finally finishing high school, this is your lifeline back to yourself. Make sure it is nothing to do with your partner. Putting our focus on a long put off goal is about remembering who we are. Our entire life becomes about the intense highs and lows of the relationship. The thing about trauma bonds is that we lose ourselves to them. Start a long put-off project with all of your might. How would your 80 year-old self feel looking back at your life? What would your 5 year old self tell you about what you are doing right now? If you bumped into Lady Gaga with your partner, what would she have to say? What about Dorothy from the Wizard of Oz? If you suddenly won the lottery, what would you do about this situation? 5. You can try out the perspective of anyone, real or fictional, dead or alive, and even different versions of yourself. Shift perspective.Ī shift in perspective gives you all new clarity. How long ago did your partner start making promises? What has he or she done exactly to fulfil those promises? What is your ideal relationship? How does this relationship differ? What changes do you want your partner to make? What proof do you have they can make such changes? 4. Avoid ‘why’ questions, which send you on a spiral and can leave you depressed (learn more in our article on “ the Power of the Right Questions to Move Your Life Forward”.) The secret is to learn how to ask good questions. Questions can shift our perspective, reveal our true feelings and give us clarity. When we remove ourselves like this, our unconscious allows forgotten things to surface. “One day, he was walking into a bar, and he met her….”. You might even want to write your entire relationship out like a story that happened to someone else. And sure, write down the good things, too. Leave the list at work, or in an email draft of an account he or she does not and will never have the pass code to.Įach day write down key points of what happened between you. But of course this must be something your abuser can never find. Making a record of everything that happens is a great start to ‘getting real’. We block out, quickly forget, and/or rewrite the reality of the abuse and focus on the things he or she promised – that future marriage that never comes, that day he or she quits drinking. Start reality training.Ī defence mechanism we use to stay trapped by a trauma bond is denial. If the person who abused you was a parent or family member, you might even have a deep-rooted unconscious core belief that abuse is love. Unless you did therapy to process your beliefs and experiences, your brain will still believe this is the best survival tactic – to put up with abuse. The truth is that most of us who end up in this sort of relationship suffered abuse as a child, whether that was sexual abuse, emotional abuse, verbal abuse, and/or physical abuse. As a child, making the best of the abusive situation was the only option. What if it’s not your fault that you can’t leave? What if, actually, your brain is programmed to be loyal to an abuser and see the best in an abusive situation? Is there a secret voice in your head that says you are to stupid or weak to leave, that you deserve this, that it’s the best you’ll get? (Not sure you are or aren’t in a relationship with trauma bonds? Read our connected article, “ What is Trauma Bonding?“). So how can you break free of a trauma bond when it feels easier to stay? We hold onto a promised better future, focus on the positives and ignore the rest, and feel a sense of loyalty to the person everyone else says we must leave. Traumatic bonding happens when we are in an abusive relationship but feel unable to leave.
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