The Breakup Interviews: Cory

Interview 11: Trauma Bonded

This interview was conducted with Cory Marie, and her name is used with permission. Thank you for your trust and openness. You can find her writing on Substack. If you’re interested in being interviewed for The Breakup Interviews, feel free to DM me.

Traumatic Attachment Forged Through Grief

A “trauma bond” is one of those terms that has become overused, often stripped of its clinical meaning. But in Cory’s case, it was both accurate and necessary. It was the only way to make sense of why she remained so deeply connected to Mitch during a period of profound grief—and why she couldn’t let him go long after she knew the relationship was over.

This wasn’t a relationship that began slowly. Cory described a certainty and familiarity when she met Mitch that felt like immediate alignment and commitment. The boxes were checked: attraction, kindness, shared values, desire for marriage, desire for children. And their shared vision wasn’t theoretical; it was immediate and enacted. The relationship was organized around a shared future, which created a deep attachment, identity, and sense of direction.

Within six months, they were living together. Within six months of that, they were pregnant—with twins. And that context matters. Because when trauma occurs, it doesn’t happen in a vacuum; it disrupts a structure. It tears apart something that was already being built.

When Cory gave birth prematurely at five and a half months, that entire structure collapsed. The twins, Jackson and Jude, did not survive. And in that moment, the relationship fundamentally changed: it was no longer grounded in love, compatibility, or a shared future. It became organized around shared trauma.

They were the only two people who lived inside that experience of grief; they were the only two people who truly understood what had happened.

“These are my babies that died, and now I have to grieve — and nobody understands it except for him.”

This is how trauma bonds form: not because two people are meant to be together, but because of the belief that they can only process, metabolize, and heal from that pain together. It’s dependence. And attachment that intensifies that way is hard to question. For Cory, leaving that relationship wouldn’t mean just leaving that relationship: it would mean abandoning and being abandoned by the only person who knows what you’ve been through.

This is her story.

Trying to Escape an Unescapable Relationship

When a relationship becomes overtaken by a trauma bond, one of the problems is that you are willing to tolerate a lot more than you should. That was true for Cory.

In the years following the loss of Jackson and Jude, the relationship became more unstable: manipulation, control, and emotional cruelty. And Cory knew that this relationship had quickly become unsustainable, but stayed in it anyway. Leaving wasn’t simple.

When she considered leaving, Cory had to face complex questions:

• Was she leaving Mitch?

• Was she leaving her grief?

• Was she leaving the only person who understood the grief of losing Jackson and Jude?

• Was leaving just running from the grief?

She captured this confusion clearly:

“I remember trying to leave the house… I would literally start packing up my car and being like, ‘I need to escape this.’ … I don’t know if it was the escape of losing my twins or the escape of this man.”

The more she tried to leave, the more complicated it became. There was guilt: sometimes driven at times by Mitch’s control and manipulation, and at other times by an internal narrative that leaving him would be a kind of abandonment of her boys.

She knew the relationship was unhealthy for her, but grief, codependence, and guilt kept turning her upside down emotionally:

“I would feel this pull again towards him… which was confusing… I would feel like I’m making a mistake by staying, but then think that I love this person so much.”

Eventually, she created distance for the first time: moving to a different state without a plan, but with a clear sense that she needed to get out.

That distance allowed her to experience him outside of the constant intensity and dependence they had been living in. And when he came to visit her, the dynamic didn’t soften: his cruelty became more visible, no longer buffered by the shared grief that had previously held them together.

For the first time, she saw it clearly. And, for the first time, she chose to leave and block him completely.

Observing Grief

The premise of my research is that, in grief, ritual matters: we need a container for grief, a container for loss. Cory was unable to untangle her complex grief from Mitch because the loss had been so complicated, and there had been no proper container to hold it. About a year after Cory had cut off contact with Mitch “for good,” he reached out asking to have a memorial service for Jackson and Jude. He was offering a container to process the grief that had bonded him and Cory for so long.

Cory immediately looked past the commitment to no contact with Mitch, because what he was offering was something she had been starving for. Up until that point, years after the loss, there had been no real container for that grief, no structured moment of honoring what she had experienced. And, regardless of Mitch’s intention, the offering of a ritual felt too important to resist.

And the memorial service, a ritual, was important. It was a healing experience, a true moment of relief. They gathered with close family at an old farmhouse, where Cory and Mitch spoke aloud, sharing their grief in front of others who could finally witness it. They buried the twins’ ashes beneath a headstone, planting flowers and trees to mark their lives and create something living out of the loss. It was intimate, intentional, and deeply emotional, a moment that gave shape and meaning to a grief that had previously had nowhere to go.

“It was very moving and powerful. It was something we always talked about; it made me feel like, okay… I can let this go.”

But it was after this beautiful, healing ritual that things got complicated. Cory was holding multiple griefs at once, and so that healing ritual also made her vulnerable to reattachment. She described how her nervous system was no longer defended in the same way, and there was a pull to reconnect with Mitch: “looking back, I see what he had said and done to make me go back to him.”

The ritual itself worked. It was real, meaningful, and necessary. But because it happened in the presence of someone she was not protected from, the healing experience entangled her in an unhealthy relationship again.

Exiting Again

She went back into the relationship after the memorial service, and over the next few years, the same patterns of cruelty, control, and emotional instability resurfaced. Over time, it became clear that nothing fundamental had changed. This time, after years of returning to the same cycle, she reached a point of accumulated clarity and exhaustion. She chose to leave because it was no longer sustainable.

As we discussed her experience leaving again, Cory revealed something important about ritual: not all ritual is created equal. Especially when you are grieving multiple things at the same time, the ritual you choose to engage with can help you process one thing, but leave you vulnerable to something else—that was how she ended up with Mitch again after swearing him off before.

But I don’t see this as a demerit to ritual. Looking back on the experience, Cory reflected that the ritual had given her something real: a container for the grief of Jackson and Jude that she had been missing for years. But because that grief had been so deeply fused with her attachment to him, it was nearly impossible to engage with one without reactivating the other.

That doesn’t mean it was a failure to have the memorial service; it demonstrates how powerful rituals are, and how, in the context of a trauma bond, what might be closure for one thing can create an opening for something else.

Perhaps this is an important distinction between different types of ritual. If a ritual is observed or co-created, there is the potential for a strong bond to develop because you are witnessing each other grieve and making shared meaning. Who you choose to share a ritual with matters: that openness can become a liability.

Ritual doesn’t just shape how we grieve, it shapes who we remain connected to in the process. When grief is shared, the question becomes not just how we honor the loss, but whether the person beside us is someone we are safe to process with.

Grief, Attachment, and Ritual

The biggest takeaway from my interview with Cory was the unmistakable overlap between death grief and attachment grief. Through the loss of Jackson and Jude, Cory lost a structured future, the identity of motherhood, and a shared experience of parenting she had intended to have with Mitch.

In the loss of Mitch and the unraveling of her relationship, she lost things too: the person who held that grief with her, the system her nervous system had organized around survival, the person who had become indistinguishable from the grief itself. The relationship had come to represent both her greatest loss and her only sense of connection to it.

Even in the face of this trauma bond that she had to fight so hard to untangle herself from, what’s striking is that she did experience the power of ritual as an antidote for grief. I interpret her ability to leave Mitch the second time as a recognition that she no longer needed him as a container for her grief: she had that through the memorial. What remained was the shell of a relationship that was toxic and harmful to her.

Perhaps ritual alleviated the pressure on Mitch as the only point of connection to Jackson and Jude by creating an external container for the grief that had previously been held entirely within the bond.

As we spoke, Cory kept returning to the absence of compassion: what she needed from Mitch, and what she was still learning to offer herself. So the question became whether ritual could help her access that compassion internally, using love not as a force of attachment, but as a way to finally let go.

I invited Cory to reflect on how ritual might help her metabolize the ending of the relationship in the same way it had helped her metabolize the loss of Jackson and Jude. I said to Cory:

“My invitation to you is to reflect on two words: love and compassion… and to reflect on what formulating your ritual might mean for you… I think that you have the evidence that ritual can be really healing for you. Creating a ritual through love and compassion does not mean you reopen the door to have Mitch in your life—it means you get to metabolize love and compassion while firmly keeping him out.”

If death grief requires ritual to be metabolized, then we have to ask why we expect attachment grief to be any different. As Cory’s story teaches, breakups are not just endings: they are losses of people, futures, and identities. Without a container for that loss, we risk staying attached to what we are trying to release.

Cory’s story makes one thing clear: sometimes, we don’t need to hold on tighter; we need to create a new container to release and hold our grief.