Part of my therapy over the last few years has involved learning about attachment styles. It’s grown in popularity, and unlike personality tests like MBTI, horoscopes, and love languages, attachment theory does have scientific backing and is widely accepted as legitimate in psychological and therapeutic spaces. It has helped me immensely during therapy in my 20s (weird to say that now as a 30-year-old!).
Thinking about attachment style and theory really helped me process aspects of my life, accept some of the impacts things had during my childhood, and better understand my present-day self and how I could improve. But it was a journey for me and not a clear-cut one.
What is Attachment Theory?
Attachment theory starts from a belief that the childhood years of your life are the most important for your emotional development. How you grew up, what events happened in your life during that time, and the type of parenting you received get imprinted deep into your being.
There are four types of attachment styles. There is secure, insecure avoidant (sometimes called dismissive avoidant), insecure anxious (sometimes called anxious preoccupied), and disorganized (sometimes called fearful avoidant).
Secure people are comfortable with intimacy and independence. They can communicate their needs clearly and trust people. The book that really helped me understand attachment theory is called Secure Relating: Holding Your Own in an Insecure World by Ann Kelley and Sue Marriott. They like to use the term secure relating because it’s a verb that describes a way of interacting. A person who securely relates can do it from a place of agency, connection, and self-awareness.
An insecure person with an anxious tendency often fears rejection and abandonment, which can make them seek validation and reassurance. They can find it hard to trust their partner, may demand proof, and may be described as clingy. These people tend to have low self-esteem, struggle with self-doubt, and overanalyze interactions. Intrusive thoughts can spring up, and their anxiety can take over. This way of relating develops because their caregiver was inconsistent in their responsiveness and availability. The caregiver may have given them mixed signals, sometimes responding warmly to their emotions and sometimes coldly.
The next style is insecure with avoidant behaviors. This is a person who is highly self-sufficient and hyper-independent, often suppressing emotion. These people can be described as cold, aloof, evasive, or robotic. They struggle with asking for help or accepting it, believing they need to do it all by themselves. They also may have an inflated ego and think other people are the problem, avoiding introspection because it may surface emotions. This develops because a caregiver was neglectful. They often were left alone, and their needs were not met. Their caregiver may have harshly dismissed the baby’s feelings or needs.
The last style is disorganized. People with this style can be very confusing and chaotic to those who are in a relationship with them. They will crave affection yet have lots of fear around getting hurt. They may shift unpredictably from being clingy to withdrawing. They may not be able to control their emotions on either side of the spectrum or feel strong extremes of both. This develops usually because the child went through abuse, trauma, or chaos in the home. The child has learned that there is no secure base and fears people or relationships.
Developmental vs Adult
Now attachment theory is a bit more complex than the internet makes it out to be. There are different levels of attachment style: one focused on developmental attachment experiences that happened when you were very young, and another focused on adult attachment styles that are informed by those developmental experiences but can be changed.
Starting with developmental attachment, the idea is that a baby begins to develop an attachment pattern based on their caretaker’s behavior. This is called an Internal Working Model (IWM). Whatever happens during that time becomes a deep part of your limbic learning and is very hard to change. In essence, what happens during this time is imprinted into your unconscious ideas of relationships and your assumptions about trust. From there, it becomes the working model, or the template through which you view relationships.
Then there are adult attachment styles. These are built from the template of your developmental attachment. Unlike developmental attachment, as an adult you have higher cortical conscious thinking. You have access to emotions that, as a baby, were undeveloped and you couldn’t understand. This is the attachment style a lot of people think of, and the good news is that it is not set in stone. You can become more secure even if you started from an insecure developmental attachment.
Narrative Coherence
Something that Secure Relating emphasizes is the idea of narrative coherence. This is how an adult speaks about their attachment, which reveals the most about their unconscious adult attachment patterns. If someone can talk about their childhood and relationships with emotional clarity and regulation, even if those early experiences were traumatic, that means they are able to relate more securely. They have come to an understanding of their past experiences and their significant relationships. They have integrated their past with their present and can have emotional balance with it. Usually, their story is logical, credible, and complete, with a balanced perspective of their experiences.
If a person has insecure adult attachment, they usually cannot clearly reflect on their childhood experiences. They don’t have the words to describe the emotions, they don’t understand how it impacts them as an adult, and they may get emotionally swept away if they try to think or talk about their past. The story itself may not be clear with large gaps or tangents because they have not or cannot reflect on the complete life story.
My Journey
Avoidant Life
When I learned about all this, it was clear as day to me that I absolutely had avoidant behaviors. I had been described by friends as aloof for a long time. Even with my close friends, I didn’t tell them about things going on in my life or how I felt about situations. I disliked touch. I described myself as not a hugger and I even disliked the cats that would sit on my lap because I thought they were too clingy and they immediately made me uncomfortable and trapped. I have been described by friends and the people I have dated as very independent and it’s said as a positive attribute, which I think it is to a degree, but I felt like I had to do everything myself and had problems asking for help.
My dating was nonexistent through high school and then only fleetingly appeared in my last semester of college. But when I finally did start to date, I tended to end things prematurely. In a book called Love Understood: The Science of Who, How and Why We Love by Laura Mucha, they said this about avoidants: “They tend to live on a restrictive and punishing diet of self-sufficiency, idealizing people they’re not with and finding negatives in people they do date.” I would find something insignificant in hindsight, but use it as a reason why we were simply incompatible. I have been the dumper, the one who breaks up with people. It wasn’t intentional, I just felt uncomfortable and acted on it instinctually by ending things.
So, I knew I had strong avoidant behaviors but why?
Orphanage Life
When it comes to developmental attachment, there is a saying that just because you can’t remember what happened doesn’t mean it didn’t matter.
I can only guess what those first 6 months were like for me in China. I know I came from a government-run social welfare facility. That I was malnourished with boils on my back. That there were many babies there. I can assume that I wasn’t given much individual care, or at least the kind of individual care that most babies who are with healthy birth families get. In Secure Relating they say avoidant children “had given up hope of receiving direct emotional comfort and had learned to bypass their awareness of their attachment need as an attempt to regulate themselves.” I can assume that I maybe had learned that in a room of crying babies, I wouldn’t get my needs met, so I learned to shut down that system and cope on my own.
An essential book for understanding the early adoption experience for the baby has been The Primal Wound by Nancy Verrier. She says that many babies develop “denial and avoidance as defense mechanisms, we are speaking of something which happens automatically in the unconscious: the blocking out of painful experiences in order to cope with one’s situation.” She states when the connection between the adopted child and their birthmother is severed, it creates a deep primal wound that will affect the adoptee’s sense of Self. It can manifest in a sense of loss, mistrust, anxiety, and depression that creates difficulties in relationships with significant others. Essentially, removing the baby from the birth mother creates a deeply damaging emotional wound that orphanage life can intensify by forcing the baby into an environment with little nurturance.
This creates issues for the adoptee later in life. They often feel they can’t count on anyone, and they must be self-sufficient. Many have perfectionist tendencies, especially if they were raised with the narrative that they are special and they were chosen. This creates pressure for the child to live up to the adopted family’s expectations since they feel they must prove themselves. There is the internal narrative in the adoptee that they already failed their first mother and for whatever reason, they were inadequate and worthless. Therefore, they need to be perfect for the adoptive family in order to prove their worth and not to be rejected again. They often suppress their true self to submit to the wishes and dreams of the parent, hampering their own needs.
Father Figure
As I’ve talked about in past blogs, I have identified with books on masculinity, and the issues men face with suppressing their emotions. Patriarchy and avoidant behavior go hand-in-hand unfortunately. Men consistently score higher on avoidant attachment measures than women across many different cultural studies.
I think about the significant male figures in my life who were my dad and Mike. I always looked up to my dad. I relate heavily with the idea of trying to mold myself into the idea of what my parents wanted from me, especially my dad. I wanted to make him proud and gain his appreciation. I admired his work ethic and noticed that he tried to give us things he didn’t have as a child. I do think he did a lot of loving, generous acts for Katie and me.
But I knew I wasn’t his favorite. It felt like no matter what I did it wasn’t quite enough for him and, for unknown reasons to me, he preferred Katie. As a child, she got more emotional attention, more tangible things, and sometimes better treatment. As a child, I didn’t think anything negative of it at all. I assumed it was because I was bad and I wasn’t worth the equal love. I told myself I needed to be self-sufficient and resourceful. I needed to prove that I could lessen the burden that I was on him and maybe then he would like me a little more. I needed to earn his full love. It set up an unhealthy comparison where I knew I was being compared to Katie and couldn’t live up to her for reasons that were never spoken.
I learned later as a 22-year-old adult that there was really nothing I could have done. Events happened when he went to pick me up from China that made him say, “getting me was his one regret in life and he wouldn’t do it if he knew how things would have turned out.” Hearing that affirmed what I had felt as a child. In some ways, it freed me from the pressure I had always felt. But that doesn’t mean as a child it didn’t heavily shape my relationships and self-worth.
I’m reading The Will to Change by bell hooks and she talks about the wound that patriarchal relations have with developing boys. When they look up to a father figure, as not just the caregiver, but the mentor and role model, their lack of love can be twice as sharp. The lack of a compassionate and emotional relationship can leave a space of empty longing and so shutting down emotionally can be “the best defense when the longing for connection must be denied.”
Eventually when dad’s relationship with Katie crumbled in high school, he spent more time with his wife in Pueblo, and I was the only one who would go over to his house. We didn’t have much to talk about when I did go over to his house. We were living separate lives by that point. But I wanted to make him happy and show that I still wanted to be his kid. When he told Katie and me that he was moving away with his wife, selling the house, and that we would live with mom all the time, Katie said he was abandoning us. I remember at the time Katie was very upset and I was not. I didn’t think of it as abandonment at the time. I wasn’t feeling much emotionally when that happened. I just accepted that and maybe it felt inevitable to me. During that period when he hadn’t sold the house but wasn’t living in Colorado Springs anymore, I would sometimes go over there alone and just cook spaghetti, the first food he ever taught me to cook, and hang out there alone. It’s hard to say that I missed him at the time because truly it wasn’t consciously emotionally motivated, I just did it.
Fast forward almost 8 years and I am in therapy unpacking my deep avoidant behavior. I am crying to my therapist that I just want to change. I want to feel some kind of deep emotion other than constant mild melancholic sadness. Verrier from the Primal Wound says for the adoptee they “would feel in touch always with a conscious deep sadness but not necessarily depression.” I said to my therapist that I want to feel love, and I want to feel deep heartbreak and heartache. She says, I think you have been heartbroken. I think you are heartbroken for your dad.
Many years of therapy helped me process the suppressed grief around my whole relationship with my dad. I understood how being adopted plays heavily into all of that. And I began to label emotions that I had learned to shove way down as a baby and child and place them onto my past experiences. In Will to Change, hooks writes that “neglect is more common than abuse: more kids are emotionally abandoned than are directly attacked, physically, or emotionally.” I still don’t think I can call what dad did abandonment or even neglect, but it wasn’t an emotional relationship. It’s clear to me that whatever it was, it impacted me and my attachment style.
Control
A big behavior of avoidants is the need for control. Tied to ideas of independence, control is a coping mechanism, a survival strategy, to manage anxiety and prevent vulnerable emotions such as weakness.
Control was a huge issue for me, and it connects to being an adoptee among the other things that happened in my childhood. Because adoption happens to a child without their consent or understanding, they often grow up feeling like they don’t have any control over their lives. An event happened that drastically changed the entire outcome of their life, and they didn’t get to choose it at all. Adoptees have an elevated risk of developing psychological disorders such as increased risk of suicide attempts and suicide, ADHD symptoms, behavioral problems, OCD, anxiety disorders, Major Depressive Disorder, and eating disorders.
For me, my way to cope with the feeling of lack of control was through an eating disorder.
Eating disorders are complicated and there are different kinds. I won’t get into that. The best book that I’ve read for my own personal experience of it was Gaining: The Truth About Life After Eating Disorders by Aimee Liu. She writes that, “it seems to be that genetics make the gun, and the cultural and familial environment loads it, but it takes the experience of unbearable emotion to pull the trigger.”
There’s lots of little moments where you could say I picked up on disordered eating habits as a child either from parents or society. But it’s safe to say I didn’t have an eating disorder in childhood. The symptoms really crept in during college.
I found an obsession with tracking calories and optimizing my health. I compulsively started running, first for pleasure and then because of routine and then because I felt I was a failure if I didn’t. Things compounded when I was a working adult making very little money and could justify skipping a meal to save a few dollars. I became obsessed with walking through grocery aisles for hours only to walk out with two items, as if the visual stimulation of food helped curb my actual hunger for food. I absolutely had to walk at least 10,000 steps a day and in 3 years that became at least 20,000+ steps. Every. Single. Day. I told myself I had to run at least three miles every day on top of that, and I felt the day was a failure if I couldn’t do it. And then I became obsessed with eating healthy which became a compulsion to read labels, never eating anything with even 1g of added sugar, removing fats and oils even olive oil, and fatty foods like avocados, and binging on foods that were low calorie but very filling like plain popcorn, carrots, and cucumbers. I was constantly thinking of food, watching food videos, browsing recipe sites, walking in grocery stores buying nothing, thinking of the next meal I would make. I couldn’t stop thinking about food. I had developed a compulsive ritual of stuffing myself right before bed with 10+ cups of plain popcorn because I had spent the whole day eating hardly anything. I stopped hanging out with people because I didn’t want to feel the pressure of eating food that would not fit my restrictive compulsion. I became more reclusive, lonely, and dependent on my compulsions to deal with the loneliness. Eventually food and these compulsions had complete control over me and my brain.
I found deep pleasure in restricting and the discipline I believed I had over myself. I constructed rituals around my lifestyle and religiously, obsessively complied with them in the name of discipline, which I believed made me a person finally worthy. Liu says, “the kid who’s going to become anorexic typically takes pride in her disciplined emptiness.” It was not about achieving a certain body type at all for me, but just about control and self-worth. And the thing is, nobody suspected anything was wrong with me. In fact, I got a lot of praise for my discipline, my fitness, and the superficial appearance of my “healthy” habits. All of that was just to protect an illusion of emotional security.
There was a conundrum developing. I had a kind of societal emotional maturity and social intelligence. I was able to talk freely about mental health issues and could talk intellectually about superficial emotions I felt. I always was a great listening ear to the emotions of my friends. I had strong fluency in social justice and psychological impacts of trauma. But I was so deeply avoidant of what was going on inside my own body. If the emotional language and world wasn’t about me and the Big Emotions that I had deep down, I could talk maturely about it. So, on the outside, I think people thought I was emotionally mature, self-aware, and had things figured out, but that was far from reality.
During this period, I was out of touch with my suppressed emotions and hadn’t truly unpacked my past experiences. People with eating disorders “hold back their emotions the same way they used to hold back their physical appetites.” They struggle to feel at home in their bodies, their relationships, and their emotions. They cope with this struggle by taking their mind off it, in the same way someone might use drugs or alcohol. It was my addiction, as one of my psychiatrists put it. Some use alcohol and drugs to cope with their pain, and I used and abused my body to cope with mine. At my worst, when I was aware I was ruining my body, it was a version of self-harm. And like an avoidant, I was in denial about it for a long time. An avoidant and a person with an eating disorder suffer from the same condition, which is that denial is an essential ingredient and function of the behavior.
There is a theory that some anorexics have high sensitivity to sensory things, and they can feel so overwhelmed by it and unable to process it that what might feel good to most people feels bad to the anorexic. Therefore, they find relief in numbness. Liu talks about how there is such an allure of the power of needing nothing to the person with an eating disorder. That’s certainly what this all did to me. I wasn’t feeling when I was doing all of that. I let compulsion take over and let these things run my life on autopilot so that I could coast by without addressing the intense pain and needs I was feeling. It was the equivalent of putting my mind on white noise when the loneliness and sadness got too strong for me.
I fell into what’s called the overcontrolled anorexic category. Liu writes about the overcontrolled anorexic that “like people with obsessive compulsive personalities, this group tends to be perfectionistic, but they are often more emotionally and sexually inhibited, more sensitive to criticism and shame, and more introverted.” Researchers estimate that one-third of restricting anorexics have avoidant personalities and the overcontrolled anorexic, with the perfectionistic tendency, maps onto avoidant coping mechanisms. This perfectionistic drive is also present in adoptees who have a “feeling of needing to be perfect, but feeling imperfect, [which] becomes even more confusing in reference to the story that many adoptees are told, which is that they are chosen.” Liu writes, “the avoidant view of perfection has less to do with rules, grades, or numbers on a scale than with a kind of transcendent or mystical love. To be perfect, this way of thinking, is to be trouble free. In effect, invisible.” Growing up thinking I was bad, a “monster”, a “future serial killer” made controlling my body the most convenient way to “perfect” myself but to also disappear.
My eating disorder was an avoidance of digging into the deeper emotional problems I was facing. Overcoming my eating disorder meant resolving my relationship to control and ultimately my emotions and what I was avoiding by letting the eating disorder consume me.
Triggered into Anxiety
I thought I had my avoidant style figured out and had been working on identifying and then not doing my avoidant behaviors. It was going great! And then I got into my first real serious relationship.
Anxiety was a foreign experience to me. I had watched people in my family go through anxiety. I understood it was a natural part of the human experience, but I thought I was just the type of person who didn’t get anxious. By this point, I was close friends with sadness. Andrew Solomon writes that “depression is a response to past loss, and anxiety is a response to future loss.” With all the work I had begun to do in therapy on my past experiences, I had opened a deep cavern of sadness that I was working through.
But I didn’t anticipate this other emotional, anxious side of me. I soon learned, by getting into my first serious relationship, that my avoidant side was protecting more unresolved pains. In hindsight, it’s fascinating the flip that happened. This relationship coincided with my work in therapy where I had begun to bring down the avoidant walls that I had built. I was also tackling my eating disorder, so I knew not to use my go-to emotional coping mechanism anymore. So, once I let someone in and opened those vulnerabilities, an explosion of hot red overwhelming anxiety and fear of abandonment dominated my relationship with that person.
I try not to use absolutes too much, but I do feel all adoptees have deep core wounds related to abandonment. Verrier from Primal Wound writes that “child abandonment is a kind of death, not only of the mother, but of part of the Self, that core being or essence of oneself which makes one feel whole.” And unfortunately, many adoptees equal love with abandonment. Many adoptees are told that their birth mothers must have loved them so much which is why they gave them up for adoption because they knew they would have a better life. While the sentiment has good intentions, it equates love with abandonment, something the child then learns as their understanding of love. Therefore, they believe, allowing oneself to be loved is associated with subsequently being abandoned and having no say or control in the matter. I knew this theoretically about adoptees when I got into this relationship but because I had suppressed this fear so deeply, I didn’t know what it would be like when it reared its ugly head.
The intensity with which I experienced this though was also due to the nature of the relationship and the behaviors of the person I was with. They had strong avoidant behaviors, were unmedicated for a time with bipolar disorder and ADHD, and had a lot of similarities with dad and Mike. It was a volatile cocktail and triggered uncontrollable anxiety and breakdowns in me. Fears of abandonment haunted my mind, and I had my first experiences with debilitating anxiety attacks. My senses were on high alert, ready to respond to anything to placate their needs while ignoring my own because I didn’t want to experience abandonment again.
On the impact of adoption for the baby, Verrier from the Primal Wound says “when brain circuits fire repeatedly they can become a default setting. That means that if instead of love, comfort, and protection, a child feels frightened, and unwanted, their brain will specialize in managing feelings of fear and abandonment, rather than co-operating with other people and exploring the world.”
I want to put this whole paragraph here from Secure Relating:
D.W. Winnicott wrote that people who feel threatened by love assume that intimacy means ‘living in a world which is really created by the other.’ This assumption gives one’s partner in a relationship all the power, creativity, and freedom, whether he wants it or not. The less-powerful partner feels she must either disappear, becoming wholly selfless, passive, and subservient, or else she must deceive, concealing her true self. In either case, Winnicott writes, there is usually ‘a compulsive element in it all, and this compulsive element is afraid somewhere a long way at the back of it.’ Fear of failure. Fear of rejection or abandonment. Fear of being exposed.”
This sums up so much of everything that happened in this relationship and how my past experiences informed that relationship. I was clinging to a relationship that was deeply unhealthy, dare I say toxic. I abandoned my own wants and needs, which was painful, but a better alternative to abandonment in my mind. Any independence or true self that I prided myself in before the relationship started to crumble. With this person reminding me of my dad, it brought back a child-like desperation for their approval and love.
I want to give some grace to myself though. As I said this was a volatile cocktail of a relationship with a person I now realize was deeply unsuited for me and had damaging behaviors and actions that would have (and had) ruined most relationships. It destroyed my self-esteem and brought me to the lowest worst point of my life. He had a history of many relationships, with abrupt ghosting and fleeing from them, and he had many messy entanglements throughout that didn’t help my anxiety and sense of security about him. I pleaded from the very beginning to never to abruptly leave me like that, telling him that would strike my core wound of abandonment. Ultimately, he left randomly one day from the house we were living in, as he had done with previous partners.
But once it happened, once he left, it wasn’t all that bad. The pain was not as sharp as I thought it would be. I felt freed from a relationship I had known for a very long time at that point was no good for me. In fact, he said constantly that he thought he was poison to me. So, when he left, it was like being freed from a bad dream where I was captive to my overwhelming emotions and fears even if my mind knew I wanted out.
My ability to overcome this is largely due to the work of many therapists by that point and being on the tail end of eating disorder recovery. By that point, I was getting much better at regulating my emotions and identifying when he would say something triggering and how to navigate that. I was regaining my self-esteem with therapists gently asking me, “Is this the kind of person I really want to be in a relationship with?” And I was processing my past experiences, identifying my emotions, and accepting this new side of me as part of my humanity and a sign I am alive.
Anxiety is still not the close friend like sadness is for me. It’s not something that shows up often anymore thankfully. But I know it’s very real in the deep crevices of my being.
Disorganized Mind
A person who experiences both ends of the anxious and avoidant spectrum is called disorganized. Developmental trauma, such as abuse, is a likely origin point for someone with this kind of attachment style. From Secure Relating: “those with higher adverse social factors show up in attachment science with lower rates of secure attachment patterns in childhood.”
There is another psychology theory called Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACES), which refers to potentially traumatic events that occur in childhood from ages 0-17. A child who goes through many of these ACEs has a high likelihood of poor health, poverty, behavioral problems, mental disorders, and deaths of despair. That’s because experiencing ACEs, especially at such a young age, extends toxic stress in the body and can impact the child’s developing brain, immune system, and stress-response systems.
There is a narrow range of experiences that ACE categorizes as traumatic enough to create these lifelong impacts:
- Experiencing violence, abuse, or neglect.
- Witnessing violence in the home or community.
- Having a family member attempt or die by suicide.
- Substance use problems in the household.
- Mental health problems in the household.
- Instability due to parental separation.
- Unstable housing or homelessness.
- Instability due to household members being in jail or prison.
- Racism and other forms of discrimination.
It’s uncomfortable to admit that certainly Katie and I went through these things. Multiple divorces, a step-parent who was an alcoholic, a step-parent who eventually fell into the category of emotional abuse, race discrimination, moving houses or sometimes fleeing a house that wasn’t safe, and adoption as a form of neglect and abandonment. Without getting into the details, I realized in therapy there was a lot for me to unpack beyond just my adoption.
With this instability in childhood, I didn’t have a stable person to go to for safety and security. Maybe on a good day it could be a certain person but another day I might receive the opposite of safety and security. Vulnerability was sometimes encouraged but sometimes reprimanded. It’s the push and pull of safety that defines this disorganized attachment style. The child can’t settle and calm their stress system because of the unpredictability and learns that no matter what they do, their environment and the people around them won’t provide security.
For these disorganized people, interactions with people are very difficult and don’t feel safe. That leads them to have higher rates of isolation because they simply don’t view people as safe. I have written quite a few times about my experiences with isolation and loneliness. It’s maybe just as close of a friend to me as sadness.
Something that Secure Relating notes about people with this attachment style is that they don’t often know how much pain the body is holding and they don’t view what they went through as horrible or traumatic. It wasn’t until college that I realized my childhood wasn’t like other people’s, and even still, with years of therapy, there is resistance to describing some of what happened negatively. I suppose some of that is being in a balanced emotional state where I can reason that the adults in my life were just trying to do what they could and that there was love there. But as a child I certainly had a problem with internalizing all that was happening in my life. I was attributing it as a problem with me and that was not a helpful answer or a solution for what I needed, which was security.
When I was in that old triggering relationship, I was in multiple kinds of therapy and recovery from very helpful, experienced people. They helped me process my past and find those areas of childhood that were triggering my reactions whether it was shutting down and going cold or becoming flooded and panicking. It was a confusing time not just because I was experiencing true anxiety for the first time, but I was going to the other extreme spectrum and shutting down as well. I might go from talking robotically and putting distance between my ex-partner and me to crumbling and spending hours crying. I felt deep pain in my body during these moments when I desperately wanted his comfort and affection but was terrified of it when it came.
As my therapists said, it was a survival mechanism from my past that was helping me cope with an unhealthy present.
The ex-partner had such similarities to my dad that brought out that avoidant side and the perfectionistic side. He was dismissive and sometimes had cutting words, he would intellectualize an emotional conversation and say I was being illogical, he brought up fond memories of his exes often along with comparing me to them and what they did better and had a way of circling conversations so nothing he did was wrong and everything was everyone else’s fault. As my therapists said, it was no surprise that I gravitated to him because of my unresolved grief and longing for a relationship with my dad, and my desire to hear him genuinely say ‘I love you.’”
There was also the side of this ex-partner that was too close to Mike. He could become rageful, raising his voice, and throwing something at the wall or hitting something. He hit the dogs and would yell at them. He had addiction issues with drugs and alcohol. These moments scared me and I reverted to a child-like frozen state when this happened. He would buy me gifts either as apology or to try to win my love instead of the hard work of connecting emotionally.
And yet he was telling me things I had never heard from anyone else but had so desperately wanted to hear. Like how he loved me, how special I was, and professions of commitment. He had moments of normalcy that was all intertwined with the negative moments. It was this push and pull where some moments felt safe but then some moments I had deep debilitating fear and anxiety. This meant my stress system could never fully relax, and my emotions were overwhelmed and all over the place.
The other big symptom of this attachment style that became full-blown when I was in this relationship was the onslaught of dissociations and depersonalization episodes. This is when an overwhelming life event happens and your body doesn’t know how to react and so it shuts down all systems. You feel like you detach from your own body and disconnect from reality.
It can feel different for everyone, but mine were more like depersonalization. I felt like I had left my body and was watching myself through a TV screen. I was an observer of what was happening to me and the world felt like some weird dream that I couldn’t touch. I had no sense of time and what felt like hours were just seconds if I remembered the episode at all. This condition is more common for those who have experienced trauma, abuse, and extreme stress. It was something that happened fleetingly as a child but because it was associated with moments when I was alone and just walking around being sad around the neighborhood, I didn’t think much of it except that I was a weird kid. When I got in this relationship, I started to experience this more often and for days at a time, and they were traumatic in themselves.
That relationship ended and this style of relating came to an end. The trigger was gone and I was in a much better mental state with my therapists. It took the experience to understand that there was this emotional undercurrent in me and to then be able to manage it. While it’s a relationship I learned a lot from, I never wish to experience it again.
Earning Security
This practice of developing a more consistent style of secure relating is often referred to as earning security.” –Secure Relating: Holding Your Own in an Insecure World by Ann Kelley and Sue Marriott
I had one last solo session with the couple’s therapist that my ex and I were seeing. In that session, the therapist said to me, “You have come so far, and you will absolutely find someone who is much better for you.” It was bittersweet because I knew I was in a much better place now that the relationship had ended. I told her how well I was doing, and I could feel pride in her. She was also an adoptee, and her perspective was essential during that relationship and what I had to process. I got into another relationship after that one, and it was like walking into another reality. Many of the issues and attachment behaviors from the previous relationship were nonexistent to minimal in the next one. I knew that was largely due to the person I was in a relationship with, who was much less chaotic, and due to all the work I had done in therapy thus far.
Finding Power
What changed? I had to develop a secure base within myself that was not dependent on others. Secure Relating says that “a secure base is more than just an ability to relate well to others; it’s a protection system in itself.” This secure base can be seen as an emotional safety net. It’s an internal feeling and confidence that there will always be a safe place for you. In Love Understood, Mucha quotes a person with secure attachment who says that because of her healthy loving family, “no matter where they are, they always have a feeling of belonging.” I was jealous upon reading that. As you know from my other blogs, belonging has always been a struggle for me. It’s something I’m leagues more comfortable feeling now, but it has been a core desire of mine.
I had to find my own source of power. Verrier from Primal Wound talks about the need for adoptees to find their power, and that means power within, not power over. She says “power within makes us feel calm and whole. It allows us to be assertive but not control over others. When one has true power, it makes us free, whereas always feeling the need to control others takes away our own power. True power involves taking responsibility for our choices and actions; it involves establishing and maintaining boundaries; it involves inviting change; and it involves taking risks.” I had to find this, which was hard coming from a relationship that devastated my self-esteem. I had to believe in myself and my worth to advocate for my boundaries and actively choose my way forward.
Secure Relating says, “Insecure relating is fear internalized. Security is love and trust embodied. Healing requires taking in and accepting the love you deserve.” Like one of my favorite quotes from the book Perks of Being a Wallflower, “you accept the love you think you deserve.” I was suffering from self-hatred and pain from my past that brought me to accept the bad treatment I was getting because I was telling myself this is what I deserved or that I wouldn’t be able to find a better love. I had to work on these misconceptions and improve my self-esteem before I could accept a better love.
I remember I had a lot of things I was working on toward the end of the bad relationship and once it ended, all related to self-esteem. I told myself every day to write three things that I was grateful for and 10 things that I was proud of about myself or why someone would want to be in a relationship with me. It was instrumental in helping me get my confidence back. I look back on that relationship and feel sad for myself. I wrote these goals, and I remember crying while writing them because I knew I was in such a bad place with all of them. I was not being an advocate for myself, and neither was my partner. I knew it was my responsibility to take care of myself and that I couldn’t rely on him anymore to be a supportive partner to me.
- I will be self-loving and more Self. More myself, more who I am and want to be, my own priority and number one caretaker of myself.
- Control my emotional regulation. Ninja at it! Zen master.
- Live out my values even when it gets hard. Compassion, generosity, love, growth, positive open mindset, hope.
- Prioritize me. My health comes first. I have the right to do what will be good for me.
- What can I do? I have power. I have control. I can be creative and find a way.
- Find peace and happiness when you can and with what you have available.
- Ask myself: What do I need right now?
I had to find the power within to overcome the emotions associated with my eating disorder and feel at peace with myself. My eating disorder stemmed from deep hatred for myself. I had to drop the perfectionistic drive by learning that there was no such thing as truly perfect and that being perfect wouldn’t solve my problems. That helped me embrace my imperfections and learn how to approach them and grow from them instead of driving them out.
Starting from the ground meant I could reexamine what loving myself meant to me and how I wanted to define that moving forward. I defined what I wanted from my next relationship and told myself that I deserved a healthy love. I learned to be more self-assured, confident in my wants and needs, and confident that I would be able to love once again and that it would be better this time. As Secure Relating puts it, “relating securely does not always mean being nice, ignoring your anger, or giving up your important stance. It means not being ruled by fear and reactivity in the communication process.” I trust my emotions and take agency in being proactive in trying to securely relate and reach a deeper emotional maturity.
I already had strong ideas about my values and how I viewed my relationship to the world and other people, but I had to interrogate if I was truly living that out. I couldn’t live out a love ethic if I didn’t love my true self.
Facing Pain
Self-awareness is not always exhilarating. Sometimes the revelations that emerge as we closely and honestly examine our families are profoundly sad.” –Gaining: The Truth About Life After Eating Disorders by Aimee Liu
As I have noted a lot through this writing, facing my emotions was essential to earning security. That does not mean a reduction of pain. In fact, the opposite. I must remember that denying pain was the reason for my eating disorder and the reason for my insecure attachments. Secure Relating quotes Danielle Bernock from Emerging With Wings: A True Story of Lies, Pain, And The LOVE that Heals saying, “Trauma is personal. It does not disappear if it is not validated. When it is ignored or invalidated the silent screams continue internally heard only by the one held captive. When someone enters the pain and hears the screams healing can begin.”
In relation to being an adoptee, I had to accept that “nothing can save the child from that primal pain of separation from the first mother, except keeping them together as mother and child.” To become more secure, you must embrace what they call “clean pain.” That is the unavoidable discomfort of life’s challenges. If you run away from those, you never grow. That is a theme I’ve written about before too.
Secure Relating writes that “to ignore, suppress, or spend our lives regretting our hardships is to diminish ourselves.” We are the culmination of our life’s experiences, particularly the painful ones. It can only do harm to bury those times rather than let something grow from the pain. Verrier writes that for adoptees, “healing starts with acknowledging the loss, exploring roots, and choosing agency over victimhood.” It’s a choice one must make and one that I had to intentionally choose through behaviors and actions. I will always have the scars of my wounds, but I don’t have to let them rule my future life.
With the acknowledgement of pain, I had to grieve. I had to grieve long and hard for my birth mother. I talked earlier about how a therapist made me realize I did have heartbreak for my relationship with my dad. With processing that came grief. I was avoiding grief and then when it happened, I had unhealthy coping mechanisms to deal with it. Now I have gone through grief in various forms and embraced it not just from the intellectual philosophical perspective, but from lived experience. I have accepted that it is a part of life and love.
But that doesn’t mean I look forward to it. I anticipate anxiously the mountainous grief that I’m positive I will experience when family members die or when Parker dies. But I have better coping tools in place and will accept that pain.
Loving People
Deciding not to act is a choice. As Richo says, ‘Remember that what we are not changing, we are choosing.’” –The Primal Wound by Nancy Verrier
These attachment wounds came out when I got in a relationship because the act of loving is one of the deepest and hardest emotions. It can unearth aspects of us that we didn’t know were buried inside us. To heal though, does not mean running away from relationships. It means going towards them with the determination to change and learn. Even when those inner child triggers come up, as they will and do in a relationship, it is on me to control my actions and behaviors. It is on me to be an adult. And it is on me to choose to do the work.
The New York Times had an article on love and relationships and reported on some advice from Ian Kerner, a psychotherapist and sex counselor. He wrote that, “Strong couples consist of strong individuals, and strong individuals are often bolstered by strong relationships.” As I was saying before, I was already working on making myself a strong individual for myself but also for my future relationship. It was a choice I knew I had to intentionally make and would be my constant task in life.
I had to reflect a lot on the bad relationship once I was out of it to not repeat those mistakes. Reducing it to just “the bad relationship” is not how I view it, but it’s just the simplest way to differentiate the relationship that I had that was overall unhealthy from the one that I had that was healthy. Certainly, I believe maturity is being able to reflect on people and see their flaws and not make excuses for them but give them compassion and understanding. It was a sad and hard breakup for both of us, I think harder on him actually. I don’t believe he did things with ill intent. Haunts were in him just like they are in me. But I knew that he did not deserve my love or could give me the love I needed. This is a grace I give to a lot of things in my life where harm happened. Sometimes people just trying to do what they could in their life at the time. While it doesn’t excuse the actions or impact, it does allow me to remove blame from my emotional brain space which can be a gluttonous beast of an emotion.
We are so disastrous to each other. We will, I hate to say it, continue to be so. And as always, the stakes of how disastrous we are to each other will not be dealt out nor experienced fairly or equally. Our collective and individual disastrousness is worth raging about, it’s worth screaming about, it’s worth all our grief.
And yet… we are also all miracles. And just as there is no productive way forward that isn’t fully honest as to how disastrous we are to each other, there is also no way forward that doesn’t involve the constant reaffirmation of all of our potential miraculousness. We must be honest about the messes we are while also being afforded a belief-beyond-deserving that we could perhaps be better.” –Garrett Bucks
I briefly wrote before about another relationship that was much different from the “bad” one that has shaped much of this writing. This new relationship was like going from night-to-day. The triggers were manageable, the emotional conversations were more grounded, and the patterns were overall healthy and reasonable. It was like the temperature went from the extremes of hot and cold to a breezy and comfortable spring day. That’s not to say this healthy relationship wasn’t without its issues. But the issues were resolvable, the partner was much more stable and closer to secure relating, and the compatibility was far more obvious.
One thing that Secure Relating reiterates and that I knew even in my avoidant therapy was that we need to be around people and have those interactions to heal from trauma. It can’t be done alone with just introspection, even though that’s very important as well. Secure Relating says, “New safe connections are needed in real life to heal at the deepest level.” They talk about how being in a safe, loving relationship can help the body rewrite the old scripts by learning safety and being able to document these new secure relating experiences. Eventually with enough of those, the body can develop a new relationship to interpersonal relations and the stress system.
I am going forward with life choosing to love. I believe love is a choice and a constant choice that one must make in a relationship. I accept that hurt will happen even in a good, healthy relationship and I choose to be vulnerable despite it. I have grown a lot since that first relationship and since the early days of avoidant loneliness. Thinking about where I was and how far I have come actually makes me excited at the prospect of new love. That fact, that I am excited instead of scared of love is such a relief to myself.
There is a proverb in Chinese: “路遥知马力，日久见人心。” Which translates to: a long journey reveals a horse’s real strength, a long time shows a man’s true heart. This journey with my attachment style and healing is still ongoing and I think has shown my strength thus far. I think as my life goes on, I make more choices, and have more experiences, my heart will continue to become more true to me.