HOW TO HEAL TRAUMA BY UNDERSTANDING YOUR ATTACHMENT STYLE

Your earliest attachments with parents or caregivers shape your abilities and expectations for relationships throughout your life. This first relationship impacts how your sense of self develops, and how you see relationships working. This is sometimes referred to as attachment wounds and trauma therapy can repair your attachment style.

From infancy you begin finding out if you are able to depend on important people to keep you safe – or not. It’s where your nervous system either grows with the belief that you are loveable as-is, or drives you to cope with emotional pain if you don’t feel accepted. If your bond is secure, your nervous system learns what it feels like to be in a relationship that gets primary importance.

Secure attachment teaches your nervous system how to regulate – by understanding what healthy consistent behavior and relationships are. You also learn that you are never alone and have the ability to weather any storm of emotion.

This first relationship may teach you how to create a safe zone with someone to make sense of yourself and your emotions. On the other hand, you may learn you are unable to trust a relationship to be a safe place to ask for your needs. In your relationships, you discover how much you can depend on someone close to soothe you or scare you, see you or shame you.

As a result of studies on babies and children, we have learned a lot about how people grow up feeling different degrees of safety, acceptance and security in their first attachment. Over the years, researchers have identified different attachment styles and the outcomes for people with these attachment styles.

We now use categories for identifying the different degrees of emotional security in relationships. We call them attachment styles. Learning about them can help you understand yourself and your experiences in relationships better.

FOUR ATTACHMENT STYLES AND WHERE THEY COME FROM

Secure attachment is the ideal attachment style between caregiver and child. Studies show that only 60% of adults have a secure attachment style. The other 40% fall into the other attachment styles: avoidant, anxious, or disorganized.

A person’s attachment style forms in childhood, then serves as a model for navigating life and relationships in adulthood. We all have one primary attachment style. Here is a brief list of the attachment styles, followed by details about their impact from a trauma-informed perspective:

·         Secure – autonomous

·         Avoidant – dismissive

·         Anxious – preoccupied

·         Disorganized – unresolved

Attachment styles help explain how people respond differently when dealing with:

·         Emotional intimacy

·         Conflict

·         Communication and understanding of needs and emotions (yours and your partners)

·         Expectations in relationships

SECURE ATTACHMENT

·         Do you generally feel close to others?

·         Are you comfortable with closeness, and also with independence?

·         Do you feel you communicate effectively and resolve conflicts as they arise?

·         Do you feel like you have fairly stable relationships?

·         Do you trust your partner?

·         Do you feel safe in being vulnerable with your partner?

While no one has the perfect childhood, if you grew up with a secure emotional bond, your parents or caregivers were good-enough at being consistent. With secure attachment, your caregiver’s behavior allowed you to feel safe and protected. You felt confident that they accepted you and were emotionally present with you. When they left, they would return as expected.

You learned that if you became upset, you felt seen. Your caregivers made your relationship a safe place to process distress until things returned to normal. Overall, you felt secure. As an adult, it may be easy for you to form close relationships with others and develop relationships that feel good. You are comfortable with both closeness and independence. Your emotions feel tolerable.

AVOIDANT ATTACHMENT

·         Do you feel closer to others when you’re away from them?

·         Do you feel the urge to pull away when your partner is seeking intimacy?

·         Do you distance yourself from stressful situations or conflict?

·         Do you feel emotionally removed from others?

Some babies and children had to learn to depend on caregivers who were emotionally unavailable or unaware of their needs. Crying may have been discouraged and you felt it necessary to “grow op” quickly.

As an adult, you may place primary importance on your independence. You may feel uncomfortable with depending on someone, or being depended on by others. You may pull away when you are presented with opportunities for closeness. You may feel like counting on others is unsafe, so you may avoid relationships all together.

ANXIOUS ATTACHMENT

·         When you and a loved one disagree or argue, do you feel overwhelmed or extremely anxious?

·         If the other person needs a break, do you pursue them until they give in?

·         Do you feel the need for lots of reassurance in a relationship?

·         If your partner is away, do you question their love for you?

Your childhood may have included caregivers who, at times, responded appropriately to your needs, yet at other times, was not available to you. Maybe one or both parents were stuck in their own anxiety or may have responded in hurtful or critical ways. You may have grown up uncertain of what treatment to expect, which lead you to feeling insecure.

As an adult you may need a lot of reassurance and responsiveness in a relationship. To feel okay, you may become overly dependent on relationships. Anxiety may increase when the person you care about is gone.

DISORGANIZED ATTACHMENT

·         Do you crave emotional intimacy, but also feel it’s safer to be on your own where you don’t get hurt?

·         Was your primary caregiver abusive?

·         Did your primary caregiver show love one minute and abuse the next?

Disorganized attachment is a combination of both avoidant and anxious attachment styles. Your caregiver may have been frightening, abusive or behave toward you in inappropriate ways. You may have feared them. They may not have been present for you. However, as a child your instinct led you to believe that you should be loyal to your parents, simply because they were your parents. You may long for closeness, but also fear it. These experiences lead to inconsistent or confusing actions and relationships.

Disorganized attachment is the primary style of attachment for survivors of complex developmental trauma.

ATTACHMENT STYLES AND TRAUMA

Any attachment style – other than secure – can lead to trauma.

The ability to regulate your emotions is something we are taught. This is not a skill we are born with. It is ingrained throughout childhood and practices throughout life.

What is emotional regulation? It is the ability to deal with emotional ups and downs, deal with change, and create a safe space to share emotions in healthy relationships.

Skills for emotional regulation come significantly easier to those with a secure attachment. For people who grew up with inconsistent, unavailable, or abusive caregiving, emotional regulation is more difficult to learn. This is due to insecure or inconsistent styles of attachment involve the experiences of feeling overwhelmed and unsafe. This creates hyperarousal (being on high alert) or hypo-arousal (becoming numb) as a means of protection.

Overwhelming distress is traumatic. Unresolved distress can lead to the use of substances or other maladaptive coping responses in an attempt to manage emotions.

NOT SECURE? NOT YOUR FAULT

The attachment style we learned in childhood and throughout our experiences growing up was the best way to cope or manage with the circumstances at hand. If you developed an “insecure” attachment, it’s not because you have done something wrong. Your attachment style is the direct result of the way your caregiver showed up for you.

As humans, we have built-in survival instincts. Your attachment style formed as your best means of self-protection. It is how you “balanced out” the insecure caregiving provided to you. No matter what, you did the bets you could.

HEALING THROUGH EMOTIONALLY CORRECTIVE RELATIONSHIPS

There is healing through therapy and experiencing emotionally secure relationships. A therapeutic relationship is sometimes called an emotionally corrective relationship because it is a therapist’s job to be ethical, consistent, and to build in security while being fully present for their client. The goal of therapy in offering a secure attachment is to help the client experience a secure relationship, and then take those skills outside into relationships with partners, children and friends.

NO MATTER WHERE YOU START, SECURE ATTACHMENT IS POSSIBLE FOR YOU.

If you are worried that your attachment style is less than ideal, please know that any attachment style can become more secure. Attachment styles aren’t set in stone. You can learn, practice, and develop new ways to connect through self-awareness, therapy and healthy relationships.

Learning about attachment can being a journey of self-compassion, healing, and moving towards a more secure attachment style – which ultimately leads to healthier, more rewarding relationships.