attachment theory

Musician in leather jacket, beard and sunglasses looking anxious holding a guitar

Treating Music Performance Anxiety by Healing Attachment Trauma

Introduction

Kenny et al (2014) present a case study of a typical professional musician suffering from music performance anxiety: a 55-year-old senior strings player in a leading Australian orchestra, named Kurt[1]. During musical performances he typically reported overwhelming anxiety, distracting physical sensations and thoughts, inability to control his arms, and striated muscle tension. This significantly detracted from both his performance and his personal enjoyment of his career[2].

Music performance anxiety is a serious problem for many professional musicians[3]. Typical symptoms while performing include overwhelming anxiety, profuse sweating, dry mouth, muscle tension, inability to focus, loss of self, loss of flow, paralysis and catastrophic performance failure. General traits common to sufferers include perfectionism, dependence on drugs and alcohol, fear of exposure, fear of failure, catastrophizing and extreme emotional distress. Such traits have consequences beyond the performance realm including poor mental and physical health. Many sufferers abandon their career in music altogether while others soldier on despite having a miserable experience[4]. (more…)

By Graham Stoney, ago

Did You Have A Difficult Relationship With Your Mother?

One of the dominant themes that my clients and other readers of this blog usually have that has undermined their self-confidence is a difficult relationship with their mother. When we have a good relationship with our mother from infancy through adolescence, our nervous system is wired for a sense of safety and we are prepared to take on the world as an adult. However, if we had a difficult relationship with our mother, this can wire our nervous system for anxiety and leave us feeling unsafe long into adulthood. Psychologists call this an attachment disorder, and the implications on the rest of our lives can be devastating.

A controlling mother can leave you feeling unsafe

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By Graham Stoney, ago

How To Heal Intergenerational Unworthiness Trauma

Intergenerational Unworthiness Trauma is a term I coined this morning to describe feelings of unworthiness and insecurity that are passed from parents to their children down successive generations.

Parents who feel fundamentally unworthy create a lack of secure attachment with their infants, leading to children with insecure, avoidant or disorganized attachment styles. When these children grow into adults, they pass the trauma on to their own children through their inability to bond emotionally with them. Everyone in the family ends up with emotional abandonment trauma manifesting as core feelings of unworthiness.

In other words, parents who feel fundamentally unworthy, insecure or broken are unable to raise children with deep feelings of worthiness themselves.

The cycle repeats down the generations until someone recognises and breaks it by doing the emotional healing work to deal with their own traumatic attachment wound, so they can create a secure attachment to the children in the next generation.

I have experienced this personally, and believe it is the underlying issue that undermined my own self-confidence for so long, ultimately leading me to create this website. (more…)

By Graham Stoney, ago