The final book I read in 2025 was Trauma Bonding: Understanding and Overcoming the Trauma Bond in a Narcissistic Relationship.
I heard about this book from my favourite podcast, Ladies and Tangents, who did a break-down about the book, sharing stories from their own relationships. (Here’s the link, if you are interested)
For reasons that are far too personal to get into on the internet, I thought reading this book might help me understand more about something I went through a long time ago.
A summary attempt
This book seeks to define what a trauma bond is, how one is formed in an abusive relationship, and how the cycle of abuse works. This book is written with the intention of helping someone who is currently in an abusive relationship come to terms with what is happening to them and understand how they have ended up in this position in the first place.
It walks the reader through the seven stages of a trauma bond cycle, outlining how each part is designed to train you to accept gradually worsening behaviour… but most importantly, it talks about how you are not at fault, or somehow ‘weak’ for ending up in the cycle.
My thoughts
If the podcast that did an episode on this hadn’t done such a thorough job breaking the book down, I think this would have been a very eye opening book for me. Even though I am years away from the experience that made me want to read this book, when I listened to that podcast and then the book, it did help understand more about the psychology behind the cycle of abuse. I have even been told, to my face, that someone couldn’t understand how someone as ‘strong’ as me could end up in that kind of situation and the shame, guilt and blame I felt for what I ‘allowed’ followed me for a long time. In fact, until I listened to that podcast episode, I never once called what happened to me abuse and it threw me big time to finally have something that described what I experienced perfectly, framed within the context of emotional abuse and coercion.
I think this book is a good first step into understanding the abuse cycle and has maybe opened the door for me to explore all of that further but I’ve had this one on my tbr a long time so I decided to listen to it to help me hit my goal of reading more non-fiction this year.
Antonia Bernardin 