Why is it so hard to leave when they hurt you? Trauma Bonding, Coercive Control & Abusive Relationships | Solo Episode with Lisa Lacy

Notes from the Edge

In this solo episode, trauma educator and author Lisa Lacy shares her personal journey of realizing she was trauma bonded to an abusive partn

Key takeaways

• Trauma bonding is not about intelligence; even highly capable people can be trapped in abusive relationships.
• Intermittent reinforcement—unpredictable cycles of abuse and affection—creates powerful neurological attachments similar to addiction.

Main topics

• Trauma bonding
• Coercive control in relationships

Notable quotes

I'm too smart for that. I can laugh at that sentence now because trauma bonding has nothing to do with intelligence.

Your body has learned the relationship. You are not imagining the exhaustion. You are not weak because separation feels physically awful, sometimes like dying.

Conclusion

Leaving an abusive relationship is rarely a single decision but a complex, nonlinear process shaped by biology, emotion,

Transcript preview

Speaker 1 (0:00) Phoenix has bizarre crime. Speaker 2 (0:02) The canals of Phoenix, Arizona are hunted by a serial killer. Speaker 1 (0:06) People are like, well, are we safe? Speaker 2 (0:08) These are sexual savers. Two grisly homicides. I know I didn't kill anyone. But solving these murders is just the beginning. Speaker 1 (0:17) That can't be his first rodeo. Speaker 2 (0:19) This is season six of American Nightmares, The Canal Murders. Coming soon, wherever you get your podcasts. Speaker 1 (0:32) Welcome to Notes from the Edge, where we have the conversations we should have been having all along. We talk about the things that we're not talking about. I'm your host, Lisa Lacey, writer, trauma educator, executive advisor, and author of the upcoming memoir, Notes from a Certified Man to the Edge. Speaker 1 (1:02) The first time somebody told me I was trauma bonded, I was 40 years old and sitting in inpatient rehabilitation for what I thought was a slight drinking problem and a bad marriage. One of the women on my clinical team was a brilliant professional, calm, direct. She told me I was trauma bonded to my second husband. My response, I'm too smart for that. I can laugh at that sentence now because trauma bonding has nothing to do with intelligence. You can be educated, successful, capable, and self-aware in a hundred areas of your life. and still feel unable to walk away from a relationship that is hurting you. I know because I did it. It took me three years after that conversation in rehab to finally go completely no contact with my ex-husband. Three years. I left more times than I could count on two hands. I would leave, swear I was done, get angry enough to believe I meant it. Then we would talk. We would decide to be friends. Then we became friends with benefits. Proximity became hope. Hope. became confusion. And before long, I was right back inside the same emotional machinery I had fought so hard to escape. And then for me, the drinking followed. Every time I went back into that relationship, I moved closer to the version of myself I tried desperately to stop being. People looking from the outside ask logical questions. Why doesn't she just leave? Why does she not answer the phone? Why does she keep going back? And those questions make sense if you assume the relationship is operating only at the level of conscious choice. It isn't. Trauma bonding is not simply loving somebody who treats you badly. It is a powerful attachment that can develop when affection, fear, Control, rejection, relief, and then reconciliation become all tangled together. The classic theory of traumatic bonding focuses on two things, a power imbalance and intermittent treatment. One person is increasingly controlling the emotional climate, while kindness, affection, remorse, or connection