Attachment injury
Were you warmly welcomed into this world just for being you? Was there a sense of safety, warmth, and love? Were you allowed to choose who you are? Did you need to earn praise and affection?
Illustration by Hao Hao
Our earliest relationships form a blueprint for many of our later connections. More often than not, we follow the map of what we received, what we witnessed, what was missed, or what we needed as children in later adult interactions. In essence, our relational blueprint provides us with an emotional map for belongingness, worthiness, safety and self-determination laid out into our nervous system as early as we enter this world.
What we know from research in interpersonal neurobiology: the brain is a social organ built through interactions with others. Our attachment bonds early in life sets us on a course of physical and psychological wellbeing - or when it is lacking - physical and psychological illness.
Every child needs to receive unconditional love – at least in the beginning of life. We only need 20-30% of attunement (the feeling that someone is there for us). No parent needs to be perfect. And nothing about the science says that the same positive effects of attachment can’t be provided by a man, a working single mother, two mommies, or two daddies.
Lessons From Harlow’s Experiments
In one of the most iconic psychological studies, Harry Harlow a psychologist at the University of Wisconsin conducted an experiment in the 1950s which involved infant monkeys being raised with two surrogate mothers - one made of wire and another covered in soft cloth. Through this study, Harlow discovered that the monkeys formed a stronger attachment to the cloth mother than their wire mother. This groundbreaking research brought to light the importance of relationships in early development, leading Harlow to profoundly state, "Man cannot live by milk alone. Love is an emotion that does not need to be bottle- or spoon-fed." These words remind us all that emotional nourishment is just as essential to a child's growth and well-being as physical sustenance.
Multiple Caregivers
“No society can understand itself without looking at its shadow side.”
Traditionally, we were raised in a village and the work of raising children was shared with our neighbors, mentors, parents’ friends, and extended family. There was a sense of rootedness, belonging, and connection to a community, culture, and a place we felt at home. Many of us across the world are experiencing an epidemic of loneliness. Families are fragmenting, we’ve lost our cohesive communities, and gone are the days of sharing the task of raising our children, and the cultural activities that brought us together. Without the basic foundations to support raising a child, parents are stretched thin and children are growing up isolated and alone.
We want to refrain from blaming and shaming parents. Parent-blaming is inappropriate and ignores the factors that limit a family’s capacity and resources to provide for their children. The conditions of parental addictions, mental illness, generational trauma, war, immigration, abusive households, poverty, and overt conflict and stressors we face in society need to be considered.
Conflicted Needs: Attachment vs. Authenticity
Illustration by Lena Mačka
Attachment, as described by psychologist Dr. Gordon Neufeld, is the drive for closeness—proximity to others, in not only the physical but the emotional sense as well. The primary function is to promote caretaking or being taken care of. For an infant, the need for attachment is mandatory and critical for survival and a healthy course of development. Our need for attachment does not vanish with age, either.
When a child is chronically wounded through neglect, abuse, or abandonment, they do not develop a basic sense of trust; if we cannot trust the world, we cannot learn to trust ourselves and other people. The lack of love communicates to the child that the world is a dangerous place and conveys to them that they are not safe to explore, make new discoveries, and take chances in life.
What happens if our need for attachment conflicts with our need for authenticity? When one non-negotiable need is pitted against the other? Not being seen and accepted for who we are can lead to a tragic tension between maintaining our need for connection and our need for authenticity. If we have to choose between hiding our real feelings in order to receive basic care or being ourselves, we will undoubtedly choose the first option. Our need for attachment trumps our need for authenticity. When children receive messages that certain parts of them are acceptable while others are not, if internalized, they cut off that part of them for the sake of attachment.
“People have two needs: attachment and authenticity. When authenticity threatens attachment, attachment trumps authenticity.”
A key distinction between attachment wounds and trauma
Trauma and attachment experiences are interconnected and cannot be teased apart in actuality, although recognizing the primary differences of each helps therapist tailor their interventions.
approach
Attachment wounds arise from experiences with primary caregivers, particularly in the absence of meeting their basic emotional needs from infancy to 18 years of age. Our basic emotional needs range from emotional attunement (someone is there for us and getting us), unconditional acceptance and love for who we are, a sense of security that love does not depend on his or her accomplishments, and more.
Trauma reactions arise when there is a lack of safety and protection in the presence of an inescapable, overwhelming threat. This can range from systemic and interpersonal (also commonly referred to as relational trauma). Relational trauma involves interactions with others that are experienced as threatening, such as physical, sexual, and emotional forms of abuse that activate survival defenses, such as Fight/Flight/Freeze/Submit responses. Systemic trauma can encompass experiences of racism, homophobia, poverty, exposure to violence, and more.
Below are a few examples of attachment or blueprint injuries (also referred to as developmental trauma in literature):
Difficulty being vulnerable in close relationships and/or keeping others at arm’s length
Feeling chronically uncared for, unacknowledged or unloved
Persistent need to be self-reliant or be “the strong one” in relationships
Chronic distrust in others and/or resistance to depending on others
Constant feeling of being second to another or un-favored
Pervasive feelings of being abandoned and unprotected
Pattern of denying, discarding or minimizing emotions and experience
Chronic worry or fear of being alone
Constant need to achieve more, improve or be productive
The key to our healthy maturation is to take care of the attachment needs of a child.
Adults with healthy attachment roots are no longer controlled by their needs. This ability to release our childhood preoccupation with our needs outgrows as we mature. When our childhood needs are not satiated, we are not free to venture forward, to grow emotionally.
The need for attachment is similar to physical hunger. We are left with our hunger for attachment if there is no sense of confidence in the supply of getting our needs met. Later in life, we are driven by our hunger. In the book Becoming a Person, the psychotherapist Carl Rogers describes a warm, caring attitude for which he adopted the phrase unconditional positive regard because, he said, “it has no conditions of worth attached to it.” Unconditional love is the indispensable nutrient for a child’s healthy emotional growth. We don’t have to do anything or be any different to earn that love, since that love cannot be won or lost. It is not conditional. It is just there, regardless of whether we are “misbehaving” or “too needy” and “whiny,” the parent still lets us feel loved. That’s when our brain says, “Thank you, this is what we needed, and now we can get on with the real task of development, with becoming a separate being.”
To free ourselves from our attachment wounds, we start from here - regaining the lost connection to our disconnected parts. In the words of Janina Fisher, a clinical psychologist and expert in trauma and dissociation, "How do we 'befriend' parts of ourselves?" The same way we befriend anyone.
A list of attachment-related content to read, watch, listen:
△ The Neuroscience of Human Relationships
△ Anatomy of Self-Hatred: Learning to Love Our Loathed Selves
△ The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness, and Healing in a Toxic Culture
△ Dr. Gabor Mate on Attachment vs. Authenticity on Youtube
I’m Listening to:
With Love,
Husna Safi
Registered Social Work & Psychotherapist
