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Trauma bonding can be a devastating and deeply confusing thing. We can find ourselves, knowing we’re in abusive relationships, feeling dependent on those very relationships, and riddled with guilt, shame and uncertainty about actions that have the potential to move us on in life. Sufferers often struggle to understand their feelings and confusion, and stay with what they know, even though they also know it’s awful and damaging to them. Trauma bonding is a complex psychological phenomenon that occurs in abusive or manipulative relationships, where the victim forms a strong emotional bond with their abuser. This bond is characterised by a mix of fear, loyalty, and affection, leading the victim to feel deeply attached to the person causing them harm. Understanding trauma bonding is crucial for recognizing and addressing abusive dynamics in relationships. This is especially true for narcissistic abuse environments. At its core, trauma bonding is a survival mechanism that helps individuals cope with abusive situations. When someone experiences repetitive abuse cycles, their brain can adapt to the trauma by forming a bond with the abuser. This bond is often reinforced by intermittent reinforcement, where the abuser alternates between periods of kindness and cruelty. This creates a sense of unpredictability, which can actually strengthen the bond as the victim becomes more focused on seeking the abuser's approval during the "good" times. To chase the “good” times, and the “good” relationship, trauma bonded individuals tend to prioritise pleasing and disappearing - physically, or through conformity. They try to become what the abuser wants them to be, whether this is “wallflower” absence, or a prop to their ego, or a tool to their stability… anything to keep the peace, and ultimately, to exact some measure of control over the situation, and thereby, their own internal regulation. Trauma bonding can be reinforced by a variety of psychological factors. For example, the victim may rationalize the abuser's behavior, believing that they deserve the mistreatment or that the abuser is acting out of love. This can create a sense of shared suffering or a belief that the abuser is the only one who truly understands them, further strengthening the bond. Breaking free from a trauma bond can be incredibly challenging. The bond is often deeply ingrained and can be reinforced by feelings of shame, guilt, or fear of retaliation. However, with support and guidance, it is possible to overcome a trauma bond and heal from the effects of abuse. One of the first steps in breaking a trauma bond is recognizing and acknowledging the abusive dynamics in the relationship. This can be difficult, as victims may have internalised beliefs that justify or minimise the abuse. However, therapy can be a valuable tool in helping victims recognize these patterns and develop healthier coping mechanisms. It is also important for victims to establish boundaries with their abuser and prioritise their own well-being. This may involve cutting off contact with the abuser, seeking support from friends and family, or accessing resources such as shelters or support groups for survivors of abuse. Developing a strong support network can help victims feel less isolated and provide them with the encouragement they need to break free from the trauma bond. Understanding the way such environments have impacted self-esteem is crucial. Survivors of such environments are often dependent on an abusive, manipulative individual(s) for any fragment of esteem, and their orientation for gaining esteem tends to be external: toward the dominating, abusive force in their lives. Realising this, and wrestling a sense of true, reliable self-esteem into one’s own hands necessitates a form of intentional practice. For clients, there’s frequently a form of mindful intentionality that we come to learn: recognizing cues, and reorienting our focus to break the cycle. It is a dangerous thing to have one’s esteem entirely in the hands of an unwell or manipulative individual. A renewed attention to self-respect, boundaries, assertion, interests and direction become crucial to the kind of work I do with survivors of such environments. Regular readers of this blog may recall the analogy of a solar system: narcissistic individuals find myriad ways to become the sun, and for others to become dependent, minimised, revolving planets. Recovery from trauma bonding is nothing short of the recognition of self: a practice through which healthy reorientation can give you your own centre of gravity, progress and loving attention - both within, and toward desirable aspects of the world. This is taking control, taking the wheel in one’s own journey, which breaks the trauma bond as it takes hold and gains permission, strength and resilience. Survivors really do have to break out of powerful orbits that constantly try to draw them in, and down. In conclusion, trauma bonding is a complex psychological phenomenon that can occur in abusive relationships. It is characterised by a strong emotional bond between the victim and abuser, which is reinforced by a variety of psychological factors. Breaking free from a trauma bond can be challenging, and takes time, but with support, guidance and practice, it is possible to overcome the effects of abuse and build healthier relationships.
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On the face of it, positivism is tempting. Rarely discussed, it’s often confused for scientific fact, or even truth itself. Arguably, it has defined our Western culture, while hardly being mentioned. It is also a prime example of our human proclivity to turn humanity’s narcissistic frailty into a false view of the entire universe: a modern day version of imagining the earth to be at its centre, around which all turns. Here’s a definition of positivism:
“a philosophical system recognizing only that which can be scientifically verified or which is capable of logical or mathematical proof, and therefore rejecting metaphysics and theism.” Oxford Languages One might say, following temptation, that of course, ridding mankind of the fuddle of the unknown is intelligent, reasonable and necessary. After all, so this argument goes, haven’t we had enough of nonsense like belief in witchcraft, bearded interventionist father-gods, fairies and other ridiculous superstitions? Of course we’re better off only believing in verified facts, otherwise we might as well believe not only in all the silly things our ancestors did, but we might as well expand our nonsense-beliefs to include things like flying spaghetti monsters, hawaiian pizza interventionist baby-gods, and invisible vampire mice that drink our dreams! "We cannot, of course, disprove God, just as we can't disprove Thor, fairies, leprechauns and the Flying Spaghetti Monster." Richard Dawkins Above all, the voice of temptation goes, it is tempting to think that science is positivism, that they are one and the same. There are, without doubt, many positivist scientists who’d agree, perhaps like Mr Dawkins…but then again, some, arguably greater voices say things like this: “I am not a positivist. Positivism states that what cannot be observed does not exist. This conception is scientifically indefensible…” Einstein So, who is right? Is Einstein declaring we ought to believe in the unbelievable? And…why on earth does any of this matter at all?! To my mind, as a psychotherapist, it matters because this is a part of our society, or as Jung might have put it, our collective unconscious. I have, for example, in my 14 years of practice, mainly worked with agnostic or atheistic people. Very few were religious, and of those few, some were quite troubled by their own beliefs in a strict, judgemental God. This is important because religion and spirituality describe a certain attitude toward the other, and that attitude is key to mental health. If, for example, we believe that everything “other” is a dead-zone of sorts, a void, nothing but blah, we are unlikely to want to move towards it in an enthusiastic manner, whether that “other” describes other people, other activities, other things, aspects of ourselves we have “othered”, or the grand Other that is inherent when we talk about religious or spiritual matters. And if our dominant cultural narrative does indeed other parts of ourselves, and the world about us, we are likely to struggle to see beyond an inherited cultural lens that distorts both other (devalued) and self (idealised), as well as the relationship between them. People, for example, who struggle to adequately care for their bodies may, in fact, be dissociated from their physicality. They have othered a part of themselves. Similarly, many people view themselves as “nothing but” chemicals and frame their mental wellbeing through this lens, as though ingesting different, or more chemicals would “fix” them. Joanna Moncrieff has recently debunked this view of the so-called “chemical cause” of depression. Returning to the question of our relationship to Everything, I find a majority of people have culturally assumed a philosophy rather than a fact. This philosophy, positivism, assumes that Everything is a void, populated by barren rocks, or, at best, a rare sprinkling of meagre phytoplanktonic alien life. It is a nothing, because nothing proven lives or exists there. Positivism encourages a form of projection, the inverse one might say, of the father-projection of the bearded God in the sky. The positivist projection is the projection of man’s narcissism, just as the above alternative is: it says that what we know, our evidence to date, is the Truth. Obviously, the idea that, because science cannot currently detect and measure things like imagination, love, consciousness, feeling and meaning - the fundamental building blocks of humanity, just as much as our biological underpinnings are - means that these and further qualities must be denied by unquestioned positivity. One might say of course a positivist culture has no God, no vital other to love and relate to: such a God must, by definition, have the very qualities that our current technologies cannot detect, even in people standing two feet apart - how could they possibly detect them elsewhere in a vast universe? If what is undetected (Unknown) is denied, it is, by positivist definition, void. It follows that, if we are at all interested in the notion of God or The Everything (Alpha and Omega), the first, and perhaps the only facet, that we must transcend, is our own narcissism. Only then can we stop projecting the positivist void, a strawman made of spaghetti, or the familiar character of a bearded man that resembles Santa Claus. “The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the eyes of others only a green thing that stands in the way.” William Blake Beyond these projections lies humility in the face of the Unknown, or, as Blake might say, infinity: being small and virtually blind in the scheme of things, we must acknowledge our limits, and the vastness of what is beyond us. Beyond narcissism, we note that we do not have God-like omniscience. We know some things, and that is wonderful. Science itself is wonderful. But a true scientist like Einstein acknowledges that the body of scientific knowledge is, by definition, cumulative. A hundred years ago, we knew far less than we do now. In a hundred years’ time, we’ll know a lot more than we currently know, unless we blow ourselves up, or ban the pursuit of science. In a thousand years, if all goes well, perhaps we’ll be able to point a consciousness telescope, or an imagination-o-metre at the sky to see whether we can detect these qualities beyond ourselves. But at the moment, these technologies do not exist. “every science is a function of the psyche, and all knowledge is rooted in it” C.G. Jung Until then, it’s wise to remain humble, and admit our limitations. Positive knowledge is an aspect of our limitation as much as our progress, and it’s a mistake to project a limitation as though it were a fact. You only need to take an example like quantum mechanics to see how even our notions of what material actually is can radically change, given time (spoiler alert: it’s a lot more complex, mysterious and interesting than we once imagined it to be). It’s an even greater mistake to pretend we can measure, define, or make any meaning whatsoever without relying on the very mechanisms that positivism struggles to acknowledge; after all, there is no measurement at all without a measurer who possesses immeasurable consciousness, imagination and curiosity. “it is a paradox of modernity that when we seek to apply scientific techniques and discourses, the soul—the seat of subjectivity—vanishes.” C.G. Jung This point, that positivism-based atheism is a function of the imagination has been skewered by scientists and artists alike. Blake argued eloquently that: “If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, Infinite.” One often hears respected writers arguing against their own projections, as if knocking over a straw man were an act of crazy rebellion. In fact, they are at best, yesterday’s arguments; whether knocking down the projection of a bearded angry man in the clouds, a spaghetti monster, or an interventionist father-santa who’ll bring you what you want if you’re “good”. It is of course, far harder to argue against things that are unknown, or unimagined. But this is exactly what humility would have of us: that we imagine (for we cannot stop imagining) that we are ants, blinking in front of the vastest of the vast. Acceptance of not-knowing - or ignorance - is the fundamental state of humanity. This doesn’t mean we eschew knowledge, learning or creativity: it means the opposite, with the caveat that we are always watchful of our proclivity to hubris. You can discern exactly these qualities in many of the greats, for example: "Hitherto I have not been able to discover the cause of those properties of gravity from phenomena, and I frame no hypotheses; for whatever is not deduced from the phenomena is to be called a hypothesis, and hypotheses, whether metaphysical or physical, whether of occult qualities or mechanical, have no place in experimental philosophy." Isaac Newton The problem of projection is a constant in science, because we are tempted at every turn to assume (project) that a mathematical theory, or even a word we have coined, explains something entirely, whereas in reality even the best scientific discovery is usually limited, and limited within those boundaries to showing a certain pattern or order which is meaningful or useful. The observer, or measurer, is always human consciousness, and the hypothesis, choice of experiment, observation and interpretation, are all influenced by subjectivity. The human mind is bound, because of its wonderful properties, to extrapolate meaning, images and stories from scientific discovery. But positivism is only evidence of poor and uncontrolled imagination. As science evolves, so does the positivist perspective. In one moment, a positivist will believe in one thing, because that is the limit of her evidence, whereas the next, she’ll believe another. A realist will, by contrast, be cautious at all times, and never believe they hold the truth in their hand. A positivist will be tempted to think they “know” the robin, due to its classification, biology, theory of evolution and so on, but the realist, while agreeing with, and loving this knowledge, will always be aware that a robin is deeply mysterious. We do not know, at root (she might say), know what life is at all. We don’t know why there is something, and not nothing in our hand, or why there is a hand at all, or what an earth we are as a (somewhat) awake being who is observing and questioning…we sit, ultimately, as mysterious points of consciousness, within a mysterious universe. Our knowledge, as Blake put so beautifully, can never change that. It is beautiful in itself, but only ever partial. If it is all we see, all we see is a narcissistic projection. Our place, as humans, always risks the distorted perspective that projection brings. Humility is therefore the basis of both truth, and all religious reverence: “He who sees the Infinite in all things sees God. He who sees the Ratio only sees himself only.” William Blake It is not inconsequential to note that, alongside humility and the withdrawal of projection, a loving, reverential attitude toward the other is often the place where great science and religions meet. The intersection of positivism with medicine and mental health I want to further my previous discussion around the problems and implications of positivism, which as mentioned in my last article, can result in a toxic form of scientism This problem, I believe, cuts to the root of the reason why psychotherapy - and mental health in general - is such a battleground for competing ideologies and treatments. In one camp sit psychotherapists like myself, who work in particular with the experience of being a human through time, from infancy to the present day. Because we work with experience, our focus sits in various areas, such as mind, trauma, relationships, development, consciousness, memory and emotions: what it means to be an experiential human over time. This might not sound particularly radical, but when you work with individuals (rather than statistics), you find yourself working with aspects that are inherently difficult or impossible to measure objectively. Psychotherapy is at root, a relationship, defined by asymmetry: the client brings an intense subjectivity, and the therapist brings intense, informed, active listening, interspersed with informed, artful responses. At root, since psychotherapy is informed by the experience of whole beings, we cannot be positivists. The reductive necessity, in-built to the positivist ideology, is simply anathema to the holistic realism of psychotherapy. Most aspects of human conscious existence are not amenable to positivism: how can you accurately and wholly represent human imagination, for example, or love, or any other aspect in a strictly statistical way? A toothpick collection, or a million matches, cannot sum up an old growth forest. “The statistical method shows the facts in the light of the ideal average, but that does not give us a picture of their empirical reality.” Carl Jung Individuals, in their experience of being alive, do not fit into the neat boxes that positivism requires. For example, it is easy to weigh a person on a scale. This gives a clear statistic that can be worked with. But how do you weigh grief, memories, relationships and insecurities? Even if you can approximate them, you can only do so by reducing their complexity. Once you have done so, what does that statistic actually mean, in terms of a person’s reality, and future well-being? If I, for example, give your grief a number of 4, is that real? How does my reduction of your grief help you? How is a number of 4 real, when grief can manifest in complex ways over time, or hide itself even from the person grieving? What is a number 4, except an insult to a person’s humanity? Grief, after all, can be tied in knots with guilt, self-esteem, personal history, trauma, depression, existential dread…Oh dear, this is a terrible avenue, because before we know it we’re back to a whole person, and therefore back to psychotherapy! “Scientific education is based in the main on statistical truths and abstract knowledge and therefore imparts an unrealistic, rational picture of the world, in which the individual, as a merely marginal phenomenon, plays no role. The individual, however, as an irrational datum, is the true and authentic carrier of reality, the concrete man as opposed to the unreal ideal or normal man to whom the scientific statements refer.” C.G. Jung Psychiatry is another example that has become, over time, more positivistic. It leans heavily toward brain, rather than mind, to the extent, sometimes, of dismissing or devaluing the latter entirely. Mind is almost a dirty word to strict positivism in this community. What matters tends to be chemical in nature, so that the voice of medical insecurity asks: if a psychiatrist isn’t prescribing, are they actually, positively, doing anything? I’ve lost count of the number of people I’ve met, who’ve gone to their psychiatrist, and left a few minutes later with a prescription in their hand, while feeling unhelped, and rather dismissed as a person. This is the nature of the sauce, so to speak: positivism has to dismiss the person. It cannot quantify experience, since it has no way to measure it and verify it…despite the deep irony that we can only ever measure anything by using mind, rather than brain! Indeed, in tune with quantum theory, we can say that so much, in reality, comes down to the qualities of the observer, and pretending this isn’t the case skews our perspective enormously. In a different vein, the school of “cognitive behaviourism” generally markets itself as “evidence-based therapy”, which is just about as positivist an assertion as one could get. This revealing phrase mirrors Freud’s own desperation to compete with the positivism of the natural sciences. In Freud’s case, he was haunted by Darwin, and longed to find the psychological equivalent of his groundbreaking theory of natural selection. One of the original behaviourists, Watson, wrote: “psychology as a behaviorist views it is a purely objective experimental branch of natural science. Its theoretical goal is … prediction and control” (1913, p. 158). He thought the purpose of psychology was: “To predict, given the stimulus, what reaction will take place; or, given the reaction, state what the situation or stimulus is that has caused the reaction” (1930, p. 11). It is as if he wants to reduce complexity to no more than a chemical reaction, and settles for the Pavlovian equivalent: human beings as statistical amoebas. The irony of the phrase “evidence based therapy” is that the majority of an individual’s evidence must be left in the trash bin when a statistical average is elevated to this degree. The mean idea of a clockwork man’s predictability in terms of cause and effect, measured in a laboratory, regularly misses and dismisses our complexity as human beings. Literature, the arts in general, humanistic psychology, psychoanalysis, phenomenology and analytical psychology all seek, by contrast, a holistic sense of being human, the pitfalls that lead to decline, and the alignments that encourage health and well-being. To my mind, no influences ought to be rejected out of hand. Behaviourism can be a useful influence, as can psycho-pharmacology: but in all areas, people who work in mental health ought to be well-versed in the dangers of reductionism, particularly when it flies undetected under the brilliant banner of science itself. The door to reductionism is always idealism, the chasing of theory and abstraction, rather than understanding and working with real people. Psychodynamic psychotherapists are not immune from pitfalls either, but the peril is not positivism, but rather issues of idealism of a different kind. Such idealists tend to wander interminably in the rabbit holes of a client’s past, or stick rigidly to singular theoretical doctrine, or slip into a cause-and-effect blame game on parental shortcomings. Psychodynamic theory is often difficult, even contradictory: some therapists seem to skip over much of it and favour friendship over the difficult work of psychotherapy. Advances in neuroscience, the link between mental and physical health, and our understanding of child development are all informing psychotherapy, confirming the accuracy of certain pre-existing theories as others fade. My own view is that we need to focus on real people, and to keep examining our own in-group biases. I work as an integrationalist, much informed by the psychodynamic school, including object relations and the many branches of psychoanalysis, as well as a working model of humanism. Humans are not automata, nor are they mere chemicals. They are not diagnoses or statistics. They are not averages or discrepancies. Neither can they be successfully treated through paradigms that mirror (or create) narcissistic environments of self-aggrandisement, reductionism and rejection. We would do well to remember that. Beyond mental health The issues created by philosophers who don’t realize they’re philosophers go well beyond competing mental health paradigms. Medical practice in general is easily tipped off balance, to damaging effect, by this issue. For many years, for example, medicine has struggled with patients who complain of serious ill-health, but who lack what a positivist demands: undeniable scientific proof of a known disease, preferably, a biochemical test, such as a blood test. In our era, diseases such as fibromyalgia, ME/CFS, Long Lyme and Long Covid, are often deemed “invisible”, in large part because science can't yet zero in on them. These diseases which are currently devastating the lives of millions of people and their carers. Often sufferers are dismissed, or referred to mental health resources under suspicion for being delusional (psychotic), or under the suspicion that they are somatising their anxiety. In these circumstances, there is rarely any conscious admission on the part of MDs that they are actually taking a philosophical position that prejudices the limitations of knowledge in a moment of time, over reality. This is not only because there is no chemical test for these diseases at present, but also because subjective knowledge must be discarded from the positivist’s perspective. Subjective knowledge, meaning the information from the patient, about their own symptoms and suffering, is experiential knowledge, and experiential knowledge is not the objective, replicable, statistical knowledge that positivism demands. Experiential knowledge, and subjective reality as a whole, infers a mind that goes far beyond the observable brain: it is as anathema to positivism as God is. "God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we, murderers of all murderers, console ourselves? That which was the holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet possessed has bled to death under our knives." Nietzche (1882) |
Tom BarwellPsychotherapist, working in private practice online Archives
February 2024
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