The phobia of attachment and attachment loss

Literature on DID lists a number of ‘phobias‘, patterns of fear and avoidance, that hinder us from getting better. We will take a look at them to see how we as patients can understand them and what might help us in dealing with them. The phobias we will look into here are

• attachment and attachment loss
• inner experiences
• other parts
• trauma memories
• change
• normal life
• intimacy (emotional and physical)

(If I remember, I will link the new articles in the list as they get published. Whenever we start a series it can take a long time to finish it, please be patient)

 

But is it literally a phobia?

We don’t understand so called phobias as avoidance or resistance here. We consider them indicators of integrative capacity or the lack thereof. We believe that it is natural and completely normal to avoid overwhelm and the intense fear is what paces our approach so we don’t hurt ourselves with content we are not able to integrate yet. Integrating experiences is hard. That doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t do it at all. It just means we can do it slowly and gently as we build capacity and not all at once. We believe that thinking of these intense experiences as irrational fears isn’t very useful. We keep the term because it is a defined concept in literature and I dislike inventing new names when it is more important to understand what it means than what it is called.

 

Phobia of attachment

The phobia of attachment will probably be the first we encounter in therapy because it can be activated as early as by first contact with a therapist. A new potential attachment partner enters our world and that is enough to feel the fear. A considerable challenge early in our therapy will be the development of a solid working relationship. That places the phobia of attachment and attachment loss first on the list. But it is not a phase 1 phobia alone. It will be with us throughout our recovery journey and the way it feels and shows will change over time. When our therapy comes to an end we will face feelings about attachment loss. They won’t feel like the desperate panic that we experience early on when trauma dynamics are triggered but it will still be really difficult and it should be. It shows us that we have built something of importance over the years of treatment.

There is really good advice for therapists on how to deal with this phobia in The haunted Self (van der Hart, Nijenhuis, Steele) and Treating trauma-related dissociation (Steele, Boon, van der Hart). But what about us? What can we do to help ourselves with the intense feelings that come up?

 

Attachment vs Attachment cry

When a new potential attachment partner enters our life it will probably get the attention of the parts inside who carry our attachment needs. But these parts are usually severely traumatized because trauma happened through attachment figures. The experience was so overwhelming that we separated the need, safely held by trauma parts, and moved it from our awareness. The intensity of the trauma experience is linked to the attachment need and frozen in time within the parts. When it gets triggered by the presence of a potential attachment figure, it all comes up together and the experience has the quality of a threat to survival. The need becomes an overwhelming reality and the loss of connection feels like the loss of life itself. Literature calls this ‘attachment cry’ and it is a survival response like flight or flight, just a social one that cries out for help. It still holds the same kind of immense energy and floods our being with this intense need to be rescued.

Attachment cry is not the same as attachment. It is the trauma response that is wrapped around our attachment wound. Actual attachment lacks the desperation, panic and fear of elimination. Attachment can be deep and down to our bones, but it feels safe, warm, peaceful, contained. There is a deep ache and sorrow in losing it but no overwhelming panic. Natural attachment loss feels like a loss of something that had an important place in us, not like being murdered by the person who withdrew. If it feels like trauma, it probably is trauma and might be based on an older feeling we know from the past.

 

The Problem

When attachment-holding parts get triggered, the attachment trauma they hold gets activated too. There is no way for a host early in treatment to know how to deal with this. It is overwhelming and utterly scary because of that. We might get flooded with an intensity we can’t cope with.

And where there are parts that hold attachment needs there will also be parts who hold needs for autonomy. They get triggered by the desperate search for attachment and move in the opposite direction, away from the potential attachment figure. While the attachment cry parts are driven by their needs for attachment these distant parts are usually driven by the fear of attachment loss, even if they wouldn’t call it that. It is just smart and logical to avoid deep connection because people will let us down anyway. No attachment means no disappointment. Entering a new relationship with our therapist will activate both sides at once.

The struggle between parts who want to move into different directions can feel like it is ripping the system apart. We just wanted to get help for our life and now that we are in therapy it all suddenly escalates into utter chaos and a tug of war. And all of it has the flavor of raw survival and a threat to our life.

 

The therapeutic goal

If we work with a real DID specialist, they will not make it a goal to create attachment. That is way too explosive. What we are looking for is a therapeutic alliance, a working relationship, that is solid enough to give us the courage to face difficult experiences. We are looking for the exact distance that does not activate the parts who need autonomy in their tendency to withdraw while also just reaching the parts who hold the attachment needs so that they can feel supported. No closer and not farther away. That is the sweet spot our Ts should be aiming for to balance the dymanic and therefore the whole system. They will not enter the scene to meet any single part’s obvious needs and go for the distance the system as a whole needs instead. A therapeutic alliance is not the same as an attachment relationship. Unskilled therapists might not be aware that we are not going for attachment as a basis for DID work because they use it as a base for their other clients.

Our actual need as a system at this point is to feel safe. Everyone has a right to that. It is why we will look for safe experiences with our Ts instead of close experiences. Closeness does not feel safe for some. But there will be safe experience in this middle ground that everyone can tolerate. We build real attachment, not the triggered attachment cry, from the base of these safe experiences. But that will take a long time and be very slow. Our Ts don’t want us to be utterly dependent on them. They want to collaborate with us to find new experiences. When attachment cry is activated it deactivates curiosity and our ability for exploration. We need that active to discover new and helpful things for and about ourselves. A therapeutic relationship in DID therapy does not build on feeling close. It creates a framework to explore scary things by providing safety and encouraging curiosity for the whole system. We will get deeper into relational topics when we work on the phobia of emotional intimacy, which is considered a late phase challenge and not something to start with.

 

 

How we can support ourselves

 

When attachment cry is triggered

Attachment cry creates a trance-like alternative reality that floods our being and it makes us experience relational dynamics that are old and trauma-related. We usually lose our connection to the current reality of seeing a therapist who tries to give us a safe space to work on our problems. The way we experience them changes. They feel like a parent, a savior, someone whose role and responsibility it is to take care of us now because we are in so much need and overwhelm. We lose our ability to see them clearly and in our alternative reality they become someone else. For some parts that might be a positive rescuer, for others they are a disappointment, a failed caregiver, and they feel angry. Our most solid way to get out of this trance-like state is to step out of the alternative reality our brain created.

 

Reality-checking the therapeutic relationship

Introducing a reality check at this point feels like reaching through dense jelly to find the facts. We are caught in a trauma-reality and it is incredibly hard to find our grounding and the real people who are engaged in therapy today. Questions we can ask ourselves:

• Who is this person? Why are we talking? What is the goal of this exchange?
• How is the role of a DID therapist defined? What do they offer? What is it they don’t offer?
• What is the difference between a therapist and a parent?
• What is the difference between a therapeutic alliance and loving care?
• Why does therapy happen with fixed appointments and not all day and in all situations?
• What am I really paying for in therapy? Is it love or is it something else entirely? What do therapists provide for me?
• What did the therapist do that felt too close or too far away for some parts?
• What did that remind us of? Is the pain more an old one or more a new one and how much %?
• Who was the person in the old reality? How did this reality overlap with this current situation?
• What are we really trying to achieve with this therapist?
• How old are we today? What are adult things we are capable of today?
• How can an adult and capable part step up and do something helpful for us?
• Can the parts who feel really needy right now notice this adult part who is offering support?

It is normal to get a ‘I technically know that, but…‘ as a response to attempted reality-checking. The felt sense of attachment need is so big it is not easily impressed by facts. Gentle and steady orientation towards the grounded reality still shows an effect over time. The more we practice this clarity with younger parts the faster they will be able to recover from getting triggered. It helps when we engage with the need ourselves instead of waiting for an outside person to come and rescue us from this experience.

There are many valid approaches to needs and attachment with DID but I personally recommend redirecting attachment needs towards capable parts of the system and creating earned secure attachment within. I experience it as the safest way to manage these attachment needs. The despair goes down as our own care goes up. We don’t depend on outside people for that. Triggered attachment parts can learn to orient towards inner helpers instead of outside helpers for support.

 

The Code of Alliance

The fear of attachment loss can be just as overwhelming as the trauma-based cry for attachment. The thought of losing a therapist can feel like the destruction of our self. That is because of old experiences where attachment injuries quite literally led to structural damage within our identity. It is not because the therapist is actually leaving. We can reality-check the contract we have with our therapist that defines the relationship.

• The T offered us therapy. We agreed. We have a contract that we will make this work.
• There are rules in this contract. We have responsibilities, the T has responsibilities.
• The rules of the contract also explain boundaries. There are specific behaviors that would actually lead to a termination. What are these behaviors? Did we do any of those for real?
• Just being difficult is not enough to erase an agreement. Everyone is difficult. Ts know what they agree to. Did we do anything apart from getting triggered?
• Did T ever say they would leave or is that a fabrication of my mind?
• What exactly did they say? If I asked an AI what these exact words mean, would it tell me it means they are leaving or something else?
• Without my scary interpretation, what did they try to express?
• Did other parts understand it differently?
• Are we sure or should I ask T about it for clarification? Asking is usually helpful, T might not have noticed that this happened and misunderstandings are common in human communication.
• One of our agreements is to have a therapy session before either side ends therapy impulsively. Even if the need to end it immediately is really big, we have to do this session first. That is part of our agreement.

I personally find it incredibly helpful to have audio recordings of sessions in case these attachment problems got triggered. It gives me the ability to listen to it word for word and hear the actual tone of voice later. It helps with the reality check. And if T really said something stupid or made a mistake we can go through it step by step the way it was recorded instead of having to rely on anyones memory and interpretations. There is no need to keep these recordings stored anywhere. If the session went well we can even delete it without ever listening to it again. It is just incredibly useful to have in case something goes wrong.

 

Mentalization

The third options for a reality check is probably the hardest and it might not be useful for all parts or early on. Mentalization is the ability to hold someone elses mind (and personality) in our mind. We create an inner picture of who someone is and how they are, how they think and feel about things, how they evaluate them, the process of how they manage information and turn it into action. Basically, we create an inner model of them inside our head. And once we have that, we can reality check our experience of them against that model. It helps with the transference dynamics that go rampant in these triggered situations.

• Is this how they usually act? Would I expect that from this person or someone else in my life?
• Based on what I know about this person, is that a typical response for them? What would be typical?
• Would the person I have experienced do it the way that I am scared of right now?
• Have they done this before? What is the actual pattern I have experienced so far?
• How probable is it that this is a form of misunderstanding, based on who they are, how they think and what they want?
• Who is the person I am confusing this with? How is my T different from them?

We might need a bigger set of experiences with a therapist to test their personality against our triggered reality. The pain is valid but it is an old one and there is a current reality that is important to understand as well. It does not negate the pain. It just places something else next to it that is also real right now. Grounding does not mean that the need has to go unmet. I means we get oriented enough to take care of it ourselves. Parts who judge us for taking care of needs with compassion are creating a problem instead of resolving it.

 

It can make things easier to start reality-checking if we use an Unblending tool first to separate the front part from the attachment cry part that is flooding us. It makes the experience easier to work with. Ideally, our therapists will be active and help us through this experience by being a safe base.

 

 

[You can find more infos in The haunted self (Steele, Nijenhuis, van der Hart), Coping with trauma-related dissociation (Steele, Boon, van der Hart) or Healing the fragmented selves of trauma survivors (Fisher). I added my own experience of what works best for me.]