Digital Trauma as a Health Safety and Security Risk: The Impact of Love Bombing and Breadcrumbing Through Concepts in Cyberpsychology and Mental Public Health

This study examines digital trauma as an emergent health safety and human security risk, focusing on how coercive relational practices, specifically love bombing and breadcrumbing, are intensified and normalized within digitally mediated communication environments. Drawing on a qualitative research design, the study employs interdisciplinary focus groups with cyberpsychologists, marriage and family therapists, and sex therapists to investigate how experts conceptualize, diagnose, and respond to technologically mediated emotional manipulation. Situating digital platforms as knowledge-producing infrastructures, the research demonstrates how algorithmically reinforced patterns of excessive affection and intermittent attention operate as mechanisms of informational and affective control, distorting emotional perception and undermining psychological resilience. Findings indicate that love bombing and breadcrumbing function not merely as interpersonal tactics but as systemic cyberpsychological processes that exploit the immediacy, persistence, and visibility of digital communication. These practices generate epistemic asymmetries in which victims’ capacity to interpret relational signals, regulate affect, and exercise agency is progressively destabilized. Participants consistently described digital trauma as a cumulative injury characterized by emotional overload, uncertainty, dependency, and erosion of trust; effects that extend beyond individual pathology to implicate broader concerns of public mental health and health security. The study’s originality lies in reframing digital trauma as both a psychological and epistemic disturbance, produced through sociotechnical systems that commodify attention, emotion, and personal data. By integrating cyberpsychology with trauma theory and health security frameworks, this research advances a novel conceptual model that expands trauma scholarship into the digital domain. The findings offer critical implications for clinical practice, public health education, and digital governance, underscoring the need to recognize and mitigate digitally mediated coercion as a legitimate and growing threat to psychological safety and collective human security.