Stockholm Syndrome • Counselling Tutor (2023)

“If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it.”

Joseph Goebbels – Nazi party

The Nazi regime manipulated a whole society into believing a lie; as a consequence, millions of people were murdered.

The name, Stockholm Syndrome, dates from 1973, when two men held up a Stockholm bank at gunpoint, taking four hostages.

Despite being held in a bank vault for six days, strapped with dynamite, the hostages feared their police rescuers; one later became engaged to one of the criminals; and another raised money for their legal defence.

In counselling cases involving Stockholm Syndrome, it is important to note that it is not a recognised as a model of mental health illness, simply because there are no long-term studies, given that hostage-taking is a fairly rare event.

However, it’s thought that the effects are linked to well-known pieces of psychology research such as the Stanford prison experiment and Leon Festinger’s cognitive dissonance.

Within counselling engagements there may be examples where abusers build trauma bonds with their victims by:

• abusive relationships and intimidation
• domestic violence
• gaslighting
• isolation from friends and family
• manipulative lies designed to undermine self-esteem and ruin judgement
• name-calling
• focus of time and energy solely on the abuser’s needs
• withholding of

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It is important in counselling to normalise how trauma-bonded clients feel, explaining that they’re not the only people in the world to feel this way in that situation.

While this might go against some modalities of therapy, such as person-centred therapy, in which you’re supposed to be non-directive, psycho-education can be such a relief to a client.

Psycho-education can also be useful in the treatment plan when working with clients who have felt some sexual pleasure during a sexual attack.

You can explain that their body was reacting in the way it was designed to, and that our sex organs are designed not to be able to be switched on and off independently. Just because the person got some pleasure from something does not mean that they were collaborating in it.

Example 1

Client: ‘Oh, he’s lovely really.’

Therapist: ‘But he hits you.’

Example 2

Client: ‘He only hits me if I do something stupid.’

Therapist: ‘Everybody makes mistakes. Even if you did make a mistake, is it right to be hit for that?’

Being fully present with clients, in their frame of reference, is vital during counselling– emotionally ‘holding’ the client while they talk about their experience, using Petruska Clarkson’s re-parenting style.

This allows you to begin to work with the negative self-concept that the client presents, as a result of the way the abuser has treated and addressed them.

It is important tonormalise how trauma-bonded clients feel, explaining that they’re not the only people in the world to feel this way in that situation.While this might go against some modalities of therapy ... psycho-education can be such a relief to a client.

Confusion often occurs as the client is trying to re-find their real self, which has been buried under an avalanche of negativity and abuse.

Confliction arises from love being a hugely powerful emotion, even when a relationship is flawed.

And denial occurs when clients refuse to see that being hit is a bad thing.

Other examples of therapy work with trauma-bonded individuals include:

• offering empathy and behaving in a consistent way (to build trust)
• using immediacy to share how their story impacts you (to help clients access words that describe the extreme nature of their experience)
• reminding clients who are no longer in the abusive relationship that the feelings they have are actually in the past
• understanding that their emotional functioning may be difficult (since this has been shut down by the abuser)
• being prepared for a relapse (as it’s common for victims of abuse to go back to their abusers).

Before working with a client with attachment bonding, it’s important to ask yourself a number of questions:

• Am I trained and experienced enough?
• Do I have enough sessions (six or even 12 is rarely enough)?
• How might my history affect the process (e.g. if you are a survivor of abuse yourself)?
• Do I need to make a referral (e.g. if a client is having flashbacks and becoming disoriented)?

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