January 2022 - Kate Gegg, AM, LCSW

January 24, 2022March 27, 2023

Secure Attachment

Many of us look for “chemistry” in romantic relationships. Often times that “chemistry” is actually the activation of our attachment circuits.
Attachment patterns are initially formed in infancy and become a template for which we base intimate relationships on moving forward in our lives.
When we think about attachment patterns, we are thinking about how we connect to others, how secure we feel in that connection, how able we are to trust, rely on others / ourselves, and how comfortable we feel with exploration away from (and distance in) our closest relationships.
We form that “blueprint” attachment to the people we are most dependent on in infancy and in the earliest years of our lives. For most of us, that is our parents.
So yes, even though you don’t remember it, those early attachment experiences shaped you, and continue to effect you in relationships moving forward.
If, in those early relationships we consistently felt security (i.e. comforted, taken seriously, and attended to while we were in duress) AND accepted in our needs for distance, exploratory play, and independence we are likely to develop what’s called a “secure base” in our attachment relationships.
That secure base feels something like, “I know I can count on them to be there if I need them, but I also know the quality of the relationship won’t change if I want to do my own thing, have my own space, and go at my own speed”.
Only about 50% of the population connects to others with that secure base. The remaining 50% struggle with some combination of these dynamics in relationships.
Our attachment patterns hugely impact who we are drawn to, what our experience of dating is like, how our relationships go, what types of conflicts we are likely to have, and how comfortable we feel with commitment and distance in relationships.
Knowing and understanding our attachment patterns can make us more efficient and self-aware daters and partners. This can help us find a good match and take care of ourselves and our partnerships, even if we’re with someone who has a different attachment type.

Our attachment patterns hugely inform who and how we date, what we expect of ourselves and others in intimate relationships, and who ignites a “spark” in us. I’m always a bit hesitant of the whirlwind romance built exclusively on a spark, not because I don’t believe in love, but because I do believe in the power of our attachment circuits.

Our earliest relationships become a roadmap of sorts where we learn how to maintain a sense of connection to others. When we are infants we are in a state of complete dependency on our caregivers, and even though we have no conscious memory of that time, we are highly aware, perceptive, and paying close attention to what works to get us what we need from our caregivers and what doesn’t.

We take the information collected at that time and use it to generalize to other relationships as a blueprint for how relationships work, and how we should work in relationships for them to be successful. Did you often need to really cry and scream to get your parents to drop what they were doing to help you? You probably internalized that you need to be LOUD with your feelings for people to pay attention to you. Did you seek closeness to a caregiver who often struggled with physical affection? Well, perhaps you learned relationships go better when everyone takes space.

While we aren’t going to remember these experiences from infancy, we can look at how we attach, relate, connect, and trust in relational settings as adults to come to understand which roadmaps feel closest to ours. There are four primary attachment types (or roadmaps): Secure, Anxious, Dismissive, and Unresolved.

As unique as we all are as individuals, there are predictable patterns of relating we all fall into and the more we know and understand our patterns the more we can 1) challenge and change patterns that don’t work for us 2) Look for romantic partners who compliment our attachment style 3) Have constructive conversations with our partners about our attachment similarities and differences to strengthen our relationships.

Lots more to come on attachment. For now, consider how securely you attach in different types of relationships. Resources below to help on that journey.

Comments:

Coming back to “the spark” I mention throughout the post. That “spark” is most likely to be felt in relationships where there is at least one party who is not operating from a secure base. There will be more on that in a future post, but I want to be clear that a “spark” isn’t “bad” it’s just often confused with “love at first sight” or “true love”, and in my experience it usually has a lot more to do with attachment patterns. Also, to be clear, if there is a spark in your relationship that doesn’t mean it’s a problem, it just may mean you and your partner will feel intense chemistry in some ways, and perhaps intense disconnects in others. That’s ok, and can all be worked through with two willing and committed parties. This will all make more sense once we get further into attachment types.
A little more on attachment types: these are general patterns, but they are not hard patterns, meaning we all have a tendency to fit into one of the four categories, but we can slide around depending on the relationship, how we are doing, and the context in our lives. We can also attach securely in some types of relationship, but not in others (friends vs romantic relationships, men vs women, etc). As promised, more to come!
If you’re a parent reading this your first thought might be, “oh lord I didn’t feel like picking my kid up this morning and now I’ve scared them forever”. Don’t be so hard on yourself – attachment patterns are formed over many experiences and are much more about the big picture of the relationship than about anomalies. No parent meets their child’s needs all the time, and quite frankly no parent needs to. Part of feeling secure in a relationship is having the confidence that a relationship can endure even with differences between the involved parties. That missed hug this morning can be a opportunity to strengthen the security of a relationship when paired with something like: “Daddy / Momma loves you, but I’m not going to pick you up right now. We can snuggle later.”
A strong / secure connection doesn’t always mean “giving in” or never disappointing the other party, but it does often mean validating the other party’s experience. For more on how to validate AND set limits see this post on validation. If you’re a parent and you need help with this, you are not alone! This is not always intuitive, especially if it wasn’t your experience in childhood. For more guidance on incorporating healthy boundaries with validation check out Big Little Feelings, they have a paid course and free content through their instagram account (and as a friendly reminder I do not get any kick backs/ payment for referrals I make to resources, I just tell you about them because I think they are helpful).
This post has more details on how our attachment history impacts our dating world.
The best book I’ve found for clinicians on attachment based work is David Wallin’s attachment in psychotherapy. Here are some useful excerpts about how secure attachment affects development and relationships: “Secure babies appear to have equal access to their impulses to explore when they feel safe and to see solace in connection when they do not” (page 19). “Children with a history of secure attachment show substantially greater self-esteem, emotional health and ego resilience, positive affect, initiative, social competence, and concentration”. (page 23) “If our early relationships were secure, the result may well be a capacity to respond – that is to think, sense feel, and act – with openness and flexibility” (Page 65). Full Citation: Wallin, D. J. (2007). Attachment in Psychotherapy. Guilford Press.
The best book for non-clinicians I have found on attachment theory is calling “Attached: The new science of adult attachment and how it can help you find – and keep – love”. I have some gripes about this book that I would tell anyone before recommending they read it. 1) I think there is a bit of critical tone towards the dismissive stance in the book, and a bit of a favorable tone towards the anxious stance. The fact is each attachment style has its upsides and downsides and dismissive isn’t “worse” than anxious (or vice versa). They are just different. 2) they do not cover the unresolved attachment type, which I think is a disappointing miss. 3) There is not enough of an emphasis on the fluid nature of attachment types; a person who is usually one attachment type is not ALWAYS that way in all relationships, even if they are that way most of the time. 4) It mentions the ability to move towards secure attachment, but I don’t think enough time is spent on it. 5) There have also been critiques on it being heteronormative and too simplistic which I think are both fair. So, in short (maybe not so short now), It’s a great introduction, the best I’ve found, I’ve recommended it many times – but don’t take it as the whole story.
If you’re not up for reading a whole book, this article is a great start – though I don’t love the description of the attachment styles themselves or what forms them.

January 13, 2022March 27, 2023

One Mindfully

A simple, but transformative skill: learning how to be fully and wholly present in just one moment at a time.
Learning “one mindfully” (as we call it in the DBT world) can reduce anxiety, improve concentration, increase our ability to handle a crisis, increase our ability to connect to our authentic selves, and increase our efficiency.
The opposite of this concept is “mindlessness” (not fully being present with any activity – i.e. “going on autopilot”) or multi-tasking (attempting to do two activities at the same time).
The most common way many of us “multi-task” is something most of us would not identify as multi-tasking: Thinking about one thing while doing another.
Like the time you were in a meeting but actually preoccupied by the conflict you had the night before. Or, when you were writing an email while thinking about how to prepare for something later in the day.
When we use one-mindfully we work to be present with our whole selves, which means paying attention to the content of the moment while also paying attention to internal cues about our experience of that moment.
We set an intention for what we will focus our attention and energy on, and we work to keep ourselves focused on that intention despite urges to split our attention, or give in to distraction.
This does not mean that we cannot choose to change where spend our energy and attention or that we have to completely finish before shifting our attention; it means that when we change what we are doing (and where we are focusing) we do so with intention and awareness, even if we are right in the middle of something.
This also does not mean we cannot transition quickly between tasks (think about cooking: you are chopping the carrots, then stopping to stir the onions). We can be wholly present with one activity while another in the background does not have our attention.
This skill centers us, and requires that we recommit again and again to what we will spend our energy on in the face of distractions. It also requires that we reassess as time goes on to determine if we want to continue recommitting to that moment, or to changing where our focus will be.

Most of us struggle fairly significantly with “doing” one thing at a time. This is because many of us are “doing” one thing, but thinking about another. In this way, we’ve become accustomed to leaving the present moment for one in the past, one in the future, or one that may never happen. When we do this we reduce our ability to concentrate by dividing our attention. We also decrease the likelihood we will pick up on important cues from the environment around us; when we are distracted we are not able to be as perceptive.

In simple terms this skill is “doing” one thing at a time, but more complexly it is devoting your attention and energy to only one “thing” at a time. As Marsha Linehan says, this means, “When you are thinking, think. When you are worrying, worry. When you are planning, plan. When you are remembering, remember. Do each thing with all of your attention”. Dialectical Behavior Therapy, and Marsha Linehan, would encourage all of us to spend as much time as possible being wholly present with whatever moment we are engaged in.

Many of us are spending large chunks of our time distracted, and not present in both mind and body in whatever moment we are in. To be wholly and fully present means paying attention to your outer world (i.e. the conversation you are in) and your inner world (your internal reactions to that conversation in your thinking, feeling, and sensing). Although it sounds simple enough, it is actually a lot of input to pay attention to at any given point in time and takes some practice straddling both your inner and outer worlds simultaneously.

One-Mindfully can be a powerful grounding and centering tool because it focuses us simply on the moment we are in. A common treatment for trauma, anxiety, and depression is learning how to be in and stay in the present. Like any new skill, I encourage folks to try this first in “low stress” situations (i.e. ones that are not likely to incite a lot of activation in your inner world) before high stress situations (i.e. ones where you expect to have a lot of thoughts, intense feelings, or intense sensations).

See comments for more on this skill including ideas for how to implement it today.

Comments:

Often, I see this struggle to be “one mindful” in the way many of us manage our relationships with our computers during the workday. Does this sound familiar: “You’re writing an email and you get a pop-up notification that you’ve gotten a calendar invite. Without even thinking you stop writing the email, review / accept the calendar invite, and then try to return to your email. But wait, now you lost where you were and so you re-read your last sentence, get back in the mindset of the the response and boom, an instant message comes in asking you if you saw the most recent email from so-and-so about this-thing or that-thing. So you scroll to the top of your inbox and read the email, respond to the instant message but wait now you can’t find that email you just had opened. Ok, you found it. But wait what were you saying, and ok now there is only 5 minutes left before the next thing on your calendar and somehow you haven’t gotten to that response yet. Now you feel this anxious pressure to get it out, but you are also aware this isn’t the quality response you wanted to send out so now you have to decide if it’s more important to get it out quickly or thoughtfully…etc”. Multiply that experience throughout your day and your day ends with you feeling frazzled, unproductive, behind, like you’ve missed a bunch of things and like you’ve been ping-ponging around all day. And that’s because you have! All those notifications are very stimulating and they are prime ways in which we forget to insert that intentionality into our decision about where we spend our time and attention when we are with our devices. One low-stress way to start trying to introduce this skill into your life is by bringing thoughtfulness to what notifications you need on, and how you respond to those notifications when they are on. As Marsha Linehan might say, “When you are writing an email, write the email.” If you find you are tempted to be distracted by your phone turn it over or put it on silence. If you are expecting to hear from someone important while you write, work to make yourself accessible in a way that will not distract you (i.e. ask them to call you, or silence texts from other people except that one person). Setting up a routine that enables a mindful perspective can take some work, but it should help improve concentration and productivity and leave you feeling better at the end of the day.
Back when therapy was always in an office you were forced to take a one-mindful perspective with your session. You didn’t have a screen, or your phone handy and the temptations to engage with something outside the content of the session were much less accessible. If you are doing remote based therapy try and re-create the in-office experience as much as possible by eliminating the possibility of something outside of the session distracting you away from being fully in the session.
If you are someone who commonly multi-tasks or operates in a “mindless” manner, it will take time time and deliberate practice to bring a more “one-mindful” stance to how you spend your time. For tips on how to bring this concept to your life at a pace that works for you, see my post on how to sustainably make long-term changes.
This concept / skill is kind of like living your life in real time meditation, albeit a meditation where you are responsive to your environment. Like our meditative practice, your mission throughout is to regularly bringing your attention back to your chosen focal point. For an introduction to meditation, and this concept of returning to a chosen focal point, see my introduction to meditation post (which has more direct parallels to today’s post), and my post on general meditation.
Sometimes we find that we can’t control our attention. That’s ok. No one is perfect at this. Sometimes we are coping best by accepting what is not within our control, and often times what is out of our control is content of our inner worlds. (If you struggle with this concept this post on acceptance might help). This can mean the thought, feeling, sensation, or external circumstance arising is too distracting or powerful to redirect yourself from (i.e. you just got news of something upsetting and of course you can’t focus on your previous intention). At that time, it can be helpful to view that as a cue that you need to switch your attention over for a period of time, even if you don’t want to. A powerful way in which you can stop ruminating (when you can’t stop thinking about something) is to set a timer for ten minutes, and just be with the worry. After ten minutes, when the timer goes off, you may find it’s easier to redirect your attention back to a different focal point. After ten minutes of really fully devoting yourself to it (instead of having it simmer in the back of your thoughts for hours at a time where you ping pong between thinking about that and all the other things in your day) you may have found a solution, or exhausted all the different ways you can think or worry about something, but either way it’s more likely to feel less pressing. There are other skills to combat intrusive worries for another day.
Regarding the idea of perfection – it is not realistic (or even the goal) to exclusively live in a “one mindfully” stance. Sometimes we do want or need to split our attention and that’s OK. The key is to selectively and with awareness choose to do so, and to use one mindfully with more important tasks.
A little more on identifying and understanding multi-tasking. There are three ways of multi-tasking: attempting to do one activity while you think about another activity (sitting in your meeting and thinking about that conversation you had last night), attempting to think about two things at the same time (going through the grocery list while you try and plan out that email to your boss), or attempting to do two things at the same time (talking to your friend and scrolling on your phone). A one-mindful perspective would encourage you to limit each as much as possible.
If you find yourself regularly tempted to split your attention or “zone out” start trying to pay attention and get curious about it. Sometimes there is a lot we can learn about what we are trying to distance ourselves from when we pull our full attention away in these ways.
Marsha Linehan’s skills, including one-mindfully, are outlined in full in her skills training manual and associated skills training workbooks.

January 5, 2022March 27, 2023

What is Trauma?

We can think of a traumatic experience as our brains saying “this is more than I can handle”.
This means what is traumatic for one person may not be traumatic for another; each person has their own unique tolerance levels for being in (and capacities for coping with) different types of stressful situations.
An experience has the potential to be traumatic for any of us if it pushes us beyond our capacity to cope, manage, make sense of what is happening, and feel safe (relationally, emotionally, and / or physically).
Feeling safe and secure are the opposite of the vulnerability, fear, and helplessness that are experienced when we are in a traumatic situation.
While there are most certainly ranges in the severity of trauma, too many of us hold too narrow a definition for what qualifies as “traumatic”. As a result we are often critical and judgmental of ourselves and others when trauma responses make themselves evident. This interferes with the process of healing from trauma and easing those trauma responses.
When we’ve experienced trauma it effects our brains; development; and sense of trust. We can become limited in our ability to be vulnerable, connect, remain focused, plan for the future, and adapt in moments of stress.
The responses that are typical of a traumatic experience are actually our body’s way of trying to protect us; numbness so we don’t have to feel the pain, anger so we can fight back, forgetting or blacking out so we are not consciously haunted by a memory, a limited ability to plan for the future so we can stay attuned to present threats, and challenges with vulnerability to prevent us from being exploited by others.
We would be best served to think of trauma (and the impacts of it) existing on a spectrum. Most of us have experienced something in our lives that deeply overwhelmed us, and most of us would go to great lengths to not go through that experience again. Trauma responses are our brains way of trying to protect us from going through a painful experience again.
We cannot recover from or heal trauma with the typical problem solving methods we use in other areas of our lives. If you’ve tried, it’s likely you’ve gotten stuck, frustrated, angry, judgmental, critical, or hopeless about changing what cannot be healed through logic and willpower alone.
I often find it’s helpful to work backwards; if you see, feel, or notice a trauma response, trust what your reactions communicate to you, even if you don’t identify as having a trauma history. If what I’m writing sounds familiar there a good chance something on the trauma spectrum is present and interfering with your ability to move forward in your life.

Sometimes our trauma is evident, other times it can only be found in the echoes it leaves behind. After trauma, a combination of the following dynamics are often present:

A struggle to trust and feel a sense of safety, even in scenarios where it might not be intuitive that someone wouldn’t trust or feel safe. Individuals who have experienced trauma remain on guard for something that could hurt them, and at times hurt their relationships in an effort to protect themselves. This can include a more limited ability to relate and connect to others due to difficulties feeling secure enough to make oneself vulnerable.
A brain that has experienced trauma is literally under more stress than a brain that has not (see comments for the science of this). After trauma, biological changes to the brain can lead to a struggle with planning, adapting, attention, concentration, and managing or expressing emotions in a constructive manner. This means work, planning, finances, relationships, communication and problem solving can all be effected.
A struggle with hopelessness or powerlessness are common and often caused by how out of control, unfair, or unpredictable life can feel after experiencing trauma. Those pervasive struggles can lead to difficulties with taking initiative, independence, and motivation.

While the desire to tame trauma responses is natural, it is counter productive to try and change them through the same tactics we use when we need to change patterns, solve problems, or break old habits in other areas of our life. When we use these tactics and don’t see changes we can dig in and tell ourselves to “try harder”, “get it together” or “endure through” leaving us angry, critical, and judgmental at our lack of progress. Unfortunately, this lends itself to shame, feelings of inadequacy, hopelessness, and giving up none of which helps us heal, change, or grow.

Our work, instead, is to retrain our brains to no longer need the trauma responses. The core of that work is in finding safety. More on that in another post. For now, consider your life and relationships through the lens of trauma and its impacts.

Comments:

Trauma doesn’t just have to be a single incident, in fact most often it is not. For more on understanding trauma see this post on relational trauma.
Another way to think about trauma is having to operate / function / live outside of our window of tolerance without the ability to bring ourselves back within the window.
Our brains are always working to try and to keep us safe. This prior post addresses how the past can inform the present.
As Bessel Van Der Kolk explains, “Traumatized people become stuck, stopped in their growth because they can’t integrate new experiences into their life”. While this language is strong, what he communicates is that trauma interferes with our ability to be objective and adaptive in the present moment, especially in scenarios that trigger a trauma response. We are less able to appropriately “read” threats accurately when we have a trauma history because our brains are so busy trying to protect us from getting hurt again. We can get unstuck, but to do so we first must accept trauma responses for what they are, and then work to heal from our trauma so we no longer need the response. The quote is from Page 53 of “The Body Keeps the Score”.
There are many useful resources out there on trauma. A personal favorite that I often encourage my clients to read is “Trauma is Really Strange” by Steve Haines. He accessibly explains what trauma is, how it effects you, and steps towards healing in a 30 minute read filled with pictures, scientific evidence, and explanations of the biology behind trauma and trauma responses.
More on the Biology of Trauma from Bessel Van Der Kolk’s “The Body Keeps the Score”: “Under ordinary circumstances the two sides of the brain work together….when something reminds traumatized people of the past, their right brain reacts as it the traumatic event were happening in the present”. He goes on to explain the left side of the brain essentially shuts down while the right brain is so activated, which means the part of our brains that helps us find words and internally organize our experience is inaccessible. At that moment, we can’t “grasp the long-term effects of our actions, or create coherent plans for the future”. (Page 45). He goes on to explain that “the stress hormones of traumatized people… take much longer to return to baseline and spike quickly and disproportionately in response to mildly stressful stimuli” (Page 46), what this means is that the stress our bodies experience when we have a history of trauma is actually higher than the stress on a body without the same history. The repeated presence of these stress hormones have detrimental impacts on our brains, “The insidious effects of constantly elevated stress hormones include memory and attention problems, irritability, and sleep disorders” (Page 46). Full Citation: van der Kolk, B. A. (2014). The body keeps the score: Brain, mind, and body in the healing of trauma. Penguin.