How do you heal attachment trauma?
How we respond to “threat” is sometimes dictated by our earliest experiences. You’ve probably heard about attachment styles by now. We usually think about how attachment influences our romantic relationships – but our attachment style can show up outside of our most intimate relationships. It can influence how we relate to the world around us, and internally to ourselves. It can speak to how we find safety when things feel unsteady or overwhelming. Our early attachment experiences with parents or caretakers create the template for how we expect to find safety and nervous system regulation.
If you’re anxiously attached, you may feel revved up, like you need to regain control through immediate solutions and answers. Maybe you grasp on to what feels ‘steady’. You may feel like you always need someone outside of you to reassure you. You might feel a sense of anxiety and overwhelm trying to tackle your day to day. Your adrenals work overtime, constantly on alert, worrying about the next item on your to do list, or the next potential catastrophe. You’re vigilant, you’re ready.
If you’re avoidantly attached, you may turn away from threat, or shut down, as a way to find control and safety. Withdrawal is how you’ve managed to keep yourself safe before, so you might not seek out support in times of distress. Emotions could feel overwhelming, and so your body might help you out with a sense of numbness or detachment.
If you have disorganized attachment, your system might be willing to try anything. You might feel anxious and revved up, or shut down and withdrawn, in different situations. You haven’t been able to find safety in any consistent way, and so threats can create a real feeling of chaos internally.
A note on attachment – I offer these as examples but as humans we contain so much more nuance. We may each ‘trend’ a little or a lot towards one of these attachment styles, depending on our relational and trauma histories. However, I don’t think we need to pigeonhole ourselves the way social media and pop psychology sometimes encourage us to do. It’s possible to experience a little bit of each of these attachment ‘styles’ depending on the situation at hand, the person you’re with, etc. Through an internal family systems lens, you very likely have different ‘parts’ who have different attachment needs, and get activated in different situations. Context matters. Attachment styles aren’t life sentences – it’s entirely possible to build secure attachment patterns with ‘safe enough’ people around us, and within our Selves.
Our attachment patterns and threat response patterns are formed by our repeated earliest experiences. They don’t have to be Major Traumas to have an impact. ‘Small’ events over time build up to train our systems what to expect and how to respond. We also live in a society and culture that is pretty regularly sending signals that we are not safe and/or creates oppression and distress in layered ways.
Kathy Kain – somatic teacher, therapist and author - uses the metaphor of a filing cabinet. Our limbic systems and amygdala – the center of our threat response architecture – begin collecting data on our external environments and safety early on. Each negative or overwhelming experience we have gets stored in that limbic system filing cabinet. Each ‘file’ contains experiential data, including interoception (how our bodies felt during the experience, what we noticed internally, sensations) and exteroception (what was happened externally and around us). Our nervous systems are predictive – they use all this past information to try and determine if new experiences are safe or threatening. The amygdala tries to ‘quick sort’ a new experience – e.g. is that thing I see a stick or a snake?? Is this feeling or sensation I’m experiencing helpful or dangerous?
If you had caretakers who were neglectful, or you weren’t met with compassion when distressed, or anything else interrupted your normal developmental pathways, there is a chance that your nervous system is primed to assume you aren’t safe. That your day-to-day existence, as well as any form of relationship, is not a place to relax.
If the bulk of the files in your filing cabinet are of negative experiences, guess what – your nervous system is more likely to move quickly to interpreting something as a threat. Your survival is at stake – so it’s not going to take any risks and assume that something is safe when it might not be. That object you see is definitely more likely to be a snake than a stick and you should be ready at all times to respond accordingly. I know, it’s exhausting.
So what do we do when our nervous systems are feeling fried, when our bodies are devoting previous energy and resources to survival? Different therapies have different approaches, but what seems the most helpful to me is this – we need to provide the antidote, and start to rewire for safety. For each ‘traumatic’ file in the filing cabinet, we want to create a new file that is coded for safety, for rest, for having our needs met. Attachment patterns took years to form, and so creating a newfound sense of safety will take time too. It doesn’t happen overnight – it happens in the little moments, in therapy sessions or out in the world, where we can say ‘oh that felt a little different. I felt a little safer, or a little closer to how I want to be in my body’.
Somatic therapy helps us really slow down and tune into the sensations, the places, the moments in our bodies where we can cultivate that sense of safety. It is not the most exciting or cathartic work – sometimes it’s just sitting together and gently holding the places and parts in us that have been deeply yearning for care. But it really can be transformational.