My learning around attachment.

Working with my own attachment patterns, I am learning a deeper understanding of my journey.  My inability to connect with my family of origin may have formed in a trauma when I was 4 years old, a brain injury that may have removed my ability to experience safety, rest, love, acceptance and community.  My ability to be part of my family, to have good childhood memories.  The injury in my brain may have interrupted neural circuitry associated with anything other than threat, terror.

When reading a quote off of Instagram from @sunchronistic, I am drawn to many of the people I support who seem to be in this experience. 

“Be careful not to become so understanding and so forgiving that you overlook the fact that you are being disrespected.  Compassion is beautiful, but it was never meant to be the reason that hurts.”

I added this.  ‘It possibly is the reason you continue to be harmed in anyway even by yourself for not being strong enough to get past an experience, that might have caused terror inside you.’

Peter Levine wrote in the Foreword to The power of attachment:

“Terror annihilates our connection to ourselves, to the embodied self, to what is true and eternal in us.  We become isolated”

Many teachings in our lives lead us to believe we have a choice with out the full picture.

We have a physiological story that we may not beable to hear, or access. It maybe: our systems pattern as a result of our experience early on in life.  combined with our education to let it go, get over it.  To connect to the ego and observe from outside of ourselves. 

Its my opinion and I am okay if I am wrong, that this is not possible.  That believing we have a choice creates the pattern of bypassing and keeping the terror locked deeply into our physiology. 

Taken from Mary Main’s research in the 1990’s - Becoming dismissive attachment, where we learned so early to manage without emotional support that their nervous systems had structurally reduced the processing of attachment – related information.

In early environments where emotional needs were consistently met with distance, redirection, or discomfort the child’s nervous system let go if the neural circuitry associated with attachment process, as an adaptation, not a decision.

If reaching for connection consistently produces disappointment, the nervous system reduces the intensity of reaching. 

The person becomes easier to care for and harder to reach, growing into adults whose bodies have become genuinely efficient at not fully receiving love.

This is not a personality trait; it is a nervous system adaptation that predates language and predates every relationship they have ever been in. 

The body did not stop wanting connection it stopped being able to land in it.

On Instagram @wall_durrant posted: How we feel love: usually it’s a sense of warmth, expansion in the chest, a relaxing of muscles and calming of breathing.  Receiving love is regulating, generates rest and calm, makes room for arousal and excitement and sadness.  And the rest of the emotional experience that don’t do well under duress.  It feels like coming home to another person.

When this is not familiar it can be overwhelming.

Peter Levine continues to share (in the power of attachment)

“if trauma is the foe, then attachment to self and others would be the inner task”

My interpretation of this is; first the attachment to self, via others is the task. 

We cannot experience connection within if we have not learned via experience of being safe enough to be connected via another individual.  This becomes possible via a client centered relationship with a support person whose directive is not to change you, not to require anything from you, just to be with you in the way you need and possibly needed from conception.  Guiding via their presence the nervous systems experience of something different, igniting the neural circuitry to fire in a way that is familiar because it is part of the nervous system, yet undeveloped.  This can cause overwhelm in the person who is being supported, and many flee in fear of this experience.  Yet the innate impulse towards healing in our nervous system continues to send signals to keep looking, keep trying, keep, keeping on. 

Some language this as, obsessive, and it can look that way at times.  This can cause us to think we are insane, and we are not. 

There is also the possibility of some nervous systems getting so overwhelmed that they flee from this and do whatever possible to avoid this experience – creating a different inner battle with the innate impulse to heal that is in their system. 

Some begin to internalize a pattern of self-judgment and over-compassion for the person who caused harm: “They were doing the best they could,” “They didn’t have it easy,” or “They didn’t intentionally mean to hurt us.” In extending compassion and understanding toward the person who caused the unintentional harm, they may inadvertently bypass the impact that experience is continuing to have on their own nervous system.

Bringing forward ones true experience may feel like we are being selfish, and we are in a way, we are self-focused for the purpose of healing, not for the purpose of being better, or judging another. 

We heal when we have an inner relationship with our truth, without blame, with our truth.  It was true that attachment is a trauma that we have to navigate, and this requires us being able to recognize our truth along with our self-protective responses that supported us to this point. 

These self-protective responses may no longer benefit us in the way they use to, and can cause an inner conflict that is longing to be acknowledged, processed and integrated.

It's my perception that integrated self-protective responses shift into physiological wisdom, leading us towards that innate impulse of healing.

They were our physiological wisdom of protection.  We don’t lose this wisdom; we transform it to greater support our present moment and our future.

I am forever learning about myself via the lense of my innate impulse to heal, and these impulses in the individuals I support. 

I learned a long time ago that until I am safe with me, I will never be safe for another.  The people I walk with teach me safety on so many levels in so many titraited ways of being what is needed in this world. I am so grateful to be safe enough for these individuals to navigate their lives with me at their side. 

Compassion for me, strengthens my compassion for others.