Welcome to Love and Abuse, the show about helping you identify poisonous communication and toxic behavior.

You deserve to be treated with respect and kindness.

That's why it's important that you learn to pinpoint manipulative and controlling behavior so that you keep your power and your sanity.

I'm your host, Paul Koliani.

Music power and your sanity. I'm your host, Paul Koliani. Thanks for joining me. I want to talk about something that is a little disturbing about our brains, the way we respond in certain relationships with certain people. And that disturbing element that I keep seeing over and over

again is something I mentioned in an earlier episode called traumatic bonding or a trauma bond.

And the trauma bond, just a real quick definition as I know it,

is when you are in a relationship with someone that mistreat you, that abuses you,

that hurts you, and you are still loving and kind toward them.

And you want to stay with them.

It's a level of bonding that includes love and abuse, just like this show is titled.

And that's exactly why I called this show Love and Abuse, because we can be in a relationship

where we love someone, even though they're being hurtful to us.

I don't always want to say they're being abusive.

They can be hurtful.

And what I've noticed with traumatic bonding is that when people get into deeply hurtful

relationships, that because there was an initial love and intimacy

and bonding and connection that that was what was imprinted first and because it was first

it almost builds like a foundation of what we fall back on.

So when there is a bad moment or moments in a relationship,

we can fall back on that imprinting and feel better,

knowing that it will get better because this is how the relationship really is because that is our origin, that is our story. That is how we began. And because we began

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