Trauma Bonding explores unconscious processes at play that entangle clients in their relationships helping clients untangle this stubborn relational pattern.

Trauma bonding can leave clients feeling emotionally entangled in relationships that are harmful, confusing, and difficult to leave, even when insight alone is not enough to create change. This one-hour workshop explores the psychological and physiological mechanisms that underpin trauma bonding, with a focus on how early attachment patterns, Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs), and unconscious relational templates shape present-day dynamics.

Participants will deepen their understanding of how trauma bonds are maintained through the interplay of threat activation, intermittent reinforcement, and implicit memory, often operating outside of conscious awareness. The session will consider how early relational environments organise expectations of safety, love, and abandonment, and how these patterns are re-enacted in adult relationships.

Clinicians will be introduced to a framework that integrates attachment theory, trauma physiology, and the role of the unconscious in maintaining relational repetition compulsion. Emphasis will be placed on recognising the somatic and affective markers of trauma bonding in the therapy room, and on supporting clients to build reflective capacity, nervous system regulation, and relational differentiation.

This workshop is designed for counsellors, psychotherapists, and mental health practitioners seeking to enhance their clinical understanding of trauma bonding and develop more effective, trauma-informed interventions that go beyond cognitive insight to address embodied and attachment-based change.

Description supplied by the event organiser.