Trauma Bond or True Love?

Unfortunately many of us can't tell the difference between trauma bonding and true love.

Cancer Full Moon Cards: Five of Swords, Five of Wands, Ace of Cups

Bottom Deck: Seven of Cups

Off the bat, one could easily equate the five of swords and five of wands with squabbles, conflict, competition and even darker aspects like outright abuse, bullying, challenges and violence of all forms. Then out comes the Ace of Cups, a wonderful indicator of true love.

This message serves to remind us that true love does not come from conflict and abuse, nor should abuse be a prerequisite for love. However we often dismiss "love" if it doesn't have a measure of intensity or passion behind it. Many of us are drawn to that which is actually toxic to us and we mistake it for love… at times we’re even taught that this is how love should show up in our lives. And I’m convinced this has been happening for several generations, possibly even longer. We unknowingly become addicted to this cycle. Many of us don’t even recognize it as an addiction, but emotional addictions are a real thing (google that as well as trauma bonding).

I want to mention that there are many beneficial things we can gain from conflict, since at times it can inform us of our own boundaries as well as that of others, conflicts show us how we show up in these situations and try to work to improve oneself (or reinforce desirable traits), and conflicts ultimately serve to bring people to an understanding TOGETHER, although sometimes people can hold onto conflict and play blame games for indefinite amounts of time.

Even on a collective level we tend to equate abuse with love and care, from interpersonal to societal. A lot of times we fail to recognize the toxicity behind our own motivations and expectations in dealing with other people, and we've come to expect (and express gratitude for) bread-crumbing from the other party, beit leaders or lovers, friends and/or family. The latest example I can think of is that while some of us struggle to keep what we already have, the collective wealth of the world's billionaires increased 20% ($1.9 Trillion).

That aside, I want to speak on something important: a lot of us are perpetuating toxic patterns of trauma-bonding disguised as love. To some degree (myself included, definitely a lot more in my past) we seek to control whatever we possibly can when it comes to our relationships, but true love is not about control and is not about making people you love feel bad: true love will never seek to hurt you.

As earlier mentioned: conflicts are a necessary part of life. However we tend to learn the coping mechanisms of our immediate caretakers, parents, and elders at a young age, without having true recognition of them or how detrimental they can be… and if said caretakers aren’t in a place to be more aware of their own feelings, baggage, traumas and addictions, children are often left to try and justify the sometimes erratic re/actions of their caretakers. They wind up being normalized and ultimately repeated in a more modern fashion/sense. It becomes a habit we’ve been hardwired to repeat into adulthood and onto our next generation.

Even with this knowing, it’s nearly impossible to show up perfectly. However if and when you express your boundaries to someone, there is a difference in responses but I’ll make an example of two typical responses: “That’s not what I meant/I didn’t mean to come off that way” tends to be a defensive response that doesn’t express love, as opposed to “I didn’t mean to hurt you, but recognize that I did and I’m sorry”, ideally followed by a mutual exchange tends to communicate a need for understanding another person’s feelings, reactions or boundaries to a situation because we are not trying to repeat the unpleasant experience. This is also how love is communicated without directly stating it. Gestures of love aren’t always laden with repeated “I love you”’s that can even border on monotonous at times, like a track on repeat. Love is an action, the words alone can be devoid of meaning if not followed by actual acts+gestures of love.

This requires emotional awareness and intelligence, as well as the ability to not be trumped by our egos and powerful (and often temporary) intense emotions. I truly hope for us, collectively, that we start to recognize the importance of emotional intelligence and start to teach it to ourselves and each other starting from a young age, hell it should even be part of the curriculum throughout life.

When we start to recognize the patterns of abuse and trauma bonding in our lives, we can start to recognize true love.

*Being a survivor of multiple forms of abuse throughout my life, I’m likely to tap more into this sort of subject matter in future pieces. May love reach you today and may you feel it everyday, beit alone or with your people. Thank you for reading <3