Attachment Trauma Wants What it Wants

Imagine a baby girl named Rosie:

In Rosie’s home, milk is something you work for.

At just six months old, Rosie knows well the conquest for milk. She must be a perfect combination of cunning and sweet to seduce her caregivers into producing it. If she fails, she goes without. She can cry all night but she won’t have another chance for milk until morning. Many nights she suffers this lack alone.

Rosie’s life depends on this game, so she learns quickly. Even the faintest possibility of milk gears her nervous system up for a survival fight. She becomes wide-eyed and fully aware, primed for the chase. She watches her caregivers with expert precision, monitoring for any chance of milk.

Rosie hates this fight, yet she never feels so alive as when she is engaged with it. The hungry hours are the worst, but those moments when she finally tastes milk feel like nectar from the gods— better than any other experience on earth. So even though she hates the struggle, she needs it too. Rosie’s existence feels defined by this situation and she thinks of little else.

Poor Rosie, right? This is trauma. Her basic need for food has been linked with scarcity, struggle, and fighting for survival.

Re-read Rosie’s story, replacing the word “milk” with “love.”

What happens?

Rosie’s story is still traumatic, but in a different way. Her story becomes one of attachment trauma, and unfortunately a lot of us can relate to it. Many of us grew up in situations where love (affection/approval/care/connection) was treated as something to be earned, not as the basic survival need it is.

Being loved/attached is the only concern of a human child. Without someone else’s love and care, a defenseless baby will not eat, sleep, regulate, or ultimately survive. Yes, it’s THAT dire and we feel it as such, even long after we grow up. Love songs croon, “I’ll die without you,” and we nod our heads in understanding. We relate to this sentiment because most of us have some attachment trauma. At some time in our life we needed to work for love, and the harder it was to get, the better it felt when we finally got some.

Back to Rosie:

Rosie is placed in a new situation. She now has access to milk whenever she wants it. Night or day, all she needs to do is reach out and it’s there. This is a relief, and for awhile she feels fulfilled and satisfied. Soon restlessness sets in and while she doesn’t miss the hungry nights, she also hasn’t felt fully alive in a long time. Her nervous system hasn’t been used to its full capability because she hasn’t had to fight for anything. Milk no longer tastes like the nectar of the gods. Rosie feels disappointed and a little bored. She begins to miss her old life.

If we replace “milk” again with “love,” in this story, we start to see how Rosie’s trauma has led her nervous system to crave an unhealthy situation. Without the struggle that has defined her she feels directionless, devoid of the juice that makes life worth living.

As adults, we experience this dynamic as “the heart wants what it wants”: a magnetic draw toward an unsuitable partner or a perplexing need to go back to a relationship that requires a lot of effort to sustain. When we crave this kind of thing, we are looking for the struggle, the fight, and of course the victory.

But it’s not really the heart that wants the struggle, it’s attachment trauma that does. It’s the part of us that feels that the search for love is a life or death fight. Sense into your nervous system as you read this. Does some part of you know what I’m talking about? If not, slow down, take a breath and read it again slowly to see how you are affected by reading this.

When human beings are not motivated by attachment trauma, we simply want freedom to explore life and living— to feel alive without having to fight.

To illustrate, let’s put Rosie to bed:

It’s been months now in her new arrangement. Rosie never has to fight for milk anymore and she rarely thinks of it. The energy Rosie once used in the fight for milk is now spent learning simple rhythms and melodies. She hears a new song and as she stands on wiggly legs, her knees start to bop to the beat. A key change in the music makes her giggle. After a while she feels the music throughout her whole body and she shrieks with baby delight! She has missed feeling so alive.

So. Rosie’s story is an over-simplification of something extremely complex— please forgive me for that: I try to keep these articles short! But I hope the concept of attachment trauma made it through. We all have some of this, and until humans are living in utopian societies where all children are tended to in exactly the way they need at all times… this will persist. Lucky for us, attachment trauma heals. It heals by recognizing the source of the difficulty, noticing when we are motivated by our traumas, and then by making new choices based on higher understanding.

If you’d like to explore this on your own, spend some time thinking, talking, or writing about this:

• When in your life was love something you needed to work for?

• What was your strategy for attaining it?

• How did it feel when you finally got it?

• What was it like to go without?

If you want some guidance through this sticky process, reach out to me or to someone you trust with your story.