Attachment, Resilience and Trauma
Therapists asking about your childhood is a cliché. But…it’s cliché for a reason.
Your childhood has a massive impact on who you are as an adult. In my work as a trauma therapist, I know that your childhood experiences have a huge impact on stress resilience. People who had childhoods that fostered secure attachments (or adult relationship that facilitate an “earned secure” attachment style) are better able to recover from stress, and less likely to develop PTSD after a traumatic event.
Let’s back up. What do I mean by “attachment”? It basically means the way that you receive soothing and connection with your primary caregiver(s) as a child. The quality of these early attachment relationships to a large extent influence everything about you.
“Attachment is part of a 3-part motivational system of fear–attachment-exploration. Fear triggers attachment behaviors. The safe haven of secure attachment soothes the fear of the amygdala, and opens exploration….Exploration eventually bumps us into something that triggers fear again which shuts down exploration and triggers attachment behaviors again which soothe the fear again and open exploration cycle of safety-exploration again.” -Linda Graham
Because we have a need for regulation, and as a baby haven’t yet developed the structures to do this ourselves, we rely on our primary caregivers to help us regulate. This is what our attachment system does for us. Attuned attachment typically leads to a wider window of tolerance, while misattuned attachment typically leads to a narrower one.
If our early attachment relationships are safe and attuned, we develop the ability to trust, accurately assess fear and regulate emotions. We can move more easily between fear, attachment and exploration. When something stressful happens to a person with secure attachment, their fear/anxiety peaks, and then over time returns to baseline in the window of tolerance. This happens more quickly and easily for those with secure attachments.
However, if our early attachment relationships are injurious or traumatic, then we might get stuck in any part of the fear-attachment-exploration cycle. This depends on how our caregiver(s) responded to us when we sought soothing after fear, or when we craved exploration. We may become more likely to seek attachment in response to fear (anxious attachment style), or seek exploration in response to either fear or attachment (avoidant attachment style), or oscillate between both (disorganized attachment).
This has a huge impact on how we respond to stress.
With an insecure attachment style (anxious, avoidant or disorganized), the peak of anxiety/fear may be higher, last longer, and take more to return to baseline. In addition, that baseline may be higher than those with secure attachment as well—meaning anxiety without stressful events idles closer to the edge of the window of tolerance.
Because our early attachment relationships influence our ordinary stress resilience, they also influence resilience to traumatic stress.
Those with insecure attachment styles are more likely to develop PTSD after a trauma than those with a secure attachment.
[This DOES NOT MEAN that everything is predetermined. Our attachment systems are quite amenable to growth and change, as is our stress tolerance. This is simply more information about how our early childhood experiences shape our adult selves.]
About 20% of people who experience trauma go on to develop PTSD. There is not a ton of research on how to prevent the development of PTSD after trauma, but this information is an interesting piece of that puzzle. If we can help kids have more secure attachments, then it follows that less kids and adults will experience PTSD after a trauma.
(I know, it would be great if trauma just didn't happen...but we don’t have control over that. However…I'd also argue that less interpersonally caused trauma would happen if more of us had secure attachment...but that’s a post for another time.)
Attachment security being a resilience factor supports the theory that relational experiences are necessary for healing trauma: developing more secure attachments in and through therapy will help widen your window of tolerance, support your nervous system in becoming more adaptive and flexible, and provide new healing experiences.