BODY – Somatics

Secure attachment is when you feel safe and comfortable both giving and receiving love. It can contribute to a regulated nervous system. Insecure attachment is when you don’t feel so safe in this area and it can contribute to a dysregulated nervous system. Around half the population (at least 40%) have an insecure attachment style, which means they can experience fear, anxiety and avoidance – or clinginess, co-dependency and an intense need for constant reassurance – in the area of intimate relationships. These are, respectively, the insecure-avoidant attachment style (I don’t need anyone, I’m better on my own and I don’t want others to come too close because they’ll only let me down anyway), and the insecure-ambivalent attachment style (my partner will abandon me if I don’t make a constant effort to keep them close). Both involve some anxiety and fear, which are pretty dysregulating emotions.

We learn about relationships during our infancy and childhood, but relationships in adult life can also impact our attachment style.  You can find out what your main attachment style is here by taking this free quiz:

https://traumasolutions.com/attachment-styles-quiz/

Let’s use the insecure-avoidant style as an example of how insecure attachment can impact the nervous system and cause dysregulation, which then potentially leads to serious psychological and physical problems. If you have an insecure-avoidant attachment style, attachment wounding likely occurred in childhood when you needed consistent love and support from parents, but instead you experienced one or both of the following:

Perhaps a parent was emotionally absent and neglectful, so you learned not to have any emotional needs. As an adult this looks like: I don’t need anyone, I can do everything alone, relationships don’t give me anything and anyone that loves me is probably insane, I’m fine and other people have it much worse than me, etc. You minimise your own needs and refuse to feel your own feelings to such an extent that you become disconnected from your emotions, you dissociate and you lose the mind-body connection, resulting in nervous system dysregulation and the beginnings of chronic health problems.

Or, perhaps a parent was abusive, angry and unpredictable, so you learned to always work hard to please them in order to avoid conflict. Or you learned to freeze and shut yourself down to minimize the chances of them exploding on you. Or you became hyper-vigilant in life and you’re always in fight-or-flight mode because you are always on the lookout for threats. As an adult this looks like: I do everything that’s required of me, I keep myself “small”, I work until burnout, I don’t complain, I avoid eye contact, I don’t know how to relax, I’m “always on”, I can’t sleep properly, I struggle with high-functioning anxiety, panic disorder, perfectionism and over-working, I’m nervous when someone gets too close to me because I know intimacy and close relationships can bring threat, conflict and danger, etc.

To expand further on this second example, if you experienced something like this in childhood, it’s likely that your threat-alert system is always on, so your nervous system is always in a dysregulated state. The fight-flight response was only ever supposed to be switched on for brief periods – until we outrun that bear, or the battle with a neighbouring tribe is over. We were never supposed to stay in this state for weeks, months and years.

Keeping your nervous system in this state consumes a HUGE amount of the body’s energy. Imagine pressing the “sport” button in your modern car, which ups the ratios in the gearbox and sucks more fuel in to the carburettor for increased performance – not just because you’re about to overtake someone and you need that extra power for a moment – but because you’re in such a rush that you need that kind of power constantly in order to get from A to B on time. Think about what that would do to your fuel consumption, over time. Think about what constant fast, hard, aggressive driving does to the components of the car and the engine over time.

That’s what you’re doing to your body when you’re living in a chronically dysregulated state. Instead of being able to use fuel to support regular tasks like digestion, and regenerating and repairing any damage (as the body usually does when it is resting, sleeping etc.) your body is instead forced to direct all its power towards this adrenalin-fuelled state of hyper-vigilance and anxiety.

This can’t go on forever, so at some point the dissociation is going to kick in and the nervous system is going to shut down and go into the dorsal-vagal or “freeze” state in a final, desperate attempt to conserve some energy and minimize the constant threats in a different way – by essentially “playing dead”. And if that still doesn’t work – and the stressors still don’t go away, and rest and repair still aren’t materialising – then the system will collapse. And this is where autoimmune disorders, chronic pain or fatigue and major issues of the digestive system kick in as the body literally tells you, “NO MORE. I will NOT go on like this. It has to stop” (see Dr. Gabor Maté’s wonderful book, When the Body Says No: The Cost of Hidden Stress).

This is an extreme example where I’m taking the whole process to the Nth degree. But it does happen. And it’s often when we hit these “rock bottom” moments, and we get physically sick, that we finally acknowledge that, “Hey, there might be a real problem here. It might go deeper than just my body. And I might need some help to get better.” And that is what I’m here for.