Understanding and Healing Attachment Trauma: From Infancy to Adulthood
As a licensed therapist specializing in brainspotting and working with adult children of emotionally unavailable parents, I've witnessed the profound impact attachment trauma can have on someone’s life. I myself, have attachment wounds and can relate. In this post, we'll explore nature of attachment trauma, its origins in infancy, its effects on brain development, and how therapies like Brainspotting can pave the way for healing through nurturing further changes in the brain.
What is Attachment Trauma?
Attachment trauma occurs when a child experiences persistent disruptions in their bond with primary caregivers, typically parents. This trauma can stem from various circumstances, including:
Emotional neglect or unavailability: This can be generational and can come from parents themselves never being provided emotional nurturing needed to know how to connect with their children beyond providing basic needs. This can look like parents not being able to guide children through difficult feelings, or dismissing difficult feelings altogether.
Physical absence of caregivers: This can sometimes be unintentional, such as them needing to work 2-3 jobs to make ends meet.
Inconsistent or unpredictable parenting: This can sometimes look like parents where their own mood and/or guilt and fears determine their parenting choices in the moment, instead of sustaining long-term parenting strategies.
Abuse or maltreatment
These experiences can lead to a deep-seated belief that the world is unsafe and unpredictable, and that others cannot be relied on for support and comfort. The effects of attachment trauma can reverberate throughout a person's life, influencing their relationships, self-esteem, and overall well-being.
The Crucial Role of Early Attachment
The core of our ability to form relationships and regulate emotions begin in infancy. During this critical period, babies are entirely dependent on their caregivers not just for physical needs, but for emotional attunement and regulation.
When a baby cries and a caregiver responds consistently with comfort and soothing, the baby learns:
Their needs matter
The world is safe
Others can be trusted
If you’re a parent yourself, you might even notice yourself just “knowing” what your child needs before they need it, or planning for their needs ahead of time. This is attunement to your child. This process creates a secure attachment, which becomes the blueprint for future relationships and emotional regulation. Secure attachment provides a stable base from which children can explore the world, develop autonomy, and form healthy relationships later in life.
How Attachment Trauma Begins in Infancy
When caregivers are consistently unresponsive, unpredictable, or harmful, the infant's developing brain adapts to survive in an environment perceived as unsafe. This is where attachment trauma takes root.
The Neurobiology of Attachment
In the first years of life, the brain is forming millions of neural connections every second. These connections are shaped by experiences, particularly interactions with primary caregivers. Here's how attachment experiences influence brain development:
Stress Response System: Repeated experiences of unmet needs or fear can lead to an overactive stress response system. The brain becomes wired to be in a constant state of hypervigilance. This can result in elevated cortisol levels, which can have long-term effects on physical and mental health.
Emotion Regulation: The prefrontal cortex, responsible for emotional regulation, may not develop optimally when caregivers fail to model and support emotion regulation. This can lead to difficulties in managing emotions in adulthood.
Oxytocin System: Often called the "love hormone," oxytocin plays a crucial role in bonding. In secure attachments, the release of oxytocin reinforces positive feelings associated with closeness. In attachment trauma, this system may be underdeveloped, making it challenging to form close relationships later in life.
Right Brain Development: The right hemisphere of the brain, which is dominant in processing emotions and nonverbal communication, is particularly influenced by early attachment experiences. Disruptions in attachment can impact the development of these crucial social-emotional processing abilities.
Limbic System: The limbic system, including the amygdala and hippocampus, plays a key role in emotional processing and memory formation. Attachment trauma can lead to an overactive amygdala, resulting in heightened fear responses, and can affect the hippocampus's ability to process and store memories effectively (might label experiences as MORE scary than they necessarily are, because the memory is around how the body is reacting, not the external information and facts).
Attachment is enhanced through the eyes
When a caregiver and baby engage in mutual gaze, it triggers the release of oxytocin, often called the "bonding hormone," promoting feelings of trust and affection. This eye contact serves as a form of emotional communication, allowing the caregiver to attune to the baby's emotional state and helping the infant learn to regulate their emotions.
Long-Term Effects of Attachment Trauma
The neural patterns formed in infancy can persist into adulthood, influencing various aspects of life:
Relationships: Difficulty forming or maintaining healthy relationships, fear of intimacy, or patterns of codependency.
Emotional Regulation: Challenges in managing emotions, leading to mood swings, anxiety, or depression.
Self-Worth: A pervasive sense of unworthiness or feeling fundamentally flawed.
Trust: Struggle to trust others or, conversely, being overly trusting and vulnerable to exploitation.
Stress Management: Heightened reactivity to stress and difficulty self-soothing.
Identity: Unclear sense of self or feeling disconnected from one's own experiences and emotions.
Healing from Attachment Trauma: The Role of Brainspotting
Even though early experiences have a big impact, our brains can change throughout our lives. With the right help, it's possible to heal from attachment trauma. One way to do this is through a therapy called Brainspotting.
What is Brainspotting?
Brainspotting is a type of therapy that uses eye positions to help people process deep emotions and traumatic memories. It's based on the idea that "where you look affects how you feel." Do you ever find yourself staring into “space” or in a specific spot or direction when you are talking or thinking? This is a brainspot! Every brainspot is associated with an area of processing in the brain. Our eyes are actually directly connected to our subcortical brain through the ocular nerve. The subcortical brain is where non-verbal processing and automatic body reactions occur.
How Brainspotting Works for Attachment Trauma
Brainspotting can be helpful for healing attachment trauma because:
It can reach experiences from before we could talk.
It connects with the emotional part of the brain and can help heal emotional dysregulation as well as dissociation
It helps us be aware of our feelings without judging them.
It can create new pathways in the brain for healthier ways of connecting with others.
It links body sensations with emotions, which is important for processing trauma.
Attachment trauma can have a big impact on our lives, but it doesn't have to control us forever. With help from therapies like Brainspotting and a better understanding of how our early experiences shape us, we can heal. If you think you might have attachment trauma, talking to a therapist can be a great step towards feeling more secure and having better relationships. Remember, it's never too late to create healthier ways of connecting with others and feeling good about yourself.
Check out more about Therapy for Childhood Emotional Neglect or Contact Me with any questions. I’m always happy to help!
