Whether you know it or not, your relationship with others is influenced by something called Attachment Styles. The style in which we attached to others can cause us great joy, or great pain. Over the last four episodes I spoke about how attachment styles form, and then I talked about Secure, Anxious and Avoidant attachment styles. This week I am covering Disorgansed Attachment. This style is a particularly interesting one because it incorporates the energy of anxious and avoidant attachment at once. It is still being studied and leads to a lot of disregulation and chaos in the nervous system and an inability to feel safe or loved. Although attachment styles is something I learned when I was studying to be a therapist, I have had 2 main mentors who have really helped me to understand this and how it plays out in our lives; Georgia Rose and Chantelle Raven. You can find out more about Georgia here on Facebook: www.facebook.com/georgiaroseevents and here on on Instagram: @georgia_liberate And Chantelle here: embodiedawakeningacademy.com/ Here also are 2 different questionnaires on attachment styles for you to find out which dominant style you are: https://www.attachmentproject.com/attachment-style-quiz/ https://traumasolutions.com/attachment-styles-quiz/
Whether you know it or not, your relationship with others is influenced by something called Attachment Styles. The style in which we attached to others can cause us great joy, or great pain. Over the last four episodes I spoke about how attachment styles form, and then I talked about Secure, Anxious and Avoidant attachment styles.
This week I am covering Disorgansed Attachment. This style is a particularly interesting one because it incorporates the energy of anxious and avoidant attachment at once. It is still being studied and leads to a lot of disregulation and chaos in the nervous system and an inability to feel safe or loved.
Although attachment styles is something I learned when I was studying to be a therapist, I have had 2 main mentors who have really helped me to understand this and how it plays out in our lives; Georgia Rose and Chantelle Raven. You can find out more about Georgia here on Facebook: www.facebook.com/georgiaroseevents
and here on on Instagram: @georgia_liberate
And Chantelle here: embodiedawakeningacademy.com/
Here also are 2 different questionnaires on attachment styles for you to find out which dominant style you are: https://www.attachmentproject.com/attachment-style-quiz/
You can connect with me on:
Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/livingthroughheart)
Instagram (@livingthroughheart)
Youtube (https://www.youtube.com/@livingthroughheart/)
LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/donnajoyusher)
https://traumasolutions.com/attachment-styles-quiz/
Welcome to the Living through Heart Podcast.
I'm Donna Joy Usher. And I'm an analytical hypnotherapist, a psychotherapist, a spiritual healer, a magnetic mind coach and a multi award winning best selling author. I believe that everybody is capable of creating whatever they want, if they can just get out of the beliefs and stories in their head. This podcast is an audio blog of my thoughts as I go on a journey to heal my soul, surrender into my feminine power, and to live from the present moment in heart. I hope you find it amusing, interesting, thought provoking, touching, raw and inspiring.
Hello, it's Donna Joy Usher. And welcome to this 32nd episode of Living Through Heart, my podcast. And today's the final installment, so part five of five of a series I've been doing on Attachment Styles.
So over the last four episodes I've talked about, what are attachment styles, how they form, and then I have gone through the three main attachment style, so secure attachment, and then two of the three insecure attachments, which are avoidant and anxious.
And today I'm going to talk about a less common insecure attachment style called disorganized attachment or fearful avoidant. So this is something that is kind of still being studied and being understood. And it is a very unique attachment style, that people can flow in and out of attachment styles between secure and anxious and avoidant, but unless a couple of very particular things have happened to them in the childhood, they don't tend to go into disorganized attachment.
Now I have a couple of clients who are disorganized attachment. So I have seen the particular challenges in working with them in regards to my other clients who aren't disorganized attachment. And in general, people who are in disorganized attachment need a lot more help, a lot more work, a lot more therapy, to be able to get to a point where they can kind of be in flow and move into secure attachment.
So what is disorganized attachment? So this is the attachment style that forms when the child is, when the child is very young, right? So like a baby, a toddler, on their head, their needs, and the needs are being met by a caregiver that is really scary or threatening or abusive, imposing or invasive, right.? So basically, the child has to form an attachment to someone that they're not safe with.
And our whole modeling, our whole, like foundational belief system, our whole unconscious mind is basically based around keeping us safe. So when our caretaker is the very person that is making us feel unsafe, and yet, the child has to bond to them and rely on them, then it becomes... a very unique attachment is formed.
So there's a lot of freeze in the nervous system. So they're in sympathetic nervous system the whole time, because they don't know, they just don't know when they're going to be safe. So with the other attachment styles, anxious and avoidant, the caretakers were maybe sometimes dismissive, or they may not have been there all the time, or they might have been there in one form, like giving them what they needed, but not emotionally available to them.
But this is very different. So this is where a caregiver is actually abusing, hurting, threatening the child. Now, the other way that this can form is basically if the parent themselves is in such trauma, and has such unresolved trauma, and they have such an energetic state that they're unable to be kind or loving, and they're frightened, then the child is picking up on their parents energy and this can also form a disorganized attachment.
And this could be if the parent is an alcoholic or drug addict try and they might not be actually abusive, but they're just not present or attuned at all. And they're in their own turmoil, they're unable to meet the child at all. And so the child cannot attach to that level of fear, that level of dysregulation in the parent. And this causes severe emotional dysregulation in the child, in the little one. So it can also result in them taking on their parents' trauma and carrying it as if it's their own.
So disorganized attachment can also form throughout life. So if somebody gets into a relationship where they have been exposed to abuse, so this doesn't have to be physical or sexual, it can be verbal, it can be, you know, even passive aggressive, so emotional abuse, and the trauma of this experience disrupts them and then sends them a disorganized attachment.
So it doesn't just happen, like what a lot of attachment styles, the majority of the attachment and foundational the attachment is formed during the when the child is unable to protect themselves. The child is unable to look after themselves and the child is 100% dependent on their caregiver, but different attachment styles can form later on in life. So this can happen later on in life.
So when I've been talking about the other attachment styles, so I've been talking about analogy of a car, which Georgia Rose, one of my mentors, used when I was learning attachment styles from her. So with a disorganized attachment, basically, it's as if the person has their foot on the accelerator and the foot on the brake at the same time. And it's almost as if, at the same time, they have avoidant attachment and anxious attachment in their body. So they're wanting to attach to someone, but then they're desperately afraid of attaching to somebody and they need reassurance and they need love. But then they're also fearful of using losing their freedom. And it's all happening on at once and it creates a particular type of pressure within the person.
So in relationship, this person can be very hot and cold. And they can be either all in or disappearing, and they can switch between one and the other. So it can be between moment to moment, second to second, hour to hour, not even just day to day that they can switch between these two.
So whereas with the other insecure attachment styles, anxious and avoidant, these people have a predictable way that they deal when they feel unsafe and threatened. So the avoidance, when they felt frightened of losing their freedom, they go and seek space, and anxious when they feel threatened of being rejected, they come in being needy.
So disorganized, is totally different. Because how they respond when they feel threatened, is inconsistent, it changes from time to time. So it's one of the reasons why this style is really complex and difficult to summarize, is because they don't have this consistency in their behaviors.
They can't find safety within themselves, and they can't find safety and others because they didn't have the safety in others when they were a child. So therefore they didn't learn how to self regulate, they didn't learn how to give themselves that safety at all. And someone who is in disorganized attachment, they are continuously hyper vigilant, looking out for danger, looking out for... you know, they squash themselves into a certain shape, into a certain box and have to behave in a certain way because that was the way that they learned would minimize the negative impact from their caregiver.
So they anticipate being hurt, punished, neglected, abused, and even when someone is being kind, they can feel threatened because sometimes their caregiver might be kind, one second, and then horrible and abusive the next. So they're confused all the time, because their system doesn't know how to find safety, doesn't know how to relax and their nervous system is continuously in fight flight, or quite often freeze is what they go into.
So what I've observed personally within my clients that are in this disorganized attachment is that there's a lot of self hatred. They can't feel compassionate towards themselves. There's a lot of hatred towards their own body, especially if it was their body that was used against them. Like they were abused, whether physically or sexually as a child, or later on. So they have a lot of self hatred, there's no compassion there, they're often dissociate very easily. So they will be dissociated from the horrible things that happened to them. And they might even talk about them in a light hearted, funny way, as if it was like something that was funny because they're not connected in with the emotion of what happened because there just can't be, they can't survive.
And this is all... this attachment and this disorganized and this dissociation, it's all a way that they learned to survive, right? They learn to survive by dissociating from their emotions. And they learned to survive by fragmenting themselves into parts. And we all have different parts. We know when I'm working with people, we go back to different, little parts of us caught in trauma at different ages. But disorganized attachment are fragmented, and they have parts and often those parts are unaware of each other.
So I'm not saying it's like schizophrenia or something like that. But when I am working with them, quite often I'm doing parts therapy with these people and trying to bring them to a level of compassion for themselves. Quite often they can't even... if you take them back to a part or a memory, it's hard to even work within that memory because they hate that version of themselves. And so it's hard to get them to do the work that needs to be done to let go of what happened in that time. And that belief that was formed because they just, it's almost like they, they blame that part of them. They blame that small child for what happened and they can't let that go.
So I know also sometimes I find with them that it's definitely and this isn't just with disorganized attachment, this can be with any attachment form, or any trauma or any wounding or anything terrible thing that happened. Sometimes people have trouble moving on from it and letting go because this part of them, because it's such an important part of their foundation, and who they are and their makeup and their belief system and their nervous system and where they are, they can't let it go because it was too important. So what happened to them was too important. It's almost like as if by letting it go, even if they hadn't forgiven the person that did it to them, they almost feel like by letting it go, they're deeming that it wasn't important, what happened to them, so they're always stuck in the past, they're always stuck in the trauma that always stuck in the wounding. And they can't let go of that and move into an easy flow of happiness of being in the present moment.
So it's quite complicated. And they do need a lot of help, they need a lot of consistent support to reestablish trust, right, and healthy boundaries. And even in solid relationships, they have a fear of rejection, because they don't really have secure attachment at all. And sometimes they can go maybe into a bit of secure if they're feeling quite good, but then something will happen. And they'll straightaway go into anxious or avoidant with that person. So if you are friends with someone, or in a relationship with someone who is very disorganized, it can be quite chaotic, and you don't know where they're coming from, you don't know how they're going to react, we don't know how they're going to respond. And all you can do is really hold space for them to be within that and not judge them for what they're going through. And just just hold space for them to feel it and go through it and come back to you and come back to center.
So to heal from this towards secure attachment. Yeah, they need a lot of consistent support, probably a lot of therapy to help them establish this healthy boundaries and they need to restore trust, not just in other people, but in themselves, because they don't trust themselves. They need to feel a sense of protection and to create safety within and without. And they need protection, they need boundaries, they need safety, they need to feel all of this to come away from this disorganized attachment they're in.
And healing this trauma that led to this attachment style is really important. Letting this person experience a new reality, right around connection, allowing them to experience a new way of being basically, by going through therapy and being able to come to a place where they do feel safe to be in their body. They can trust themselves and others, and they can actually start to love themselves, therefore they can accept love from others.
So if this resonates with you, disorganized attachment, then just be kind to yourself, surrounding this, remembering that all of these attachment styles, were not the problem, they were the solution. They are what formed as a way to keep us safe. They were what formed as a way to help us understand the world. And they were what they were just you know what a small child who didn't know any better created as a way of being able to live and to know the rules and to stay safe. So don't be hard on yourself.
If you are in insecure attachment, especially disorganized attachment, because people who are in disorganized attachment are so hard on themselves. They're always hyper analyzing everything they've said, everything they've done, because they just don't know when they're going to be in danger. They just don't know what is going to trigger up them being in trouble or them being in fear of them being abused, or whatever it is this child where they still carry this energy of what it was like when they were a child even. Well, I mean, all the way through their adulthood if they don't let it go.
And this is how these woundings impact us, right? Because things that happen to us when we were very small, and that led to our belief systems are our reality. It's how we live our life. It's how we see the world. And for these people who had to form attachment and had to accept care from somebody who should never have been a caretaker, who was continuously putting them in danger, whether it be physical and emotional or physical or emotional. The these people are, you know, struggling to hang in there a lot of the time and they need a lot of help. And they need to be able to come to a point where they can just, well, forgive themselves, or not that they have anything to forgive but to forgive themselves and to love themselves and to let go and just to sink back into the truth of who they are underneath the layers, underneath the trauma, underneath the woundings, underneath the masks, underneath the persona and the idea and how they show up in the world to stay safe, to sink back down underneath that and remove all of that so they can just sit in their soul and in that true essence of who they are and start to live a life that they love.
Okay, so there ends the five part podcast series on Attachment Styles. I hope you enjoyed it. Next week, I'm going to talk about something that happened to me last night actually. And it's a podcast that in my head, I'm pretty sure it'll be called this in my head. I'm recording it, When Shadow Bites, and it's talking about a couple of things that I've been learning within a course I'm doing with Georgia Rose called Secure In Love, which is all about different things. So it's about shadow. It's about needs and wants woundings, mother woundings, father woundings, boundaries .
It's a lot of stuff that I'm learning with her over these nine weeks and a lot of stuff that I've learned before but learning in more detail and more depth and starting to work through processes in my own life and bringing stuff up but yeah, some stuff that I learned from her that had a trigger and then something a little bit scary actually very black comedy. Something black comedy scary happened to me last night. I'm going to talk about that next week in episode number 33.
So I hope you are having an amazing week and yeah, and if you want to reach out to me at all, donna@donnajoyusher.com, in the outro I mentioned my websites, and you can find me on social media as well on Facebook and Instagram as well as YouTube.
I hope you enjoyed this episode of the Living Through Heart Podcast. To find out more about me and Living Through Heart, check out donnajoyusher.com and livingthroughheart.com. There you'll find links to everything you need, including some free tools to help you and ways you can work with me on your own soul healing journey.