February 2025 - A time to reflect on how important self-love is and the best way to care for ourselves is by learning our story.
Too often we feel unseen and misunderstood in relationships. Why? Two words – “attachment wounds”. Experiential Therapy can be an effective tool to solve the mystery by uncovering the root cause(s) of our inner child, teen, and adult attachment wounds and unveil the stories that keep us stuck reliving our emotional pain repeatedly.
What is an “Attachment Wound”?
According to Psychology Today, an attachment wound refers to a psychological trauma originating from a disrupted or unhealthy early caregiver relationship, often caused by an absent, abusive, or emotionally unavailable parent or guardian. This can lead to a deep-seated insecurity and difficulty forming healthy secure attachments in adulthood.
Attachment wounds aren’t just rooted in childhood. Traumatic experiences in our teen years or adulthood can also contribute.
Spiritual teacher Eckhart Tolle describes attachment wounds as a “pain body” or a collection of unprocessed negative emotions, memories, and beliefs that accumulate over time. Essentially, it is our core emotional injury that we carry around with us which can manifest in various forms such as anxiety, depression, anger, or resentment.
Once we truly see our story from the perspective of our younger self, we can begin to see why we have conflict in relationships. For example, do our past experiences influence the way we communicate in professional settings? If we have an unresolved “pain body,” it may shape how we respond to authority figures. In turn, we may also have difficulty absorbing constructive feedback from others or consistently avoid confrontations in the workplace. Our relationship attachment styles develop from core wounds and survival patterns from parts of self.
Four Attachment Styles
Our attachment styles develop from these core wounds, influencing how we interact with others. In psychology, there are four main attachment styles:
Anxious-preoccupied
Dismissive-avoidant
Anxious-avoidant
Secure
While there are four main categories, we may move to different attachment styles, depending on the relationship or the situation. One might connect differently with a coworker compared to a partner or close friend. Think about attachment in terms of energy and action. When two people come together and someone triggers uncomfortable feelings (or energies), we often engage by acting in a manner that doesn’t necessarily serve our highest good. For example, the anxious-preoccupied attachment style may try to control or manipulate a situation while being hypervigilant.
What I Learned At Pivot Retreat
Having just returned from a 5-Day Intensive Women’s Health Retreat called Pivot, we focused on naming our pain bodies, putting words to that original seed of our deepest hurting. Some examples are: “Not enough”, “Not safe”, “Rejection”, “Abandonment”, “Not seen”, “Betrayed”, “Dismissed”, “Neglected”, and “Disregarded”. When these pain sources are activated, they can cause us to have consistent emotional challenges, impacting our thoughts, feelings and actions. For example, if someone experienced rejection in childhood, they may feel triggered when a friend takes too long to respond to a text.
Unfortunately, repeated pain body activation keeps us stuck in survival patterns that we have adopted during those painful times in our lives, which may be in the form of anger, sadness, anxiety or social isolation. Our relationship attachment styles develop from these core wounds and survival patterns.
How to Heal & Break Negative Patterns
Healing Our Inner Child Wounds
At Pivot, I learned that we can significantly change the way we respond to our pain body by recognizing and interrupting the activation before it negatively impacts us and those around us. Here is what I learned about how to be relationally aligned:
I first had to identify my pain body (more than one!) by asking myself:
Did I feel unsafe, neglected, rejected, abandoned, disregarded, betrayed, or other emotional pain sources in childhood, teens, or adulthood?
With the help of trained experiential therapists, I was able to go deep and learn my story starting from childhood through adulthood while in a safe environment.
I made a list of my survival patterns or the way I managed and tolerated my feelings when my pain body became activated in childhood, teens, and adulthood. I asked myself:
What were all the feelings that came up when my pain body activated?
What were my actions when my pain body activated?
I learned that showing up securely in relationships, including myself, requires building a new muscle and knowing my attachment style in my various relationships.
By increasing my awareness during each interaction, I can know why I show up the way I do.
I can have healthier outcomes when I learn how to repair, restore, and integrate my parts of self, so I can have a different relationship to my past wounds and the people who contributed to the trauma and drama I have lived.
What I discovered is that the “blame game” is never productive and hinders the repair process. When we blame others (colleagues, friends, family, and partners) we transport ourselves back in time to the original attachment wound into a little child who feels alone, neglected, rejected, abandoned, and unsafe. Furthermore, what I didn’t know was that some of my original wounds stemmed from my teens and my adult years which was very evident in my story.
The old saying that time heals all wounds is just not true! With the right tools, a healthy support system, and a clear wellness plan, you can start breaking negative patterns and make meaningful, secure relationships at home, with partners and friends, and in the workplace.
More FREE information on attachment styles, relationships, self, and psychotherapy on The School of Life.
“You, Yourself, as much as anybody in the entire universe, deserve your love and affection.”– Buddha (563-483 BC) |
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