The Danger of Weaponized Attachment

"Weaponised attachment (Lesiak &Gelsthorpe,2025) refers to a coercive socio psychological mechanism through which affective bonds are constructed, destabilised, and instrumentalised to sustain domination even in the absence of physical restraint. The concept designates a structural technology of coercive control in which attachment is deliberately produced through cycles of intimacy, emotional mirroring, and trauma disclosure, then strategically destabilised via intermittent reward and punishment."

"This oscillation generates disorientation and cognitive dissonance, converting attachment into a regulatory apparatus that normalises abuse, re signifies harm as care, and collapses the distinction between safety and subjugation. Within this configuration, love functions not as an affective counter to violence but as its medium, the mechanism through which coercion is made affectively sustainable and epistemically invisible. Weaponised attachment therefore constitutes a form of affective governance in which the victim's capacity for connection is re engineered"

Weaponised attachment describes a coercive socio-psychological mechanism that builds and exploits affective bonds to sustain domination without physical restraint. The process deliberately produces attachment through cycles of intense intimacy, emotional mirroring, and trauma disclosure, then destabilises that bond via intermittent reward and punishment. The resulting oscillation creates disorientation and cognitive dissonance, converting attachment into a regulatory apparatus that normalises abuse and re-signifies harm as care. Love functions as the medium that makes coercion affectively sustainable and epistemically invisible. The focus shifts from individual pathology to perpetrator strategies and engineered relational structures.

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