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Disorganized Attachment or Why You Think You’re Crazy But Really Aren’t

October 14, 2011 176 comments

People with insecure attachment: avoidant, anxious or disorganized, tend to have a much more interesting time in therapy than people who formed secure attachments in childhood. I want to talk about insecure attachment and its affect on therapy, with an emphasis on disorganized attachment since that was with what I struggled. Human beings are born unable to care for themselves in any way; they are totally dependent literally as a matter of life and death on their caregiver, usually their mother, but whomever it is that is responsible for caring for them as a child. (That’s so our heads are small enough so that a baby can be delivered. Can you imagine delivering a child with an adult sized head? Time out for all the readers who have delivered babies to wince and say “OUCH!” Okay, everyone back?) There is a biological imperative for the child to stay close and there is a corresponding biological imperative on the part of the caregiver to respond to the needs of the infant. Thus the two humans, infant and caregiver, form an attachment bond. Humans form attachments throughout their life, but none as profound or far-reaching as the one they experience with their parents. That bond, formed while we are developing, has the power to shape both how we see ourselves and the nature of the universe in which we live. Continue Reading

Categories: abandonment, ambivalance, attachment styles, attachment theory, dependence, disassociation, disorganized attachment, earned attachment, feelings, insecure attachment, needs, self-worth, trauma

What I learned in therapy Lesson 2

October 9, 2011 7 comments

See here for Lesson 1.

See here for Lesson 3

Lesson #2: I don’t need to be scared of my feelings or overwhelmed by them. I learned this by watching the Boundary Ninja not be overwhelmed by them.

By the time I started working with the Boundary Ninja (OK I give, I’m using an acronym 🙂 BN) I had done significant work in therapy, recovering memories, processing trauma, learning about boundaries and most importantly, in learning I had my own voice. Throughout this, anyone who knew me (for over three minutes) would have probably described me as a very emotional person with a wide range between my highs and lows (for the geeks in my audience, if I were a sine wave, I would have a high amplitude. :)) So you can imagine my total shock that the most major discovery I made working with BN was how very far I stayed away from my feelings. They were often in lockdown, shut away, and kept as far from me as possible. This dynamic was so pronounced that I was in my late 40s before I actually realized I was a right-brain dominant person and that I actually had a creative side. I had fled SO far over into my left brain to stay away from my feelings that I had gotten an engineering degree.  (I worked as an engineer for eight years, then left the work force for five years when my first child was born and when I returned became a technical writer.)
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Categories: abandonment, disassociation, feelings

Commitment

October 7, 2011 8 comments

This is poem/dialog I wrote when I really started to trust the Boundary Ninja to not abandon me and see me through my healing (a promise which he kept). When I started working with him, I both craved and deeply feared moving closer in relationship.  This dialog was actually an attempt to articulate the limbic resonance between us, the unspoken questions I asked with my feelings, and the unspoken answers he provided with his consistency. It was also an internal recognition of the priceless gift I was being given.

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Categories: abandonment, ambivalance, commitment, limbic resonance, transference