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I would like to highlight a recent comment-reply about ‘therapy’ that is at the end of this post:

+THOUGHTS – INCLUDING DISMISSIVE-AVOIDANT INSECURE ATTACHMENT DISORDER

I have said this before on this blog, and it’s time to say it again.  If you are in therapy, there is nothing about the experience that means you need to set aside what you know about yourself.  “Listen to your gut.”

It is a fact that our earliest forming right social-emotional brain is the part of our brain that gathers all the information our body has to tell us about ‘its’ experience in the world.  When you hear the expression, “I had a gut reaction” or “I knew it in my gut,” the right brain with its physiological roots in our body experience and awareness is what the ‘gut’ truly is.

The other, more accurate way to say this is, “I am having a visceral reaction.”

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VISCERAL

Date: 1575

1  : felt in or as if in the viscera : deep <a visceral conviction>

2  : not intellectual : instinctive, unreasoning <visceral drives>

3  : dealing with crude or elemental emotions : earthy <a visceral novel>

Definition of VISCERA

plural of viscus

1  : an internal organ of the body; especially : one (as the heart, liver, or intestine) located in the great cavity of the trunk proper

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We are taught that ‘feelings’, including the identified physical ones like touch, heat, physical pain, are not ‘reasonable’.  That is a myth.

What we all need is for the information our right brain knows to be passed over the ‘wall’ to our left brain so that they can — TOGETHER — cooperate jointly, equally and in a balanced way with our living.

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I meant what I said in the reply to the comment I mentioned above.  There is nothing particularly extraordinary about therapists.  Most of them, I would guess, come from troubled pasts of their own.  If they have not explored the new research about the formation of our ‘attachment’ circuitry from birth — especially as it is altered through traumatic early infant-child conditions of unsafe and insecure with our caregivers — a therapist really has no REAL (and therefore reason-able) idea what ‘attachment’ really is, what it does, what it is meant to do, what it does NOT do if our early development was changed by trauma, or how to FIX our attachment ‘problems’.

Simply being told that we ‘won’t make progress’ or ‘won’t get better’ if we don’t ‘form an attachment with them’ belongs — in my thinking — to the trauma drama side of the fence.

With these simplified, often inaccurate demands often made by therapists clients are left believing there is ‘something wrong’ with them that they can’t or won’t or don’t want to form one of these illusive ‘attachments’ to their therapist.

Your gut (your viscera) will tell you when the trauma drama wheel is in full motion in your therapy.  There is nothing more important in my thinking than for a ‘client’ to be allowed to trust the information their gut (through their right brain and in cooperation with their left brain) is telling them.

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True, most clients in therapy today probably have had traumatic pasts.  If the trauma happened early in their life, if they were born into trauma drama, they will be caught in the web of trauma drama in their own life at the same time that they have an unrecognized, unexplored, and unexplained INSECURE ATTACHMENT DISORDER.

Telling a client whose physiology was changed early in their development because their entire body-brain-mind-self had to change and adjust to survive trauma that what will ‘fix’ them is the formation of an ‘attachment’ with their therapist is like telling that same client that, like Dumbo, all their problems will get better if they only do what it takes (being told “You can do it if you want to and are willing”) that they can FLY.

HOGWASH!

If, as I mentioned in my reply mentioned above, any therapist has not thoroughly studied current developmental neuroscience about human attachment, in my book they do not know what they are talking about.

CONSUMER BEWARE!  CONSUMER, BE AWARE!

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What I have been writing about in my recent posts about insecure attachment styles-patterns-disorders, resentments, Grice’s maxims and trauma drama applies here.

If our body, through particularly the experience of our right brain, is telling us that we are NOT feeling peaceful calm, then at the same time we are not feeling safe and secure (the essence of secure attachment).

If we do not have peace and calm built into the center of our nervous system-brain because of our altered development in infant-child environments of trauma and abuse, having someone, even a therapist telling us to ‘get there’ – form ‘an attachment’ – ‘feel safe and secure’ – feel peace and calm — will NOT magically make this state appear in our body, our brain, our nervous system, in our mind — or in our self!

What, in my opinion, so often happens in therapy IS a continuation of trauma drama if

(1) there is too much of the wrong information given

(2) there is not enough of the right information given

(3) the information being given is not REALLY (or reason-able) accurate to what is really important and is therefore ACTUALLY IRRELEVANT

(4) the TRUTH about the facts is MISSING

When this happens a client’s BODY will tell this this is the current state IF peace and calm is not an increasingly more present state between the client and the therapist.

True, there are many therapeutic theories and strategies that encourage what is called PROJECTION — whereby the client explores feelings from the PAST in therapy as if they are connected to the therapist rather than to the person who actually committed the abuse and harm in the first place.

These same schools of thought (and therapist thinking and action) also ASSUME that if a client forms this mysterious ‘attachment’ to the therapist this entire process will not only HAPPEN — but effectively help a client to ‘heal’.

I am not going to argue with these thoughts.  What I am going to say is that if no one — not the therapist, not the client — REALLY knows what human attachment is PHYSIOLOGICALLY — what it does and why — the core difficulties within the client are not going to be changed in the way both the therapist and the client hope that they will.

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Anyone who is reading this post has access to relevant information necessary to become — most of the time — more educated about attachment than their therapist is likely to be.  Simply Google search attachment and child abuse, or attachment and brain development, or attachment and ANYTHING and begin to educate yourself by exploring what pops up on your screen.

In my book, it is critically important that trauma survivors, especially infant-child abuse survivors, find and learn this information.  All of our physiology is affected by our human attachment system — no matter how it was formed.  Please follow the links presented in the comment-reply cited above!  To be in therapy to resolve trauma drama difficulties while being exposed to more of the same patterns in the therapy itself is NOT helpful — in my book.

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