Trauma

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Attachment theory provides insights into how individuals experience relationships and events and regulate emotions. Relationships characterized by secure attachments are crucial in adding meaning and value to our lives. Ideally, children are born into a nurturing environment where a mother and father provide love and care as part of the child’s initial relationships, forming a strong bond. This secure connection with a parent or both parents is crucial during childhood and teenagers as it helps children develop a lifelong way of emotionally relating to themselves and others. A good attachment with a parent or parents becomes a solid place they can trust and a source of reliability of love, security, and needs. Appropriate attachments foster trust and offer a reliable safe haven for children or teenagers facing fear or uncertainty, a springboard for future relationship safety. 

However, certain adverse experiences such as natural disasters, exposure to violent crime, witnessing domestic violence, or enduring parental abuse, including emotional neglect—can disrupt healthy attachment development. These negative experiences can damage a sense of self, sense of safety, and isolation and can lead to attachment trauma— feeling there is danger, resulting in long-term challenges such as negative self-perception and difficulties in forming and maintaining relationships. Individuals who have suffered from attachment trauma may exhibit resistance to close relationships, pushing others away to safeguard themselves against potential hurt based on past experiences, or they may be overly needy. They can’t feel secure even if others are offered genuine stability, love, and care in their relationship, or a person with attachment trauma may want and need relationships yet push people away as both a need to feel connected yet feel safe to distance. This perpetuates and further damages a mutual attachment trauma in all subsequent relationships. Through therapeutic interventions, clients can learn or re-learn how to build trust in relationships while they develop ways to learn how to self-soothe, begin to feel safe, to love, to be loved, and have a felt sense of safety within a healthy way of interacting and relating with others.