Attachment Styles Q&A: Building Secure Attachments
April 16, 2024
Attachment Styles Q&A: Final Questions
May 1, 2024
Building a More Secure Attachment Style after a History of Childhood Trauma
Question: What about disorganized attachment? Or those with DID? Can people with these create secure attachments?
Short Answer: Some people respond to trauma with disorganized attachment, a smaller number struggle with identify diffusion. For these people, a more secure attachment style can be developed over time. Generally, they will need support and a great deal of courage to counter the early messages their brain encoded due to the extent of the trauma they were exposed to so early in life.
Building secure attachments after a history of childhood trauma is an act of pure courage. As a human, your initial attachment style created its baseline in the first 3 years of life, before you had full use of words. Your tiny self was looking for safety, security, and care. You needed this all day, every day. When your little self experienced bad things without adequate care you felt emotions like fear, rage and helplessness. Your earliest years taught you that people aren’t to be trusted, good people aren’t necessarily going to be there for you when bad things happen, and that you need to go it alone even when it feels lonely. Trusting is hard.
Last week, we explored several ways to build your attachment security. Reflect on positive relationships, notice your own actions, use self-compassion, communicate clearly, and build a village. An early trauma history makes these tasks harder.
A lack of healthy role models in your early years means you can’t handle it like your parent did. One parent once told me, “All I know about parenting is what not to do. It makes it hard to know what to do.” The struggle to trust, to believe that people will really be there for you, makes it hard to cope with a good friend who made a mistake. If your inner self is still carrying intense emotions from trauma, these can disrupt your intentions to communicate clearly or to think through a problem before reacting. In many ways, the instincts to protect yourself, learned during early years of trauma, no longer serve you as an adult.
Explore Your Own Path
You are now the adult who takes care of you. You get to make sure your needs are met. You decide when, how, and at what pace you address your own trauma history. While I am a mental health professional, I am not your mental health therapist. I am offering information for you to consider. As an adult you get to consider what I, or anyone else, offer and decide if it is helpful for you in your journey. You define for yourself what is “significant trauma” or “trusting too much or too little.” It is your right to expand your attachment style or leave it as is for now. This is your journey. Trauma was done to you; healing is what you choose for yourself.
Consider Professional Therapy
One option is to look for professionals who have experience in trauma informed care to support you in building a more secure attachment. There are several treatments that are recommended for people whose trauma occurred before they had the words and the life experience to understand what was going on. These include EMDR and DBT along with trauma informed CBT. (I know, alphabet soup.) There is no one therapy that is right for all people.
Therapy needs to be done at your pace. Traumatic experiences are overwhelming events that happened without your consent. Healing includes finding ways to manage intense emotions, practice communication skills, and develop coping skills that work for you. It is not recommended to talk about all your worst memories before you have the skills to cope with how you feel about them. You choose and can change, therapists as it meets your needs.
Notice Patterns in Your Relationships
Focus on building relationships with people who treat you with respect and care, who value you as you are. Be wary of people who focus on being your rescuer or who bully you. If you find yourself stuck in a relationship where you switch from being rescued, bullied, and accused (where you constantly move from feeling victimized, to being angry, to apologizing), take a step away to think about how you are being treated, and how you are showing up in this relationship.
In this difficult relationship, you are each an adult, responsible for your own self. Ask for, and show up with, respect and care rather than guilt and anger. You are seeking to relate adult to adult, where each person is responsible for themselves and you can support one another, without taking responsibility for each other’s internal state. You can’t fix someone else. This is a hard truth, particularly in dealing with the people from your childhood.
You did not deserve the trauma that occurred to you. As an adult, you have the right to explore all your options for growth and thriving. Your awareness of your attachment style gives you choices to explore your relationships differently. Coping with the impact of childhood trauma is a journey. You are not looking for that one special person who will heal all of you. You are looking to build a healthy village. Notice how far you have come. Make it a habit to give yourself credit for your healing and growth. You deserve to feel joy and meaning in your life – to thrive.
Peace,
Laura
Last call for questions: We will be wrapping up this attachment style blog series. If you have a burning desire, please send me your questions this week at resilience@learnmodelteach.com . If you have questions beyond this week, do feel free to ask, and I will answer you directly, or I will answer it in a future blog. I am also expanding my coaching practice. If you would like to schedule a coaching session to explore this, you can find more info here.
