"trauma bonding"

new piece; sadly apt for dark times

Hey all,

I wrote about “trauma bonding” for the Parapraxis Romance issue.

This piece is really personal and it goes kinda hard. It’s about being unable or unwilling to leave—a historical situation, a romantic partner, a worldview. At some point between the emergence of Covid and spring 2024, I started describing myself as “trauma bonded” to someone I was dating. I meant that a string of horrible things (maybe traumas, maybe just normal bumps in the road) fucked us both up together, and so leaving each other felt unthinkable. I was using the term wrong—it refers to the “paradoxical” attachment that can occur with domestic violence, where the person being harmed becomes more stuck, rather than less. I wrote about what’s really going on with both kinds of trauma bonding—the banal, commonsense use, which refers to a kind of sticky attachment endemic to a world in chronic crisis, and also the acute, technical usage.

I wrote this piece in July 2024 and revised it in August 2025. Like so much of the work in this kinda devastating issue, I had to try to hold together “the personal” and “the political,” which, in writing, is always a little like trying to stick repelling rare earth magnets together with scotch tape, even though in lived experience, say, the knowledge of the incursions into Iran and Lebanon and the banal shittiness of daily life are totally flooding each other all the time.

We were taught to experience our personal lives as somehow more “real” or essential to our selfhood than our politics, and also political action as something not to be contaminated by personal feeling or psychic need, because that would discredit the seriousness of our demands. (Yesterday, at the Psychosocial Foundation groups seminar, LeftRoots cofounder NTanya Lee discussed how people have all these unmet socioemotional needs that they carry into the political work, and how movements can neither pretend those needs don’t exist, nor lose track of strategy in order to focus on meeting needs instead—this rings deeply true to me.) As I dug into the phrase “trauma bonding,” I saw how we often use it as a way to name something about the experience of commuting between these two inseparable, allegedly separate realms—a commute that has gotten much shorter and MUCH more jarring in the past few weeks.

People around me are debating whether hegemony exists anymore—whether anyone is bothering to manufacture anything like consent, to patch up the holes in collective imperial delusion, to pretend that business-as-usual still exists. The dark thing is how people take over its role for themselves, doing its job for it in order to keep going to work and doing the dishes. Last night I finished reading Alenka Zupančič’s Disavowal, where she talks about how people manage crisis by telling themselves something like “I know well [that shit’s fucked in the world], but all the same [I have to go about my day].” She writes:

“‘Adapting effectively to the new reality’ can be part of the status quo. And so can numerous forms of catastrophism and fascination with the apocalypse, with various disasters and predictions of doom, with the spectacle of it. Far from being the opposite of disavowal, this kind of catastrophism is an important part of its contemporary functioning. The end of the world, for example, acts as a kind of spectacular backdrop, a coulisse, a stage on which we can simultaneously go on with our business as usual. More often than not the images of the apocalypse are but a phantasmatic screen that screens (and protects us from) the actual ‘apocalypse’ that is already going on and is not waiting for us somewhere in the future.”

In fact, knowing a lot about what’s going on—knowing better—becomes a way to shield your delicate little routine from it, a way of mastering it. I feel really implicated by this.

Rereading my piece this morning I’m struck by how it’s both of a slightly different moment and darkly prefigures this one in a skin-crawly way. I think it’s at the exact right distance where the argument is not quite out of date but gives you an eerie feeling of how history can move really fast, can unfold in ways you both do and really don’t see coming (again: knowingness).

The piece is also kind of accidentally about the writing of Lauren Berlant, who passed shortly after I arrived to their department for grad school, and lived two blocks away from where many of the events in this essay took place. I only really knew them parasocially but am grateful to be forever haunted by their work.

With deepest gratitude to the Para team—Hannah, Wendy, Jacqui, and Geoffrey especially—as well as early readers Emma Pask, Reed McConnell, Caleb Lewis, Ari Brostoff, friends at PAF who heard the first draft aloud in a chapel. And, of course—with deep warmth—my unnamed interlocutor.

x

p.s. you can read my recent interview with Grace Byron over on her Substack!