From birth, nature builds in unconscious defence mechanisms and adaptive behaviours in order to protect the child from annihilation from early trauma
When the child starts life, they experience the world as a frightening place, so in order to reduce their fear they need to form an emotional bond with somebody in order to reduce their stress and anxiety. They identify and bond with their main caregiver (usually the Mother), and of course, they are very likely, at some time in the future, to experience her as their first aggressor.
Mother can be experienced by the child as being both “threatening and kind”, and this seems to lead to the child turning to emotional bonding for survival. This psychological condition is known to-day as “Stockholm Syndrome”. It is found to happen universally in situations where people find themselves to be held captive and in fear of their lives; as in kidnapping, hostage situations, and narcissistic abuse.
This phenomenon of trauma bonding with the narcissist aggressor can be found in Narcissistic Victim Syndrome. In Stockholm Syndrome, the victim adapts to the traumatic situation by unconsciously going into an regressive mode, where they return to childish infantile patterns of behaviour (Regressed Infantilism), and bond with their captor as they did with their mother earlier in life as a defence against annihilation.
In order to cope with the discomfort of living within such madness, the victims motivational drive provides a way that they can rationalise to reduce the dissonance they are experiencing (Cognitive Dissonance). to understand the dynamics of all these defence mechanisms, they will then be able to appreciate why victims stay in these narcissistic abusive relationships, as it is a clever, but complicated unconscious self survival strategy.
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