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My company-related thoughts concerning my experiences of this past week have come to include what I am trying to learn and understand about the interplay between our human attachment and our caregiving systems.  It is most common for those of us who are survivors of severe infant-child abuse to have a body-brain that was changed in its physiological development in such a way that our stress-distress (insecure attachment) system works differently from ‘normal’.

Our ‘warning’ system shows its nearly continual activation through our patterns of attachment to self, others and to our world around us as it manifests in our insecure attachment patterns that are very difficult to ‘turn off’.  This means that when we ‘caregive’ we are accomplishing this feat in different ways from ‘normal’.  A body-brain built in a safe and secure earliest attachment-relationship environment will activate when ACTUAL threat exists in the environment.  At other times it will turn itself off and caregiving smoothly happens within these times.

These two systems — our attachment system and our caregiving system — are not ordinarily designed to operate at the same time.  Once our attachment needs are met the system turns off (and body-felt anxiety all but disappears).  I believe many people, especially parents, can react appropriately in caregiving their offspring because they can accomplish BOTH system activations at the same time.  Experts refer to Earned Secure attachment when this happens.  Based on my own experience I call this Borrowed Secure attachment.

When it comes to adult-to-adult interactions it can be harder to gain clarity about how these two systems are operating within relationships.  Needing ‘more than normal’ is an understandable and very normal consequence stemming from abuse, trauma, neglect and maltreatment of infants and children.  Gaining clarity about WHAT we need, WHEN we need, HOW we need, and WHO we feel we need what from are part of our never-ending healing process.

Give and receive is what our rupture-repair patterns are about.  I am very clear about how these patterns work when I am in interaction with children, but am having to learn as much as I can about adult interactions that seem foggy to me in these areas.  In the meantime as I continue to learn, I try to achieve a gentle forgiving stance that is most clearly connected to this thought as I struggle in adult relationships:  “Linda, this isn’t the end of the world!”

From the time I was born everything in my universe felt like ‘the end of the world’ or ‘the world is ending NOW (or very soon)’.  Just taking a breath, backing up from the specific details of a troublesome experience and giving myself time to process accomplishes a lot for me!  The experience of the passage of TIME itself becomes altered in the midst of trauma.  I try today to literally manage time so that it slows down.  In that slowing down I can allow more and more information into the picture that can help me gain a better, clearer perspective about what matters most — and what doesn’t.

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