Place Attachment and Hurt
*Note: This essay references abuse, power dynamics, and trauma.*
You can be attached to a place that hurts you.
This sentence stopped me in my tracks.
You can be attached to a place that hurts you.
I am writing my doctoral dissertation on place attachment, and this statement encapsulates it all—the messy tension of loving a place that hasn’t always been for our good.
Place attachment, in brief, explores how an individual interacts with their environment—and how that interaction supports their pursuit of goals and holistic wellbeing. Place attachment research considers individual and group characteristics, physical and social features of a space, and a person’s affective, behavioral, and cognitive bond with a place. Place attachment explains how physical spaces become places of meaning, purpose, and feelings of positive regard.
Place attachment goes beyond belonging—a buzzword in education research—to explore systemic and enduring features of spaces and how they facilitate social connectedness and wellbeing.
Add in the lens of critical geography, and we start to see what spaces communicate about who belongs, who holds power, and most importantly, who is not welcome in this place. Spaces are NOT experienced equally.
By default, physical spaces are neutral; meaning is socially constructed. There is nothing about an environment, a room, a house, or a national park that has value or worth before humans enter the picture.
But then, humans come in, and—consciously or not—start to appropriate spaces, deciding who belongs, who is in the out group, and what it means to be connected to a place.
Place attachment is often described through two related constructs: place dependence and place identity.
Place dependence describes a person’s reliance on a space. So a graduate student would be dependent on a lab to conduct experiments, a university to complete courses and earn their degree, or their home to provide safe and stable shelter every night.
Place identity explains how a person’s sense of self is informed and shaped by an environment—including memories, feelings, beliefs, preferences, and values—as they relate to the physical setting in which life occurs. This means that all the experiences a graduate student has at their institution—good and bad—shape their sense of self. Place identity informs who we are, where we belong, and how we move through the world.
Place attachment is predominantly studied through positive conditions—feelings of happiness, pride, and liking. A handful of studies have looked at place attachment through the lens of displacement—whether by natural disasters or refugee situations. But to my knowledge, there is limited research on the complex relationship of a person returning to a place that holds memories and conditions of trauma or harm.
You can be attached to a place that hurts you.
The moment I read this sentence, I instantly thought, “This makes complete sense.”
The closest thing I can compare this to is the phenomenon of trauma bonding.
Trauma bonding is the unhealthy relational formation between two people where harm is mixed with intermittent reward: affection, apology, closeness, relief, or hope. The inconsistency deepens the bond because a person’s nervous system gets trained to chase the “good moments”—the dopamine hits. A person can endure a surprising amount of pain while awaiting the increasingly rarer moments of reward.
I am not saying that trauma bonding and place attachment are the same thing. Trauma bonding is dependent on a power-imbalanced relationship in which the person with power abuses the other while intermittently offering “rewards.”
Graduate students are a vulnerable group because they often are at the whims of the people who hold the power to confirm or withhold their degree. Not every adverse experience in graduate school is rooted in power imbalance, but there are still similarities between trauma bonding and place attachment in complex environments like graduate school.
In psychology research, there are several types of interpersonal attachment: secure, anxious, avoidant, and disorganized. I believe the same is true of place attachment. Some people might experience places as secure and nourishing, while others navigate places with a bit of detachment—closeness mixed with a sense of threat.
We tend to think of place attachment as “good,” but in reality the word “attachment” merely describes a bond between a person and something else. So it makes sense that a person can be attached to a place that is not necessarily the healthiest environment simply because it holds connection, meaning, familiarity, identity, memory, and survival patterns.
Here’s what this looks like in real time. While it’s not the same mechanism as trauma bonding, attachment to places that harm us develops similarly.
We persist in a harmful environment to experience occasional moments of belonging or mattering.
We endure stress because occasionally we find meaning in the neverending to-do lists, critiques, and other hurdles on the path to graduation.
We navigate loneliness for the occasional epiphanies of “this matters.”
We live depleted and burnt out—surviving until the next affirmation of our work, our presence, or our worth.
What it boils down to: sometimes harm strengthens attachment.
You can be attached to a place that hurts you.
And here’s why it becomes so hard to untangle:
This place shapes you—even if it shapes you through loss, pressure, or scarcity.
You’re learning how to survive here, and survival creates loyalty.
You’re building identity here—whether to fit in, to grow into a professional, or in opposition to dominant beliefs.
You are seen in this place…sometimes (even if it’s inconsistent).
You’re investing in this place every day you show up. You’re committing your time, your tears, your work, your love, your hopes, and your money.
And you carry your story here—and leaving can feel like erasing chapters.
You can be attached to a place that hurts you.
Can you feel it?
Let it sink in. This is the part I don’t want you to rush past.
We stay in places that hurt us because as much as they break us down, they still hold meaning and purpose.
We cannot deny the formative and transformative nature of places—even if that formation is not as we would have liked.
By simply existing with other humans, we are being formed day in and day out—adverse experiences and all.
This is the heartbreak and the dignity of the paradox.
A place can be formative without being good for us.
A place can be meaningful without being safe.
A place can feel like home and still be the thing we’re healing from.
It’s a grief and a joy.
Two of the strongest human emotions yet the most challenging pair for us to allow to coexist.
What we’re saying: “This place mattered… And this place hurt.”
AND.
And. And. And.
This place mattered, and this place hurt.
You can be attached to a place that hurts you.
And that’s ok.
There is nothing wrong with loving and returning to a place that broke you down. It is part of being human. But loving a place doesn’t automatically mean it’s safe or good to stay. It’s complex.
Sometimes we stay because we like a place. Here are some other, perfectly human reasons we might stay:
Familiarity: it can feel safer to stay in a place of hurt than to venture into a new place where we don’t yet know the rules of belonging and existing. Stability and predictability feel safe, even if a place is not good for us.
Narrative coherence: this place has formed our sense of self (place identity), and we’re afraid that if we walk away, we lose part of ourselves.
Dependency: we’ve been reliant on a place to meet our needs, and we’re unsure if we will still have access to these resources or opportunities outside this place. Will we still be able to graduate? Do we still want to?
Survival solidarity: there is a version of ourselves that fought to survive in this place, and we don’t want that fight to be in vain. Leaving can feel like betraying the self we fought so hard to protect.
Sunk cost: we’re afraid that if we leave, we’re admitting that our time in the space wasn’t worth it or that we never ought to have come to this place to begin with—even though it WAS worth it.
Remember: attachment is a bond—not consent or endorsement.
I am not here to convince you to stay in or leave a place. That’s above my pay grade and my expertise. This article is meant to provide shared language, not clinical advice.
By all means, PLEASE leave a place of abuse—one in which a power dynamic is wielded to your harm.
*If you’re unsure whether what you’re experiencing is abuse or coercion, you deserve help sorting that out—preferably with a trusted professional.*
But if you’re navigating the complexities of grad life, then my hope is that you feel encouraged having named the very real, very normal thing you’re going through as you pursue your degree.
If you need help determining if you should leave a place, then I recommend Emily Freeman’s How to Walk Into a Room. She walks you through questions of belonging, importance, and worth to evaluate staying and leaving spaces.
Additionally, talk with someone! A mentor, a therapist, a life coach… Any of these folks will have wisdom to help you discern staying or leaving graduate school.
If you do leave, try to remember that leaving can honor the cost. You’re not losing yourself; you’re choosing to enter a new place where you can hopefully cultivate and embrace a whole, healthy version of yourself—never losing the lessons you learned along the way.
And if you stay, pursue healing as best you can—acknowledging that only so much healing can happen while you are in school and the rest will come after graduation. At the very minimum, reclaim the script and write your own narrative of meaning and identity within this place. Choose who gets access to the parts of your identity rooted in this place. Choose the messages you internalize. And choose what you refuse to normalize as a “reality of grad life.”
Attachment is not the same as approval. You can be attached and still set healthy boundaries.
Whether you stay or whether you go, this decision holds grief. Grief that expectations remain unmet. Grief that you were hurt. Grief that all the good is mixed with memories of pain.
Grief is normal. Grief is part of being human. Grief tells us that something mattered.
And truthfully, grief deepens our experience of and capacity for joy, beauty, goodness, and gratitude—if we let it.
You can be attached to a place that hurts you.
If nothing else, I hope this gives you language. Naming what’s happening is the first act of freedom because you reclaim power. Naming helps normalize feeling attached to something that hurt you. You are not crazy, and you are not alone in this. And now you have the power to heal.
May we all extend ourselves a little more grace as we navigate the complexity of living, learning, loving, losing, healing, and hoping.
*Just a disclaimer that this post contains affiliate links. This means that I will get a tiny amount of money if you purchase something, but there is no additional cost to you.
