Trauma Bonding Signs That Start in Childhood: A C-PTSD Perspective

You keep going back to relationships that hurt you. You feel most connected to people when things are chaotic or intense. You mistake anxiety for chemistry, and when someone treats you well, it feels boring or wrong somehow.

If this sounds familiar, you might be experiencing trauma bonding—and if you have C-PTSD, there's a good chance these patterns started way back in childhood (even if they went unnoticed).

What is Trauma Bonding?

Trauma bonding is when you form a strong emotional attachment to someone who hurts you, neglects you, or treats you inconsistently. Your brain is literally creating these attachments–these not-so great attachments–to people who remind you of relationships from your childhood.

The confusing part? Trauma bonds often feel like love. They feel intense, consuming, and like you can't imagine life without this person—even when being with them makes you miserable.

For people with C-PTSD, trauma bonding often starts in childhood with parents or caregivers. When the people who are supposed to keep you safe are also the ones who hurt you, ignore you, or blow hot and cold, your developing brain learns that love comes with pain, inconsistency, and having to work really hard for scraps of affection.

Why Your Self-Esteem Makes You Vulnerable to Trauma Bonding

Many people with C-PTSD struggle deeply with self-esteem, and it's not because there's something inherently wrong with them (or you). One of the biggest reasons is the development of a very strong inner critic.

This inner critic often forms in childhood, usually through repeated messages from parents or caregivers that were critical, minimizing, dismissive, or emotionally neglectful. Sometimes this comes from overt meanness or bullying, and other times it comes from what wasn't said or given.

Emotional neglect plays a huge role. When a child consistently does things well but rarely receives praise, encouragement, or recognition, they don't build a sense of internal worth. If, on the other hand, they're quickly criticized, shamed, or spoken down to when they make mistakes or fail to meet expectations, the message becomes clear: love and approval are conditional.

Children need someone in their life who builds them up and reflects back that they are capable, lovable, and worthy. Self-esteem doesn't come from nowhere—it develops because caregivers communicate, directly or indirectly, that the child is valuable. 

Adults who didn't receive that foundation often grow up feeling incapable, unintelligent, unattractive, or unable to handle hard things—not because it's true, but because they were never told otherwise. Without that early foundation, people with C-PTSD often doubt their abilities, second-guess themselves, and feel like they can't trust their own perceptions.

And here's where trauma bonding comes in: when you don't believe good things about yourself, you often outsource your sense of worth to other people. But compliments don't land, or they feel suspicious. If someone says "You're smart" or "You're attractive," it may be dismissed as lying, manipulation, or having an ulterior motive.

Meanwhile, when someone treats you poorly or inconsistently, it confirms what you already believe about yourself. That feels familiar. That feels true. And your brain mistakes that familiar pain for connection.

6 Signs of Trauma Bonding (And What They Feel Like)

Here are some signs that you might be experiencing trauma bonding, especially in the context of C-PTSD:

1. You feel most attached during or after conflict. The relationship feels most intense and "real" when there's drama, fighting, or making up after a blow-up. Calm periods feel uncomfortable or boring.

2. You make excuses for behavior you'd never tolerate from anyone else. You find yourself defending or justifying treatment that, if a friend described it to you, you'd tell them to run.

3. You can't leave even though you know you should. You've tried to end the relationship multiple times, but you keep going back. The thought of leaving fills you with panic even though staying makes you miserable.

4. Intermittent reinforcement keeps you hooked. They're not terrible all the time—they're sometimes wonderful, which makes you believe if you just try harder or wait it out, you'll get the good version consistently. (Spoiler: you won't.)

5. You feel responsible for their emotions and behavior. If they're upset, it must be because of something you did. If they're cruel, you must have deserved it. Their actions are somehow always connected to your failures.

6. Healthy relationships feel "wrong." When someone treats you with consistent kindness and respect, it feels boring, suffocating, or untrustworthy. You might even sabotage good relationships because they don't feel like "real" love.

How Your C-PTSD Reinforces These Patterns

People with C-PTSD often have a negativity bias rooted in childhood experiences. That negativity isn't a realistic assessment of who you are—it's a reflection of how you were treated. The people who shaped your self-image often didn't have an accurate or healthy understanding of you either.

Trauma bonding feels so strong because it recreates the dynamics you learned as a child: love is conditional, safety is unpredictable, and you have to work really hard to earn affection that might be taken away at any moment. Your nervous system recognizes this pattern and mistakes it for home.

Breaking free from trauma bonds isn't just about leaving relationships, you’re rebuilding your relationship with yourself and understanding that the familiar feeling isn't the same as the right feeling.

Healing from Trauma Bonding

In therapy, one of the ways this is addressed is by slowly and intentionally rebuilding a realistic sense of self. This includes identifying strengths, naming accomplishments, and developing a fuller picture of who you actually are—not just the negative story you learned early on.

This isn't about sugarcoating or pretending flaws don't exist. Everyone has weaknesses. But for people with low self-esteem stemming from C-PTSD, the negative traits tend to overshadow everything else, which isn't accurate or fair.

Over time, this work helps you stop seeing yourself only through the lens of criticism and deficiency. You begin to develop a more balanced view of who you are, what you're capable of, and what you deserve. 

This process is slow and intentional, but it's one of the most meaningful ways therapy supports people healing from C-PTSD and chronic low self-esteem.

Recognizing trauma bonding patterns in your life? We specialize in C-PTSD and understand how childhood experiences shape adult relationships. Reach out for a free 15-minute consultation to explore how therapy can help you break these cycles.