What is a trauma bond? Why work with a trauma bond marriage therapist on the Space Coast of Florida? First, a trauma bond is a pattern of abuse. Trauma could be physical, emotional, sexual, mental, psychological abuse of any kind. For one, you may feel manipulated and you might feel like there’s gaslighting. Often, your voice isn’t heard and you may also feel ignored. It is common for couples in a trauma bond to feel emotional pain, unimportant or unwanted by one another.
Also, in a trauma bond, whatever the trigger is, ie, the fight, laundry on the floor, money, parenting or infertility, triggers an emotion that is really a wound from childhood.
How does seeing a trauma bond marriage therapist on the Space Coast of Florida help?
Well, couples therapy is a safe place to heal from this trauma cycle. Often, a trauma bond mirrors unhealthy childhood relationships. If you are in a trauma bond, there’s often childhood trauma that is unresolved. So, you are both fighting, hurt, angry, and not getting the love you want. Commonly, current criticisms and negative communication mean you and your romantic partner have trauma wounds from childhood.
To begin, book your free phone consultation for marriage counseling to break the trauma bond, increase playfulness and create a joyful connection using the button below.
What is trauma from childhood and how does it play a role in my current trauma bond?
A parent or a caregiver who was supposed to love you and nurture you, was not available emotionally. You may have had to take care of an alcoholic parent. So, if there are any sort of issues that you had growing up, you could have a hurt inner child part of you. Maybe, you had parents who were alcoholics or parents who had severe mental health issues like depression or bipolar, that is traumatic.
Maybe, your spouse may have had a highly critical or verbally abusive mother.
Deep down they want the approval of their mom, but will never get it. This trauma makes your spouse more deeply want attention from you. As well, childhood trauma means that as a little child, you were forced to take care of yourself. Therefore, the person that you deeply wanted affection and approval, neglected you and could not give that. Often, when a couples seeks counseling for a trauma bond cycle, they are both re-triggering one another’s childhood trauma.
Examples of childhood trauma that set up a trauma bond in adulthood
So, childhood trauma can come from a variety of different experiences. For example, sexual abuse, emotional abuse or living in a high conflict or domestically violent home as a child leave a lasting impact. As well, all the above creates a love wound that romantic partners re-trigger in fights. So, then when we end up in a romance, a marriage, the fights get so intense and escalated. Essentially, emotional pain from childhood leaves a wound. Fights with a romantic partner re-trigger these love wounds. Arguments, things said, and hurtful jabs re-traumatize and re-trigger past emotional pain. This cycle of unresolved childhood trauma in both people creates a trauma bond for couples.
Intense anger means the inner child part of you is still needing your love.
An inner child part of you is hurt and still needing your affection. Working with you inner child, building compassion, and self-acceptance are valuable tools. Sometimes, couples get into traumatic fights because they are needing to feel safe in some way. Negative communication only crates more damage. The fight that you’re having with your romantic partner actually triggers the wounds of your inner child that are unresolved.
To begin, book your free phone consultation for marriage counseling to break the trauma bond, increase playfulness and create a joyful connection using the button below.
Unresolved trauma that you experienced in childhood, actually impacts your romantic relationship.
If you had a parent had borderline personality disorder, and was incredibly unstable and unreliable, or moody, that leaves a lasting impact. If your parents had anger issues or, you had to take care of your parent emotionally, that is traumatic. You may have missed out on being a child, and you had to be a parent at a very young age. It really triggers you when your partner seems to be acting like your emotionally neglectful parents. Therefore, as humans, we develop some childhood trauma from that experience that stays with us. Wisdom Within Counseling helps couples develop compassion and understanding for one another after childhood trauma.
What does a trauma bond for couples cycle look like?
A lot of times when couples end up in a trauma bond, they experience a high conflict cycle of communication. For instance, negative communication, name calling, and door slamming are common. Frequently, couples experience moments of intense, frustrating anger that prevents openness. Emotional instability occurs in each fight because neither party is using healthy communication skills. Your trauma bond marriage therapist on the Space Coast of Florida can support healthy communication skills.
Learning healthy communication skills can break your trauma bond cycle in your relationship.
After fights like this, you might feel hopeless, upset distressed. This is because your body goes into fight, flight, and freeze mode. Past trauma memories make your mind feel unsafe and anxious after a fight. In a couples trauma bond, there is not much stability, so partners have anxiety about creating a more emotionally stable future.
What are positive, emotional coping tools and how can they be a part of working with a trauma bond marriage therapist on the Space Coast of Florida?
Trauma bonds can be so distressing because both people are completely dis-regulated. Essentially, healthy couples can stay calm, grounded, and maintain inner peace when in a disagreement. However, couples stuck in a trauma bond tend to lack emotional regulation skills. Working with a trauma bond marriage therapist on the Space Coast of Florida can teach positive coping skills. These emotional coping tools help each person in the relationship practice self-soothing and self-care. Rather than engaging in a pain fight or saying something intentionally mean, couples can find healthy ways to communicate.
What is emotional dysregulation in your romantic relationship?
Dysregulation is when you’re not grounded. You’re like not centered at all and you are filled with intense emotion. Your blood is boiling and you’re not feeling heard. As a couples therapist, in this moment, there are a lot of emotional needs not being met. So, in a trauma bond, as counselors, we help you identify when you need to self-soothe and regulate your emotions.
It is common for couples in a trauma bond to lack education on self-regulation.
Commonly, counseling with a trauma bond marriage therapist on the Space Coast of Florida helps individual calm themselves. You can gain tools to feel restored and peaceful from the inside out. Instead of anger, you can gain self-soothing tools to feel creative and develop groundedness.
To begin, book your free phone consultation for marriage counseling to break the trauma bond, increase playfulness and create a joyful connection using the button below.
What are healthy self-soothing skills that every person needs to have a healthy relationship?
Take a shower, go for a walk for 15 minutes, eat food, or have a glass of cold water to self-regulate. In DBT, dialectical behavior therapy, couples can make self-soothe kits. These are physical boxes with mints, fidgets, dough, essential oils, and crystals or worry stones to use. Essentially, when you notice a fight escalating, instead of fighting back, do some knitting. Get creative and draw, paint, use some clay, and de-stress yourself in some way by yourself.
Often, couples stuck in trauma bonds get more and more intense together, angry, blame their partner, mean, call names, and critical.
Instead, of fueling the fire of the fight, just re-center regain your own sense of groundedness. To note, the self-regulation skill of self-soothing can take months to learn. That is where counseling with a trauma bond marriage therapist on the Space Coast of Florida comes in. Katie Ziskind, a licensed marriage and family therapist, specializes in complex trauma bond. Because your partner may be re-triggering you constantly, it may be difficult to create inner calm.
Marriage therapy in Melbourne, Florida can teach you how to self-regulate and not get sucked into the trauma bond cycle anymore.
From self-soothing, you can develop a grounded, calm, confident version of yourself. Form there, you can decide who you want to be and restore inner peace. Restoring that sense of true leadership in your life is healing. Learning to be calm and accepting of yourself is a skill to heal a trauma bond.
Two people who have a history of trauma and a history of abandonment and pain, need couples therapy to learn new skills.
As well, even if you both feel that you have immature parents, marriage counseling teaches skills to build a healthy relationship. You can learn new ways to communicating and break the negative, traumatic cycle that you both in childhood. So, healing from a trauma bond benefits not only you as a person, but your partner, and your children.
You can feel calm and articulate your words more effectively from counseling with a trauma bond marriage therapist on the Space Coast of Florida.
Also, you can know when you need to pull back and do what we call self-soothing. Healthy communicators practice self-care. So, if you are in a trauma bond, you may be really struggling with feeling connected and close.
How do couples in a trauma bond communicate?
As a child, you pushed through. Now, here you are as an adult and you’re in a relationship. There is tension, anger, and high intensity emotional moments. Some of these younger wounds, these unhealed traumas are getting re-triggered by the fights. It feels like your partner is throwing arrows at you in a conflict. So, what happens in a trauma bond is both people have childhood trauma. Then, both people as adults in this romantic relationship are in conflict and triggering each other’s childhood trauma. They each know how to do it super well and that’s also one of the attack mechanisms in a trauma bond.
Trauma bonds in couples counseling are a cycle that they can be broken.
Both people need to want to grow for the better though. If y ou are in a trauma bond, there is hope. From working with a trauma bond specialist in couples therapy such as Katie Ziskind at Wisdom Within Counseling, you can heal. As well, Katie Ziskind and her team of therapists at Wisdom Within Counseling specialize in complex trauma (CPTSD). In general, it much feel chaotic now, but if you’re in a trauma bond, there is hope.
The first step is working with a couples therapist who understands trauma bonds and complex trauma.
Counseling with a trauma bond marriage therapist on the Space Coast of Florida supports both people in understanding complex trauma. Couples can learn self-regulation skills and inner peace tools.
Counseling with a trauma bond marriage therapist on the Space Coast of Florida helps couples gain healthy communication skills.
Self-awareness and understanding when you need to pull back and not talk is a skill too.
Often, couples keep arguing when it is not effective to keep talking. Therefore, couples can identify when it’s not effective to keep talking or keep the fight going. Couples can gain awareness for the trauma bond cycle to prevent themselves from getting sucked into an escalating fight. As well, self-awareness may look like communicating when you are not able to be calm too. You might say, “I’m not my best self, and what I’m about to say is not healing, and that is not who I want to be. I need five minutes to cool off.”
The communication skills that you learn in counseling actually help you communicate everyone in your life better.
You’re passing down healthy communication skills to your children from being in couples counseling. As well, in a trauma bond, we talk about complex trauma, and we talk about post-traumatic stress disorder. Your spouse might need education around complex PTSD symptoms. Couples can learn how to support each other in an intimate relationship after trauma. When one or both people have complex post-traumatic stress disorder or PTSD, a trauma bond can occur.
To begin, book your free phone consultation for marriage counseling to break the trauma bond, increase playfulness and create a joyful connection using the button below.
Learning to nurture each other and care for each other and truly build an emotional intimate connection is powerful.
Couples therapy in Melbourne, Florida is a process of building a meaningful connection. Trauma bonds are not a specialty for many couple’s therapists. A lot of therapists are just generalists. As well, when you see a therapist that isn’t educated on complex trauma, they actually get sucked into your argument cycle or pick sides.
Working with a trauma bond marriage therapist on the Space Coast of Florida is essential to breaking your trauma bond.
Connecting with a specialist for trauma bond marriage counseling can help you really gain effective communication. If you start to yell or get into this typical argument pattern, your couples therapist will pause you. You get concrete communication skills right in session. Your marriage therapist will redirect you both into a healthier way of speaking. Commonly, couples need help learning a more effective way of talking right in session.
We don’t often learn healthy communication skills in childhood.
Through childhood trauma, couples learn they deserve disrespect, and abuse. Likewise, learning how to communicate calmly can be new. Your trauma bond therapist in Melbourne, Florida will ensure you can both feel heard and validated emotionally. Healing a trauma bond is about gaining self-respect and self-worth.
At Wisdom Within Counseling in Melbourne, Florida, we believe you deserve to feel loved and feel respected.
Wisdom Within Counseling specializes in helping couples create a safe, nurturing, romantic and intimate partnership after trauma.
And, when our parents may not have treated you so well, you may have learned how to survive. Children with trauma grow up living in fear mode with a lot of anxiety. Now, in your romantic relationship you can both work on unresolved childhood trauma together. You can learn to reduce those CPTSD triggers and build positive coping tools. Holistic creative therapies at Wisdom Within Counseling support self-acceptance and trauma recovery.
Katie Ziskind and her team at Wisdom Within Counseling are trauma bond specialists. We work with couples who get stuck in complex trauma modes of fight, flight, freeze. When couples get into high conflict arguments, there’s unhealed wounds and trauma underneath that. So, when you feel intense betrayal, anger, or loss, that is intensified.
Maybe your partner has addiction issues, sex addiction, drug addiction, alcoholism themselves and their adult life, all of these things can really cause problems in your marriage. It can lead to trust problems.
If your partner spends money behind your back, or you’re really not feeling on the same page about money values, that can really cause a problem for your marriage and for your romance.
Couples counseling can give you skills to break the trauma bond.
You can begin by understanding the pattern of conflict. Then, you can identify what cycle you’re in and how to self soothe. Next, you can learn how to handle emotional distress and tolerate the stress in a healthy way.
Skills for incorporating mindfulness including yoga, art, painting, all of these self-care strategies. Holistic therapies help couples regain groundedness and centeredness. To note, the goal of breaking a trauma bond is to help you and your partner be able to talk and communicate effectively. And, do so calmly from a grounded, creative, compassionate place of leadership within yourself. And a lot of times when people are in a trauma bond, they’re communicating from a place of anger.
Stuck, trauma bond couples communicate with harshness, criticism, defensiveness or yelling.
Marriage therapy in Melbourne, Florida provides effective and calm ways to help your partner hear you. So, instead of yelling, name calling, criticizing or belittling, you can feel confident communicating. And, your intimate relationship can improve in a healthier way.
Healthier communication is not something we learned growing up, especially growing up in a traumatic environment. So, if you’re stuck in a trauma bond in your marriage, there is hope. Our team of therapists at Wisdom Within Counseling would love to help as a complex trauma specialists. You can gain tools to build a healthy marriage. And, you can build the communication styles that are healthier.
Couples counseling supports safety, love, authenticity and playfulness. Acceptance and compassion, promote a sense of relationship resilience.
Couples counseling along the Space Coast of Florida helps you both feel loved and hopeful versus hopeless or lost or unclear.
Hope and conflict resolution skills build long lasting love. If you’re looking to work with a trauma bond specialist, Wisdom Within Counseling can help.
We can help you gain emotional connection together.
Wisdom Within Counseling supports couples along the Space Coast of Florida in Cocoa, Cocoa West, Rockledge, Palm Bay, Orlando, Merritt Island, Suntree-Viera, West Melbourne, Malabar, Sebastian, Cape Canaveral, Cocoa Beach, Patrick Air Force Base, Satellite Beach.
At Wisdom Within Counseling, our team helps you build the marriage that you desire and you dream of.
