"healing" FA attachment issues

Hi and welcome....I think it can be really personal....case in point....I have been in therapy for a long time...aware of my own issues but unable to really make much progress in the healing space until a very astute doctor recommended lexapro to me which is an SSRI.  That was a real game changer for me as it allowed me to access “reason” instead of simply swirling in my emotions.  I do think therapy is a very important step...because healing trauma is not an easy task.  I do recommend building trust in self by honoring who you are and then rewarding those steps along the way where you felt fully you in the moment.  Also having secure friends who can demonstrate other choices of how to view things is very helpful.

Well Krolle, you want to heal and you seem to be growing a self-awareness, so you are on the right track and well on your way, over 2 major obstacles that to be honest, most people never cross.

IMO, attachment "styles" across people may present themselves in similar ways, the "reactions". However, the "causes" of each individual's attachment style varies widely, from alcoholic parents, to sexual abuse, to emotional neglect, to narcissism exposure, to.... etc.

To be "aware" of the reactions is great, but this "conscious" process doesn't change the underlying "causes" that are unconscious and created the trauma response in the first place. So, to answer the question of "how", the question needs to go a bit deeper to "what happened", and then this informs the best treatment process for healing.

For instance, you are aware of a challenge to deeply "trust" people. So sure, I could say... well then just trust people more! But of course, that's attacking the symptom (conscious), not the cause (unconscious reprogramming in the brain-body).

But if the "cause" is my parents were emotionally neglectful and verbally abusive, then attacking that "cause" might look like reparenting exercises and building/healing the inner child and need for a strong sense of self, security, worthiness, authenticity, and internal love.

And the "how" to do this, may include a wide range of therapies or methods. One thing that I will say, is that it seems more and more research on attachment trauma shows that classic CBT may help with top "symptoms" such as beliefs and depression, but are not as effective as some other techniques to get deeper to the core issues.

So in this light, definitely look at broader options such as EMDR, Somatic Experiencing (Peter Levine), Emotional Focused Therapy, Reparenting (Daniel Brown and Imagine Ideal Parent), etc... it seems that these modalities are showing to be quite effective, since we are learning that trauma is stored in the brain-body in many complicated ways.

edit: It might also be helpful to dig a little deeper, than just it's hard to "trust" people. In what way? What is the fear? HOW would they break your trust? Fear of trust is just too surface level, you aren't scared of the loss of trust, but the story behind that, how it would play out, how you would be affected, HOW they would break your trust, talk behind your back, not be there for you, abandon you, reject you, not accept you, overburden you, etc.

Best of luck.

Welcome to the board, and this is a good question. I read about anxious preoccupied attachment and identified with it 5 years prior to having any idea how that information was actionable. I felt like oh hey, I've found my user's manual... but that didn't give any insight into making anything easier!

For me personally, I found that there were five things I needed to do to make attachment theory actionable for myself:

1. Objectively understand and articulate my "narrative" to myself (the why... confronting childhood reasons I developed an AP style and seeing what multi-generational trauma I'd taken on that wasn't even my own). I'd think this applies to all insecure attachment styles, though somatic experience work is more helpful to people who are less verbal and analytically inclined than me and helps people work through this with body work more than talking.
2. Find ways to genuinely build my self-esteem. AP don't trust themselves, and trust others more than self. To connect with yourself and understand your needs and how to communicate them, you need to spend time accepting yourself, exploring who you are, and finding ways to build your identity. FA share this issue, but it's combined with distrust of both self and others, so there's extra work involved in learning to trust others as well. While they distrust both, FA tend to distrust others less than self when leaning anxious and distrust others more than self when leaning avoidant.
3. Recondition my nervous system. This meant, sitting with myself to understand what types of situations caused me to get triggered, what the underlying fear truly was, and learn tools to self-soothe. Even though exploring deeper feelings when triggered was thoroughly uncomfortable. For AP, the fear underlying getting triggered is generally a fear of abandonment. FA shares this fear but flips back and forth between getting triggered into anxious nervous system flooding by a fear of abandonment and getting triggered into avoidant nervous system shutdown by a fear of engulfment. So as FA, you'd need to explore both triggered states. Self-soothing the anxious side involved building on my numbers 1 and 2, since all of it was working together.
4. Start learning what secure behaviors and mindset look like. I didn't even ask myself this question for like 8 years. It was okay, I'm AP, now what. I never asked, how do I become more secure? I ended up doing this naturally after working on steps 1-3, but I couldn't believe it wasn't intuitive to ask this earlier. I read a lot and watched videos etc. about learning better communication and relationship skills.
5. Get comfortable with self-acceptance and knowing myself, both in my mind and my body. Understanding my narrative helped with this, but I still had to consciously train myself to ask myself who I was and what I wanted to do instead of acting on other people's values that were programmed into me at some point. I didn't do any somatic experience work, but I did do yoga and got involved with some very physical sports that allowed me to experiment with different states of physicality and mindsets and relaxation. I think yoga can get way too woo-woo for me, but the aspect of being within your body and learning what it was like to be present and grounded was very useful for someone with insecure attachment. This was a surprise for me and not something I expected, and I only realized it in retrospect after having done yoga for maybe a year and a half, sticking with it that whole time just for exercise reasons.

FA has more work to do because you need to address comfort with both independence and interdependence, so you're dealing with healing both the AP and DA aspects. But ultimately, you're looking to connect with yourself; heal past trauma; recondition your nervous system to not disproportionately freak out or shut down when feeling fearful; learn healthy boundaries, sense of self, and communication skills; learning it's okay to have needs, what yours are, and how to express them properly (as well as which needs it's healthy to meet by yourself); have a healthy sense of trust in both others and yourself; and learn comfort being both inter- and independent. This all comes together to allow you to overcome a fear of abandonment (while also practicing not abandoning yourself) as well overcome a fear of engulfment (and feeling comfortable with healthy boundaries).

It's a lot, but that's good news because it means there's a lot of different actions you can take that will all help. It can get daunting, but it's very worth it. Professional help will probably make it much faster than how long it took me without it, and it's easier to find the right professional help when you know what issues you're trying to address and can verbalize it (I didn't know this at all the couple times I tried and hadn't found good therapists who might have asked the right questions to get us there).

There's also a ton of information and exercises posted by anne12 to explore that can help as well: jebkinnisonforum.com/thread/1073/healing-disorganized-attatchment-chock-trauma

Wow, I'm blown away, what excellent responses already, plenty of information to look through. I cant thank you guys enough for taking the time to share your experiences with me. Also thank you for the welcomes and “compliments”. Alexandra I really like your metaphor of finding the user manual. I understand you on that.



Tnr9, I need to digest what you said about your experiences with the SSRI's, I am very grateful for you explaining, I am seriously considering drug intervention for the first time in my life regardless of attachment styles, decades are too long of a time to feel so depressed. However in regards to therapy. I have had counselling on a couple of occasions and was mostly disappointed by it.

I'm assuming if you continue to see a therapist there must be something significantly positive you get out of it, especially if you describe it as a tremendous help? (question open to any of you that have had therapy of some kind).



Simon/Alexandra, I very much like your logic of finding root causes and deeper narratives rather than symptoms/ present manifestations, it appeals to the reductionist in me. However, Other than my mother being very anxious and my Father very dismissive avoidant I can't think of any overt abuse I suffered as a child, big T traumas as they say. Though I was consistently a very unhappy child and often felt very lonely, despite having plenty of friends. Perhaps something happened prior to that I have no recollection of. Do you guys have any memories of those early time periods in your life and how they affected you? If you feel comfortable sharing anything of course.



I think if I break down how a person might break trust the most, at least in a romantic relationship, then it is to become irrelevant to them after allowing myself to open up and connect with them, especially suddenly. I guess distil that even further down to.... abandonment. Closely followed 2nd by someone controlling/ trapping me....not surprising for an FA lol. A 3rd big one is someone not being who they claim to be. I mean personality wise/ethically, not catfishing lol. Do those resonate with you?


Related to point number 2 on your list Alexandra ,the latest manifestation of my trust issues is that I do indeed feel unable to trust myself, as in not sure what is real anymore, I don't mean in the sense of schizophrenia or something (hopefully). I recently went through what I assume to be an abusive relationship, I was isolated, trapped and told that I was very shitty person and my opinions were wrong/invalid, which I definitely internalized. Since it ended and I have had chance to self reflect, I have questioned if everything was indeed my fault as she so often said, and I feel incredible shame about that. I'm certain that episode made me significantly more anxious.....almost to PTSD levels I guess, though I did not link it with self esteem Alexandra! That will be an interesting avenue for me to explore, thank you.



I would be very interested to hear if you guys have any similar personal experiences, with shame in your relationships? And Doubt that your experience of an intense situation was even 'real/valid'?

Kind regards 
Krolle

Hi Krolle

You will be surpriced about what can cause some desorganised behavior when you read my thread.

(E.g. birth trauma, stressed out parents, a death early on in your family, being born prematurely, In-utero stress, hospitalization, accidents, too much stress, operations, intergenerationel trauma, developmental trauma, dental work, bad relationsships, bullying, parents who argued in a quiet way, if you had to choose between your parents ect....)

When we are in survival mode we are not able to bond. It lies in the instinktive level - in the reptile part of your brain.

You may only have 5% desorganised attathment/trauma, but these 5% can cause all the trouble in your lovelife.

Depression can be anger that is turned inward.

About sadness: jebkinnisonforum.com/thread/2079/sadness
The two kinds of sadness are nutritive and habitual.
Nutritive sadness is if you lost a loved one, the death of a love one ect.
Habitual sadness in the cellular structure. Comes out as a defence, because as a child you couldn't get what you wanted. If we can sence, that we are not connected enough, wasn't feeded enough or at the right time as babies or there was a lot of fear when we were born, i f .
When we can not werbalise this as babies, we feel the sadness in our bodies and in our cells. We shut down. It gets locked in our somatic self/in our biology/in our philosophy. (Not in our emotions)
This understanding of sadness is influenced by SE by Peter Levine. These specific distinctions are from a Peter Levine Master Class titled: Depression, Healthy Aggression, and Life Energy. A brief summary: when one is robbed of life force energy, usually a result of early childhood trauma and toxic shaming parenting practices, it leads to a turning INWARDS of oneself along with a false sense of self (mainly because the true self was squashed early on due to the inability of the primary caretakers to fully accept and be able to be with the energy of expression of their young). This sets up a vicious cycle within the child, and eventually adult, which leads to an insidious sense of unworthiness, deep biological and postural shame, plus the inability to express healthy life force energy and aggression (standing up for self; setting boundaries; moving and pushing ahead in life via relationship, personal health, and career, to name a few.)
When we start to heal, we begin to feel worthy, feeling more alive, that we have the right to feel our feelings, to laugh ect.

It can be something "mecanical" -
You can also have a blockage in the nerve at its source in your upper part of the spine or in the lower part of your spine so that there is no flow in your system, you can have a twisted spine or you can have a contracted psoas ect.

You can have lack of vitamins/minerals ect.

The relationship you are decribing sounds very unhealthy -was the person a narc or a psycopath ? (These type of people can suck the life out of you)

"Attatched" does not say a lot about desorganised attatchment.

Hey Krolle....

1. Therapy.....I too was kind therapy for a very long time (actually, I have been in and out of therapy since I was 12).  What was different this time was the type of therapy.....I have a somatic experiencing therapist.  We focus on trauma in the body and then seek to understand the background.  For instance....I feel embarrassment and anger in my throat and we determined that as a child I had no voice...not literally, but that I was not heard or when I spoke, I was ridiculed or ignored or told that I was selfish...so decades of that caused me to be unable to express these basic feelings in a mature way.  It has been really profound that connections between body pains and attachment wounds.

2. Childhood trauma.....I don’t have many memories prior to my parent’s divorce when I was 8 years old.  Prior to that, I was told by my mom that my dad loved me a lot. It seems that when we moved to Seattle, my dad wanted a more open marriage....which my mom refused after finding evidence that my dad had cheated on her.  Then there was a period of him coming back and going way before the divorce took place.  There was a custody battle for me (I have 2 younger brothers but I guess my brother Paul said outright he did not want to live with our dad)....he won the custody battle but then did not want me.  My dad died recently and I never got a full story from him, but I believe he was a narcissist....not an NPD...but more on the tendencies scale.  What made it all worse was that he was a psychiatrist so he used to say that I was “this close” to normal. My mom is a very stoic woman....she left her family in Scotland to work here in a visa where she met my dad.  She and I are water and oil....complete opposites....so I used to drive my very introverted, very time bound, high boundary mom crazy.  I am super, super sensitive and for decades I would take it all so very personal.  One incredibly interesting thing I learned in therapy is that pre the divorce...I was happy...you can see it in photos...I am beaming....post divorce.....I was sad or angry.  If you want...you are welcome to read back over my threads....I came here, as many people do...trying to understand how to win back a dismissive leaning FA that I had dated but for me...it was an obsession....It took 3 years to get over a man I dated for 10 months.   And I still to this day...miss the safety and softness of him.  

3. Trust in self and others.....I have started to use the phrase “honoring myself”....meaning that I respect myself enough to listen to what is going on inside of myself.  I see my new role as a guardian over the wounded girl...not a parent.  And as I have become more trusting of myself...I have become more trusting of others.  I really do think it starts with self.  Yesterday I was going to work on my taxes but instead I watched an entire series on Netflix.  I did not feel shame...I just made an internal commitment to work on my taxes today.  My therapist calls it being your own best friend.  Also, part of that has been recognizing where I end and the other begins....so that when I call my mom and she sounds rushed and irritated, that is about herself and not about me (my mom always sounds rushed and irritated...that is just part of her time consciousness), when I am working and a firedrill comes to my attention...that firedrill was not caused by me so I don’t need to react to it...I can take a pause, gather FACTS and respond to it.  I credit somatic experiencing for helping me determine my physical limits...which has helped me to become aware of where I end and another person begins.  Trauma tends to numb us from our body and it is really good to get back into it.  

4. Choice.....I think this is something so important that I wanted to give it a separate bullet.  Growing up, I had things happen to me that I had no choice in....what I have realized in therapy is that many of my insecure reactions have come from a feeling of not having a choice...for instance....when the last guy broke up with me...it was a unilateral decision.  I had no say in it...which I believe made it far worse and created in me a desire to have a different outcome where I did have choice.  A lot of my emotional reactions that seem to be more than the situation should allow all tie back to not feeling like I had choice...things happened to me...and that eroded my trust as I felt powerless.  So I retreated into fantasy where I would repeatedly re enact a desired outcome outcome in my head hoping that somehow it would happen and I would get stuck there.  I am very much aware of this need and where I can, I try now to visualize options and choose one that works best for me.  It may be as simple as...how do I respond to this disappointing loss of not getting something I wanted?  Or how do I balance being there for a friend versus getting me time.  Taking back the right to choose was a huge victory.

I hope this helps.

Thankyou for chiming in Anne. I'm working my way through your thread. Some excellent information in there. A lot to get through, but as has been stated that's a good thing as it gives lots of options to explore.



Its quiet intriguing how all kinds of trauma could effect one's nervous system. Its going to be harder for me to conceptualize how sadness could be stored at a cellular level, though I am open minded enough to give it a whirl. I know that many people with emotional problems have chronic pain, digestive issues, poor sleep etc, including myself. And most of it without a diagnosable cause. Many of the ideas on your thread would help to explain those kinds of phenomenon.



Reagrding my ex, I don't know if she was a narc or something else, I suspected BPD for a while but can't be sure now, I have actually started to question whether it was me that is the narc/psychopath and that's where part of my guilt comes from. I think, however it has more to do with attachment styles, insecurities, traumas etc. The only thing I can say for sure is my own subjective experience. Which has been one of a lot of suffering. Both in the relationship and from the aftermath since.



Would you guys mind if I told that “story"? I tried not to do the usual thing and make the thread all about my situation. But it would be very cathartic to tell, And I would certainly appreciate all of you guys input. There's likely lots of attachment stuff happening I'd love to get your opinion on.