“Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.” Rumi

We all long for love, connection and support in our lives. We are hardwired for connection with others and aren’t meant to be separate, isolated beings. Yet relationships, of all kinds, are often the most challenging area of our lives. They provide an opportunity for tremendous growth but also cause a great deal of pain and can leave us feeling hurt, confused and angry.

Early relationships in our life provide a blueprint for how we relate to ourselves and others and the types of bonds that we form. The relational field with our caregivers in childhood has a tremendous impact on our sense of self and on relationship patterns as adults. There is increasing awareness of and focus on early attachment patterns in the field of psychotherapy and an understanding of how these patterns are formed, and how early relationships impact our brain development. Daniel Siegel’s book The Developing Mind is a valuable resource on this subject of interpersonal neurobiology.

The good news is that we all possess the capacity for secure attachment with others and can find our way back to it later in life if there have been attachment disruptions early in life. Diane Poole Heller is a body-centered therapist who has created a somatic method of therapy (Somatic Attachment Training experience) specifically designed to address attachment wounding and help therapists work with attachment patterns in adults. Diane emphasizes that we can all “excavate our core intactness” and find our way back to wholeness and security. We are hardwired to bond with others.

Ideally there is a safe, secure, caring environment in childhood with caregivers who are positive, warm, consistent, protective, predictable and able to accurately read and respond to children’s emotional cues and provide soothing when needed. There is also a natural rhythm between aloneness and connection, parents join children in play and can also initiate repair with the child when there has been a misattunement (misreading of the child’s cues). The parents themselves model warm, secure relating as a unit and can initiate repairs in their relationship as well. This environment creates secure attachment.

Inside of this safe, secure environment children develop good boundaries, feel secure within themselves, have a healthy sense of self-esteem, develop a basic trust in others, understand how to respond to emotions in themselves and others, are resilient in the face of stressors, and feel deserving of love and affection. A basic sense of worthiness develops and all of these traits carry over to adulthood.

When there are disruptions and this environment is not the environment a child grows up in then various adaptations can occur. The child learns to protect him or herself and adapt to what the environment is offering. In these situations parents’ own unresolved patterning and wounding comes into play and their difficulty relating in consistent, nurturing, emotionally attuned ways affects the way that the child learns to interact with the world. The goal of understanding attachment patterning is not to blame caregivers, but to understand what affected us in these early environments and why, lift shame and self-blame off of the adaptations we formed, and find our way back to more fulfilling relational bonds as adults.

In brief, and future blogs will cover each of the insecure attachment styles in more depth, there are three insecure styles of attachment that can develop in response to different stressors and parenting styles in the early childhood environment: anxious/ambivalent, avoidant, and disorganized. In adulthood each of these styles unintentionally creates barriers to secure bonds with others. The Anxious/Ambivalent style is characterized in adults by feelings of insecurity, a preoccupation with the other person in relationships, fear of abandonment, difficulty trusting one’s self or the other person, need for reassurance and often a sense of despair about finding lasting love. Avoidant attachment is characterized in adults by autonomy, independence and self-reliance rather than reliance on others, difficulty identifying one’s own feelings and needs, minimizing the importance of relationships and support, withdrawal from emotional bonds and expectations of disappointment and hurt from others. Disorganized attachment is characterized in adults by mood shifts, panic or rage, inner chaos and turmoil, a longing for relationships coupled with the fear that relationships are dangerous, and a state of increased activation or hypervigilance in the nervous system.

With guidance, self-awareness, willingness and understanding we can repair and heal the patterns that may be disrupting relationships in our lives and find our way back to our secure attachment system. The work is subtle, and it can take time to really unravel the layers in the nervous system and heal the emotional scars, but underneath, at the core, lies our essence of ‘enoughness’ and our authentic, intact Self that is created for deep and true intimacy with others. It is worth the work of uncovering and the grief and anger that may be encountered along the way.

As we uncover our secure attachment system we become anchored into a more secure sense of self internally and it is easier to form secure bonds, of all kinds, with others. Internal security means that we accept all parts of ourselves and feel more grounded in a sense that we deserve love, that we are worthy, that we can trust in the goodness of life, and that we are enough. When we live from a foundation of secure attachment we become more forgiving of ourselves and others and can hold more space for others to make mistakes and to transform. We are able to connect deeply with ourselves and self-regulate our own nervous systems and also take in support from others and enjoy the rewards of the interactive relational field.

We all deserve the richness and beauty of this secure way of being and the gift that comes from risking openness, even when there have been layers of hurt, so that we can give and receive love deeply.