insure attachment

If we turn away from our own pain, we may find ourselves projecting this aversion onto others, seeing them as somehow inadequate for being in a troubled situation. ~Sharon Salzberg,Real Love: The Art of Mindful Connection

Attachment is a unifying principle that reaches from the biological depths of our being to its furthest spiritual reaches. ~Jeremy Holmes, John Bowlby and Attachment Theory

Why do people have to be this lonely? What’s the point of it all? Millions of people in this world, all of them yearning, looking to others to satisfy them, yet isolating themselves. Why? Was the earth put here just to nourish human loneliness? ~Haruki Murakami, Sputnik Sweetheart

As we adjust to our “new normal” and social distancing, many of us staying “safe at home”, our anxiety may be running rampant. As we are either in close quarters with those we normally live with or are alone because that is our normal, we may find ourselves feeling frustrated and our attachment wounds being activated.

This can have us turning to all kinds of unhelpful or even harmful behaviors. Behaviors that we developed at a young age that were meant to either keep us alive, or are meant to try and get our attachment needs met (in perhaps a very backwards sort of way).

We may find ourselves picking fights.

Pushing people away.

Feeling “clingy” and demanding.

Allowing (untrue, harmful, and hurtful) narratives about others or about ourselves to run rampant in our heads.

Falling back into ultimately harmful relationships (and remember, a relationship doesn’t need to be outright abusive for it to be harmful, any relationship that keeps us stuck in repeating hurtful patterns and cycle and doesn’t encourage our healing and growth, is harmful).

Our anxiety may be over the top.

Our fear of abandonment may be going wild.

So much is happening in our minds and bodies right now as we move through this unprecedented and totally unknown space.

We can find ourselves becoming rigid.

Hard.

Immovable.

Ultimately stuck, stagnant, repeating patterns and cycles that hurt us and others.

Now is the time for us to slow down.

To find ways to calm our systems, take a half step (or more) back, and to consider situations from a more rational place.

A time to examine if the reaction we are having is based in an old trauma, the present situation, or some combination of the two.

A time to consider how our past pain and hurts are impacting us in the present.

A time to find new, helpful ways, of soothing our systems. Of managing our overwhelm.

A time to shift into softness.

To connect to compassion, for ourselves and others.

To find ways to be more vulnerable, with people who are safe enough.

To explore our own wants, our needs, our desires, for our relationships, for our world, for our Self.

To nurture our own bodies and minds, those we care about and for, our planet.

To consider what fulfills us, what ignites our passions, what gives us a sense of abundance.

To expand, to transform, to evolve.

To move into softness is counter-intuitive when our fear response is activated. It is challenging to do even in the best of times. We live in a culture that encourages us to disconnect, to judge, to be harsh and hard.

Moving into softness can be challenging. It requires self-awareness and a willingness to shift, to grow, to transform. It asks us to come home into our bodies, to learn to sit in the discomfort of our emotions and their bodily sensations, to expand our windows of tolerance so we can respond to situations with love for ourselves, others, and our relationships.

We are in challenging and complex times. Finding ways to calm our systems, to rest, to allow the space for our own evolution is vital. We are at a precipice in the collective, a time for us to decide if we want to continue on in the harmful ways, destroying our relationships and planet, or if we want to shift into a nurturance culture, one of caring, of compassion, of coming together and lovingly encouraging each other to expand outside our comfort zones, to break generations old patterns and cycles, to revolt against all that keeps us apart and to evolve into the people, and the society, we have always dreamed of.

/../

This essay was originally written for my weeklyish newsletter and has been edited for publication here. To receive my most recent essays, you can subscribe here.

Last weekend Sarah Martland (Founder of Trauma & Co) met to figure out ways we can support our community right now. We have changed the pricing the the Trauma & Co Community to make it more accessible to more people, and we’ve also made some changes to what all will be offered in it. We have also brought an offering planned for later this year forward, as well as added an extra pricing level. You can learn more about Resourcing for Complex Times: Supporting Ourselves Through Challenging Experiences here.

The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances: if there is any reaction, both are transformed. ~Carl Gustav Jung

I no longer believed in the idea of soul mates, or love at first sight. But I was beginning to believe that a very few times in your life, if you were lucky, you might meet someone who was exactly right for you. Not because he was perfect, or because you were, but because your combined flaws were arranged in a way that allowed two separate beings to hinge together. ~Lisa Kleypas, Blue-Eyed Devil

We all deal with stress and our emotions differently. Some of us need to hide away and process in solitude, others of us need to talk things out (and then talk them out some more), some of us need to write things out to get clear, and many, but not all of us, need some combination of these.

When we are in relationship, be that friendships or sexually intimate relationships, we tend to want the other person to process things in the same ways we do. It can be confusing in the least, and jarring and anxiety provoking towards the other end of the spectrum, when they don’t.

So what do we do, when in relationship, our own anxiety (and therefore attachment needs, sense of worth, etc) is activated because a person we care about is managing their own stress and emotions in a way that is not our way, or not in a way we are familiar with?

Well, if you are like me, we initially freak the fuck out. 🙂

This especially can show up when one person in the relationship has a more anxious attachment style and the other person in the relationship has a more avoidant attachment style. But it doesn’t have to be about attachment styles. It can also be about personality types.

Introverts tend to need solitude to process. Extroverts tend to need their village to process.

Of course these are all general statements. Each of us are unique individuals, with unique histories and ways of doing things. Yes, there is overlap, yes many of us experience similar things; and we are also all still unique.

This includes our ways of dealing with stress and highly emotional situations.

When we see our loved ones are in pain of some sort, be that stress or emotional distress, our initial instinct tends to be to fix it, to make them feel better, to do whatever we can to make the hurting stop.

On the surface this is about our love of the other person and not wanting them to be in distress.

However, if we go a little deeper, this manic need to stop the other person from feeling bad is more about our own inability to tolerate difficult or painful emotions. So, when another is in distress, it raises our own uncomfortable feelings of anxiety and so in order for us to feel better, we need to make the other person stop feeling bad. Now. If not sooner.

But others get to feel their feelings and process them in the ways that work for them just as we also get to feel our feelings and process them in the ways that work for us.

So what do we do with that anxiety, with those uncomfortable feelings of seeing someone we care about in pain? How do we manage our own discomfort without trying to force the other person to change?

Well if I had an easy five step program for this I bet I could make my millions and retire in the next few years.

A truth is, there is no easy way to learn how to manage our own feelings of anxiety and discomfort. It takes time, it takes actually sitting in our own discomfort and learning how to tolerate it, first in tiny bits, and with practice more and more.

Coming into our bodies is part of this process. Learning to feel all the sensations that our bodies express when anxious can give us the clues we need to signal that we need to regulate our own systems in that moment, to take a moment, to slow down and breathe. To bring our frontal lobe online and not allow our limbic system hijack things and put us in instinctual reactionary mode. To allow ourselves to consciously and intentionally think through what is happening in our bodies and why it is happening.

I know for me, my immediate response to situations where another person is processing in their own ways that are anxiety provoking for me is to flee. To walk away. To shut down. And then I jump into fight mode. And then I go on a pendulum ride back and forth between wanting to bolt and run far, far, away and wanting to pick a huge fight just to get the other person present with me, regardless how that “presence” shows up. I want to take action. I want to either fix it or completely break it.

At least that is my immediate, primal, wounded response.

Thankfully, over the last few years I have been learning to slow down. To breathe. To check-in with myself and my own defense mechanisms and how to self-regulate and self-correct so that I don’t turn an already stressful time for the other person into an even more stressful time by freaking the fuck out all over them.

Am I perfect at this? Hell no. It is a practice and it is ever evolving. And I can see the progress from where I was five years ago, one year ago, six months ago.

Remembering that those we love have their own ways of doing things, and that as long as they aren’t causing physical harm to anyone or lashing out and causing emotional or psychological harm to anyone, then they get to just do things in the ways that work for them, regardless of what it may or may not trigger within us.

Our work is in managing our own anxiety in these situations. Of course we can let the other person know we are there if they need/want our support (assuming we can actually hold the space for their own pain and not have that activating us to the point of trying to fix things). Of course we can check in every few hours or days or whatever is appropriate and simply say “thinking of you” or “I know things are rough right now, just want you to know you are on my mind/I’m here/etc”.

And in those in-between spaces of our reaching out and them responding in some way (and remember silence is actually a response), we need to find the ways that work for us to manage our own stress and anxiety around our loved one’s discomfort and what it has brought up for us.

/../

This essay was originally published in my newsletter on June 16, 2019 and edited for publication here. If you’d like to receive my weekly(ish) newsletter with my most current essays and offerings, you can do so here.