What is an attachment (or primal) wound? This is a wound that developed out of early life experiences, based on the unavailability and/or lack of safety of our environment and our caregivers. Attachment relates to the level of safety, consistency, and responsiveness that was available to us at developmentally crucial points of our life. More specifically, infancy through childhood and then again in adolescence. The important thing to know about attachment or primal wounds, is that they do not only occur in cases of extreme abuse. I believe that this is a common misconception that immediately turns people away from considering the idea that they may have an attachment-based wound. These wounds occur for a variety of different reasons. It could be that you were born to a bother mother who was severely depressed, anxious, highly distracted, or dependent on substances. It could be that you were born into a family where one or more siblings proceeded you, making it more challenging for your parent or caregiver to give you adequate and timely responses to soothe and nurture you. It could be that you lived in a highly chaotic and stressful environment, with adults who did not know how to regulate their own emotions. It could be that you had emotionally distant or emotionally unavailable parents, who did not have the knowledge or emotional skills to engage with you in a deeply emotional and meaningful way. It could be that your parents or caregivers were emotionally immature and responded to your emotions in a way that shamed you, punished you, or left you alone to figure it out on your own. It could be that your parents or caregivers had misinformation on how to appropriately respond to your needs, such as letting you "cry it out" or "self soothe" when this is quite literally developmentally impossible. It could even be that you had well-meaning parents who simply worked too much or were over-scheduled and not there consistently enough to securely attach to you in the ways we are biologically wired to do. So here is what happens when these are the types of experiences that we have – our nervous system and deepest part of our brain (the subconscious) begins to internalize dysregulation and messages like “I am not worth responding to, I can not count on my needs being met, I am not sage”. This is all completely outside of our conscious awareness, as we are too young to be thinking in these terms at this point in development. As you can imagine, having this pattern or messages imprinted into your being can begin to create a wide variety of symptoms. When most people hear of attachment wounds, they hear it in the context of how these symptoms might show up in relationships. Attachment wound symptoms in relationships can look like avoidance of intimacy, anxiousness and a preoccupation for reassurance in the relationship, a push-pull in behavior dynamics, lashing out or “protesting” behavior in lieu of proper communication, or self-sabotaging in relationships. Attachment wounds can be very apparent in relationships, because that is exactly how they were created – in relationships. Now that we understand what causes attachment wounds, the symptoms of what it looks like in relationships makes a lot of sense, right? If we never learned and internalized appropriate responsiveness, consistent connection, and deep emotional safety and understanding with an attachment figure - we are not going to respond to relationships in a healthy, productive way. In fact, we may even begin recreating emotionally toxic or abusive dynamics ourselves. While attachment wounds are the most apparent (and most talked about) in relationships, this deep-seated wound can cause a slew of symptoms that are not treated properly because we are misunderstanding or overlooking attachment wounding as the primary cause. Other symptoms of this primal wound can be addictions, binge eating or other disordered eating patterns, chronic anxiety, chronic depression, low self-worth or self-esteem, ADHD symptoms, feeling chronically mentally and emotionally disorganized and chaotic, or poor sleep. Maybe the connection between these symptoms and the root cause of attachment is not as obvious, but let’s think about this for a minute. It feels pretty terrible for an infant or developing young child to not be responded to properly, whether we are consciously registering this pain or not. And when I say it feels terrible, I mean catastrophically so. When needs aren’t met at these crucial points in development, a survival state or annihilation fear is activated. This feeling is deeply, deeply painful. And what do humans do to numb pain? We eat, we drink, we get high, we throw ourselves into chronic screen use to distract, we over-work ourselves, we numb. Anything we can to disconnect from that gnawing feeling inside that just doesn’t feel good. Chronic anxiety and chronic depression are the nervous system’s response to not being able to internalize safety. The body never learned it was safe and that it would be responded to. Therefore, it either becomes dysregulated with fear (anxiousness) or it collapses and “gives up” (depression). These two emotional states, as you have now learned, can prompt so many different behaviors that work against our health. Many people may not be able to remember the details of early childhood, making it difficult to really pinpoint whether or not they had these experiences and therefore uncertain of the true cause of their symptoms. I can say with a good degree of confidence, that most of us have attachment wounds. This is because generationally, culturally, emotionally, there are a lot of individuals who struggle to parent and live a lifestyle that is truly conducive to allowing infants and children to internalize secure attachment and consistent emotionally safety and connection. While there most definitely may be other contributing factors to your symptoms, if you notice these symptoms in yourself, I encourage you to learn more about the ways to heal these very powerful, very deep, primal wounds. Healing these wounds allows you to live in a branch of your nervous system that allows you to thrive and make healthy choices for you and your life. And as long as we are alive and learning how to live, why not give it a try?
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