When Leaving Feels Impossible: Trauma Bonds, Suicidal Thoughts, and the Way Out No One Tells You About
by Jessica Anne Pressler, LCSW
TRIGGER WARNING: A note before you read: This post discusses suicidal thoughts and includes a description of a suicide attempt. If you are having thoughts of ending your life right now, please reach out. In the United States, you can call or text 988 to reach the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline, any time of day or night. If you are outside the U.S., please contact your local crisis line or emergency services. You deserve support, and you do not have to carry this alone. You can call 911 as well.
There is a particular kind of suffering that people who have never been in a trauma bond struggle to understand. From the outside, the question seems simple: If it hurts that much, why don't you just leave?
If you have lived it, you know that question lands like a slap. Because you have tried. You have packed the bag, written the text, said the words out loud. And then something inside you folded, and you stayed. Or you left and went back. Again and again, until you stopped trusting yourself to ever get out.
I want to talk honestly about what that pain can become. Not only the anxiety and the depression, but the darker place many people reach and very few talk about: the moment when ending your life begins to feel like the only exit. I want to talk about it because I have been there.
What a Trauma Bond Actually Is
A trauma bond is an intense emotional attachment that forms in a relationship marked by cycles of harm and relief. Cruelty, coldness, or chaos is followed by warmth, apology, affection, or simply a pause in the storm. That relief is not incidental. It is the glue.
Psychologists call this pattern intermittent reinforcement. When comfort arrives unpredictably, after pain, the nervous system learns to crave it far more intensely than it would crave steady, reliable kindness. Your body begins to organize itself around waiting for the next good moment. The person who hurts you becomes the same person you turn to for relief from the hurt.
This is why a trauma bond functions so much like an addiction. You are not simply attached to a person or a relationship. You are attached to the moments of relief. The brief return of tenderness floods the system with a sense of safety and reward, and then it is gone, and the craving for it becomes the thing that keeps you there.
The Torture of Being Unable to Go
People who have not experienced this imagine that staying is a choice made freely, day after day. It rarely feels that way from the inside. It feels like being held by something invisible.
You know the relationship is hurting you. Sometimes you can name exactly how. You may have friends who have begged you to leave, and you may agree with every word they say. And still, when the moment comes, your body will not follow your mind. The fear, the longing, the grief, and the hope all rise at once, and you find yourself staying, or going back, while some quieter part of you watches in despair.
This gap between knowing and doing is one of the most painful parts of a trauma bond. It breeds shame. You begin to believe something is fundamentally wrong with you. You stop trusting your own judgment. You start to feel that you will be trapped in this feeling forever.
And that sense of forever is where things can become truly dangerous.
How Anxiety, Depression, and Suicidal Thoughts Become Intertwined
Living inside a trauma bond means living in near-constant threat. The anxiety is relentless: monitoring moods, anticipating the next rupture, bracing for the shift in tone or the silence that signals trouble. Over time, a nervous system held in that state becomes exhausted.
Depression often follows. Not only sadness, but hopelessness, the collapse of energy, the loss of the self you used to be. You may withdraw from people who love you, sometimes because the relationship has isolated you and sometimes because shame makes you hide.
When anxiety and depression combine with the belief that you cannot leave, something especially painful can take shape. The mind, searching desperately for a way to make the suffering stop, may begin to see death as the only door that is not locked. Suicidal thoughts in this context are often not a wish to die so much as a wish for the pain to end, paired with a conviction that there is no other way out.
My Own Story
I am sharing this part because I know how isolating these thoughts can be, and because I wish someone had said these words to me.
In two of my own romantic relationships, I came to see suicide as the only way I could stop the pain. Leaving was not something that I thought would be an option to stop the pain. There was pain in leaving too. That is how much pain those relationships held for me. I did not understand that I could simply go, because every time I tried, it felt as though I was truly unable to. Leaving seemed impossible. Staying felt unbearable. And in that impossible space, ending my life began to look like the only door.
I remember one night when my husband was unable to show any empathy, compassion, or kindness toward me at my most vulnerable time after promising me he would. I caught up to him as his key entered the lock and begged, “Please, call them and tell them the truth.”
He couldn’t look at me. “Stop, already, enough!” he screamed.
I froze in my tracks. He rarely raised his voice. His painful words usually came in emails and texts.
As he closed the door, he glared at me and slowly said, “You have just ruined any chance at a positive relationship, and it is entirely your fault.”
My body stiffened as I watched him disappear into the kitchen. “It’s all my fault,” I whispered, the usual refrain, as tears ran down my cheeks.
I felt like I was under a hypnotic spell. I kept repeating my mantra, “It’s all my fault, it’s all my fault,” as I slowly climbed the stairs, my legs sluggish, as if stuck in quicksand. I went into the bathroom, turned on the hot bathwater, and closed the door behind me. Did he ever love me? I wondered as I opened the cabinet. I took out all the medicine I could find and methodically placed the pills into one container, leaving it open by the edge of the tub. “I am worthless. I am unlovable. It’s all my fault,” I repeated as I filled a paper cup with water and placed it next to the pills. Slowly undressing, I neatly folded my clothes and placed them on the counter next to the sink, setting my shoes on the floor in the corner. I didn’t want to leave a mess.
Exposed, ugly, vulnerable, I stared blankly at the beige tile, avoiding the mirror. I lowered myself into the scalding hot bath, not noticing the immediate red burn on my body. I slid down until the water almost covered my nose and mouth. I had been forsaken by my husband, again. I didn’t blame him. I wasn’t worth it. My own parents wouldn’t stand up for me either. I wept; the pain radiated through every cell in my body. Images of being screamed at by X played in front of me like a movie, but his inaction, his abandonment, and his blame were the true sources of my anguish.
Please God, please make the pain stop. I can’t live like this anymore. “Make it stop,” I screamed... silently. Staying with him was excruciating, but the thought of losing him was unbearable, and he left that choice to me. I looked over at the pills I had placed on the side of the tub. If he hated me so much, why wouldn’t he leave? I was aware of what I was doing, yet my body had taken over. It was as if I were watching someone else.
I sat up and reached for the lethal combination of pills. Then suddenly, as if someone had poured freezing ice water over me: “Your children!” Again: “Your children!” Just as I was about to put the pills in my mouth: Oh my God, my children. I didn’t want them to be tortured and controlled by feelings of abandonment the way I had been. I placed the medicine back on the edge of the tub and lay still in the water, trying to absorb how close I had come to dying. Oh my God, I almost died.
I climbed out of the tub, opened the drain, and stared at the water swirling away. I carefully placed the pills back into their bottles and returned them to the cabinet. I meticulously applied my lipstick and liner, put on the same clothes I had been wearing, and walked downstairs, planning to pretend this never happened. As I descended the staircase, I noticed how quiet the house was and panicked, suddenly afraid he had left. I was relieved only when I found him sitting at the kitchen table on his computer.
Minutes after nearly losing my life, my greatest fear was that he had left me. That is the grip of a trauma bond.
I know now what I could not see then. It was not that I was weak, or foolish, or incapable. I was caught in something that works on the body and the brain the way an addiction does. I was attached to the moments of relief, to the hope that the tenderness would return and stay. The pain and the relief had become so tightly wound together that I could not find where one ended and the other began.
And I am here. I did get out. The door I could not see was there all along. It took support, time, honesty, and a great deal of compassion for myself, but it was there. If you are in that place right now, I want you to hear this from someone who has stood where you are standing: the feeling that there is no way out is not the truth. It is the bond talking.
The Part of Us That Keeps Pulling Us Back
In my work, I describe something I call the Traitor Within. The Traitor Within is a misguided, well-intentioned aspect of self that repeatedly leads us down self-destructive pathways. The traitor is primarily formed in childhood as adaptive responses to trauma and dysfunction, in order to feel safe, shaped by the messaging and modeling of those around the child. It originally served a protective function. These patterns persist into adulthood as an inner monologue or state of being that drives repetitive self-defeating behavior, transforming what was once survival into self-sabotage.
In a trauma bond, the Traitor Within often speaks in familiar voices: “It will be different this time. You can't survive without them. No one else will ever want you. This is what love feels like. It’s your fault. You can fix this. They’re hurting. I am too sensitive. It’s not so bad.” Understanding that voice is not about blaming yourself, and it is never an excuse for the behavior of the person who harmed you. It is about recognizing that the pull you feel has roots, and that what has roots can be understood, and what can be understood can be healed.
What Helps
If you see yourself in these words, please know that breaking a trauma bond is possible, even when it feels impossible. A few things matter enormously.
Tell someone the truth. Shame thrives in secrecy. Telling one trusted person, whether a friend, a family member, a therapist, or a crisis counselor, what you are really feeling, including any thoughts of suicide, begins to loosen the bond's hold.
Treat suicidal thoughts as a signal that you need more support, not as a plan. If those thoughts are present, reach out to the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline by calling or texting 988, or go to your nearest emergency room. Tell someone. Please. You are not alone. You are not overreacting. You are taking your life seriously, which is exactly what you deserve.
Work with a therapist who understands trauma bonding. Leaving is often not a single moment but a process, and it helps enormously to have someone beside you who knows the terrain, who will not judge the times you go back, and who can help you build safety step by step.
Expect withdrawal and be gentle with yourself through it. Because a trauma bond works like an addiction, leaving can bring intense longing, grief, and even physical distress. This does not mean you made the wrong choice. It means your nervous system is recalibrating. It passes.
Reconnect with people who love you. Isolation keeps the bond strong. Even small moments of connection with people who treat you with steady kindness help your nervous system remember what safety actually feels like.
You Are Not Weak, and You Are Not Alone
If you are still inside a relationship that hurts you, and you have tried to leave and couldn't, I want you to know that this does not make you broken. It makes you human, caught in one of the most powerful psychological patterns there is.
If you have had thoughts of ending your life because it felt like the only way out, I want you to know that you are far from alone, that those thoughts can ease, and that another way out does exist, even if you cannot see it yet. I could not see it either. And I am so grateful I stayed long enough to find it.
Please reach out. Call or text 988. Tell someone. Let yourself be helped. There is a life on the other side of this, and you deserve to live it. There are excellent communities one that I highly recommend is Dr. Nadine Macaluso’s. drnae.com
About the Author
Jessica Anne Pressler, LCSW, is a licensed clinical social worker who has been a psychotherapist for nearly 40 years. She developed the "Traitor Within" framework to help people name and understand the repetitive self-sabotage that shows up in their adult lives. She is the host of the podcast Your Traitor Within, author of Your Traitor Within: A Year of Journaling Prompts for Healing and Empowerment, and author of her debut novel, Traitor Within — How Her Fear of Abandonment Led Her to Abandon Herself.
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