How To Heal Attachment Trauma

The term Attachment Trauma describes the emotional wound created by growing up with one or more emotionally unavailable parents. It is extremely common, poorly understood, and can profoundly impact our emotional wellbeing, mental health and ability to create and maintain healthy emotionally connected relationships in adulthood.

In normal development, infants develop a sense of safety through a secure attachment to emotionally available parents. This security gives the child a solid basis from which to explore the world, including developing relationships with other people. A child’s comfort zone and associated resilience gradually expand over time through a series of increasingly challenging excursions from the safety of the parental bond into the unpredictable outside world. Whenever the child feels overwhelmed in their ability to cope with what they find, they return to the safety of their parents to regroup emotionally before venturing out again into the unknown.

But what if things go wrong?

Evolution has ensured that as infants we feel intense terror if we think we are being abandoned, which motivates us to get our parent’s attention to restore our need for safety. If our parents themselves feel unsafe to be around though, we have no connection by which we can have our feelings soothed, and can grow up in a state of constant hyper-vigilance. We end up feeling like we are constantly walking on eggshells around our parents, who we intuitively perceive as being emotionally unsafe.

This creates a deep emotional and social wound leading to a persistent fear of rejection and abandonment which can last long into adulthood. The very relationships that make life worthwhile end up feeling unsafe as our unresolved parental attachment wound gets projected unconsciously onto everyone we meet, and the world at large.

Were you afraid of your mother?

The intense terror of emotional abandonment is one reason why many bad childhood experiences ranging from simple neglect to hard-core physical, emotional or sexual abuse at the hands of our parents, are so traumatic and have such a strong impact long into adulthood. The lack of safe parental emotional connection compounds the effect of the trauma in ways that wouldn’t happen as severely with other adults.

Since emotionally unavailable parents are often uncomfortable with their own feelings of distress, they may have sought to shut us down emotionally when we were upset to avoid being triggered. Strategies for doing this include deliberate punishment, withdrawing affection, rescinding approval, denying positive reinforcement, or exploding with rage that overwhelms our nervous system and puts us into fight, flight or freeze mode.

Being on the receiving end of these strategies is extremely painful, frightening and damaging when what we really want is our parent’s unconditional love and support. This often leads to us denying and suppressing our true feelings as a strategy to avoid further punishment, abandonment or abuse by the emotionally unavailable parents. Denial and suppression of feelings further compounds the internalization of emotional trauma that we now feel even less safe to express and release in a healthy manner.

In the face of such an overwhelming threat, we can lose the ability to ask for what we want emotionally and to stand up for ourselves. Once this pattern of learned helplessness around an emotionally unavailable or abusive parent is entrenched, it can also last long into adulthood. This can cause challenges in our wider relationships, which can end up being traumatic in their own right. The pattern of emotional suppression, repression and denial that we learned from our experience of our emotionally unavailable parents keeps the trauma in place long after the bad experience has passed. Over time the internalized emotions of trauma build up to the point where we may experience panic attacks, social anxiety or serious depression as an adult, without knowing exactly why.

Attachment trauma is one cause of Complex Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (C-PTSD). It’s considered “Complex” because rather than being the result of a single intense emotionally overwhelming experience, it is caused by the systematic and ongoing effects of emotional neglect or abuse. It has also been referred to as PTSD of Abandonment because emotional abandonment is the central cause of attachment trauma.

A powerful technique for healing trauma-related anxiety is to remember the first time that a particular unpleasant class of event happened and express the emotion that overwhelmed us in a safe environment. Releasing the emotion attached to the traumatic memory eliminates its power over us in the present. The ongoing pattern of emotional overwhelm in attachment trauma makes this difficult because there was no single event involved. It’s also likely to go right back to our earliest experiences before our brains were capable of storing situational memories. Nevertheless, the trauma remains stuck in our nervous systems.

Trauma doesn’t just go away of its own accord. Time alone isn’t the great healer we would like it to be. If we experience attachment trauma and grow up without getting some kind of emotional healing for it, we can turn into a socially anxious adult who remains terrified of rejection and abandonment. This in turn profoundly impacts our relationships with other people, since our wounded inner child feels that people are fundamentally unsafe.

Since attachment trauma is fundamentally an interpersonal wound, it requires an interpersonal solution.

Attachment trauma can be healed by connecting with a safe, emotionally available and stable adult who can act as a proxy for the empathic parents we never had. In emotionally-focused therapy, an empathic therapist acts as a safe place to express, release and resolve the feelings that we had to deny as a child in order to survive.

Other relationships with emotionally healthy adults can also help in the process, but beware that attachment trauma is very common and poorly understood. Many people suffering from attachment trauma don’t recognize it and it is the basis of many codependent relationships. If you enter into a relationship with such a person, your healthy expression of emotions may trigger their attachment trauma. Unless they are very self-aware you may find yourself being emotionally abandoned and your feelings being minimized, denied and suppressed once again; just like they were around your parents.

Working with a trauma-informed emotionally-focused therapist or coach to heal our primal emotional abandonment wound can have a powerful effect on healing attachment trauma. It also helps facilitate emotionally healthy relationships that continue the work of therapy in the real world, to rewrite our childhood programming that told us that it wasn’t safe to be our true selves around other people.