Welcome to the Emancipate Your Mind podcast.

I'm your host, certified religious transition and trauma recovery coach, Terry Hales.

I help people step out of the shadows of religious fear and shame and embrace their

authentic selves with love and empathy.

If you're ready to throw off the shackles of learned binary thinking and explore

a more nuanced approach to life, this is your playground.

Hello, everyone. Welcome back to the Emancipate Your Mind podcast. For the past week or so, we've been

talking about the difference between trauma bonding, which is a bond between an abuser and the person

that they're abusing, kind of a Stockholm syndrome kind of a thing where the person who is being

victimized might fawn or people please or create these sympathetic connections with someone

who's treating them poorly in order to keep themselves safe. But today we're going to talk about

something that is often called trauma bonding but is not,

and it's bonding over shared trauma.

It's something that you'll see happen in support groups for people who've gone through a certain

kind of trauma.

It's sometimes what happens when you're at a party and you find someone else who had a really

similar experience to what you did in childhood and just like understands and gets you.

And there are some really deep benefits that come from this kind of bonding, but there are also

some possible pitfalls.

And because many of us in this space have experienced either religious or childhood trauma of some sort,

whether it was little T trauma or big T trauma,

I thought it was important for us to talk about this because we need to understand

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