This is understanding today's narcissist.

Brought to you in part by psychcentral.com.

And now here's your host, Christine Hammond.

Today we're going to talk about a difficult subject called trauma bonding.

And I want to explain to you just how a narcissist ensnars a person through what is known as a trauma bond.

And the reason this is so difficult to hear is because for a long time when you are the victim

of some type of abuse, at some level you believe that it's your fault.

And you've made excuses. You have believed that you are a person who couldn't be caught in abuse. There's an ego that's kind of

attached to it. And so as we identified before the different ways that a narcissist can actually

abuse you, coming into the reality that there is a trauma bond that

has formed as a result of abuse can be very overwhelming.

So I encourage you to really take this kind of slow, and I'm going to give you a little

story, and then I'm going to explain the different ways that this actually happens to people,

that they get caught and ensnared by a trauma bond.

But feel free to, like, pause it, come back to it, a moat a little bit,

because it's going to be hard when you start to realize and you start to come out of it.

And the next episode that I'll talk about is going to be how to come out of the abuse fog,

and that will be very helpful in particular, because we'll talk more about just what that

winds up looking like.

But for today, let's focus on a trauma bond and how that actually ensnars a person together and keeps them from

really leaving when they know that they probably should or they might not even realize it at the time.

So I'm going to tell you the story. This person's name is Katrina and she had a friend, a really close girlfriend that she had most of her life.

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