ATTACHMENT
TRAUMA & WOUNDS
The Impact of Our Earliest Bonds
Part of healthy development requires that children feel an invitation to exist exactly as they are. As adults, I believe many of us are still looking to fulfill that need.
If your childhood lacked the essential aspects of nurturing and stable environments and relationships, you may still be confused about where a sense of security comes from. You may have internalized a feeling that your needs will not be met. That you must work hard to find and secure rest, love, peace, and acceptance. That you are not lovable or good enough just as you are. That you are responsible for holding and handling your own pain.
Unhealthy attachment and relational trauma in childhood can result in struggles to not only self-soothe, but to know how or when to ask for help.
Without the foundation of secure attachment, in an attempt to find peace, we may trade parts of our true selves for security or survival. The good news is, they can be reclaimed.
These adaptations to adversity weren’t meant to be permanent ways of existing in the world, especially if they do more harm than good today. Whether you had a stable or fragile foundation, consider your capacity to adapt again — this time with choice and intention, with all of you on board!
So, What Is Attachment Theory?
Attachment theory helps us understand how our framework for connection developed in life; it examines how we can be impacted by what happened to us, as well as what did not happen to us that should have. In our early formative years we are learning our identity, a sense of self-worth, how to navigate and regulate our emotions, carry ourselves and connect with others. We didn’t all grow up with consistent unconditional loving attachment. During critical stages of development, it is common for many of us to experience a negative event, trauma, or emotional neglect, impacting our sense of security in our attachment with others.
Some people move on through these events okay, while others have difficulty closing these wounds and the external experience leads to an internal and lasting sense of insecurity.
Pioneers in attachment and developmental research divided the attachment system into four distinct styles or adaptations (secure, avoidant, ambivalent, disorganized), but this is not to say we strictly belong to one or another or that any style is set in stone. It's helpful to think of attachment as a spectrum. Attachment is about biology. It’s not about one style being good and another bad. It’s really about how your nervous system learned to keep you safe in your environment and subculture.
In therapy, we bring our dominant patterns into awareness, with compassion, to create exciting opportunities for growth. It can be helpful for people to learn what their protective systems chose to do to keep them safe in a time of distress so they can reassess if these strategies are the best for them today.
What is an attachment wound or trauma?
An attachment injury is an experience of betrayal, broken trust, or abandonment during a critical moment of need. Causes can be overt or covert. Injuries can shape our attachment style, aka how we trust, view, and connect with the world. Given the early timing of these events, many people have trouble recognizing these patterns in adulthood.
Although we never stop growing and adapting, our earliest relationships form the blueprint for how we interact with others across all domains of life, be it personal, social, or professional. Our young selves receive and internalize messages early on in childhood about how to behave. As adults, many of us still operate by these rules, working to be acceptable as a way of survival or getting our needs met.
It often goes beyond a singular incident. We take a betrayal inside and it becomes an identity of “I must not be _____ enough,” giving birth to destructive patterns and self beliefs. This can guide how you move through your life, in fear of being exposed.
Attachment wounds do not only occur in childhood and adolescence. Experiences we endure in our adult relationships can also cause deep wounding that reshapes the way we interact with others and the world.
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The belief that “I’m lovable/accepted only when I am succeeding, achieving, or doing well,” can pave the way for perfectionism and believing there is no room for failure.
If your needs were inconsistently met, you may have grown fiercely self-reliant, overvaluing independence and believing you must do everything on your own. This can impair building trust in relationships and working with others.
Anyone who didn’t receive consistent, agenda-less, unconditional love as a child, may strive to “be good,” or meet their own needs with success so they never again have to hinge their self-worth on another individual or relationship.
Experiences of emotional or physical abandonment may lead to codependency or a struggle to accept healthy separation within adult relationships.
Children who are denied vulnerability and spontaneous play may struggle to be in touch with their emotions and to allow themselves to fully feel them.
If you didn’t feel it was safe or appropriate to express your emotions, or couldn’t rely on them to be acknowledged, you may practice denying them yourself.
If you live(d) in a constant sate of hypervigilance around significant others or caretakers, you may have an exaggerated threat response.
Any experiences of abuse, infidelity, or ruptured trust or reliability in adult relationships.
What happens if these wounds are left unattended?
These dynamics shaped early on can continue to play out in adulthood. For example, if it was not normal, acceptable, or encouraged for you to feel and express your emotions, you may struggle to feel safe being vulnerable with others today. It can be hard to trust in adult relationships when you experienced hurt, broken boundaries, or emotional neglect during your upbringing. Still feeling restless, you may seek comfort and approval from the external world, whether from a partner, work, appearance, food or substances, rather than attending to and soothing your own emotions. Some of these early experiences pave way for the development of habits and coping strategies in adulthood such as perfectionism, avoidance, unhealthy boundary setting and codependency.
And yet, we are biologically wired for secure attachment and fundamentally designed to heal! We can adopt this style through the practice of skills, enhancing emotion regulation, and gaining corrective experiences.
Reprogramming your nervous system, healing attachment wounds, and learning new relational skills is possible at any point in your life!
What does healing look like?
Guided by neurobiology, Polyvagal Theory, and Attachment Theory, I help people shift towards secure attachment and improve relationships by building awareness of their framework for connection and inviting their entire system — mind, body, and spirit — to adopt strategies that better serve their life today.
We examine current tendencies and tend to the roots and wounds that remain raw to the touch, even after decades. Sometimes it is hard to recognize these wounds, and they certainly are not always intentionally carried out by caregivers. Many of these patterns are multigenerational; parents may have experienced their own attachment injuries in their childhood or are lost in navigating their own anxieties, traumas, or mental health issues.
I want you to know that you can enjoy deep, intimate, and secure relationships no matter what childhood experiences you endured. Our system is highly adaptable.
Let’s listen in on the conversations between your brain and body to learn what patterns and cycles you may be stuck in, and then develop new skills to encourage secure attachment. We’ll get specific and tailor experiential exercises, breathwork, somatic practices, and more, to creatively align with your specific needs.
With greater awareness, you may feel both a rush of relief, motivation, and resiliency. As well as pain and grief in recognizing what you have been missing. I practice with great sensitivity to this ebb and flow throughout the nonlinear journey of therapy, with tenderness and consistent support.
SOME OF THE WAYS WE CAN FOSTER GROWTH:
Feel empowered by learning your attachment style and developing compassion for how your system has evolved
Practice shifting your focus when you’re feeling dysregulated to get above the situation and wisely look at yourself and recognize your relational patterns
Learn to securely relate by mapping what is happening in your nervous system. What are signs of dysregulation in your body? What are signs of safety that support connection?
You can practice communicating this learning to a partner in order to prevent re-wounding
Learn how to recruit your body to change from an armored or collapsed state to a connected, compassionate state
Experience empathic co-regulation (deeply nourishing attunement with another) in your life — this is naturally part of the relationship we build as therapist and client!
Implement action-based responses as a healing alternative to fight, flight, freeze and fawn reactions when in distress
Practice savoring the good in life — create corrective experiences and real embodied memories of joy, connection, and safety