Long before many of you were conceived, I introduced the concept of drama bond or drama bonding into the discourse of Cluster B personality disorders, especially narcissistic and borderline personality disorders.
So what is drama bond or drama bonding and what is a difference between drama bond and trauma bond? They sound the same, but are they the same?
My name is Sam Vaknin. I'm the author of Malignant Self-Love, Narcissism Revisited and a professor of clinical psychology.
Today we are going to go deep into the rabbit hole of drama bonding.
First of all in the description, you will find two additional videos that I would like you to watch. And they describe trauma bonding in a very unusual way.
One is a presentation to a conference in 2021 and the other one is an interview with Stephanie Carnes, a trauma expert.
Trauma bonding is an extreme experience. It is unidirectional in the sense that the victim bonds with the abuser, but the abuser does not bond with the victim.
In this sense, we can conceive of trauma bonding as a kind of self-harming attachment, an attachment that is self-defeating, self-destructive, self-trashing, self-mutilating, and in short, self-harming or harmful.
Trauma bonding is fostered by repeated, recurrent, traumatizing, unpredictable intermittent reinforcement experiences involving a power asymmetry.
Now that's a mouthful.
First of all, there has to be an element of trauma.
Now, trauma is a much abused, overused and misused word. Trauma is a subjective experience.
There's no way to quantify trauma. There's no way to objectify it, to make it objective.
Trauma is the way specific people, certain people, react to experiences.
We could have 10 people exposed to the same experience. Only one of them would be traumatized and the other would walk away, unscathed.
And so trauma is a subjective experience. That means that only people with highly specific psychological profiles are bound to be traumatized.
And I deal with it in numerous videos. There's a trauma playlist on this channel, which I encourage you to watch.
And in the particular case of trauma bonding, the trauma is induced by mistreatment or maltreatment, especially unpredictability, what is known as intermittent reinforcement.
And the unpredictability has to be a feature of a power asymmetry.
In other words, the abuser holds all the power. The victim is powerless and helpless, either because she chooses to be, this is known as learned helplessness, or because there is something structural in the relationship, for example, financial dependence or common children, which render the victim essentially at the mercy of the abuser.
But the unpredictability is the core, the inability to gain a modicum of certainty, determinacy in a relationship, waking up in the morning, not knowing what to expect.
This creates, of course, dependency on the abuser. The abuser holds the power to harm and hurt the victim, to inflict pain on the victim.
And so the victim ingratiates herself, the victim kind of becomes submissive, obedient, obsequious, the victim cowers and caters to the needs of the abuser just in order to make sure that she is not being she will not she is not abused yet again.
And of course this leads to dissonance and ambivalence on the one hand the victim hates the abuser for abusing her and on the other hand she loves the abuser.
It all started with love. Love bombing or real love. Fantasy or reality, whatever the case may be, initially, there was a real attachment between the two. The abuser and his victim, the predator, and his prey.
It is all founded on real attachment.
So trauma bonding is a malignant, cancerous, metastatic form of healthy bonding. It is not divorced from healthy bonding. It has all the elements of healthy bonding.
This is a common mistake in the literature even, let alone among self-styled experts, as if trauma bonding is something that has nothing to do with real love or with real attachment or with real bonding, with couplehood, or with being in a dyad or with sharing a life with someone, companionship, and so on.
That is not true. Trauma bonding has all the elements of a good, healthy, functional relationship. Support, succor, companionship, collaboration, love, attachment, bonding, you name it, it's all there.
The only problem is that it is only half of the equation, only part of the equation, and the other half is comprised of abuse, verbal, psychological, sometimes physical, maltreatment, degradation, humiliation, shaming, attacking, denying the victim her agency and personal autonomy and independence and so.
So there are these two parts, one of them healthy, one of them sick, and it is this conjunction, this combination that creates the trauma bonding.
Because there is ambivalence there.
I love him, but I hate him. He's good to me, but he is bad to me. He treats me well, he mistreats me.
It all emanates from the same source, from the abuser, and it's difficult to reconcile.
And because it's irreconcilable, because you can't put everything together within a cohesive coherent framework, this causes the trauma bonding.
And it is known also as identifying with the abuser.
So it is a complex, trauma bonding is a complex phenomenon because on the one hand, you're truly attached. The victim is truly attached to the abuser in a meaningful, healthy way.
And on the other hand, the outcomes of this healthy attachment, this love, this companionship, this friendship, this partnership, the outcomes of all these are very bad, very negative.
And when we have a discrepancy between behaviors and emotions, effects and cognitions and real life consequences, when we have this discrepancy, we tend to freeze.
We tend to freeze and we tend to get even more involved emotionally in a desperate attempt to make sense of everything, to restore order and structure and justice, to somehow imbue what's happening with meaning and purpose and direction.
It becomes like a challenge, There is this immersion in, I'm going to make this work, or I'm going to solve this, I'm going to make sense of this.
And above all, the source of the pain, the source of the hurt, is also the source of the comfort.
So you can't let go of one without letting go of the other.
The very person in the trauma bonding, the abuser, the perpetrator, the one who inflicts on the victim, immeasurable pain, agony, torture is the very person who holds the key to her happiness and contentment and comforting and soothing.
And so this creates, of course, dependency.
Dissonance and ambivalence are the core reactions and engines of trauma bonding.
Don't forget another thing.
Narcissists create introjects in the mind of the victim. They use entraining to create in the mind of the victim a representation of themselves.
So the narcissist has an ally inside the victim's mind. It's like installing an app on a smartphone.
And this introject, this voice, this representation of the narcissist in the victim's mind, colludes with the narcissist, collaborates with the narcissist.
And because the narcissist perceives himself to be a victim, the introject that represents a narcissist in the victim's mind is also an introjective victim.
In other words, the narcissist's internal voice in the victim's mind keeps saying, you wronged me, you victimized me, you are the abuser.
And so the victim feels guilty. She feels remorseful. She doubts herself for no good reason. She asks herself, am I really the narcissist? Am I the abuser? Have I done something wrong? Could I have behaved differently? And so on.
This is another reason for the bonding.
As long as the victim feels that she is responsible for what's happening and that she should be held accountable for the predicament that she finds herself in, then of course she would continue in the relationship. She would become more and more bonded and attached to the abuser, because she would unconsciously even perceive the abuser as having been victimized by her.
She would feel remorse and regret, and she would attempt to compensate the abuser for her own misbehavior, for her misconduct, and for the abuse that she has meted out to the abuser.
So it's a hall of mirrors. It's very disorienting.
And what do we do when we get disoriented? We freeze.
Trauma bonding is a freeze reaction. A freeze reaction writ large. Simply put.
And you could conceive of trauma bonding as a form of self-mutilation or self-harm, as I said, replete with the same three functions.
To numb these regulated emotions that threaten to overwhelm the victim.
To allow the victim to feel alive through pain and to punish, defeat and destroy herself.
It's self punitive.
Okay, this is a general introduction to trauma bonding.
And now we come to drama bonding.
Drama bonding is not the same as trauma bonding, although it may involve traumatic figments or traumatic elements.
Drama bonding is equally extreme, as extreme, as radical, as colorful, as colorful, if you wish, as trauma bonding.
But it is bidirectional, whereas trauma bonding is from the abuser to the abused.
In drama bonding, there's a collusion, there's a collaboration between the two participants in the drama, or the three or whatever, usually it's two.
The two participants work together to create the drama, to engender it, to foster it.
They write the plot of the drama and then together, and then they implement it together. Then they bask in the drama together. They absorb its effects and consequences together. They react effectively and cognitively almost in the same way.
And in this sense, drama bond or drama bonding is at the core of cults, actually.
So in cults, you have both trauma bonding and drama bonding, because cults are about drama, and they are bidirectional.
Exactly like trauma bonding, drama bonding is a self-harming attachment.
And it is self-harming because drama is the antonyme, is the opposite of personal growth and development.
When you are immersed in a dramatic, erratic, crazy-making situation, there's no time for evolution, personal evolution, for learning, for insight, for there's no time for all this.
It's a survival mode. You're fighting. You're coping.
So drama is a distraction away from the regular course of life.
And drama is also counterfactual. It's not realistic. It drives you away from reality. It's unhealthy. It's pathological.
Like trauma bonding, drama bonding is fostered by experiences.
As I said, some of these experiences may be traumatic. Some of these experiences are unpredictable. Some of these experiences are intermittent.
So there's intermittent reinforcement involved.
And in this sense, drama bonding is very similar or resembles trauma bonding.
But there are additional things in drama bonding, which usually cannot be found in trauma bonding.
For example, in trauma bonding, the abuser engages with a victim.
I would say that trauma bonding involves over engagement, too much engagement, a hostile takeover, a merger, a fusion, and enmeshment.
Whereas in drama bonding, there is object withdrawal. Object withdrawal is the opposite of object constancy.
In other words, the participants in the drama sometimes withdraw from each other, avoid each other, and this generates a drama.
Most of these dramas are actually founded on avoidance, on an attachment style that is dismissive or fearful or anxious.
So the drama is a reaction to the potential for loss. It's a reaction for the anticipation of loss of abandonment of rejection.
And so object withdrawal is critical here
You could also say that drama bonding is the reactive pattern to separation insecurity or abandonment anxiety, which is not the case in trauma bonding.
In trauma bonding, the abuser makes clear that he is in the victim's life, intends to stay there, maybe teach her a lesson, maybe he's angry at her, maybe he's abusive and punitive and so on, but he's always there. He is too much there. He is in control. He is the victim. He seeks to annihilate the victim and become one with her. Annihilate her by becoming one with her.
That's not the case in drama.
In drama bonding, in many cases, the threat, the menace is, wow, I'm going to lose him. I'm going to lose her. They're about to walk away it's on the verge of a breakup
So object withdrawal similarly drama bonding drama as the name implies drama it's a theater production. There's a structural narrative fantasy that underlies the drama.
In trauma bonding, trauma with a T, in trauma bonding, it's exactly the opposite. There is no narrative.
The potency, the force of the trauma bond is because it's unpredictable. It's intermittent. It's crazy making. It has no story, no sense, no meaning, no connectivity, no explanation. It's totally insane. It's nuts.
Whereas in the drama bond, there is definitely a story, a narrative, a fantasy, and they're rigid.
That's why drama bond or drama bonding is common in cults. It's a rigid narrative, and both participants in the drama adhere to the narrative. Accept the rules of this concocted universe, this alternative or virtual reality.
If you want to watch drama bonding in action, I advise you to watch the movie, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf with Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton. Amazing movie. Ninety-sixth, I think, but amazing movie.
The best depiction I've ever seen of both trauma bonding and drama bonding in a couple and you will see there that both participants adhere to something to a story and it is as if they're going through the motions, as if they're following some kind of scripted thing. Like they're on a movie set. It doesn't feel real most of the time.
And sometimes they say something and you can see in their eyes and body language that they're like, what the hell am I doing? I mean, why am I doing this?
It's as if they're controlled from the outside, but by some director, as if the whole thing is a simulation of some kind, with a demented coder behind it.
So the drama bond feels a little dissociative, feels a little like not real, unreal.
And because it is like this, it involves a lot of uncertainty, indeterminacy, insecurity.
There is a power asymmetry, even in drama bonding, there's insecurity.
There is a power asymmetry.
Even in drama bonding, there's a power asymmetry.
Exactly like in what is known as shared psychosis or folie à deux. There is an inducer. There is the person who writes the script, the person who cocks the fantasy, the person who comes up with a plot or the narrative, and there is the participant, the actor.
So it's like a director and a script writer and an actor or actress. So there is a division of labor and one of the participants has more power than the other.
So there is power asymmetry. And there is a division of labor and one of the participants has more power than the other.
So there is power asymmetry.
And there is uncertainty, indeterminacy, insecurity and so and so forth, but not like in trauma bonding.
In trauma bonding, the locus of uncertainty is what is he going to do next
In trauma bonding the question is what is he going to do next how is she going to behave next. It's future oriented.
In drama bonding the question is how long is it going to last? When is it going to walk away? When is this movie going to be over and the credits roll?
So it's also future oriented, but whereas in trauma bonding, there is object constancy, in drama bonding there is not object constancy.
There's the anticipation of the unwinding of the drama with the exit of one of the participants.
And it leads to anxiety, not to dissonance, not to ambivalence, but to anxiety, to desperation, acting out, attempts to regain the partner within the drama.
There is a hidden or implicit assumption or belief that the more dramatic you are, the more crazy making, the more you act out, the more addictive you become to your partner.
You're both drama addicts, you're both drama magnets.
And so it's as if the partner asks you to be dramatic. As if the participants in the drama bond have agreed to bond through drama and to gratify or satisfy each other's needs for drama. They're like both of them are enablers, each other's enablers.
So you want me to be dramatic and then you will stay in my life, you will stick around if I'm dramatic. You will never abandon me, you will never reject me, never walk away. You never break up with me. The more dramatic I am, the more toxic I am, I'm going to be toxic. I'm going to be dramatic just to keep you in my life.
And this is the essence of drama bonding.
Okay. I did my traumatizing best to explain the differences between trauma bonding and drama bonding. I'm open to questions in the comment section and to making another video in the future, should your questions address lacunas or anything I've missed.
Okay, it's been a very traumatizing, traumatizing video but very dramatic and I hope you've bonded with me even more than before.