Can You Develop a Trauma Bond Attachment as a Result of Abuse?

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In 1973, four bank employees were held hostage for nearly a week in Stockholm, Sweden. After their release, none of the victims were willing to testify against their captors, and instead raised money for the defense of their former captors. Baffled, police involved a Swedish psychiatrist and criminologist, Nils Bejerot, who studied the events, and the victim’s reactions. Bejerot described the experience as a form of brainwashing, originally naming the phenomenon after the bank where the hostages were held, though the term was later popularized as the Stockholm Syndrome.

Stockholm Syndrome came to describe a phenomenon wherein people developed positive feelings and attachment towards their captors, sympathizing with their goals, and even opposing or blocking the actions of police or law enforcement. A former police crisis negotiator once told me that they sometimes would encourage hostage-takers to eat with their hostages, in order to deliberately encourage the development of such bonds, which might protect the hostages.

In 1997, Patrick Carnes, the psychologist who largely created the modern sex addiction treatment and codependency industries, coined the term “trauma bonding” to explain why some people remain in destructive, abusive relationships with people who are treating them in unhealthy, traumatizing ways. Carnes suggested that trauma bonds were dysfunctional attachments that occur in the presence of danger, shame, or exploitation. He referenced depictions of unhealthy relationships such as in the movies War of the Roses or Fatal Attraction, and even mentioned the strange relationship between Lucy and Charlie Brown in the comic strip Peanuts to describe how people can keep relying on others who constantly betray them. These fictional examples reflect the way this concept is based on anecdotal views of human psychology, rather than empirical evidence. In Carnes' essay, he mentions the emotional bonds developed by people in hostage situations. Though he doesn’t specifically reference Stockholm syndrome, it seems clear he’s drawing on this concept.

The concept of trauma bonding has little presence in scientific literature, but is clearly connected to the concept of Stockholm Syndrome, as in this review of research regarding adult sex trafficking, where researchers used terms of Stockholm Syndrome and trauma bonding to identify relevant research studies. In this review, researchers only found 15 relevant articles, though they argued that common features of imbalance of power, deliberate manipulation of positive and negative reinforcements, victim gratitude and self-blame, and the victim’s internalizing of the perpetrator’s viewpoint and goals were present across the different papers.

A similar study in 2019 attempted to study these same concepts of trauma bonding and Stockholm Syndrome in adolescent and child victims of sex trafficking. This study ultimately found only 21 relevant articles over 30 years, though the authors then argued that there was enough conceptual difference to identify a unique term of “trauma coerced bonding.” This concept suggested that the bond was intentionally promoted, “characterized by brutal terror inflicted on the victim and controlled by the trafficker, is planned specifically for the purposes of obtaining profit without emotional affection for the victim.” (Sanchez, Speck & Patrician, 2019. P52).

A Stockholm Syndrome Scale was developed to measure trauma bonding with an abusive partner in 1995, but received very little scientific attention, and was never normed on wide populations. The scale suggests that cognitive distortions, strategies for coping with abuse, depression, and low self-esteem, and “love-dependence”—the feeling “one cannot live without one’s partner’s love”—are core components of this theoretical variant of trauma bonding.

A current search of the Pubmed database for Stockholm Syndrome yields only 22 results, and a similar search for trauma bonding finds only six studies. In 2008, British researchers critically examined the concept of Stockholm Syndrome and found that there was remarkably little empirical support for the phenomenon. They found few studies in the scientific literature supporting it, predominantly limited case studies, with highly variable definitions and descriptions. The authors suggested four common features across these articles, including direct threats experienced by the victims; isolation; sympathy for their captors, and that the victims often had opportunities for escape, which they failed to use. The authors point out that Stockholm Syndrome seems to largely be a concept fed by media, to boost attention and offer an engaging, mysterious psychiatric-sounding term to explain complex human interactions and situations.

In 1999, an FBI Special Bulletin was published, titled “Placing the Stockholm Syndrome in Perspective.” This analysis found that in a national database of 1,200 different hostage/barricade situations, 92% of the victims showed no evidence of aspects of Stockholm Syndrome. Interestingly, some victims showed anger and negative feelings towards law enforcement, usually because of frustration with the slow pace of negotiations. When the analysis included those individuals, 95% of victims showed no evidence of symptoms of Stockholm Syndrome. This bulletin suggests that in order for Stockholm Syndrome to develop, according to their analyses, three factors were necessary: significant time must pass; hostages must not be isolated but must remain in contact with their captors; and the captors must treat the hostages kindly. The bulletin indicates that Stockholm Syndrome usually does not develop in hostages, and is not as pervasive as once thought.

In fact, in the original Stockholm bank hostage situation, later interviews found that the hostages were primarily angry and disappointed with law enforcement and the government for their long protracted captivity, and that this anger in part contributed to their refusal to testify against their captors.

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One interesting case study in the literature describes a woman in the Netherlands who sought psychiatric treatment, reporting that she’d been held in a cult, and had developed a trauma bond based on Stockholm Syndrome with the cult leader, her father, who’d sexually abused her and other women. Initially, her clinical team speculated that her presentation was consistent with Stockholm Syndrome, and used this concept to explain her dependency upon her abusive father. However, over time, the doctors learned that the woman’s story was feigned, and that she was a person with severe mental illness and a lifelong history of fabricating fantastical stories. Ultimately, the doctors redefined their approach to her, as a form of Munchausen’s disorder (factitious disorder).

The concepts of trauma bonding and Stockholm Syndrome are extremely inconsistently defined, and based exclusively on anecdotal reports, clinical observations, hypothetical theories, and fictional stories. There appears to be no objective, empirical evidence supporting these proposed syndromes. Definitions and alleged symptoms vary wildly, as do the alleged conditions which seem to create this alleged phenomenon. In some theories, it’s isolation and kindness, in others it involves connection and varying kindness and punishment. A common theme across all of these theories is that simple explanations, such as “the captives were angry at police for not rescuing them earlier,” are ignored, in favor of sexy, mysterious psychological hypotheses. In stories of trauma bonding, this theory is used to explain why women and children may stay in abusive relationships, without ever referencing the very real economic, cultural, gender, and social factors that lead to disempowered people feeling trapped in such relationships, with difficulty accessing services and supports to get out.

At this point, it seems that Stockholm Syndrome and trauma bonding are, at best, hypothetical theories presented by armchair media experts and old-school clinicians who develop theories based on anecdotal evidence, to explain highly complex, variable, and individualized situations. Without much further work to carefully and consistently define and measure these concepts, they should be viewed as little more than urban myths and psychobabble.