Traumatic Bond

Three things happen at once and together they constitute the bond. One will is sublated to another, the two share an animus and therefore the same emotional reactions, and both are dominated by the single remaining will. Sharing an animus is what makes it a bond rather than merely a domination, since a pooled animus is the same structure that love produces through balanced interaction, and what differs is that one will was absorbed rather than two remaining intact. That accounts for why the attachment is real rather than feigned, and why the sublated person defends the arrangement. Marsh identifies two types by destination. Endogroup sublation is produced by initiation rituals that take anima from the person being initiated and distribute it to the group including them, building a strong group animus and destroying the individual one. Endo-ideal sublation attaches the will to the figure at the centre instead. The two behave differently under loss, since a will given to a group survives the fall of any figure and a will given to a person is exposed when that person falls. The general mechanism is the ordinary one. When interactions are unbalanced, energy from the weaker is absorbed by the stronger until the weaker is consumed by or sublated to the stronger, so the bond is the endpoint of a sequence of unbalanced interactions rather than a distinct kind of event.

Traumatic bonding was named by Donald Dutton and Susan Painter for attachment forming under intermittent abuse, with power imbalance and intermittency identified as the two conditions, and Stockholm syndrome covers similar ground in popular usage while remaining contested clinically. Research on coercive control and on high demand groups documents the same attachment. Betrayal trauma theory accounts for why dependence on the abuser inhibits recognition of the abuse. Marsh's contribution is the shared animus, which supplies a mechanism for the attachment rather than treating it as a paradox to be explained away, and predicts that the bond behaves differently depending on whether the will went to a group or a person.