Trauma bonding is one of those terms people hear and think sounds dramatic, until they realize it explains exactly why leaving certain relationships feels impossible. When coercive control is in the picture, the push-and-pull of affection and fear can quietly turn into an emotional attachment to an abuser that feels confusing, powerful, and painfully real.
What looks like love from the outside is often emotional dependency built through manipulation, isolation, and the subtle signs of coercive control people are taught to ignore. Let’s break down how it actually works, and why it’s so hard to spot while you are living inside it.
KEY POINTS
- Coercive control reconfigures attachment into submission.
- Abusers manipulate core emotional bonds through cycles of fear, affection, and degradation.
- Social norms, legal systems, and economic structures reinforce dependency and normalise subordination.
- Trauma bonding is engineered, not chosen. It is the result of perpetrator tactics, not victim pathology.
‘We can create boredom. We can create a sense of frustration. We can create fear in them (…) They’ll have no privacy at all, there will be constant surveillance—nothing they do will go unobserved.
They will have no freedom of action. They will be able to do nothing and say nothing that we do not permit (…) In general, what all this should create in them is a sense of powerlessness. We have total power in the situation. They have none.’
— Stanford Prison Experiment, (Zimbardo, 2007b)
In the Stanford Prison Experiment, 24 college students—pre-screened for mental stability—were randomly assigned to the roles of guards or prisoners.
Although physical violence was explicitly prohibited, the guards exerted control through psychological means, systematically erasing the prisoners’ identities, imposing degrading conditions and manipulating their emotional states.
Before the experiment was terminated, one participant expressed a desire to leave the study, but upon hearing his fellow prisoners label him a “bad prisoner,” he began crying and repeatedly stated, “I can’t leave, I don’t want them to think that I’m a bad prisoner”. This response shows the impact of psychological coercion, even without physical force.
Related: Why Is It So Hard to Leave? The Truth About Trauma Bonding
It raises a critical question: If brainwashing can turn a promising Stanford student into a “bad prisoner” in just three days, what are the long-term effects on individuals subjected to coercive control for years, or those born into environments of such manipulation?
Similar dynamics operate in domestic violence. Perpetrators of coercive control don’t just dominate through rules or threats; they reshape how victims see themselves, their relationships, and their options. Over time, autonomy is eroded, identity is reconstructed, and submission becomes structurally embedded.
It’s not about failing to leave; it’s about being conditioned to believe there is nothing to leave to.
Coercive control restructures attachment itself, turning a basic human need into a tool of entrapment. As Bowlby (1969; 1980) argued, we form emotional bonds to seek safety—especially in times of distress.
Perpetrators of coercive control exploit this need by using intermittent reinforcement—alternating affection with punishment—to create confusion, dependency, and emotional instability (Dutton & Painter, 1993; Stark, 2007).
This isn’t a one-off act of harm, but a cumulative process that gradually erodes autonomy and reshapes perception.
Victims often develop what researchers call trauma bonding (Freyd, 1996), a paradoxical attachment in which the threat of harm and occasional moments of relief reinforce emotional loyalty to the perpetrator (Herman, 1992).
The victim remains psychologically tethered in anticipation of approval, reprieve, or a return to affection (Dutton & White, 2012; Johnson, 2008; Williamson, 2010).
Trauma bonding is reinforced by social conditioning. Gender roles that valorise female self-sacrifice, emotional labour, and dependency may teach women to see endurance as love (Gilligan, 1993; Walker, 2009).
These norms make abuse easier to rationalise, especially when patriarchy devalues autonomy and frames male authority as natural (Connell, 2013).
Abusers exploit this through control, isolation, and gaslighting, creating a false sense of safety in submission (Stark, 2007; Mahoney, 2013). In simple words: If love means service and obedience, then there is nothing wrong with him using and dominating me. And if using and dominating me is ok, why wouldn’t I love him?
Beyond psychological conditioning, patriarchy reinforces trauma bonding through structural barriers that make it difficult for victims to leave.
Economic dependence is one of the most significant factors, as women who are financially reliant on their abusers face limited options for independent survival (Brush, 2003).
Unequal pay, occupational segregation, and the undervaluation of care work contribute to the material conditions that keep women trapped with abusive men (Acker, 1990).
Economic insecurity intensifies trauma bonding by making abusers not just sources of emotional reinforcement but also material survival, increasing the stakes of leaving (Stark, 2007).
Perpetrator Involvement in Creating Trauma Bonding
Trauma bonding does not happen passively; it is actively cultivated and maintained by perpetrators through deliberate psychological manipulation, control strategies, and structural reinforcement of dependency.
Perpetrators of coercive control employ calculated patterns of abuse and intermittent reinforcement to condition victims into a state of emotional entrapment (Dutton & Painter, 1993; Stark, 2007).
Unlike situational acts of violence, coercive control operates as a sustained system of domination, in which perpetrators systematically undermine autonomy, distort reality, and foster dependence to create an attachment dynamic that is resistant to rupture (Williamson, 2010).
This process is not incidental but intentional, ensuring that victims remain psychologically tethered even in the absence of physical restraint.
Additionally, perpetrators strategically engineer dependency by isolating victims from external sources of support, such as family, friends, and financial independence (Stark, 2007). This isolation erodes alternative attachments, ensuring that the perpetrator becomes the victim’s sole emotional reference point.
In many cases, this extends beyond psychological control to material entrapment, as perpetrators restrict access to money, employment, and housing, reinforcing the victim’s reliance on them for survival (Johnson, 2008).
This creates a dual-layered entrapment, in which trauma bonding is reinforced both emotionally and structurally, making escape not just difficult but psychologically inconceivable.
The creation of trauma bonding also involves manipulating victims’ identities and self-perception. Perpetrators often dehumanise and degrade their victims while simultaneously positioning themselves as the only source of validation and protection (Williamson, 2010).
This paradoxical dynamic—the abuser as both the cause of distress and the perceived solution—creates cognitive dissonance, which victims resolve by deepening their attachment rather than resisting it (Mahoney, 1994).
Over time, victims internalise the perpetrator’s constructed reality, viewing themselves as unworthy, incapable of leaving, or responsible for their own suffering.
Ultimately, trauma bonding is not just a psychological consequence of abuse; it is an intentional strategy of coercive control, designed to create an enduring state of compliance, dependence, and distorted attachment (Stark, 2007).
Recognising the perpetrator’s active role in shaping trauma bonding is crucial for developing interventions that disrupt these patterns, empowering victims to reclaim autonomy and recognise conditioned attachment to their abuser.
Related: What Is Trauma Bonding and How It Keeps You Stuck In Abusive Relationships
So why do I still love him?
Because coercive control doesn’t merely dominate behaviour; it colonises perception and reconfigures attachment at the root. What feels like love is often the residue of a system designed to confuse survival with intimacy.
The perpetrator controls not just the relationship, but the conditions under which care, safety, and worth are made available—intermittently, strategically. This manipulation exploits the brain’s drive for connection, creating a feedback loop in which threat intensifies dependency, and isolation makes the abuser appear as the only source of relief.
In this context, “love” is not affection freely given; it is a conditioned response formed under structural duress.
Trauma bonding is not a failure to recognise harm; it is the intended outcome of sustained psychological manipulation, gendered conditioning, and structural neglect. When institutions treat coercive control as confusion or choice, they reinforce the perpetrator’s logic.
To undo trauma bonding, we must first break the illusion that domination is care.
That work is clinical, cultural, and political—and it begins by naming coercive control for what it is: not a failure of love, but a deliberate dismantling of autonomy, designed to bind rather than wound.
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Mags Lesiak is a psychological criminologist and doctoral researcher at the University of Cambridge. Her work examines how legal, clinical and algorithmic systems interpret and govern harm through the frameworks of risk, care and code. She is the first author of The Invisible Abuser (SAGE, 2025), which introduced the concept of weaponised attachment and ranked in the top 5% of all research outputs tracked by Altmetric, shaping national and international discourse on coercive control.
Mags has contributed to national policy development through the UK Government Office for Science and Technology, including behavioural-science input into COBRA and national emergency planning. She is also the lead author of Social Capital and Crime 2025, a Demos report now used by local authorities, safeguarding boards and policymakers across the UK as an evidence base for community-level crime prevention. She specialises in risk governance, policy design, data analytics, and strategic foresight. She works across qualitative, quantitative and machine-learning methods.
Her research and commentary have appeared in ABC Australia, the American Bar Association, Teen Vogue, Psychology Today and Policing Insight.
Website: https://mags-lesiak-newsletter.beehiiv.com/
Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/magscambridge/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/magslesiak/
Written by Mags Lesiak, MPhil
Originally Appeared on Psychology Today
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