Why We Return to What Hurts Us: Trauma Bonds, Love-Bombing, and the Familiarity of Pain
- Dr. Howard A. Friedman MD, founder of HHOM LLC
- Nov 22, 2025
- 6 min read
11-20-2025
By Dr. Howard Friedman, M.D. | Veteran | U.S. Army Medical Corps | Internal Medicine | HHOM LLC
Opening Poem — "The Body Remembers Home"
We don’t stay for the bruises,
or the nights stitched with silence.
We stay because the nervous system
names the familiar as safe,
and the unknown as threat.
We stay because the pulse races
and calls it connection,
because apology feels like oxygen
after a long-held breath.
We stay because the body remembers
how to survive chaos—
and has forgotten how to rest
in peace that doesn’t test us.
The danger isn’t pain itself.
The danger is when pain
feels like home.
-----Dr. Howard Friedman, M.D.
I. Introduction — When Walking Away Isn’t the End
People imagine toxic relationships end the moment someone finally leaves. Suitcase packed, door shut, life reclaimed. But why we return to what hurts us has less to do with weakness and more to do with biology, memory, and the nervous system’s craving for what feels familiar. Walking away ends the relationship. Staying away requires rebuilding an identity—and that’s why we return to what hurts us, even when we know better.
In truth, leaving is often just one moment in a repeating cycle. Many return—sometimes quickly, sometimes after months of clarity. Not because they lack willpower or insight, but because biology and identity pull them back toward what the mind already knows how to endure. People return to relationships that damage them not out of desire for pain, but because familiar hurt can feel safer than unfamiliar freedom.
This is not about blame. It’s about understanding the forces—neurological, emotional, and physiological—that hold people in patterns that cost them parts of themselves.
Walking away ends the relationship. Staying away requires re-building an identity.
II. The Cycle That Creates the Bond
Trauma bonds form not from constant abuse, but from inconsistency: affection and harm, validation and rejection, rupture and reconciliation. The contrast creates attachment.
A common cycle:
1. Idealization and Intensity
Affection, attention, rapid merging of lives. It feels like destiny, not danger.
2. Devaluation and Control
Affection shifts to criticism, guilt, manipulation. Identity begins to erode.
3. Conflict and Rupture
Arguments escalate. The nervous system shifts into survival: fight, flight, freeze, or fawn.
4. Apology and Reconciliation
Tears, promises, tenderness, gifts. Relief floods the system.
5. The Cycle Repeats
Every rotation deepens the attachment.
People stay for the contrast, not the pain. They stay for the memory of how it started.
III. The Chemistry That Hooks the Bond
What feels emotional is often physiological.
Dopamine — The reward of unpredictability
Intermittent affection hits harder than consistent love.
Oxytocin — Bonding even with danger
Reconnection after conflict releases the same chemical that bonds infants to caregivers.
Adrenaline — Mistaking anxiety for passion
Stress feels like intensity, and intensity feels like connection.
Endorphins — Relief after pain
The “calm after the storm” becomes its own drug.
People don’t stay because they’re irrational. They stay because their body rewards survival with closeness.
IV. Love-Bombing: The On-Ramp to Dependency
The entry point is always intensity.
constant communication
immediate declarations of destiny
fast intimacy, gifts, flattery
merging before evaluating
Love-bombing bonds first, reveals reality later. The danger isn't the affection—it’s that affection is used to secure the bond before trust is earned. People spend years trying to revive the first ninety days. Love-bombing isn’t proof of deep love. It’s proof the relationship can’t survive without intensity.
V. The Nervous System: When Chaos Feels Like Home
Some bonds activate old survival wiring.
If childhood taught someone that love is:
unpredictable
conditional
earned
volatile
or tied to caretaking
Then calm feels unsafe, and connection feels like vigilance.
They don’t return because they want chaos. They return because they recognize it.
The body confuses activation with aliveness. Peace feels like withdrawal. Chaos feels like purpose.
VI. The RAS: When the Brain Edits Reality to Protect the Bond
The Reticular Activating System filters reality to protect emotional attachment.
It downplays danger:
“They’re just stressed”
“It’s my fault”
“This isn’t really abuse”
It amplifies hope:
apologies
promises
memories of early affection
The brain doesn’t hide the truth—it prioritizes the parts that preserve the bond.
VII. Why Leaving Feels Wrong—And Why People Return, We Return to What Hurts Us Isn’t a Mystery—It’s Conditioning
Leaving threatens identity, routine, and emotional equilibrium.
People return because:
loneliness feels like abandonment
guilt feels like responsibility
reconciliation feels like redemption
identity was built around the relationship
peace feels disorienting, not comforting
They aren’t returning to the current reality—they’re returning to the possibility they were sold.
Most don’t leave once. They leave until it holds.
VIII. Breaking the Cycle: What Actually Helps
You don’t break a trauma bond by cutting ties. You break it by rebuilding the self that formed inside the relationship.
Steps that matter:
track patterns, not moments
rebuild support outside the bond
retrain the nervous system to tolerate calm
shift identity from caretaker to self
stop trying to “win” the relationship
choose reality over potential
Healing begins when someone stops trying to return to who they were with the other person and starts returning to who they were before them. You don’t leave the person—you return to yourself.
IX. What Loved Ones Need to Understand
If you’re watching someone stay, leave, return, and repeat, understand this:
They don’t need shame. They don’t need ultimatums.They don’t need someone yelling “wake up.” They need someone who stays available without being consumed.
Support looks like:
boundaries without abandonment
validation without enabling
presence without pressure
You can’t pull someone out. You can only be the place they recognize when they climb out themselves.
X. Conclusion — Loyalty Shouldn’t Require Self-Destruction
Trauma bonds blur devotion with endurance. They convince people that love is earned through suffering, and that leaving is betrayal rather than survival. But real love doesn’t demand self-erasure.
The question is not: Do I love them?
The question is: Who do I become when I stay—and at what cost?
The moment someone stops fighting to restore what the relationship once was, and starts fighting to restore who they once were—that is the beginning of freedom.
Love should not require disappearing to keep it.
Closing Poem — "The Turning"
There is a moment
when the body finally notices
that peace has a pulse too.
A quieter beat,
steady, unprovoking,
without the adrenaline of survival.
At first it feels like emptiness—
because no one ever taught us
that safety could be silent.
But then the breath slows,
the chest unlocks,
and the nervous system whispers
a truth long buried:
You do not have to bleed
to belong.
The turning begins the day
you stop chasing the storm
and start learning how to rest
in calm that doesn’t apologize
for being gentle.
Dr. Howard Friedman, M.D.
—Dr. Howard Friedman, M.D.
Board-Certified | Internal Medicine | Veteran | U.S. Army Medical Corps
Founder of Howard’s House of Medicine (HHOM LLC)
Frequently Asked Questions:
Q: Why do intelligent, self-aware people go back to relationships that hurt them?
A: People don’t return because they lack insight—they return because the nervous system prefers the familiar. The brain is designed to predict danger, not seek happiness. If someone's history taught them that love comes with volatility or emotional labor, then chaos feels like home and calm feels like abandonment. Returning is often a survival reflex, not a moral failure.
Q: What’s the difference between passion and trauma bonding?
A: Passion builds connection through shared meaning, trust, and consistent intimacy. A trauma bond builds connection through cycles of intensity: affection → withdrawal → conflict → reconciliation. The emotional “highs” come from relief after stress, not genuine closeness. If the best moments exist mainly to recover from the worst ones, that’s not passion—it’s conditioning.
Q: How does someone break a trauma bond without feeling like they’re betraying the other person?
A: You don’t break the bond by hating the other person—you break it by reclaiming the parts of yourself that disappeared during the relationship. Start by tolerating calm, rebuilding outside support, and choosing what’s real over what’s promised. You’re not betraying anyone by leaving. You’re ending the betrayal of yourself.
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