Domestic abusers forge ‘trauma bonds’ with victims before violence: study

The study outlines the "tactical playbook" deployed by male abusers based on in-depth interviews with women who have suffered domestic violence.

Some revealed how their abusers used a mix of intense affection and emotional cruelty - mixed with stories of their own childhood trauma - to generate a deep psychological hold that can feel like an “addiction.”

Current therapeutic approaches should move away from “victim pathology” and focus on “perpetrator strategy” instead, according to study author Dr. Mags Lesiak.

Cambridge University criminologist Dr. Lesiak says her findings show that male abusers engineer a “trauma bond” - an attachment based in cycles of threat and relief - that leaves victims desperate for approval.

While the bond is usually viewed as a response to violent trauma, Dr. Lesiak argues that it is intentionally manufactured by perpetrators using strategic systems of control long before they leave visible marks.

As such, she says that recovery methods relying on theories of co-dependency “shift blame onto victims” while ignoring the “deliberate brainwashing” by abusers.

Dr. Lesiak conducted extended interviews with 18 women - including doctors, a dentist, a science teacher and a chef - who had suffered repeated domestic violence during a relationship for the study.

To investigate the roots of attachment beyond “captivity” – the active threat of harm, or control via shared housing, children or finances – women recruited for the study were economically independent and often lived away from their abusers during the relationship.

Dr. Lesiak says the women’s relationships had all safely ended, but most held a "seemingly inexplicable" desire – even to themselves – to return to the abuser.

She said: “Patterns of manipulation, grooming and coercion were so consistent it was as if all these women were talking about the same man.

“This is a distinct perpetrator profile.

"Specific techniques are used to construct and then weaponize love to produce a form of psychological captivity.

"As with the victims in this study, it can tether women to abusers even without physical or financial coercion.

“Victim attachment to an abuser is not a passive trauma response, but the result of deliberate brainwashing by a perpetrator.

“The abuser’s psychological tactics can get obscured by ideas of co-dependency, which suggest that a victim is partly culpable due to something broken or masochistic within.

"Domestic abuse isn’t about victim pathology but perpetrator strategy.”

Dr Lesiak, who spent a decade in frontline mental health and domestic violence services, identified three "core" themes running through the interviews.

She says an experience all the women shared is what she terms the “two-faced soulmate”.

Abusers displayed an outward charm and often a fierce devotion to their partner, particularly early on.

But that gave way to cruelty, with verbal and then, months later, often physical abuse randomly mixed with a return to warmth and affection.

Dr. Lesiak said: “It fits patterns of intermittent reward and punishment, a staple of grooming.

“Many women described classic love-bombing in the early stages.

"Some spoke of such intense happiness that other non-abusive relationships paled in comparison.

“These relationships start with enchantment.

"The coercion and abuse that follows is so disorientating, it leaves victims desperate to preserve the earlier image of their abuser.”

Participants in the study, published in the journal Violence Against Women, all reported childhood trauma - from emotionally distant parents to sexual abuse.

Dr. Lesiak says the perpetrators "cultivated" a sense of shared pain, coaxing personal histories out of the women by sharing accounts of their own traumatic childhoods.

She said the information was exploited by abusers as a "tool of control" - either to generate false intimacy, or through humiliation: belittling their partner over who had it worse, or using it to mock them in front of others.

Dr. Lesiak said: “All the perpetrators co-opted the healing potential of mutual trauma to justify abuse, foster dependency, and obscure responsibility for their own actions."

When asked how they felt about their abusive former partner, most women compared their situation directly to addiction, and admitted retaining a compulsion to see their abuser despite a clear understanding of the impulse as destructive.

Dr. Lesiak said: “While it is uncomfortable, I must respect the language used by the participants, and it was explicitly that of addiction and craving.

"Several women related it directly to hard drug use."

She says three of the participants relocated to new cities just to reduce the chances they would reinitiate contact.

Dr. Lesiak said: “Abusers make sure their partners experience euphoric highs and desperate lows.

“This creates a powerful psychological reward system that operates on the same logic as a slot machine, with unpredictable wins, sudden losses, and escalating self-blame.”

She argues that professional training for police and other frontline workers should include recognizing non-physical forms of entrapment – such as the “two-faced soulmate” profile – as indicators of coercive control.

Dr. Lesiak added: “All human bonds involve care, endurance, and sometimes pain.

"By coupling cycles of affection and cruelty with the exploitation of shared trauma, abusers create a bond they can use as a tool of control.”