Can’t let go of a toxic partner?
Do you still long for a toxic partner you left? Does going no-contact feel impossible? You’re not alone. You might be surprised how common this experience is. One reason is that your natural biology makes it very hard indeed.
Understanding more about this is what I want to share with you now. Knowledge is power or rather mindfulness is power: once you become aware of what is happening on your auto-pilot, you can then develop the skill to manage it. This will increase your power and autonomy over your own life…leading quite frankly to better life outcomes and quality of life for you.
One dictionary definition of longing is a deep, often restless and painful desire for something, frequently implying a sense of loss or incompleteness. And people do feel like this about toxic partners, at the same time as being aware of why that person is bad to have in their life.
Our neurochemistry is a real leveller: it doesn’t matter how capable, intelligent or educated you are, it’s easy for your neurochemistry to be in charge of you when you enter and leave a romantic relationship. That’s where the phrase ‘fool for love’ comes from. It’s a powerful evolutionary drive that no matter how urbanised and artificial we make the world, climbs around and clings to us like ivy. It’s how babies are made and humankind procreates.
Many of my clients are female victim survivors of domestic abuse (also called domestic violence or intimate partner violence which may or may not include physical attacks). These women were and are strong and capable. They found a way, under extreme long term pressure and threat, to escape and find safety again. Police sometimes worry about these clients as they know from experience that there is a high risk they will reconnect with the male perpetrator, sometimes with fatal consequences. I have had clients like these.
I say male here, knowing that domestic abuse does not depend on the perpetrator being male: it can and has happened in some same sex and non-binary relationships. But the statistics show, time and again, that the overwhelming majority of perpetrators identify as men.
I don’t blame men intrinsically. I blame patriarchy which is alive and well across the world even in so-called woke, modern countries where it is accepted that women work, have a chance (if they’re very lucky) to sit on company boards etc.
Patriarchy creates the system of power-over where anyone who isn’t male, is defined as lower down the pecking order. As a person's level of power increases, their moral compass and sense of empathy tend to diminish. When someone gains completely unchecked or unlimited control, they are almost guaranteed to abuse it.
Patriarchy does not encourage males to express their emotions and vulnerability in childhood and adulthood and this is a recipe for emotional instability leading to dangerous mood swings. When someone feels out of control they often seek to control. This inability to regulate safely emotions such as anger, when combined with usually greater physical and societal power leads to domestic abuse.
We can already see a few examples of men challenging this by modelling it is good to express their emotions and hence vulnerability. We also see of course the far greater number of Manosphere influencers who want to turn back the clock to when domestic abuse was normal and expected.
Back to focussing on our heroic female victim survivors. It’s only after building a strong therapeutic alliance of several months, that some clients confide in me that they are yearning for their abusive partner. I expect what stops these clients confiding sooner is the shame they carry of feeling this way because it is so taboo.
Counselling when done right is the space where you can say whatever you really feel or think without fearing what will happen as a result (unless you say you are about to harm yourself, someone else or you mention a child being abused).
It’s so freeing in that way - to say the unsayable and then discover that you are not a horrible or defective person for saying it or thinking it. The counsellor’s response should be compassionate curiosity. This is the foundation for the client to observe their thoughts and feelings and eventually have more choice and autonomy over them.
One of my clients referred to her separated partner as the love of her life, despite him being in jail and denied bail for extremely serious charges of abuse against her and the kids. She shared that if he was released on bail and found her, that she was very worried she would willingly return to him, even when she knew the risk of him killing her was high. The evidence that she had collected, and given to the police, was so strong and irrefutable that she was not in denial or forgetting the many instances of his severe abuse.
She told me she remembered strongly the good times with the perpetrator and how much she wanted those times again. She was able to hold in her mind how much he hurt her and her kids whilst experiencing deep feelings of longing for him.
She voiced a lot of internal confusion and tension as she swung between calling him out for what he did, whilst also referring to times where he was so completely the opposite, when he made her feel so good.
I encouraged her to speak about her positive, as well as negative feelings, and experiences about him. This was because I believed, following Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) that airing them would lessen rather than increase their power. Think of reverse psychology - the more you try not to think about something the harder you do…so do the opposite!
ACT has some simple and effective techniques to help people realise that thoughts and feelings come in and out of our consciousness and they are therefore not fused with one’s identity. Noticing regularly how they come and go, without judgment, helps the thoughts and feelings dissipate in the moment.
Did this work with this client to stop her longing for her lethal partner? It actually had very minimal effectiveness. So what’s a counsellor to do when her client and her kids’ safety is at risk?
This client was different to many of my other clients in similar situations. She was close to her parents and felt her childhood had been good. So framing the problem in terms of attachment trauma (from one or both of her parents which would then have been compounded by her adult partner’s abuse) didn’t seem a good fit.
However it is possible for attachment trauma to begin in adulthood. I considered this together with the cycle of abuse where there are short periods of calm or even joy (while the perpetrator love bombs or makes a show of atoning for his abusive behaviour). What this means is that loving behaviour by the perpetrator is intermittent, in other words on and off.
It’s this very on and off pattern that is so damaging to victim survivors. The off can be perceived as rejection by the abused partner and this may feel unbearable where there is a strong bond. The more unbearable the rejection, the more the victim survivor feels anxiety, fear or panic. This then activates their natural ‘attachment’ system which drives them to find safety back in the arms of their abusive caregiver/partner (Lahousen et al, 2019). Many victim survivors report not wanting the relationship with their partner to end, but rather just wanting the abuse to stop which my client said many times to me.
I explained this theory to her and it was clear that she felt it didn’t ring true to her experience. We then moved on to discuss trauma bonding. Trauma bonding tends to involve a sense of powerlessness and a perception of the abuser as powerful in a way that requires the victim survivor to rely on them for protection and survival (Dutton & Painter, 1993). This client had mentioned a few times being drawn to this man because he conveyed a strong sense of protection. However this approach didn’t help us to further uncover the mechanism that kept her attached.
She had also mentioned that he had made her listen to ‘spiritual’ recordings on repeat while she was trying to sleep at night. This is where the trail led to Stockholm Syndrome, which is defined as a coping mechanism where victims of abuse or captivity develop positive emotional bonds and sympathy toward their captors. Victims are considered to have been brainwashed or in other words coercively persuaded.
Stockholm Syndrome was depicted by psychiatrist Nils Bejerot after a 1973 bank robbery in Stockholm, Sweden. For six-days the bank employee hostages blocked the negotiations for their release and protected the robbers. I need to say here that there isn’t consistent academic research to back up that Stockholm Syndrome is actually a thing. Either way it didn’t prove a fruitful avenue of exploration for this client.
In the time between sessions I reflected on this client’s struggle to detach emotionally from her abuser. I started thinking about attachment to the abuser as an unhealthy addiction, like someone who is addicted to heroine or ice and pays huge consequences for that - in terms of risking health, life, connections, family, financial security, home etc but they do it anyway.
I looked for research on domestic abuse and emotional addiction but didn’t find anything. I found instead a research article with the title Engineered highs: Reward variability and frequency as potential prerequisites of behavioural addiction by Clark & Zack published in the Addictive Behaviors journal in 2023.
These authors were impressively connected to the Centre for Gambling Research, Centre for Brain Health, Molecular Brain Sciences Research Department, Centre for Addiction and Mental Health and Department of Pharmacology and Toxicology. Their research suggests that intermittent reinforcement, that is when rewards (affection, attention) are given sporadically, is the most addictive kind of behavioural conditioning. The authors talked about how ‘variability of reward may ensure ongoing activation of midbrain dopamine neurons. Such variability may confer ‘drug-like’ addictive potential to non-drug rewards.’
They identified internet-based gambling, videogames, shopping and pornography as fitting this profile. But what about domestic abuse? In my mind, this was also true of how domestic or emotional abuse operated: when someone gives you love inconsistently, your brain ruminates over getting more love from them which mimics the cycle of addiction. I took this learning and I was able to destigmatise this addiction for my client by comparing her addiction to the abuser with these less taboo addictions.
This led me to learn about neurochemistry and the natural ingredients we all carry in our biology. These are oxytocin for females and vasopressin for males which chemically motivates us to keep connections (Freeman 2017, Taylor et al 2010), endogenous opioids (pleasure, pain, withdrawal, dependence), corticotropin-releasing factor (withdrawal, stress), and dopamine (craving, seeking, wanting).
Clinical Neuropsychologist, Rhonda Freeman says ‘when someone leaves a relationship, they will have two stress systems causing discomfort. The first is the Hypothalamic–pituitary–adrenal axis stress system (HPA), the other is a social stress system that is driven by oxytocin’ . Let’s not forget to add the pain, withdrawal, dependence, and craving added from the other chemistry: no wonder it’s hard to manage emotions or make logical decisions such as go no-contact or never long for that man again! (Freeman, 2017)
How de-pathologising and non-stigmatising is this? Women, even those with more than one domestic abuse relationship did not, as society, community and relations often accuse them, choose wrong and choose wrong again – choosing doesn’t come into it.
Over a few sessions, my client and I spoke about her longing for the abuser in terms of behavioural addiction caused by the perpetrator’s intermittent reinforcement. She has reported for some months now that she is not thinking these thoughts any more.
If they do return, I will remind her that this is an old pattern that she released herself from before (by practising mindfulness of that pattern, by viewing it from the outside without self judgement or blame).
If you’re in your own neurochemistry jail reading this, choose no contact (or use a parenting approved app if shared kids makes that impossible). Only then can you begin to break his cycle of intermittent reinforcement that causes you to be addicted to the abuser.
Sources
Psychobiology of attachment and trauma—some general remarks from a clinical perspective by T Lahousen, HF Unterrainer, HP Kapfhammer - Frontiers in psychiatry, 2019 - frontiersin.org
https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychiatry/articles/10.3389/fpsyt.2019.00914/full
Emotional Attachments in Abusive Relationships: A Test of Traumatic Bonding Theory by
Donald G Dutton and Susan Painter in Violence and Victims, Vol. 8, No. 2,1993
Engineered highs: Reward variability and frequency as potential prerequisites of behavioural
addiction by Clark & Zack 2023 published in Addictive Behaviors journal 2023
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0306460323000217
The Brain Can Work Against Abuse Victims - The hidden ties to toxic partners by Rhonda Freeman, 2017
Are Plasma Oxytocin in Women and Plasma Vasopressin in Men Biomarkers of Distressed Pair-Bond Relationships? Taylor, S. E., Saphire-Bernstein, S., & Seeman, T. E. 2010. Psychological Science, 21(1), 3-7. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0956797609356507