Attachment Disruption
Human development occurs largely through relationship. The quality and safety of a person’s connection or attachment to early caregivers significantly contributes to how they experience themselves and their world. Secure attachment is the basic psycho-biological platform allowing for co-regulation—for our instinctive, mammalian need to safely connect with others. The creation of secure attachment relationships and the reparation of attachment wounds is a primary focus of my clinical work.
Children who have endured traumas such as neglect, abandonment, caregiver violence, disruptive medical procedures, a traumatic birth, or family systems plagued by addiction or mental illness often experience difficulty regulating their emotions and forming safely connected relationships. Persons deprived of securely attached caregiver relationships report feeling both unsafe and alone. They often exhibit symptoms of developmental trauma disorder (DTD), learning disabilities, sensory processing disorders, addictions, and personality disorders.
I understand the healing of insecure attachment and DTD as having two intertwined elements: first, the ongoing experience of a deeply secure, attuned connection within the therapeutic relationship, and secondly, the resolution of early trauma.
The therapeutic relationship can offer persons with insecure attachment a profound “reparenting” experience, in which the client consistently experiences the therapist as optimally attuned, deeply caring, flexible, and genuinely interested in them. This relationship functions to awaken the client’s psycho-biology out of chronic patterns of fear, rage and freeze and into interpersonal safety and social engagement. The process and scope of healing developmental trauma differs from working with “shock” trauma stemming from discrete, traumatic events occuring after normal psycho-biological development in childhood. Because developmental trauma impacts the developing organ systems, its healing is not simply a process of restoring a previous condition of health. Rather, the resolution of developmental trauma entails the development of both psychological and physiological capacities of experiencing safety and connection. Persons fortunate enough to enjoy change of this depth often report entirely new experiences of regulation and ease within their bodies and relationships.