🦚You left. So, why are you still there?

“If even just a fraction of what you’re saying is true, you need to get out,” she said to me. “That man is dangerous, and you need to make an escape plan now.”

I’d just unloaded on my best friend, Sonya, about the latest disagreement with my husband. Things had been really tense at home and the last few days they’d escalated to a bizarre level. The day before this conversation, I’d actually googled “Do I have to have sex with my husband if he says so?”

Rosalind was at the table with us. I didn’t know her that well. She’d never met my husband and I felt bad giving her such a negative impression of him. I glanced over at her and said, “I know this sounds bad, but you’re only hearing my side of the story.” And then she said, “If even just a fraction of what you’re saying is true, you need to get out.”

At that moment, a knot unraveled inside me. These were the words—you need to get out—that just about every single family member, every single friend of mine had skirted around or avoided saying for the best part of twenty-five years. Katia, who was married to a friend of my husband, had come close to it a few days back, telling me as we left the gym after a workout class, “Your marriage is the most dysfunctional one I've ever seen.”

But now, I was hearing the actual words I needed to hear, from someone I barely knew. Three days later, I packed up anything that I knew I absolutely couldn’t leave behind and got the kids to do the same with their stuff, and we moved in with a friend who’d offered us a place to stay.

The moment the cult loses its grip

I often say I “left the cult” a few days before I physically left my ex. Those words from Rosalind did it. That was when the trauma bond started to break. Not when I packed the bags. Not when I walked out the door. But when someone said the quiet part out loud and something shifted deep inside me.

Years of abuse, devaluation, and manipulation had created this powerful trauma bond with my ex-husband. Breaking it wasn’t a single dramatic moment where I suddenly saw the light. It was a process. But for me, it started with those words from a near-stranger who had nothing to lose by telling me the truth.

Working with so many survivors has taught me that this moment, when the knot unravels, happens at wildly different times in the process for different people.

When does the trauma bond start to break?

For some people, it breaks BEFORE they leave:

• When someone finally names what’s happening as abuse
• When they read something that describes their exact situation
• When their abuser does something so shocking it pierces through the fog
• When they realize their children are being affected
• When they see themselves through someone else’s eyes

For others, it breaks WHILE they're leaving:

• In the attorney’s office, hearing the facts of their case read back to them
• While they’re packing their bags and feeling a sense of clarity for the first time
• During the actual conversation where they say “I’m done”
• When they see their ex’s true colors emerge during separation

And for many, it breaks AFTER they've already left:

• Months or even years later, when the fog finally lifts
• When they start therapy and begin connecting the dots
• When they see their ex treat a new partner or their children the same way
• When enough time and distance finally bring perspective
• When they stop making excuses and see the pattern clearly

Your brain is at war with itself

Breaking a trauma bond is so excruciating because of cognitive dissonance. That’s the intense psychological tension you feel when you’re faced with two opposing concepts: what you believed about your partner and your relationship versus what you’re actually starting to see.

You believed your partner loved you. The evidence shows they abused you. You believed you had a partnership. You were actually in a hostage situation. You believed the best in them. But now you realize that this was far outweighed by the worst in them. You dwell on the moments of happiness. Then you remember they were always followed by devaluation, tension, and abuse until the cycle swung back to another happy moment. Your brain struggles desperately to make sense of this and reconcile it all. The mental gymnastics it takes are exhausting.

You can physically leave the relationship, pack your bags, sign the divorce papers, and still find yourself defending your ex, making excuses, or questioning your own judgment. You’ve left the relationship, but the relationship hasn’t left you.

The trauma bond keeps you tethered not just to your ex, but to the version of reality they constructed for you. When you break free, you start accepting the truth and you let go of illusions you held onto so firmly. That’s hard work, and it doesn’t happen the moment you walk out the door.

Why the timing matters (and why it doesn’t)

There’s no “right” time for the trauma bond to break. Some people physically leave before they’ve mentally left. They’re still making excuses, still hoping their ex will change, still feeling guilty about leaving. The cognitive dissonance is still raging inside them.

The trauma bond doesn’t usually break cleanly. It frays and loosens over time. Sometimes it seems to break, then snaps back into place. It’s a process, not an event.

But understanding this process matters for several reasons. First of all, it helps you be patient with yourself. If you’ve left but you’re still struggling with those feelings of attachment, doubt, sorrow, or guilt, that's normal. The physical leaving often happens before the emotional leaving. Give yourself grace.

When you understand how the process works, you’ll also realize why leaving is so hard. People who’ve never experienced a trauma bond don’t see why you can’t “just leave.” They also don’t get that the attachment is biochemical. It’s deeply wired into your nervous system thanks to the cycles of abuse and intermittent reinforcement you experienced. You’re not weak. You’re human.

It’s ok if you saw your ex’s true nature before you left, during your escape, or years later. There’s no right time or way to wake up from the fog of a trauma bond.

The danger of the unbroken trauma bond

Some people leave without ever breaking the trauma bond. They physically separate but remain emotionally tethered. They keep going back. They keep hoping. They keep making excuses. They keep letting their ex back in. I see this happen a lot with men who have abusive wives, and I think it’s because society doesn’t validate male abuse victims as much as female ones (I blame the patriarchy) and they don’t have access to the resources that women do (again, I blame the patriarchy), or they feel too proud to access resources like therapy or helplines (say it with me, I blame…).

Often, victims find themselves in another relationship with similar dynamics because they haven’t healed the wound that made them vulnerable to narcissistic abuse in the first place.

That’s why it’s so important to work on breaking the trauma bond that keeps you in your abuser’s mental prison. You free yourself when you truly disconnect from the person who’s been manipulating your reality for months, years, or even decades.

How to know if you’ve broken the trauma bond

You’ll know the trauma bond is breaking when:

• You stop making excuses for their behavior.
• You stop hoping they’ll change or apologize.
• You feel anger rather than just sadness or confusion.
• You can see the patterns clearly without gaslighting yourself.
• The cognitive dissonance quiets, and you’re no longer torn between who they pretended to be and who they actually are.
• You stop feeling responsible for their emotions.
• You make decisions based on what’s best for YOU and your children, not what will keep the peace with them.
• You stop feeling any strong emotions when they text or call.
• You feel relief rather than guilt about being apart.

Breaking free takes time, and help

You don’t have to do this alone. I’d actually go so far as to say, you can’t do it alone. The trauma bond was created in isolation. It thrives when you’re not able to reality-check with others. To break it, you need to connect with people who can help you see clearly. If you can’t find people in your immediate environment, you can look for online groups to support you.

Maybe you’re still in that relationship, making excuses or feeling guilty about wanting to leave. Maybe you’ve left the relationship but still find yourself emotionally bonded to your abusive ex. Whatever your situation, your knot will unravel when it’s meant to. But you can actively work to loosen it. Reach out. Talk to someone. Read about narcissistic abuse. Stop isolating. Let someone tell you the truth.

For me, it took 25 years and the words of a near-stranger. But it doesn’t have to take that long for you.

Want to know how I can help you?

If you're struggling to break free from a trauma bond with a narcissistic ex, I can help you with strategy, communicating with your ex (my specialty), documenting their behavior, and/or presentation for court. You’re welcome to book a 30-minute consultation, free of charge, to see how I can help you and to give you an idea of whether we're a good fit.

Want to know more about what I do?

Resources

There are a myriad of resources out there for people who want to work on breaking the trauma bond they have with an abuser. Some of those resources frame the issue as one of addiction or codependency.

I find these approaches unhelpful and invalidating at best and harmful at worst. They make it sound like there’s something fundamentally broken in you that made you susceptible to abuse. The reality is that abusers hijack normal human attachment systems. You’re not codependent or addicted to trauma. You were systematically and deliberately manipulated by the person who abused you.

Yes, they used a technique of intermittent reinforcement to hook you in and keep you hooked, in the same way that casinos keep people pushing the buttons on those fruit machines. But just understanding that and seeing how it played out in your relationship can be enough to break the trauma bond, without making your own brain the villain of the piece.

The resources below take this approach. They focus on what abusers do, not on what's supposedly wrong with victims:

BTW, if you know someone who needs to hear “you need to get out” like I did, feel free to forward this to them. Maybe it can be their “Rosalind” moment.