CHAPTER SIX: DEMYSTIFYING ATTACHMENT

“At the center of your healing is you, Has always been you, Will always be you. You are the mender.”

Upile Chisala

Secure attachment is when we have a base inside of ourselves that supports us being in a loving relationship with the world. Knowledge of attachment theory has seen a boom in the collective in the past few years. Once isolated to the world of psychology and psychoanalytic theory, “what is your attachment style?” has become common parlance on dates and in social gatherings.

Some of the biggest misconceptions I see about attachment styles is that they are a fixed state, rather than an adaptive and protective mechanism that can change throughout our lifetime. Our attachment styles tend to arise most evidently when we’re triggered relationally, and different people can trigger us in different ways. Yes, we may ordinarily tend towards anxiety or avoidance, and we may also be surprised to meet the anxious part of ourselves with a particular partner when we are usually avoidant and to meet the avoidant part of ourselves with another when we are usually anxious.

Our attachment strategies are here to protect us from the pain and danger of being in relationship; they are here to protect us from the threats of intimacy. The avoidant attachment strategy emerges from a feeling of:

“It is not safe for me to be in connection. Through connection I risk enmeshment, or being overwhelmed by another, and I need to rely on myself to meet my needs in a safe way.”

The anxious attachment strategy emerges from a feeling of:

“It is not safe for me to be alone. Through separation I risk abandonment, and I need to rely on others in order to predictably meet my needs.”

People who are anxiously or avoidantly attached often grow up in households where their needs were not fully met. As a result, they learned to pull closer or pull away from in order for those needs to be met.

In your adult relationships, you might find that in moments of rupture, or moments where your needs are not being met, you want to pull closer to your partner; you want to speak and digest now and you want to repair now. You may find yourself fighting with your partner or creating conflict for no apparent reason, which can be another way to create closeness. You may notice urgency in these moments and that urgency is a hallmark of anxious attachment.

Alternatively, you may also find yourself desiring to pull away from your partner and the relationship; you want space, to put down your phone instead of immediately responding to it, and you need more time to process and to be away from your partner in order to return to a state of safety and come back to the relationship. This is the path of avoidant attachment.

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I first read about attachment theory in 2018. I had experienced my first big love, and my first big heartbreak. Having been a newly awakened queer, I was in the turmoil of what felt like my first real love. I was head over heels and smitten and within one meeting with this person at a college event, had decided that we were going to be married and I was ready to devote my entire life to them. Yes, you guessed it, I am anxiously attached (leaning)!

When I found the language of attachment, I felt like my life had been saved and a window or world of possibility had been opened to me. Suddenly my neuroses and craziness made sense within a psychological framework - attachment.

My great desire for intimacy, my almost primal fear when I felt the relationship being threatened, the absolute rage I felt when I didn’t feel my needs were being met and I felt like my partner wasn’t here with me, the checking of my phone constantly to see if my crush, lover or ex had texted me, the absolute fixation I would feel in a romantic partnership in a very short amount of time and my inability to focus on anything that was happening outside of my relationship all made sense within the framework of my anxious attachment.

Knowing my attachment strategy didn’t make things easier or completely stop my anxious attachment from being present in my life. I still felt the absolute tumultuous motions of heartbreak, the gripping fear of separation, the fights and makeups and breakups. The difference became that I understood where these behaviours were coming from, I could release the shame and confusion of “why am I doing this” and even when I was deeply gripped by the spell of attachment - I at least had the awareness to understand the current nature of my craziness. Also, I could communicate this to my partner.

This is the power of attachment. At the time, one of the primary resources on attachment was the book Attached by Adam Levine. Unfortunately, this book is pretty biased towards anxiously attached folks and takes a “just get over it” approach to avoidance, which I have found to be pretty unhelpful. Over the past few years, and thanks to social media, attachment theory has become much more of a household name. You can go on instagram and find therapists and coaches speaking about attachment theory. You can listen to countless podcasts where people are discussing their attachment styles. You can even take a quiz on Buzzfeed or Cosmopolitan or a similar pop culture oriented magazine to find out a little more about how you uniquely are in your most intimate relationships.

Attachment theory saves lives. Through understanding our attachment strategy, we can get our lives back from the tumultuous and often possessed nature of our attachment strategies. Seriously.

I have countless friends and clients and far off acquaintances who regularly report how understanding their attachment strategy has changed their lives for the better.

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Here are the biggest things I think people get wrong about attachment theory:

1. attachment wounds are healed relationally, not individually or in isolation.

2. attachment can be more accurately described as a strategy/not a style - attachment is not fixed and permanent, but rather flexible, adaptable and changeable according to your circumstances and how you are meeting them.

3. attachment strategies are not “healed” or “overcome” - we simply find new ways to be in relationship with them.

Let’s unpack.

Attachment wounds are healed relationally, not in isolation

Attachment wounds are created relationally, and they need to be healed relationally.

Our earliest attachment wounds develop in relationship with our primary caregivers - those who take responsibility for meeting our needs earliest in life - often a mother and/or a father, or a custodian/primary caregiver. As children, we are deeply vulnerable to the world and we have little to no ability to meet our own needs. Humans are relational beings - we have learned to survive in community and we need community in order to survive. As little beings, we rely on the adults around us to be there to meet our needs for touch - love - food - nourishment. We are completely at the mercy of the people who have brought us into this world.

What happens when we have an unavailable caregiver? Either emotionally or physically. What happens if we have a caregiver that we don’t feel safe with? Who isn’t able to meet our relational needs? What do we do about this gap in our needs and the ability of our caregivers to meet them? We develop attachment strategies. Attachment strategies are primarily strategies to get our needs met. When we are anxiously attached, we may have an unavailable caregiver - physically or emotionally - and we learn that to get our needs met, we should stay as close to our caregiver as possible. We cling to our mother’s pant leg, we cry when she leaves the room or is out of sight. We learn that - in order to have our needs met - our caregivers need to be right there and right within our line of sight. When they are not, cortisol spikes in our system. Our anxiety rises. And our survival strategy says “get back into connection.”

The MO of an anxious attachment strategy is to be in connection, at whatever cost. Even when, in adulthood, we have an emotionally unavailable partner or are able to mentally discern that this is not the best relationship choice for us to make - it becomes very hard to ignore the seductive voice of attachment that tells us that losing connection is dangerous.

In contrast, the avoidant attachment strategy emerges in environments where we may have an unavailable or overbearing caregiver, and we learn that the best strategy that we have for meeting our needs is to take care of them ourselves. Through this strategy, we learn to distance ourselves from attachment figures for fear that we might be swallowed or overwhelmed and that we might lose our individuation or our personhood - who we are. In a study done with babies with different attachment strategies, researchers found that children with an avoidant attachment strategy experience the same indicators of stress in the body - cortisol levels spiking, anxiety rising - however they will not show this stress externally and if anything will appear to be disinterested or disconnected.

Attachment is the dance between connection and individuation. From a spiritual perspective, we all have both of these parts within us. We have the part of us that votes for connection and attachment. And we have the part of us that votes for individuation and sovereignty (personhood). We have the part of us that pulls us closer to other people AND the part of us that pushes us apart so that we may have space to be ourselves. In the case of attachment strategies - we see the polarity between these two forces, and we see what happens when they have been taken to the extreme; survival through connection that ignores one’s individuality, and survival through individuality that ignores one’s needs for connection.

Secure attachment is about being able to balance both forces within us. Balance doesn’t happen perfectly in every given moment. We will have moments of being thrown to one side or the other, but secure attachment is about spending a lot of our time in this zone of balance and learning how to return to this zone when we are thrown out of it.

Those with avoidant attachment strategies - or as Stan Tatkins calls them, Islands, have a particular brilliance for choosing individuation. Those with anxious attachment strategies - or as Stan Tatkins calls them, Waves, have a particular affinity for cultivating connection. Secure attachment is not about existing in a singular part of this graph/spectrum, but being able to embody and move through the whole spectrum.

Secure attachment is an embodiment that is comfortable with, and able to navigate the realms of individuation and connection. I have often thought about secure attachment as a mythical experience, and I will wait to see if my mind changes about that in the process of writing this book.

Attachment can be more accurately described as a strategy, not a style. Attachment is not fixed and permanent, but rather flexible, adaptable, changeable according to your circumstances and how you are meeting them.

People often describe attachment as a “style” instead of a strategy. Describing attachment as a “style” can make it sound fixed, stagnant and unchanging. But the truth is, attachment is fluid and changing. Our attachment strategies change and adapt to meet our circumstances - we can experience a particular attachment strategy in one area of our lives and a different one in another. This is because people trigger different things within us. We are not the same everywhere, and that is okay. Our strategy may change from moment to moment, from person to person. And, we may have a strategy that we tend towards. That is okay. When we can understand attachment strategies for what they are - strategies for getting our needs met - we are able to empathize with ourselves and others when we feel more of our anxious or avoidant parts arising.

Attachment strategies are not “healed” or “overcome” - we simply find new ways to be in relationship with them.

Many of us spend an entire lifetime in the self help and self development world trying to heal out of ourselves. But we don’t heal out of ourselves, we heal into ourselves. We don’t heal out of our protective strategies, contrary to popular belief. We heal into relationship with our protective strategies. When we can understand why they were there in the first place, and what challenging childhood circumstances necessitated their presence, we can have empathy, compassion and understanding for ourselves. When we are able to cultivate this compassion and empathy within ourselves, we are able to offer that understanding to another. Suddenly, we stop taking people’s protective strategies so personally and we see the wounded child within.

This doesn’t mean we have to keep being in relationship with people if the presence of their wounded child is continually hurting us, and there is no repair in the relationship (more on that later). Instead, we may kindly choose the right distance from which to love this person. When we realize that our attachment strategies will not be healed or overcome, we start asking ourselves: “how do I live and work with this part of me for a lifetime?”.

Where once we were trying to fix and change ourselves, we are now accepting ourselves and trying to find the right circumstances, people, dynamics and relationships that are complimentary to our attachment strategies. We stop working against them and we start working with them. This is when our life and our relationships transform for the better.

When our attachment system is activated, we need to learn how to hold our scared and trembling inner child. We must allow that child to curl up into our arms and into our warm embrace, allowing our skin to touch and for their body to press into ours. This is all that our inner child wants - someone to hold them, someone to press and lean into, and someone to say: “I’m not leaving you, I’m not going anywhere and I love you dearly. You can take all the time you want to tantrum, or hide, or cling to me, and I will still be here.”

This is what creates calm and ease and safety in the body of our little one, and thus in our own body. When we hold this little one, we get the opportunity to see what they are feeling and sensing. We listen to their cries, to their uncertainty, to their longing and their yearning. We also orient towards our adult selves to get an accurate read on the situation. Are we yearning so much for love, care and respect that we are ignoring the fact that it may not be there with this particular partner? Are we going “la la la” when people show us their actions? Are we choosing to believe more in their words and their sweet promises of forever and always than what we are witnessing with our own two eyes? Sometimes we close my eyes like the two of swords and insist on saying “but they said!”.

Sometimes it’s hard when we are in the middle of the attachment frenzy to tell which way is up and which way is down. Where are we gaslighting ourselves and where are we doing “mindset work”? Where are we using dissociative magical thinking and where are we using creative and reality-affirming magickal thinking? Where are we lying to ourselves about the capacity that another person has to love us, and where are we lying to ourselves about the capacity that we have to love them? In order to be able to think, and see clearly, we need to cultivate secure attachment with ourselves.

Secure attachment is the experience of holding that small child and being the responsible and loving parent they need.

It is to become our own advocate and our own best lover, and to engage with the world from this place of centredness. We must learn to find our centre in connection and ultimately cultivate a secure attachment with our Self.

As we cultivate this state of secure attachment we may ask ourselves: where is the place inside of me where connection can land? Where is the landing strip, the shelf, the cupboard, where the connection has room to make itself at home in my body? How do I let connection in in a sustainable and mostly safe way? Secure attachment is an internally cultivated state that trusts in your own belonging, connectedness and resilience in the face of attachment ruptures. Secure attachment is a resilient state of attachment that is able to withstand the pressures and tensions of the world and come back to an ultimate place of “I am okay within myself.”

Can I trust that when I look away, you will still be here? Can I trust that when you are out of my line of sight, you are still with me? Can I trust in the strength of our connection and can I trust in our ability to come back together when things are challenging? Is it safe enough for me to take space for myself? To be with myself, without your physical presence? When the answer is yes, this is secure attachment. We cultivate this secure attachment by learning to hold ourselves within the rocky waves of the sea of attachment, by learning what our tendency in the face of attachment ruptures is, and by learning to feel what centredness actually feels like in our body.

When we say “body, show me centre” and our body does, we can learn to orient towards that centredness again and again as life knocks us away from it. Life will knock us away from our centre - that is good and normal. Our task as magickians is to learn how to gently come back to centre, again and again, like waves lapping up onto the shore of our own exquisite coastline. We allow ourselves to bask in the radiance of our own sunlight and rest in the shade of our own clouds. And when others come to play with us in our sandy waters, our peaceful beach does not have to turn into a hurricane site overnight. We can remember our centredness, and remember that this is our beach; always there for our enjoyment and pleasure, and to be shared with others when and as we see fit.