From M. T. Evans:
"Trauma Bonding – Number 3 – Repetitive Compulsion Disorder
I have written before about this very real phenomenon in my eBooks, and it is definitely worth mentioning again as one of the key elements of trauma bonding.
Narcissists are unpredictable in nature. The dealing out of random and conflicting abuse and support creates heightened anxiety and addictive state within their victims.
The example I like to use to explain this disorder is what happens to lab rats when they have a button, which releases food pellets, that is set on ‘random’. Normally the rat knows how many times to push the button to receive his meal, and is very content with that.
However, when the button becomes unpredictable and unstable the rat goes into a frenzy pushing the button until the floor of the cage is littered with pellets. He is more interested in staying ‘hooked on’ pushing the button than attending to his own self-care.
The rat is addicted to pushing the button (trying to get it to act predictably), just as a gambler is hooked to a poker machine, and just as a narcissistic abuse victim is hooked on trying to gain stable, sane, and safe behaviour from the narcissist.
When life is ‘dangerous’ with any hope of ‘relief’, our psychological and emotional survival wiring compels us to hang on and put all our energy into finding relief from the danger. Manic fear and pain reign until the euphoric relief of the situation presents.
If the button was re-set to a standard number of pushes the rat relaxes again, yet if the button was taken out of the cage, the rat would suffer survival panic.
If the addicted gambler wins a jackpot, she experiences temporary relief that she has won back her money lost, yet if she is removed from the poker machine before winning, she will find a way to get back to a machine as soon as possible.
If the narcissist attends to your needs, apologises and acts like he or she has reformed, you feel incredible relief and that you have been removed from the war zone. Yet, when the narcissist leaves the scene and is no longer reassuring you, you suffer severe separation anxiety that can feel akin to a heroin addict deprived of the next fix.
Repetitive compulsion disorder creates intense addiction anxiety, which can only momentarily be relieved by ‘jackpots’, but never takes long for the anxiety to reach an intense peak again – and of course when we don’t know better, we think these feelings of I can’t live without you and I can’t think about anything but you are ‘love’.
Trauma Bonding – Number 4 – Peptide Addiction
With all of the survival fears, powerlessness and anxieties taking place, a great deal of neuro- peptides, resulting from your disturbed, fearful and unstable thoughts, are manufactured in your hypothalamus (chemical manufacturing plant of our brain) and are distributed into your bloodstream and received by the cells of your body.
Our cells get addicted to the peptides they receive powerful doses of, and then physiologically we get addicted to getting more of these peptides, which the narcissist triggers within us regularly.
This creates feelings of I need his attention, I need his validation, I need his approval, I need his support, I need his love, I need him to provide me with some RELIEF and eventually just like a drug addict licking the crumbs off the lounge room rug, we will try to get any amount of the narcissist’s energy regardless of how damaging and soul destroying it is.
What we don’t realise, in our obsessive quest for relief, that it is the pain and intensity of the dramatic highs and lows that the cells of our body have become addicted to.
We have become a helpless addict, and our drug dealer is the narcissist. He or she is dispensing regularly our body cells’ drug of choice – narcissistic abuse.
The thought of breaking away from the narcissist of course, at this level, feels unthinkable, and impossible to do.
And of course, we mistake it for ‘love’."