Somatic therapy can help individuals and relationships understand their attachment styles. Understanding the certain dynamics of how you relate to yourself, your emotions, and the people closest to you can help you navigate your emotional triggers and set you on a course toward healthy relationships and more wholeness. Learning about your strategy sheds light on your adult relationships.
Attachment Styles in Different Relationships
Attachment styles show up differently in our different relationships. Friends, partners, colleagues, our children, parents, or siblings. You may navigate each of these relationships from a different attachment strategy altogether. You might have a secure way of relating to your boss or work. Then, you might have an anxious experience in relationships with intimate partners. And vice versa.
Rather than thinking of attachment styles like you are either this or that, think of it as a spectrum of strategies that have been put into more simplified categories. The spectrum of strategies is all part of the process of bonding and attachment.
Vulnerability and Attachment Strategies
Attachment styles have to do with someone's conscious and non-conscious approach to and response to intimacy. Intimacy is all about vulnerability. In other words, intimacy requires vulnerability. Insecure attachment styles and strategies attempt to protect someone from vulnerability.
Some attachment strategies mitigate intimacy vulnerability. Some support intimacy. Attachment strategies can help build trust and connection in relationships. Some strategies also hinder building trust and connection. These attachment styles are more like non-conscious impulses, instincts, and defaults toward intimacy. Intimacy with self, with our emotions, and with others.
The Development of Attachment Strategies
Our attachment strategies (or styles) develop and imprint from our first attachment relationships. We go through a formational pruning process during our developmental years. The pruning and entrainment process happens over time. This time and experience gives us our attachment architecture. Attachment architecture becomes second nature in our adult relationships. Whatever happens between us and others in those first 1, 2, 3, or 5 years teaches us how we will relate to ourselves and others.
We learn how to relate to needs, wants, intimacy, and emotional expression of self and others in early life.
Childhood Experiences That Shape Attachment
Some attachment strategies distance ourselves from or shut down from feelings or needs. Especially, when our parents couldn't manage their own overwhelm, anxiety, or control efforts. This can also happen when a parent scares or terrifies the little one as well.
Others learn to track distance, closeness, overwhelm, or lack of emotional engagement. Getting preoccupied with the details of engagement with exquisite detail. These attachment strategies are powerful attempts to get love, safety, and connection. Shut down and you may not get negative attention. Pay close attention and you'll figure out how to adapt to make them stay.
These attachment strategies help people navigate a lack of secure attachment in childhood. In adulthood though, these strategies cause or disrupt the adult attachment experience.
Attachment is the forming of bonds with others. This may be for survival, connection, for sex, for marriage, for children. Regardless of the end game, attachment processes vary throughout humanity. Not one "style" is cookie-cutter. As somatic therapists, we look at the early, middle, and late stages of one's development. The early hard-wiring lives in our brains, hearts, and bodies.
The early stages of your life and your current relational experiences are linked. Somatic therapy helps develop strategies that give you the relationships you want. We look at resolving and repairing any attachment deficits. Such as mirroring, attunement, boundaries, co-regulation, and self-regulation. In attachment work, we see how impactful these strategies are on how you relate to others. We help heal the early attachment architecture.
Examples of Childhood Experiences Impacting Adult Attachment
Some early childhood experiences that impact adult attachment processes:
• relational overwhelm
• low autonomy
• lack of emotion-based mirroring
• lack of attunement (not being emotionally felt by another enough)
• being exposed to chronically dysregulated parents
• having to parent or soothe your parent
• being given too much independence and responsibility at too young of an age
• too much aloneness or not enough safe connection
• overwhelming experiences like sexual abuse
• verbal and emotional abuse, confusion, chronic criticism, and/or manipulation
• being exposed to a parent who is frightening (unmanaged mental illness, substance abuse)
• Early childhood chronic conditions or injuries without proper emotional support
• lack of privacy (helicoptering)
• Absent mothering figure or parent absences in the early attachment life.
• Not enough or too much touch
We were getting a strong message about intimacy in our early years. Intimacy equals safety (secure attachment). Or intimacy equals unsafe, unstable, overwhelmed, or too much. Intimacy might mean shame, fear, rejection, disgust, confusion, or loss of autonomy. Or intimacy might feel warm and cozy. Intimacy might equal sex, with the removal of emotional or relational vulnerability.
The Hard-Wired Nature of Attachment
We are hardwired to attach to our early life caretakers for survival. These patterns of relating are what we now call attachment styles. These attachment styles are an attempt to restore a felt sense of safety. The strategies try to settle the activation of intimacy threat.
The insecure strategies use distancing or pursuing to deal with intimacy threats. The secure styles use curiosity within communication and prioritizes safe connection. Some styles are a mixture of both distancing and pursuing.
In general, most people fall into the secure or insecure strategies in relationship to intimacy. Under the insecure wing, we are anxious, avoidant, or disorganized. You'll also find words like ambivalent, angry-dismissive, wave, island, dismissive-avoidant, and disorganized.
Somatic Therapy’s Approach to Attachment Repair
In somatic therapy we are not too concerned about the title, we are oriented towards repair. We look at how your strategies are either helping or hindering your relationships. And we make a plan to increase secure functioning.
The nervous system gets conditioned and entrained in childhood. Most adults have had a handful, or more, of adult relationship experiences. These experiences have either repaired or affirmed the need for protective strategies.
Our adult attachment styles, learned in childhood, often lead to repetitive relationship cycles. Dating the same type of person, and getting into the same type of relational dynamics with partners, bosses, or friends is a hallmark of early attachment injury. The repetitive experiences reaffirm and harden the strategies even more.
Creating Space for Attachment Healing in Somatic Therapy
This is where somatic therapy enters the picture. Giving space for reparative experiences. Giving healing experiences of feeling feelings, of being felt. Giving embodied experiences of listening and being heard. Orienting to and digesting what it is like to be seen.
Relationships require vulnerability. The insecure styles were conditioned to protect themselves from vulnerability.
Moving Toward Secure Attachment Through Somatic Therapy
Somatic therapists bring awareness and conversation about someone's attachment patterns. We help people develop a secure style. Embodied experiences of attunement, emotional processing, need for permission, and co-regulation create safety. Safety in relationship to others creates a secure experience. Other strategies can also be incorporated to support attachment healing. Modalities like IFS (parts work), hypnotherapy, sex therapy, and ketamine-assisted therapy.
It is perfectly normal to long for intimacy and connection. It is also perfectly normal to desire to be seen and heard, but to also be terrified, and overwhelmed by it.
If you shut down and back away from people who express the desire for more from you, or their needs, you are likely on the avoidant spectrum.
If you ruminate about your relationships and pursue them, you are more likely anxiously attached. You may be preoccupied with someone liking you, choosing you, and wanting you.
Somatic therapy works to increase your capacity for secure functioning in intimacy.
Characteristics of Secure Attachment
Here are the qualities of an earned secure or secure attachment that we work on in Somatic Therapy at The Compass Healing Project:
• Communicates easily and frequently, navigates feelings in self and others with curiosity
• Has built-in experiences of being lovable and worthy of being understood, heard, and responded to.
• Can easily repair when hurt happens or mis-attunements knowingly or unknowingly take place.
• Tends to stay curious and empathetic rather than defensive or shame-spiral-y when someone is hurt by them
• They can hold and wait while you share and expect your ability to do that too
• They are able to easily prioritize connection with others over everything else.
• They will regularly prioritize connection in action
• They keep their partner in mind while going about their days and indecision-making.
• Non-defensive and curious when needs or wants are expressed
• If they experience anxiety they take proactive steps in the relationship to co-create more safety.
• Will use play, attraction, and invitation to get partners to develop better skills.
• Don't hang onto relationships or people that continue to show a lack of skills.
• Protect their partner in public (no shaming, jabs, or sarcasm here!) and in private.
Understanding and Healing Attachment Patterns With Somatic Therapy
Understanding your attachment style and how you relate can give you a lot of clarity. Learning to shift your usual dance steps towards more vulnerability and security allows your nervous system to heal. You'll experience more depth and pick better partners, friends, and bosses. Utilizing curiosity to feel what you feel as you relate to others can help you take your power back. Feel into your inner landscape and recognize that it is a somatic echo of your early life experience.
Build Secure Relationships Through Somatic Therapy in San Diego, CA
Ready to explore how your attachment style impacts your relationships? Somatic therapy can help you cultivate a secure, fulfilling way of connecting with yourself and others. Begin your journey toward deeper intimacy and emotional freedom—reach out to Compass Healing Project for support. Follow these three simple steps to get started:
Reach Out and Fill out our New Client Inquiry Form to get started.
Schedule a discovery call with one of our skilled somatic therapists to discuss your needs and goals with Somatic Therapy.
Begin building secure relationships with the help of somatic therapy!
Additional Counseling Services at Compass Healing Project
At Compass Healing Project, we take a holistic approach to therapy, using a range of modalities to support various mental health needs. In addition to helping you build secure relationships with somatic therapy, we also offer EMDR, Clinical Sexology, hypnotherapy, ketamine-assisted therapy, and embodiment practices—each tailored to help with anxiety, depression, PTSD, grief, sexuality concerns, and relationship issues. To learn more about our services, visit our blog or connect with our compassionate therapists in Colorado and California, who specialize in trauma resolution, emotional healing, and integrative therapy to support your journey to well-being.
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