Attachment Theory and Trauma
Trauma can also be identified as ruptured connections. We experience a sense of broken connection to our bodies, to ourselves, to others, to the earth, to our spirituality, to our being.
Diane Heller said, “Broken connection and trauma are almost synonymous.”
We can’t talk about trauma without understanding physiology. Healing trauma requires working with the nervous system to create symptom reduction and integration of many life experiences and different parts of self.
Trauma is survival energy trapped within the body. The body creates symptoms to compensate for the excess energy. The symptoms (anxiety as one of them) are showcasing unresolved trauma and need release and resolution. When there is resolution to trauma there is symptom reduction. With symptom reduction comes the journey from isolation to re-connection.
Trauma can also be identified as ruptured connections. We experience a sense of broken connection to our bodies, to ourselves, to others, to the earth, to our spirituality, to our being. Feeling disconnected creates a sense of isolation, an intolerable sense of loneliness.
It becomes time to reconnect in relationships. And although we get hurt in relationships, it’s also where we heal. We are fundamentally social beings. We regulate through connection.
To begin reconnecting, we need to understand our own early attachment templates, as well as that of those around us. Attachment wounds from early childhood affect our adult relationships.
Secure attachment is about connection. How we connect with others and how we connect to our bodies and different parts of ourselves. Connection is central to everything we do in our lives, especially our relationships. It requires a sense of safety and the capacity to be present.
Attachment is biological and influenced by our nervous system.
Trauma impacts our nervous systems and directly influences our attachment patterns and capacity for connection. Trauma separates us from ourselves and therefor from others.
When survival energy (trauma) is trapped within the nervous system, we get stuck in destructive feedback loops between our mind and body. The brain asks the body how we are doing and the body responds with feelings of stress that surely mean something is wrong. The brain is convinced danger is immanent and the circular conversation continues.
Physiology dictates our emotions. Healthy physiology is experienced when the mind and body feel safe. Without safety, we are endlessly turning inward to seek it. We are drained of vitality and any new experience carries a level of threat, undermining our ability to connect with others.
The journey back to secure attachment begins with reestablishing connection to our bodies and to the parts of us that have been traumatized. You can create a path to your own self-mastery by tapping into the wisdom of your body.
Regulation and Co-Regulation in Attachment
Self-regulation, and our ability to care for ourselves is hugely important, but co-regulation must be learned first.
The nervous system initially forms through the influence of our primary caregivers. Our caregivers serve as our prime regulators. How well they regulate themselves and regulate as a coparenting team and couple, if still romantically together, hugely impact the child. Their ability to regulate sets the tone of the home environment.
Our childhood environment impacts how we see ourselves, the world, and others for our entire life. Our nervous system learns directly from our caregivers and whatever information we absorb becomes who we are on a neurological and cellular level.
As a child if you received loving facial expressions and smiles, if you were held and touched, if your parents were attuned to your needs and regulated themselves, these attributes are injected into your nervous system and body through implicit memory. This memory system isn’t cognitive, but felt, interpreted, and stored by the body.
If you weren’t fortunate to grow up with such compassion and regulation, your nervous system is missing a link that transcribes safety in connection with others. It’s hard to trust others and even harder to ask for help. You hold back in relationship out of fear of rejection, shame, and perfectionism, among many other manifestations.
It’s so important to find tools to self-regulate, such as yoga, breath work, dance, or exercise, but it is revolutionary to be able to feel safe in connection to others.
It is through safety with others that we are able to influence a change in our attachment patterns, enjoying the numerous benefits and joys that security brings. Safety with others is a reflection of safety within oneself.
The qualities a regulated family environment encompasses are safety, loving presence, play, responsiveness, and consistency.
A child raised in this environment learns that they have influence over their environment. When they cry, someone tends to them. Before words, their basic needs are met consistently through attunement to their preverbal signals. The child is able to express a full range of emotions and their caregivers stay consistent, responsive, present, and loving. The child feels safe.
This is the foundation for secure attachment. This is how childhood is supposed to look. This is what we were designed for, connection and safety.
But unfortunately, this is considered an ideal situation, and far from the norm. This doesn’t occur most of the time. Instead many of us develop behaviors and learned attachment patterns to survive in a home environment that was unpredictable, inconsistent, and frankly produced terror in the young child.
No matter how dysregulated the home environment was, no matter the depth of the current insecure attachment patterns you experience, the secure attachment system still resides within and is waiting for the opportunity to trust and connect with self and others again.
To invite secure attachment to re-emerge, contingency is needed. This means a feeling of being seen, understood, and felt by another.
You feel it in your nervous system that this other person is present and attuned to you. Contingency is something we are wired with. It’s almost instant when we know someone gets us and when they don’t.
Our brain literally knows when it is receiving mixed signals and inconsistencies, as well as authentic connection.
We need the nourishment from a few people who can provide contingency for us. This is how we begin to heal and resurrect safe, healthy, and joyful attachment. This is how we find our way back to secure attachment.
The Original Attachment Blueprint
We have an unconscious attachment template that was developed in childhood and carries over into our adult relationships. We act out patterns and behaviors without being conscious to them. We blame the other without being able to observe ourselves in the dynamic.
Unresolved trauma and unresolved attachment history infiltrates our relationships and create drama, as well as pain.
The patterns are repetitive until we become aware of their source. We always act out what we cannot see or understand. The original wound keeps us unavailable.
We must make the original attachment template conscious if we seek to heal and create healthy attachment patterns in relationships. If we do so, then we can nurture safe environments and people, attune to situations and people that aren’t safe, and identify when destructive patterns are present.
No matter the kind of template we grew up with we can move into secure attachment by resolving past trauma.
This work requires tapping into our implicit memory (body) of our original attachment template and making it more explicit (cognitive), so we can process, integrate & resolve. This work allows us to create new patterns and new choices that were available before.
It’s important to note that when we are under stress, it is much more likely we would revert back to our original attachment templates.
We naturally desire safe and healthy environments that allow for secure attachment as it regulates our nervous system and gives our brains access to more options and high level functions.