Attachment Styles and Trauma

Attachment Styles and Early Trauma

Getting Help through EMDR

Our earliest relationships in life tend to significantly shape how we experience feelings of closeness, safety and connection throughout our lives.

These patterns are known as attachment styles and they often operate beneath our conscious awareness holding a significant influence over how we relate to partners, friends, coworkers, and especially, ourselves.

When there has been experiences of trauma, attachment styles can be impacted and can often become more intense, confusing or painful. The following aims to help you understand attachment styles and how these are impacted by trauma.

What is the function of attachment?

At its core, attachment can be best understood as a means of survival during the earliest years of life. If you consider the perspective of a newborn baby, its very survival depends on their caregiver being present and providing care, food, safety and emotional regulation. Thus, by attaching to a caregiver that is consistent and emotionally present, they learn that others are predictable and can be relied upon to meet their needs. Typically, when this care is somewhat inconsistent we can see this impacting upon an individual’s attachment style both in their younger years and throughout their adult lives.

What are attachment styles?

Attachment theory describes how we learn to seek closeness, safety and connection in relationships, particularly when we are under stress. These patterns emerge early in life through our interactions with caregivers and continue to shape our adult relationships.

Typically, attachment styles tend to fall into four (4) common categories.

Secure attachment

People with a secure attachment style tend to feel quite comfortable with intimacy and autonomy. They have a tendency to trust others, regulate their emotions adaptively, and navigate conflicts with others without excessive fears, withdrawals or emotional dysregulation. In relationships, they are typically able to easily give and receive love and tend to have quite stable relationships with others over time.

Anxious attachment

People with an anxious attachment style tend to hold a deeper fear of abandonment or rejection. Individuals with this attachment style tend to be highly sensitive to relational and emotional cues, seek reassurance, and experience intense emotional reactions when connection feels uncertain.

Typically, they tend to reach out to others when they are feeling distressed, which can often become perceived as ‘too much’. This can also further their experiences of abandonment or rejection.

Avoidant attachment

Individuals with an avoidant attachment style tend to experience discomfort with closeness and place a strong emphasis on independence. For people with this attachment style tend to keep others at a distance as emotional needs can often feel unsafe or overwhelming.
This often leads to withdrawal or emotional shutdown when in relationships and in times of distress.

Often, they can struggle with being vulnerable around others and choose to avoid deeper levels of intimacy, further reinforcing their desire for independence and handling things on their own.

Disorganised attachment

Individuals with a disorganised attachment style typically have a severely dysregulated attachment system. They often want closeness whilst simultaneously fearing it. This pattern is often associated with unresolved trauma and can often feel confusing or distressing for the individual and for their partner(s).

Is there a relationship between attachment and trauma?

In essence, yes. Attachment difficulties do not arise ‘out of nowhere’. They are often adaptive responses to early environments that were inconsistent, unsafe or emotionally unavailable.
Some examples of childhood traumas that can impact attachment styles include:

Emotional neglect and/or inconsistent caregiving
Chronic criticism, shaming, or invalidation
Repeated exposure to conflict, violence, or unpredictability
Caregivers who were emotionally dysregulated

In these instances, caregivers’ inconsistency results in them being a source of fear or emotional pain for the individual. This results in them learning, at a deep level, that relationships are risky. Furthermore, these experiences can become implicit memories (felt in the body rather than remembered as clear stories).

For adults, these attachment difficulties can manifest as:

Intense fears of abandonment
Difficulties with trusting or relying on others
Repeating unhealthy relationship patterns
Intense emotional reactions in relationships

Typically, individuals often know that they are reacting this way but often find themselves struggling to be able to modify these patterns.

Why attachment patterns can feel so hard to change

Attachment-related reactions are often quite fast, automatic and charged with strong emotions. Typically, they are less driven by conscious thought and more by the brain’s threat and survival mechanisms. People have been raised in an environment where this is ‘all they’ve ever known’ and find it hard to break away from feeling this way.
For a lot of individuals, insight alone is often insufficient to be able to change these patterns as the emotional reaction within the brain is often experienced as just as severe as if the past is happening in the present.

How EMDR can help with Attachment and Trauma

EMDR is a trauma-focused therapy that helps the brain to reprocess unresolved memories that continue to show up in the present and continue to impact relationships and other aspects of everyday life. When focusing on attachment-related trauma, EMDR focuses on several main areas:

1 – Reprocessing Early Attachment Traumas and Experiences

EMDR can target early memories linked to attachment such as feeling rejected, unsafe, unseen or alone. As these memories are reprocessed, they can then lose their emotional intensity and no longer trigger their usual automatic reactions.

2 – Shifting Deeply Held Beliefs

Attachment trauma can often create core beliefs such as:

I’m unlovable
Everyone will abandon me
Vulnerability is dangerous
I can’t trust anyone

EMDR can help to shift these beliefs for people on the emotional level, beyond the intellectual.

3 – Improved Emotional Regulation in Relationships

As attachment-related traumas are reprocessed, it allows the individual to be less reactive. This, in turn, leads to:

Fewer episodes of emotional dysregulation during conflict
Reduced intensity of emotional dysregulation and conflict
Decreased need for withdrawal, pursuit or for self-protection

4 – Creating new relationship experiences

EMDR can also help to strengthen corrective emotional experiences. This can create moments of support, safety, and connection which, in turn, assists the individual to learn that relationships can be secure and safe.

Moving Toward a More Secure Attachment

Whilst completely changing one’s attachment style can be quite difficult, it is possible to develop a more secure attachment style. This is not about blaming past caregivers but more about allowing these deep-seated patterns to relearn responses that are no longer suitable to the environment.
With trauma-focused therapies (such as EMDR), many individuals will experience:

Greater emotional regulation in relationships
Increased self-compassion and compassion for their partner
Improved sense of clarity of one’s emotional needs
Clearer boundaries and communication
A deeper sense of emotional safety for them and their partner

In Summary

For many people, relationships can feel disproportionately painful, confusing, or draining. This doesn’t mean that someone is ‘too much’, broken or avoidant. These types of relationship patterns make sense when seen through the trauma and attachment lens. Many of these patterns would have proven useful for survival at certain parts in life where things were emotionally unsafe.

EMDR can help to target these attachment-related experiences and their impact on people’s lives at the source.