“We’re Not Family, But We Have a Trauma Bond”: Yellowjackets, Sui Sin Far, and the Cost of Survival

Female relationships shaped under trauma, whether through state violence or survivalist isolation, reveal the uncomfortable truth that care and harm often coexist. Yellowjackets and Sui Sin Far’s “The Land of the Free” show that trauma distorts bonds, weaponizes them, and sometimes breaks them entirely.

In Showtime’s Yellowjackets, Misty says, “We’re not family, but we have a very intense trauma bond.” The phrasing is chilling because it collapses the categories of love, loyalty, manipulation, and fear. Trauma bonds are not friendships, they are contracts written through desperation. They hold people together, but not gently.

Sui Sin Far’s “The Land of the Free” offers a parallel formed not in the wilderness but in the machinery of the American immigration system. When Lae Choo stands frozen as her child is taken, the narrator reveals, “She was very still, but the tears would not stop flowing.” Stillness becomes its own kind of trauma response; a bodily shutdown when the world becomes unendurable. Her pain isolates her, even from the other women around her, who are equally trapped within patriarchal and racialized systems but cannot bridge the gulf of her suffering.

Both texts show how women’s emotional lives are shaped by external violence. Trauma becomes the architecture of their relationships: what they can give, what they can’t, what they lose. In Yellowjackets, the girls both love and fear one another; every act of care is shadowed by past betrayals. In “The Land of the Free,” Lae Choo’s isolation is enforced by the state, but it operates the same way: trauma dictates connection.

The tragedy isn’t that women fail each other, it’s that the systems surrounding them make genuine support almost impossible. Trauma makes intimacy volatile. It creates loyalty, but it also creates resentment. It builds closeness, but only by turning survival into a competition.

And here’s the part we don’t like to admit: trauma is not a moral teacher. It doesn’t make people kinder. It makes them adaptable. Sometimes it even makes them dangerous.

What both texts ultimately ask is not whether women can love each other, but whether they’re allowed to. Trauma bonds form because the world leaves women no other option. And until the systems that create the trauma are dismantled, female solidarity will always be imperfect; powerful, necessary, but fractured by the violence that produced it.