Breaking Free of Stockholm Syndrome

When your tormentor is your redeemer

“do not look for healing at the feet of those who broke you” ~ Rupi Kaur (Milk and Honey)

It is both a blessing and a curse that we humans are so highly adaptable. We are capable of adjusting to the worst circumstances in order to survive. In the context of a violent relationship, for example, the victim disowns the horror of the traumatic reality and takes on the abuser’s perspective. By banishing the helplessness and terror actually experienced, the victim copes with frightening circumstances.

Known as pathological adaptation, these adaptive strategies employed to survive abuse, become maladaptive once the danger ceases.

Pathological adaptation is relied upon to endure a trauma bond; a tenacious attachment reinforced by a repetitive cycle of abuse in which the abuser is imbued with tremendous power. The machinations of operant conditioning explains how this occurs.

Operant conditioning points out that what we learn is impacted by reinforcement and punishment. A pattern of intermittent reinforcement amid unpleasant consequences establishes unpredictability and confusion. The abuser capitalizes on this phenomenon.

We see this illustrated in the cycle of abuse with a batterer who in the aftermath of an assault (punishment), will cajole his victim with feigned contrition, lavish gifts, and false promises of repentance (reinforcement). Over time the victim’s mind scrambles to discover what one has to do to avoid injury and acquire a positive response from the abuser. Eventually, a distressing state of mental conflict and disharmony known as cognitive dissonance sets in.

The desperate urgency to make sense out of what is happening and to have some sort of locus of control becomes a driving force. The victim will convince herself that any sign of kindness or even the absence of abuse is proof of the abuser’s humanity. She cannot yet accept that she is little more than a source of sadistic gratification or narcissistic supply. She has to believe she matters and that the abuser is merciful.

The victim will obsessively try to formulate patterns that explain a rhyme and reason for when and why the abuser is mistreating her, and when and why the abuser appears safe. She will modify her behavior accordingly until her assumptions are discredited by further arbitrary abuse. With the continuation of escalating abuse and deterioration, the victim gives in completely, yielding to the abusers' reality and assuming blame for the abuser’s random mistreatment. The victim becomes completely malleable to mind control and morphs into an identity demanded by the abuser.

Compliance with the abuser’s perspective paradoxically assuages the unbearable pain of confusion, danger, helplessness, and deliberate cruelty.

At this point, the victim is brainwashed and caught up in an addictive cycle. The abuser is the only one who can stop the pain.

The tormenter has become the deified redeemer.

The aforementioned example of pathological adaptation is known as trauma bonding or Stockholm Syndrome, a term coined by Swedish forensic psychiatrist Nils Bejerot. Based on a bank robbery and hostage situation in Stockholm Sweden, Bejerot examined the psychological inclination in the female hostages to defend and even help their captors. He surmised that the hostages needed to form a positive emotional bond with their captors, demonstrate abject compliance, and deny reality so as to manage the threat of psychological annihilation.

Adapting to Stockholm Syndrome, has both psychological and neurobiological repercussions. This means that latent genetic predispositions and vulnerabilities can emerge (anxiety, violence, or depression) which determine one's ongoing functioning. In the aftermath of trauma bonding, it is inevitable to experience symptoms of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.

My history of systemic child abuse required me to establish coping strategies to prevent complete psychological collapse. I adapted to ongoing violence and deprivation through dissociative fantasy. I learned to fawn and subjugate myself the way the women did in my father’s pornography. Therapy assisted me with cultivating socially and psychologically appropriate ways of being, but the tendency to negotiate with and minimize abusive behavior was tenacious. I was brainwashed.

I saw similar tendencies evidenced in the women who were part of a therapy group I ran in a partial hospitalization program in the 1980s. All the women in the group were survivors of sexual abuse. Many had been sex trafficked. In the early stages of recovery, they twisted the narrative of abuse to convince themselves that they were willing participants, and in fact were in control of the men who either abused them as children or solicited them when they were forced into prostitution. One woman who was shot by a john defended her beloved pimp, lauding him for doing his best to check out the men who picked her up in their cars.

With the passage of time, sustained sobriety and a cultivation of a culture of support and recovery in the group, the women were able to acknowledge the horror they endured, yet had to disown and revise so as to hold onto a modicum of sanity.

Only through severing all ties with perpetrators could these women begin dismantling the insidious intractability of Stockholm Syndrome and embark on the process of recovery.

For me, this meant severing all ties with my family of origin.

Breaking free

To recap, forming a pathological allegiance to one's abuser is a coping mechanism and an effort to adapt by normalizing terrifying dynamics. This tormenter-redeemer motif is the foundation of Stockholm Syndrome. Those immersed in Stockholm Syndrome, from cult devotees to victims of narcissistic abuse, display extreme loyalty to the abuser, bordering on worship.

They are over-identified with the abuser. The abuser’s world is all there is. Victims of Stockholm Syndrome are trapped in a double bind of having to maintain an ostensibly positive emotional bond in order to mitigate the possibility of further harm.

It’s why battered women can’t leave. Why children of maternal narcissist’s sacrifice their sanity to bargain with calculated malevolence. Why disciples worship virtue signaling, grandstanding gurus.

Breaking free of traumatic bonding is indeed a grueling task, yet as poet Rupi Kaur wrote in Milk and Honey,

“if you were born with the weakness to fall you were born with the strength to rise”

Typically it is when one has fallen to the depths of their despair and is at death’s proverbial door that they find the strength to rise up and break away.

Staying away, however, is where difficulties ensue.

Leaving an abuser who you are pathologically bonded to ensures that excruciating symptoms of physical and emotional withdrawal will kick in. As with any addiction, cravings for the ‘high’ will blind the victim to rational thought. The abuser will be remembered as a source of solace from unbearable torment. That s/he was the instigator of that torment will be muddled by a delusional narrative that suggests it is only the abuser who can assuage your suffering.

Fighting the impulse to return necessitates the support of a trusted witness who can consistently remind you that the power-submissive trap inherent to Stockholm Syndrome makes you erroneously view the abuser as your salvation. The victim needs to be constantly reminded that this trap deflects from agonizing truths.

As challenging as it is, demythologizing the abuser and dismantling a fictitious narrative is imperative to breaking free and staying free.

This process entails shattering illusions that protected the victim from the reality of incessant trauma.

Dismantling the delusional narrative means confronting the magnitude of danger and exploitation embodied in episodic flashbacks, emotional flooding, dissociation, and prolonged complex grief. It means accepting that the romanticized bond was all a lie.

Having to face you were nothing more than supply, just someone to use and feed off of, a distraction, a source of sadistic fulfillment, is rife with humiliation and loss. Ironically when the victim breaks away s/he is plagued by feeling discarded, because nothing that truly mattered was real.

Inevitably, what set the victim up for exploitation is called into question. Beliefs about eternal devotion and loyalty are re-evaluated. Naive notions of unconditional kindness and love, the denouncing of darkness, and intractable devotion are confronted and modified. Rage is ignited, fueling a necessary period of hate that allows the victim to release needless self-blame.

Once restoration takes hold, the victim’s world view, ethics, and values undergo a massive overhaul. In the aftermath of heinous betrayal and relational trauma, the victim in recovery morphs into an intelligently guarded discerning survivor. From this place, it is understood that there are things in life that are not reparable; that there are things in life you simply learn how to live with. It becomes obvious to the survivor that human evil is real, and reliance on instinctual aggression so as to preserve and protect oneself, is a moral imperative.

Breaking free of Stockholm Syndrome is a bitter-sweet place of triumph.

A new future awaits, along with the hoped for promise of loving relationships and an empowered life filled with self-directed purpose.

Nonetheless, all milestones and victories, no matter how joyful and remarkable, will always be informed by a past replete with harrowing lessons of traumatic victimization. That is the sacrifice that the survivor has to make for life to go on, and for thriving to ensue.