Growth Catalysts

Have you ever bonded with someone too quick? Almost too quick? And discovered a few weeks or months later that it was not the best idea to bond with this person at all? That there was too much pain there? Or anger?

Whatever it was, it made you regret bonding too quick with that person?

I did that not so long ago. It was the intellectual conversation that caught my attention first. The easy banter. A needy presence and we love being needed.

Then there was the grief just under the surface.

I connect easily with people who are grieving, or have lost someone close and not properly dealt with the loss yet. Perhaps I understand grief well because I grieved for my father and it was the heaviest grief I have ever felt.

I connect easily with people who have been abandoned as children. Whether it was physical abandonment or emotional abandonment. I don’t quite know why I connect with abandonment so well. It could be an abandonment I haven’t identified as abandonment yet.

Something I lacked in childhood that I want to heal in myself?

The challenge with Trauma bonds is that you eventually want to break them. It may take weeks, months or years, but eventually, you cannot sustain them emotionally. They are too intense. Too damaging. They are all consuming leaving no energy for other relationships – not even the relationship with yourself.

Trauma bonds are also hard to to break. You get too immersed in them, almost drowning. Ever felt pity for someone you know you cannot live with? Guilt that you needed something more? Or you felt anger and desperation and started acting out of character? Just to make them leave you so you didn’t have to leave first?

As for me and my trauma bond not so long ago – it didn’t last too long. One morning, I woke up and stopped communicating with the person. I had warned them that it wasn’t a bond I wanted to keep in my life.

That didn’t make it easier to break.

To have the life we are dreaming about, we have to be brave enough to do what we have to do to keep ourselves safe, healthy, and growing.

Sometimes, we have to be brutal. Other times, we have to be kind. Often, we have to be decisive and discerning.

2020 seems like the year to make these difficult decisions. As nature cleanses itself, we get a chance to cleanse ourselves and our surroundings.

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Recommended reading: Go to Tolbert Reports and read Sunset and Mental Health Questions. Browse that beautiful page! You will enjoy it in these times when we have so much time in our hands.