True love or trauma bond? 5 warning signs you are not in love but bonding over trauma

Are you in love, or are you bonding over past trauma? 

This question might shake you to the core. Struggling to define whether you are in love or you are related to someone by trauma is certainly a detrimental dilemma.

For instance, if you and your partner are in a vicious cycle of breaking up and getting back together, you wonder whether it is fate that brings you back to one another or you are so broken inside that you don’t believe there is anyone else who could love you. You get so hooked on each other that you forget how to function whenever you are apart.

The desire to spend time with your loved one slowly turns into an addiction. Instead of sustaining a healthy interdependent relationship, you become codependent, moved by your inability to deal with what’s actually tearing your soul apart.

If you can relate to these words, you might find the following helpful.

Here are 5 red flags that what you have is not love but bonding over past trauma:

1. You are completely dependent on your partner. 

You have no confidence in yourself unless you are in your partner’s company. In a way, you believe you are incapable of functioning without relying on their support. It feels like you are addicted to them.

Whenever your significant other is not around, you act like an addict in abstinence. You feel as if being on your own would be the death of you, disregarding the fact that their presence does much more damage to you than their absence.

2. You don’t really like their personality. 

Despite being hooked on their love, you actually disapprove of many of their behavioral traits. Whenever you give it a thought, you realize that the way they carry themselves drives you crazy. You often find yourself wondering what got you so emotionally attached to a person you don’t really like.

And that thought usually leads to you considering altering their personality, believing it would strengthen your relationship. Maybe if they were more compassionate, more empathetic, or more thoughtful, things would be different. But no matter how much you try, you always fail because you forget that the change must come within.

3. You constantly fall in and out of love.

You break up for a while, then you get back together as if nothing has happened. After several months you break up again. You both go through tears, pain, and all that jazz that comes along with heartbreak. And then you get back together one more time. You overlook the lows and desperately focus on the highs, believing this time it would be different. But it never is, is it?

4. You sacrifice your own needs to make them happy. 

True love in no way should make you sacrifice yourself for the sake of your partner’s happiness. Your needs should be equal to theirs. Indeed, relationships are not always 50/50, but they shouldn’t be one-sided either. If you are only giving, one day, you will be left with nothing else to give even to yourself.

5. Something inside of you tells you that this isn’t love.

Trust your intuition. If it is telling you that the person beside you may not be right for you, it is most probably right. If it is telling you that what you and your significant other are experiencing is not love but bonding over trauma, again, it is most probably right.

Holding onto someone just because they are aware of what you have been through is nowhere near a healthy relationship. Instead, you should give yourself time to reconsider your feelings and determine whether you truly love them, or you are simply staying in a toxic bond only because you are afraid to be alone.