Make-up sex promotes “Trauma bonding”. Resist the urge to fall for the hoovering attempts of a love-bombing abuser who strives to get YOU addicted to engaging in the adrenal-enhancing romantic pattern.
In an adult relationship between healthy, loving, and normal people, a little physical companionship goes a long way to promoting health and feelings of emotional comfort. But in a relationship with a Cluster B person or someone who is fundamentally narcissistic by habit or nature, it’s a ritual that the Abusive party uses to emotionally bind their victim to them.
Trauma Bonding is such a serious psychological phenomenon and common “honeymoon phase” abuse tactic that it even has it’s own Wikipedia distinction. The web source notes, “Traumatic bonding occurs as the result of ongoing cycles of abuse in which the intermittent reinforcement of reward and punishment creates powerful emotional bonds that are resistant to change.”
Yep. They are certainly right about THAT.
Abuse and Relationships reports, “Trauma bonding, a term developed by Patrick Carnes, is the misuse of fear, excitement, sexual feelings, and sexual physiology to entangle another person. Many primary aggressors tend toward extreme behavior and risk-taking, and trauma bonding is a factor in their relationships.”
The more traumatizing a person’s early home environment, the more likely they are to be attracted to people who force trauma bonding techniques onto them.
This includes people who do things like getting drunk and doing or saying horrible things, folks who go on drug binges and pull disappearing acts then come home begging for forgiveness, those who abuse then apologize insincerely while lying about having a desire or intention to change, and people who for whatever reason just seem to like picking fights to crank themselves and their partner up emotionally to heighten their own sensations of pleasure after deliberately manufacturing chaos and pain.
The Stir notes the following signs that YOU might just be involved in an addictive feeling, trauma bonded romantic relationship with a spouse or lover when and if you spot these 10 warning signs of trauma bond behavior:
1. You think being treated badly is normal. If you tell your friends and family how your husband [or wife] speaks and behaves toward you, they are concerned for you. Yet you think nothing is wrong.
2. Fighting. You have repetitive fights about the same thing, over and over, and no one ever wins, there’s never any insight. If you do feel that you “got somewhere” with the fight, that’s all wiped out when you have the same fight about the same thing again — probably the next day.
3. You defend your abuser/user. You find yourself complaining to friends, family, or therapists about how your wife [or husband] is treating you, but then instantly begin to defend him or blame yourself, i.e., “Well, if I didn’t nag him [or her] her so much, he [or she] wouldn’t have hit me,” or “If I wasn’t so fat, he [or she] wouldn’t need to cheat.”
4. Loss of free will. Everything in your mind tells you to leave your spouse, but you find yourself unable to make any kind of change.
5. You’re in love with the fantasy, not the reality. You find yourself incredibly attached to the “storyline” of “how things should go” or “how they should be” despite the fact that the reality of the relationship bears little resemblance to it.
6. “Auuuughhh!!!” You often feel like Charlie Brown, who repeatedly kicks the football that Lucy holds, only to have her pull it out at the last minute. The idea that THIS TIME he [or she] won’t pull the football continues to have power despite his [or her] always pulling the football and you always landing on your back.
7. Conversion. You keep trying to “convert” your spouse into someone who treats you right, “convince” him [or her] to behave differently, or “prove” yourself to him [or her]. You think if only you can “prove” yourself, everything will be different. You try to get him [or her] to “understand” that what he [or she] does/says is hurtful to you. If only he [or she] would “understand”!
8. You don’t like him [or her]. You “love” your spouse, but you don’t like, respect, or even want to be around him [or her].
9. The next generation. Although you can’t leave your spouse and even say you don’t want to, you’d be horrified if your daughter [or son] brought home a new boyfriend [or girlfriend] and declared he was “just like daddy [or mommy].”
10. Obsession. If you do manage to break away from your spouse, you obsess and long to the point of nostalgia about the horrible relationship you got away from and that almost destroyed you.
All people who trauma bond to their Abuser and accept hoovering gestures from them as signs of apologies are at risk for being psychologically and emotionally conned back into willingly participating in trauma bonding behavior.
Does it feel nice to make nice with another person after an argument?
Honestly? Sometimes yes and sometimes no.
That’s why when it comes to deciding whether or not to have makeup sex, it’s important to ask yourself why you are doing it as well as the motivation of the Abuser.
In a healthy relationship, when a dispute between parties arises, both sides seek to understand and validate one another’s psychological, social, and emotional perspective. That does not mean agreeing with the other person all the time or fully accepting their analysis of any given situation.
Validating another person’s perspective means understanding it to the best of your ability, followed by clearly communicating your impression to the speaker in order to confirm whether or not you actually understood what they meant or were intending. To do so requires no change in the listener’s position on any point or argument.
It’s truly showing respect for both yourself and the other person to strive to eliminate conflict caused by simple or complete misunderstandings. Once everyone is clear about their feelings and positions and everyone understands where the other person is coming from, only then can truly collaborative communication to solve the problem by seeking a respectful compromise or a “win-win” solution.
Here is where abusive people who act like social predators disrupt the natural and healthy communication process that SHOULD occur most importantly between romantic partners. By refusing to validate their victim’s perspective or truly change their long-term behavior after being informed that it’s causing problems for another person, they manage to do a couple of really nasty things to their victims.
First of all, the victim is upset by the original transgression that caused the tiff. Second, the victim then is re-traumatized by their abuser when and if they feel invalidated. Third, to be offered an insincere apology is simply time-wasting and offensive. Fourth, to demand a victim’s rights or needs go unrecognized creates in victims a tremendous sense of “sourceless anxiety”.
Sourceless anxiety is the latent build-up of repressed frustration that causes people to get sick, to feel stressed out, or to develop stress-related health disorders. Blood pressure, tension headaches, grinding teeth at night, muscle fatigue, sleep disturbances, ulcers, cancer, you name it — all of it is tangentially related to being overwhelmed emotionally by unmet psychosocial needs.
When a victim just wants peace, love, and kindness in their life but they have been comprehensively abused, that’s exactly the time they are most likely to turn to an Abuser who hoovers in order to try to end the pain and make themselves feel good. Letting a person who hurt you back into your bed is NEVER good.
But seriously…
Even if a fight was with a kind, loving, and normal person, having make-up sex BEFORE both parties validate one another and come to a mutually beneficial decision about how to handle any romantic or marital situation is toxic. It’s a lazy way to hide pink elephants in the living room.
When there’s a problem in a marriage or romantic relationship between two parties — or when one party feels aggrieved and the other is clueless — it’s a recipe for disaster. Feeling all warm and fuzzy, lovey-dovey, and getting laid is like putting a dirty finger bandage on a leg amputation.
Stop it.
If you cannot resolve your difficulties with another person, loving up on them to make you feel intimate, validated, or accepted is disrespectful to them as well as undermining to yourself. The weaker the mind and character of a person, the more likely they are to use romance or sex to help them avoid dealing with the grown-up, human, intelligent issues they themselves have no earthly idea how or willingness to fix.
Learn to spot the warning signs you have fallen into a pattern of Narcissistic Abuse by habit, being abused then falling for the hoovering / honeymoon /betrayal lather-rinse-repeat formula.
Bottom line… top-down style; absolutely NO B.S. thinking about such things or longing in the loins allowed.
If you go through one romantic catastrophe after another with your mate, interspersed with bouts of days, weeks, or months of amazingly hot action between the sheets, that breathless feeling you always have is not excitement — it’s more than likely someday going to turn into straight-up Adrenal Fatigue.
Solve your relationship problems FIRST before ever deciding to make a pass at your partner. It’s okay to hug and hand-hold why you both hoot and holler and cry things out, but resist the urge to ‘get nakie’ and play cave kitty with your love when and if there’s still hard feelings or rampant misunderstandings involved.
Unless, that is, you don’t mind being sexually used as well as abused by a narcissistic, sociopathic, or self-aggrandizing romantic partner. In all reality, people who use fights as an excuse to have make-up sex are already well on their way to a high conflict divorce situation already.
Only the most foolish men and women stay long term in relationships where the closest they ever feel is when they are BOTH enthralled with their partner during one of the Narcissistic Abuse honeymoon phases. Just know if you feel you still have unresolved issues and your partner pressures you for sex, it does not matter if they are a man or a woman.
It’s perfectly okay to say NO and ask for them to resolve difficulties first — as well as to give you time to heal emotionally from any upset before you are expected to behave in ways that are intimate.
If they get mad you refused them or use your request to rebuild true intimacy and trust [back] over time as an excuse to cheat, then you will know not only are they NOT an adult of good character that they really have GOT TO GO. There is nothing healthy about sweeping dirt under the proverbial bedroom rug or having a three-way tryst with a pink pachyderm coloring your memory of the experience.
