THE BRAIN HELD HOSTAGE: THE NEUROCHEMICAL HIJACKING OF DOMESTIC VIOLENCE - Deborah Breda - ETHICA SOCIETAS-Rivista di scienze umane e sociali

Neurobiology of trauma, relational dependence, and the operational implications of trauma bonding for Police Forces and the Red Code

Abstract: This contribution proposes a reinterpretation of domestic violence in the light of the neurobiology of trauma, peritraumatic dissociation, and the mechanisms of traumatic attachment, showing how remaining in an abusive relationship cannot be understood as free consent, moral weakness, or voluntary inconsistency. Repeated violence alters the systems of stress, reward, and emotional regulation, fostering a form of relational dependence that displays significant functional analogies with addictive processes. Within this perspective, the cycle of violence is analyzed as a progressive process that compromises memory, risk assessment, decision-making capacity, and self-protection. The essay also examines the operational implications of this interpretive framework for Police Forces, social services, and the wider local support network, with particular attention to the prevention of secondary victimization, risk assessment, and the centrality of no contact as an essential condition for protection and recovery.

Keywords: #domesticviolence #traumaticdependence #traumabonding #cycleofviolence #neurobiology #peritraumaticdissociation #secondaryvictimization #policeforces #redcode #nocontact #protectedabstinence #riskassessment #SARAProtocol #awarenessdiary #hippocampus #amygdala #prefrontalcortex #cortisol #dopamine #oxytocin #BDNF #estrogenbetareceptors #DeboraBreda #EthicaSocietas #EthicaSocietasMagazine #ScientificJournal #SocialSciences #HumanSciences #ethicasocietasupli

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Introduction: the apparent paradox and the risk of secondary victimization

“Why doesn’t she report him?” “Why does she go back to him after reporting him?” “Why does she contradict herself in her statements?” These questions, recurrent in the day-to-day work of law enforcement agencies, social services, and public debate, appear formally legitimate. However, when formulated without adequate scientific and clinical awareness, they risk turning into an indirect form of accusation, fueling that phenomenon of secondary victimization which shifts the focus of attention from the perpetrator of violence to the person who suffers it, thereby intensifying her isolation, shame, and self-blame (Ulivieri, 2019; Breda, 2025b).

The first interpretive mistake lies in reading a woman’s persistence in the relationship as a fully free and rational choice. The second lies in confusing ambivalence with unreliability. The third, even more serious, lies in overlaying traumatic suffering with a presumption of shared responsibility. In reality, the trauma literature clearly shows that repeated exposure to violence produces profound alterations in defense systems, mnemonic processes, emotional regulation, and threat assessment, making exit from an abusive relationship a far more complex process than common sense would suggest (Herman, 2015; Van der Kolk, 2015).

What is needed, then, is a change of paradigm. In most cases, we are not dealing with a deficit of will, nor with a covert form of complicity, nor with a manipulative distortion of facts. Rather, we are facing an intertwining of trauma, conditioning, relational dependence, and neurobiological hijacking, within which the violent partner becomes at once the source of threat and the apparent source of relief. It is within this dynamic that so-called trauma bonding takes root, namely that pathological bond which is consolidated precisely through the alternation of fear, humiliation, waiting, violence, and reconciliation (Walker, 1979; Herman, 2015).

Domestic violence as relational dependence: a neuroscientific reading

The neuroscientific and psychotraumatological literature does not allow reductive shortcuts, yet it provides sufficient grounds to argue that intimate partner violence deeply affects stress, attachment, and reward systems. In particular, some theoretical models have highlighted how intense romantic love and attachment may involve motivational and reward circuits partially overlapping with those studied in addiction, especially on the dopaminergic side and in the compulsive pursuit of the relational object (Fisher et al., 2016; Liebowitz, 1983).

Within this framework, the “substance” is not an external agent but the relationship itself. The aggressor acts not only as the author of abusive conduct, but also as the controller of the distribution of fear and relief: he destabilizes, devalues, terrorizes, and then interrupts suffering through promises, affectionate gestures, repentance, or an apparent return to the initial love. It is this oscillation that constructs the traumatic bond and makes it resistant to rupture (Walker, 1979; Herman, 2015).

Further support for this perspective is offered by the recent experimental research of Agrimi and colleagues, which identified, in a preclinical model of repeated violence, significant alterations affecting the hippocampus, estrogen beta receptors, and BDNF, thereby confirming the neurobiological plausibility of a deep and lasting impact of violence on systems of emotional and behavioral regulation (Agrimi et al., 2024). Scientifically, however, the necessary rigor must be maintained: this does not mean mechanically transferring experimental data to the human clinical experience, but rather recognizing that the difficulty of leaving the relationship cannot be dismissed as mere “lack of will,” since it lies at the intersection of trauma, chronic stress, induced affective dependence, and impaired self-regulatory capacity.

The cycle of violence: a neurochemical analysis of cerebral hijacking

The cycle of violence, already described in psychodynamic and relational terms, may also be understood as a mechanism of neurochemical capture. Each phase modifies the victim’s internal state, producing adaptations which, in the immediate term, serve survival, but in the medium term consolidate subordination to the violent partner (Walker, 1979; Herman, 2015).

The initial phase: idealization, intensity, and emotional anchoring

The relationship often begins in hyper-intense ways: constant attention, gifts, incessant messages, absolute declarations, rapid promises of cohabitation or marriage. What appears to be extraordinary passion is often an accelerated form of constructing the emotional bond. On the neurochemical level, intense romantic experience is associated with activation of reward circuits, involving dopamine, norepinephrine, and, according to part of the clinical and popular literature, phenylethylamine, often referred to as a molecule implicated in euphoric states of falling in love (Liebowitz, 1983). The partner is thus encoded as a privileged source of pleasure, meaning, and belonging.

This first phase is decisive because it lays the psychic foundation for later dependence. The victim does not bond with someone initially perceived as an aggressor; she bonds with a promise of absolute love, with a form of emotional intensity that seems to fill voids, needs for recognition, and desires for stability. Precisely for this reason, the subsequent shift toward control and violence produces a devastating effect: it does not destroy a fragile bond, but strikes an emotional investment that is already deeply consolidated.

The tension phase: walking on eggshells

Gradually, the partner becomes irritable, demeaning, and unpredictable. A word, a gesture, a slight delay, or a trivial disagreement can become possible triggers of anger. The woman thus enters a condition of permanent hypervigilance: she monitors tone of voice, measures her words, anticipates the other’s moods, and spontaneously modifies her behavior in an attempt to prevent the outburst.

Neurobiologically, this phase corresponds to persistent activation of stress systems. Cortisol tends to remain elevated; the autonomic nervous system remains oriented toward threat; the amygdala increases its reactivity; and the prefrontal cortex, subjected to chronic alarm conditions, progressively loses efficiency in planning, critical evaluation, and the inhibition of more immediate emotional responses (Van der Kolk, 2015; Carnell, 2022). Under such conditions, the victim does not decide in full freedom, but rather adapts her conduct to an environment perceived as constantly dangerous.

It is in this phase that the devastating process of self-blame becomes consolidated. The traumatized mind seeks an explanation for the irrational, and the most readily available hypothesis often becomes the cruelest one: “If I made a mistake, then perhaps I can prevent it from happening again.” This thought of guilt, though false, offers a paradoxical illusion of control. That is why it is so resistant: it is not merely the product of the perpetrator’s manipulation, but also a desperate attempt to restore predictability within chaos (Herman, 2015; Breda, 2025a).

The explosion phase: acute trauma, terror, and dissociation

Violence erupts in physical, verbal, psychological, or sexual form. At this moment, the victim’s brain activates extreme survival mechanisms. The sympathetic nervous system increases heart rate, accelerates breathing, and prepares for flight or freezing. But when actual escape is impossible, body and mind may resort to a more radical defense: peritraumatic dissociation (Van der Kolk, 2015; Herman, 2015).

Dissociation is not absence of pain, nor voluntary passivity, nor emotional indifference. On the contrary, it is an extreme response to an event perceived as intolerable. The person may report feeling outside her own body, observing the scene from a distance, experiencing time as slowed, or perceiving a sensory numbing. Memory itself may become fragmented, with gaps, chronological confusion, and apparent contradictions in later testimony. For this very reason, judgmental language about the victim’s “contradictoriness” is not only unjust, but scientifically unfounded.

It is often in this phase that the woman reports the abuse or expresses a desire to separate. This step does not arise from cold calculation, but from a neurobiological and psychic alarm threshold that can no longer be ignored. When the survival system assesses that her own safety or that of her children is at imminent risk, a window opens in which silence is broken. It is precisely this window that must be recognized as a moment of maximum risk and maximum opportunity for intervention.

The criminological literature, the experience of anti-violence centers, and operational practice converge in indicating that the moment of separation or reporting may coincide with a peak of dangerousness, because the aggressor perceives the loss of control as a narcissistic wound and a threat to his dominance (Walker, 1979; Breda, 2025c). For this reason, any institutional intervention at this stage must be rapid, coordinated, and concretely protective. The accelerated procedures introduced by the so-called Red Code also belong to this perspective, since they impose a fast-track approach for proceedings concerning domestic and gender-based violence.

No contact as a clinical and operational measure of protection

Once the rupture phase has opened, the strictest and most effective criterion is no contact. This is not a moralistic formula, but a protective measure grounded in clinical, investigative, and criminological reasoning. Interrupting every direct or indirect contact with the perpetrator of violence means removing the victim from the stimuli that reactivate the traumatic cycle: messages, phone calls, meetings “to clarify things,” pressure mediated by relatives or friends, pleas for forgiveness, or contacts instrumentally centered on the children.

Each reactivation of contact may, in fact, reproduce in abbreviated form the same neurochemical dynamic: increased stress, anguished waiting, promises of repair, illusory relief, and relapse into the bond. For this reason, no contact does not represent an excessive rigidity, but rather a minimum prerequisite of protected abstinence. Only in the absence of the traumatic source can the brain gradually reduce hyperactivation, the prefrontal cortex recover its capacity for judgment, and experience be re-elaborated without continuous re-exposure (Van der Kolk, 2015; Carnell, 2022).

For friends and family, supporting no contact means not acting as intermediaries, not passing on information, and not minimizing the aggressor’s attempts to re-establish contact. For institutions, it means ensuring that protection is effective and not merely formal or paper-based.

The honeymoon phase: relief that consolidates dependence

After the explosion, the aggressor may appear repentant, loving, and vulnerable. He brings flowers, cries, promises change, declares himself ready for therapy, invokes the children’s well-being, and recalls happy moments. For the victim, exhausted by fear and extreme stress, this apparent transformation produces an immensely powerful sense of relief. It is here that the core of traumatic dependence is cemented.

The collapse of tension is experienced as liberation. The return of affection produces gratification, respite, a reduction of anguish, and the sense that the “real” man is the good one, while the violence was only an exception, perhaps caused by stress, alcohol, jealousy, or a relational error that can be repaired. In this phase, oxytocin and attachment systems may reinforce the bond once again, while the memory of trauma is reinterpreted in light of reconciliation (Fisher et al., 2016; Herman, 2015).

It is precisely at this point that the violent relationship takes on a configuration functionally analogous to dependence: a phase of tension and crisis is followed by a phase of relief that strengthens the bond with the very person who caused the suffering. From this derives the apparent paradox of return. The victim does not simply go back “to him”; she goes back toward what her nervous system, after terror, registers as the only immediate source of respite.

Traumatic dependence as neurochemical hijacking

Taken together, these phases progressively hijack the brain’s reward mechanisms, creating a neurobiological pattern that shows significant analogies with addictive processes. The extreme stress of the tension and explosion phases corresponds, on the functional level, to a condition of crisis; the intense relief of reconciliation acts as reinforcement of dependence. The circuits involved — particularly the mesolimbic dopaminergic ones — are the same that the literature has placed at the center of mechanisms of intense attachment and dependence (Fisher et al., 2016).

This does not mean crudely equating love with a drug, but rather recognizing that the alternation between deprivation, fear, reward, and relief can produce a form of pathological learning that is extraordinarily resistant. The brain learns that the source of relief coincides with the violent partner, and it is precisely this coincidence that makes it so difficult to break the bond through willpower alone.

Cinematic parallel: There’s Still Tomorrow

On the cultural and symbolic plane, one of the most effective representations of this dynamic can be found in Paola Cortellesi’s film There’s Still Tomorrow. The face of the protagonist, Delia — often suspended, absent, withdrawn from the immediacy of the violent event — conveys to the viewer not apathy, but the bodily language of traumatic survival. Estrangement, emotional aphasia, the body present while the mind is elsewhere: all this constitutes a persuasive cinematic rendering of what clinical literature describes as dissociation. The film’s strength lies precisely in having visualized trauma without falling into the spectacularization of violence: not the victim’s passivity, but the neuropsychic cost of survival (Cortellesi, 2023).

Operational implications for Police Forces: recognizing dependence in order to intervene effectively

Understanding the neurobiological mechanisms of violence is not a theoretical exercise, but an essential operational lever for police officers. Every day, the State Police, the Carabinieri, Local Police, and other bodies intervene in cases of maltreatment, stalking, and proceedings connected to the Red Code. To be effective, it is necessary to move beyond the traditional approach and integrate knowledge of trauma bonding, dissociation, and dependence on the violent relationship (Breda, 2025c).

An operator trained in trauma will no longer ask, “Why doesn’t she leave him?” but rather, “What specific support does she need in order to exit this dependent relational bond?” Abandoning judgment means recognizing that the victim’s apparent ambivalence is not unreliability, but the symptom of a neurochemical hijacking and of a survival strategy.

This awareness must also be reflected in risk assessment. Knowledge of peritraumatic dissociation and trauma bonding makes it possible to correctly interpret signs such as an absent gaze, emotional detachment, memory gaps, or minimization, thus avoiding reading them as automatic indicators of unreliability. Such a reading must be integrated with the tools already in use — including risk assessment protocols, lethality checklists, and structured tools for analyzing dangerousness — so that the response becomes more complete, accurate, and oriented toward effective protection.

The awareness diary: a support tool and a possible investigative aid

From this perspective, it may prove useful, where possible and under safe conditions, to suggest an awareness diary, in which the victim records facts, exact words, places, witnesses, emotions, bodily sensations, and contexts. For the injured party, this makes it possible to transform chaos into a recognizable sequence, helping her to visualize the recurrence of the cycle of violence and to take cognitive distance from manipulation. For investigative work, it may constitute a useful reconstructive support, especially in cases of repeated and progressive violence, in which a single episode risks appearing isolated if not situated within its dynamic context.

Recording in a structured way the facts, the exact words, the emotions and bodily sensations, as well as the place and any witnesses, can help strengthen the readability of the overall picture and restore greater narrative continuity to an experience that trauma tends to fragment.

The importance of protected abstinence

Exiting violence is not a punctual act, but a process of relational detoxification. As in every framework of dependence, distance from the source of reactivation is a necessary, though not sufficient, condition for recovery. The traumatized brain needs time to reduce amygdala hyperactivity, rebalance the stress response, recover executive functions, and regain a sense of continuity of the self (Van der Kolk, 2015; Carnell, 2022).

The support network, therefore, must not limit itself to abstractly encouraging separation, but must make it concretely sustainable: physical protection, access to protected shelters where necessary, legal support, specialized psychological assistance, economic support, and containment of the perpetrator’s attempts to re-establish contact. Protected abstinence, in this perspective, is not an accessory detail, but the minimum threshold within which healing may begin.

Conclusions: toward an ethics of complexity

Understanding domestic violence in neurobiological terms does not mean reducing everything to brain chemistry, but rather rescuing the phenomenon from moralistic simplifications. It means recognizing that the victim’s behavior develops in a context of threat, manipulation, affective dependence, and altered defense systems. Above all, it means shifting judgment away from the woman and toward the structure of violence that traps her.

The most important lesson, for institutions and helping professions alike, is that compassion is not enough unless it is informed. What is needed is a competent compassion, capable of reading trauma without translating it into guilt, ambivalence without translating it into falsehood, and dissociation without translating it into unreliability. For Police Forces, this translates into an additional responsibility: to be the first safeguard that interrupts not only material violence, but also the symbolic chain of secondary victimization.

The cinematic representation of Delia in There’s Still Tomorrow reminds us that behind every absent gaze, behind every apparent passivity, there is often a brain struggling to survive with the only means at its disposal. The body is held hostage, but the mind seeks refuge elsewhere, waiting for the moment when real escape finally becomes possible.

Preventing secondary victimization therefore means training operators capable of recognizing trauma bonding, dissociation, neurochemical hijacking, and the window of maximum risk that coincides with reporting or separation. It means replacing the accusatory question with timely intervention, judgmental distance with concrete protection, and incomprehension with knowledge. In this sense, the task of institutions is not merely to repress violence, but to make possible, for those who suffer it, a return to freedom, continuity of self, and relational dignity.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Agrimi, J., Bernardelle, L., Sbaiti, N., D’Angelo, D., Canato, M., Marchionni, I., Oeing, C. U., Barbara, G., Vignoli, B., Canossa, M., Kaludercic, N., Raffaello, A., Spolverato, G., Dal Maschio, M., & Paolocci, N. (2024). Reiterated male-to-female violence disrupts hippocampal estrogen receptor β expression, prompting anxiety-like behavior. iScience, 27(9), 110585.

Breda, D. (2025a). Il linguaggio come strumento di violenza e di riscatto [Language as an instrument of violence and redemption]. Ethica Societas – Rivista di scienze umane e sociali.

Breda, D. (2025b). La forma della violenza sul partner e la colpevolizzazione delle vittime [The forms of intimate partner violence and the blaming of victims]. Ethica Societas – Rivista di scienze umane e sociali.

Breda, D. (2025c). Il ruolo della polizia locale nella prevenzione e nel contrasto della violenza di genere [The role of local police in the prevention of and response to gender-based violence]. Ethica Societas – Rivista di scienze umane e sociali.

Breda, D. (2025d). 25 novembre: la lotta contro la violenza di genere è ancora aperta [25 November: the struggle against gender-based violence is still ongoing]. Ethica Societas – Rivista di scienze umane e sociali.

Carnell, S. (2022). La neuroscienza del trauma. Guida pratica alla guarigione usando la mente e il cervello [The neuroscience of trauma: A practical guide to healing through mind and brain]. Giovanni Fioriti Editore.

Cortellesi, P. (Director). (2023). There’s Still Tomorrow [Film]. Wildside; Vision Distribution.

Fisher, H. E., Xu, X., Aron, A., & Brown, L. L. (2016). Intense, passionate, romantic love: A natural addiction? How the fields that investigate romance and substance abuse can inform each other. Frontiers in Psychology, 7, 687.

Herman, J. L. (1992). Trauma and recovery: The aftermath of violence – from domestic abuse to political terror. Basic Books.

Liebowitz, M. R. (1983). The chemistry of love. Little, Brown and Company.

Ulivieri, S. (Ed.). (2019). Corpi violati. Condizionamenti educativi e violenze di genere [Violated bodies: Educational conditioning and gender-based violence]. FrancoAngeli.

Van der Kolk, B. A. (2014). The body keeps the score: Brain, mind, and body in the healing of trauma. Viking.

Walker, L. E. (1979). The battered woman. Harper & Row.

ESSENTIAL WEB RESOURCES

1522: European anti-violence and stalking helpline, https://www.1522.eu/.

D.i.Re – Women’s network against violence, https://www.direcontrolaviolenza.it/.

ISTAT. Helpline 1522.

ISTAT. Perception of safety, Roma: Istituto Nazionale di Statistica. https://www.istat.it/it/archivio/296982 (o report equivalente su sicurezza donne).