Beyond Broken

Wendy’s Blog

Attachment Hell

What is Attachment and why is it Hell when things go wrong?

attachment

If you had an ideal childhood where your consistent parents celebrated your uniqueness and each of your achievements as you moved through your developmental stages, then this blog does not apply to you.

“However, most of us had a childhood that was far from this ideal. Our young, vulnerable nervous systems were not protected and regulated by ideal parents. We often felt overwhelmed and alone, and to buffer ourselves from these recurring feelings of overwhelm, we developed survival patterns”, says Steven Kessler in The 5 Personality Patterns.

These survival patterns can stay with us our whole lives and we identify them as ‘us’.  However they are a series of defensive postures that help us regulate energy and events from the outside world. The real ‘us’ of us — our essence — is lost, since it was not activated by attunement when were were young. The good news is we can recover our truest selves, but it takes work.  We have to begin the process of attuning to ourselves, attending to those overwhelmed and lonely parts within.

If your parent or parents were there, but not consistently, you will believe that if you ramp up your nervous system and attention to others, maybe that will make them stay with you longer.  You live a very vigilant, anxious life in a terrible quandary: your need for others is so large, but your capacity to take it in is so small (since it was not there sufficiently when you were young). To heal and find your way back to your real self you will need to practice receiving and containing.  You have what you need now to fill up your system and regulate yourself but you will have to work at it.  You also have to pay special attention to letting in the goodness that comes your way, letting it land in you. You will have to reverse your focus from outward to inward. You will feel whole and settled as if you have finally come home.

A testimony to this work –

“So first, I would say I am healing from my attachment wound.  Part of this process is knowing my vulnerability to the story/feelings of being left, especially in my closest relationships.  When I am getting pulled to the old pattern of relating, I know I need to slow down and hold myself with love and compassion so I don’t abandon me.  This allows me to be intimate with myself and my real needs while creating opportunity for intimacy with the other. I risk asking for what I need.  I am clear about what is a true request versus a whiny demand or manipulation.  If I’m feeling whiny energy, this needs to be held and explored. And surprise to my younger self:  My requests are usually met with a yes!  And when they are not, it allows me to open to other paths to getting my desires met.”  Anonymous

If your parents were not available especially emotionally, you will stop expecting anything from others. You will live life in your own bubble. You will overrate your opinions and views of the world and discredit others. You will not allow yourself to have any needs since they will not be met, but your quandary is that, to do this, you must make yourself numb. This numbness helps you regulate difficult, overwhelming experiences but you will also be numb to joy and much of the pleasure that life offers. To heal you will need to take the risk to slowly step our of your bubble and notice that there is nourishment for you there. You will have to slowly let your body feel again and risk having your needs. You will feel more of everything: love, joy, pain and your old drab life will take on unbelievable colors.

A testimony to this work –

“Understanding my attachment style has allowed me to accept actions and beliefs that I previously thought were an unchangeable part of ‘who I was’. Not accepting them kept these patterns of behavior in place and created a profound sense of isolation and personal failure. As I have grown to accept these patterns as legitimate outcomes of my childhood experiences, new possibilities are opening up to choose differently; choosing connection rather than isolation and hopelessness. I now have a loving partner who both understands me and yet is available for a deep intimacy that I have never previously known. An inner gate has opened and although my old responses and patterns occasionally show themselves, I recognize them for what they are: ghosts that no longer have power to bind me to past vows. I have a real choice now and I choose love more and more often. True and justified hope is now mine. ” Jack Bodger

If your parents, who you needed to love you, also hurt you — well then you are really in trouble.  Your quandary is the belief that love = harm or hurt. This will make it very challenging for you to form healthy lasting relationships as an adult. You will be drawn to the love and repelled by the harm. You are like a magnet turning towards the attraction of love and then flipping over and repelling that connection out of fear. Unfortunately, some of us in this category experienced child abuse in the form of physical and emotional harm. Others of us experienced neglect which creates tremendous hurt in a young child.

This is what happened to one dear little one who was subjected to treatment by heartless immigration tactics, separated from his parents with no warning for 73 days. He experiences this as extreme neglect. His mother is there one moment and then gone the next. His master regulator of all those overwhelming and lonely feelings is suddenly gone. He becomes extremely dis-regulated, and this may last throughout his life. You see this dramatically in the news video of his reunion with his mother. He will repeat this in every relationship for the rest of his life. This clip, from the CBS New “60 Minutes” program, includes commentary from two psychiatrists.

To heal this pattern it will be necessary to begin to de-couple the hurt and harm from the love.  The body needs to experience them as two separate streams of energy and not all muddled together.  (You may also have to do the work of the previous two patterns because you have used all the patterns to cope with so much distress.)

A testimony to this work –

“What shifts when moving from a perspective of enduring or surviving life to a perspective of thriving and moving with life, being in mutuality with life?  When in survival mode, the body feels tense and painful and is always on guard for danger. Emotionally, there is a feeling of needing to protect against hostile outside forces (which could be anything or anyone). Spiritually, there is a sense of hopelessness and despair that anything will ever change and that there is nowhere to turn for help. 

When a sense of thriving is available, everything changes. The body sinks into a grounded calm, with soft belly and easy breath. Emotionally, there is a sense of curiosity about life, which spurs playfulness and vulnerability to anything or anyone that is currently present. Each moment feels like an opportunity to experience the precious gift of life, whatever it brings. Spiritually, there is a joy, an outward facing energy, an embracing energy that enfolds everything and everyone in my sphere.” Ann Rebera

All these patterns or adaptations influence how we see ourselves and the world. They become our reality — not actual life itself.

As you read the testimonies I hope you feel a profound sense that healing is possible for you.  Each of these people are dismantling their patterns and it is working!  This takes time.  It is not a quick fix.  But this can be our healing task in this life time. I hope our three year old friend Emmers finds the help he needs.

YOUNG LOVE

“We sail and we sail together.
The name of our ship is the new beginning
and our sails are a hopeful color.
Filled with the winds of changing times.
We sail and sea around us waves.
And it swells as a great heart beating.
All the storms of night are passing.
How can we sink when we can fly?”

From the cover of my leadership camp’s handbook 1971

“When you are 15, or thereabouts, you love the art you love more passionately than you will ever love art again.  Around that time your sense of taste has only just recently come into being. ….. You have been transformed from a kid… to a young adult with an ‘aesthetic’.”

—From Jonah Weiner Rage Against the Machine, New York Times Magazine

In the summers when I was 16 and 17 I was sent, by scholarship, to a leadership camp in Upstate New York.  By day, we did social action, building a playground for migrant worker children and by night we discussed the deep questions of religion and spirituality.  On weekends we would clean up and dress in all white and sing and dance our hearts out.  This was my art, my aesthetic.  I fell in love.  Looking back 49 years later, I am sure that my fellow campers and what we created together saved my life.

Recently one of my best friends from camp found me on Facebook.  She then posted this picture from 1972 of the two of us sitting on the grass near our beloved pond – my head in her lap.  As I gaze at that photo, I know that is still me.  I love intimate contact, and thrive on the meaningful conversation.  We had many that summer about love, life and God..

I lost touch with everyone from that time in my life. There is not much continuity in my life in general. From studying trauma, I understand now.  Trauma is very isolating.  My mother had died a year earlier when I was 15.  I fully absorbed all the love, belonging and even redemption I could those summers, but I had no idea how to stay connected. I was connected but also alone, floating in a very remote sea of sorrow.  For me the storms did not begin to pass until I was 40.

At 40 I had left my husband and moved 3000 miles away to California.  My aloneness was no longer my internal condition but an external one as well.  Roaming a book store/coffee shop early one morning before my first business appointment – a book jumped off the shelf. It was Motherless Daughters by ­­­­­­­­­­­Hope Edelman. The author had written the book because when she lost her mother she couldn’t find anywhere to turn.   She hoped it would help others to interview girls and women who had lost their mothers.  She found we all share a common trajectory as we try to transverse our lives without our mothers.

I began to grieve and by the time I finished the book and got to the resources list I could not stop crying.  I called the therapist she recommended, barely able to speak, choking out the name of the book. I remember this kind woman saying, “I know, I know”.

She was miraculously close to where I lived, and I saw her for several years.  She would ask me about a feeling, and I would tell her a story.  I still do this sometimes, but slowly I began to unpack what had really happened to me.  The sudden loss of my mother and the betrayal by my father.  An only child alone. It is still a lot to feel.

Back to the summer camp, we were leaders from all over the Mid-Atlantic states.  After camp we began treks to visit each other in beat-up second-hand cars from Wilmington Delaware, to Wilmington, North Carolina.  We scarcely lived between these visits.  We all met in DC and marched in the protest against the Vietnam War.  We were serious kids and we loved each other seriously.  At summer’s end we would form a large circle back out on the lawn and sing “Leaving on a Jet Plane”.  One camper writes all these years later, “I cried for three weeks after that.”

What will I find out about myself as I renew these friendships and we ‘catch up’ after all these years?   Maturity seems to require of us to disavow things we believed and loved in our youth.  It is hard to live in the world for 65 years and be as virtuous as I believed I was at 16.   Yet my passion for love, for deep spiritual quest and for friendship is the same.

Are You Resilient?

What is Resilience?

It has been called the great puzzle of human nature.

Is it something some people have and others do not?  Is it something you can learn?  Some research on resilience talks about genetics and a predisposition towards resilience.  Here are diagrams of a seesaw with a fulcrum to illustrate this.   Your life experiences and genetic predispositions sets this fulcrum to make your seesaw go up or down more easily.  Adverse childhood experiences make moving the fulcrum more challenging.  It can even make resilience out of reach for some people.

However, it is people who have had the most adverse life experiences and somehow have overcome them that inspire us the most.  Who are these people and what did they do?  The answer to these questions can help us understand resilience.

Resilient people possess three characteristics: a staunch acceptance of reality; a deep belief  that life is meaningful; and an uncanny ability to improvise. You can bounce back from hardship with just one or two of these qualities, but you will only be truly resilient with all three.

Viktor Frankl was preoccupied with survivorship/resilience during his dehumanizing, life threatening experiences in concentration camps in Nazi Germany.  He later traced the roots of his resilience to a sense of purpose and the acquisition of meaning.  He then expanded meaning into three dimensions: purpose, mastery and autonomy. He wrote about in his famous book, “Man’s Search For Meaning”.

Other core characteristics of resilient people include the ability to form strong attachments to others and the possession of an inner psychological space that protects them from intrusion or abuse.

“More than education, more than experience, more than training, a person’s level of resilience will determine who succeeds and who fails. That’s true in the cancer ward, it’s true in the Olympics, and it’s true in the boardroom,” says Dean Becker, the president and CEO of Adaptiv Learning Systems, quoting from Diane Coutu in her Harvard Review Article, “How Resilience Works.”

So how can we train ourselves to become more resilient?

Realism versus optimism is key to resilience.  Do I truly understand and accept the reality of my situation?  It’s an important question to ask since we often slip into denial as a coping mechanism when facing difficult life experiences. Can I form meaningful relationships while preserving my own boundaries?  Can I find a greater meaning even in the most wrenching circumstances or trust that it will become clear later?  Can I improvise and dig a tunnel even if I only have a spoon – like one of the famous concentration camp escapes in Nazi Germany?

When I touch into my own sense of resilience I find two different varieties.  One of them I will call the bulldozer.  She will bulldoze her way out of a situation — head down, full steam ahead.  The other one is softer and requires that I slowly sink into myself. What I find there is a kind of confidence and reassurance that I can handle whatever I am facing.  This one I will name Helene, after my grandmother.

My Nanny Helene, as I called her, was the great love of my early life, and she loved me back.  I was her first granddaughter and she adored me.  It is an amazing feeling to be adored and I am sure this contributes to resilience, although I do not find it mentioned in the literature.  My grandmother was a great dreamer and she always seemed to make her dreams come true, whether it was creating a successful restaurant in Washington D.C. or moving in the great social circles of the city.  At a time in the 1950’s when many women spent hours putting on make up, doing their hair and dressing to perfection before leaving the house, my grandmother stuffed her dyed blond hair under a cashmere beret. A hat pin was the last thing she needed to keep the beret on her head while she rushed around the city — a career woman before her time.

She compensated for my grandfather’s dementia and devised constructs, as resilient people do, to make meaning out of suffering.  With only one breast from a mastectomy, she bought her bras from a dismal medical supply shop.  For her resilience was a reflex, a way of facing and understanding the world and building a bridge from a present day hardship to a fuller life in the future.

Resilient people  face reality with determination, make meaning of hardship instead of crying out in despair, and improvise solutions from thin air.  This describes my grandmother.  I inherited some of these qualities from her, along with two of her hat pins.  And here they are.

 

 

Acknowledgement: I drew heavily on the work of Diane Coutu, and her Harvard Review and her article, “How Resilience Works.”

 

Healing The Shame Of Sexuality

(Photo taken at Ephesus, a Greek and then Roman city that flourished around the time of Christ)

 

I have been exploring Dan Siegel’s Wheel of Awareness in which he describes the hub of awareness as the center of ourselves and the spokes and rim as the things we take in from the  outside world: our senses, our mind thoughts, our relationships, our body sensations.

Practicing this for several days I became interested in my hub, the essence of me that is me — the center.

This is a new variation on many practices of I have tried over the years.  I have always found some resistance to going into the center of myself.  In the past I have  thought I was afraid of how little would be there, that I would find that I am really just made up of everything going on outside of me.  I am very ‘other’ focused.

This time I began to notice something new stir in the center of my being.  The word feminina came into my consciousness.   It is a word my husband uses to refer to me often.  The word means feminine in Portuguese.  I have noticed that I have a slight aversion to him calling me this name.

This aversion, as I really explore it, contains a lot of strong emotions and is a microcosm of myself as a sexual woman — fear, shame and lust.  In the center of my being I find my sexuality as an integral part of the essential me!

When I was becoming a woman at age 14, my mother was becoming a man.  She had a radical mastectomy and then took hormone treatment which made her voice lower, and hair grow on her face.  This was horrifying to me and I understood — this happens when you are a woman.  I also knew that  for women there was another type of danger, whispers of pregnancies, getting in trouble, being a bad girl.

My own budding sexuality, although active, went into hiding, laced with shame and isolation.

This may be a common experience for women even though my coming of age experience with my mother was unusual.  The photo above depicts  Medusa looking very ambivalent herself, some 2000+ years ago. It adorned a wall of a home in ancient Ephesus.

If I am Feminina, what does that mean?  Pressure to be something, the receptacle of endless need?  I have not had many positive associations.  AND that is changing!

My husband and I have been working with sexual fantasies and preferences in a new way in our teaching . Of course it has been so healing for us as well.

Sexual fantasies  and sexual preferences are a great way to find a view into the center of yourself.  Our sexual fantasies are working underground on very above-ground issues.  The main issue for each of us is how to resolve the inherent conflict between two of our most basic needs; arousal and safety.

Through fantasy we can have our arousal in a safe and private place.  Our fantasies are also busy resolving other issues.  Inside our fantasies we find our deepest wounds.   Some of our fantasies are direct.  I was used as a child so my fantasies are about being used.  Others compensate and are indirect.  These fantasies provide us access to what was denied us as a child, power, importance, admiration etc…

Finding your sexual preferences by exploring pornography can also be so helpful.  I was always put off by pornography – above it all.  But now I see images of women like me.  Doing things I like to do.  I always thought there was something wrong with me.   I am normal after all!  I feel my shame lift and freedom take its place.

I love this quote from  The Autobiography of My Mother: A Novel  by Jamaica Kincaid.  She is describing a young women who turns 14.  “And so, too, the smell of my underarms and between my legs changed, and this change pleased me. In those places the smell became pungent, sharp, as if something was in the process of fermenting, slowly; in private, then as now, my hands almost never left those places, and when I was in public, these same hands were always not far from my nose, I so enjoyed the way I smelled, then and now.”

What if each of us could embrace our sexuality with all it’s bodily manifestations in this way?  What freedom awaits each of us as we can feel normal and accept the fullness of our feminina.  For men I am sure there is an equivalent experience of isolation and shame around sexuality.  Let’s all come into the light that is our own unique yet normal sexuality and see what a beautiful vehicle it is to work our our deepest issues and come into contact with the deepest center of ourselves.

 

 

 

The Dry Desert of Self Contempt

Each of us has words we say to ourselves silently that we would never speak out loud to anyone else.  These words become so familiar they barely reach conscious thought but they carry very negative energy.  With my clients we have excavated phrases like “you are such an idiot”, “you are a fat big”, “you do not even deserve to live”, or “you are worthless” and more.  You might be interested in listening for what you say to yourself.  This self-contempt is so painful, but is actually meant to protect us.  If we say these things to ourselves we will fend off the criticism of others.  We will whip ourselves into better shape (smarter, thinner, deserving, etc).  Sometimes these words were said to us and we have internalized them.  Sometimes we just lived in an environment where our significant others interacted with us in a way to make us draw these conclusions.  For example, one of my client’s Dad was a policeman.  When he came home after a long day of work all he wanted to do was watch police chase videos on TV or Pornography on the computer which was in the living room.  His Dad did not delight in him or show interest in him.  He drew the conclusion that he must be an idiot and he now has trouble focusing on tasks — finishing things he starts.  This of course confirms his phrase “You are such an idiot”.

The healing of this dynamic has some challenging but very clear steps.  Self-contempt is in our control.  First we have to excavate these phrases.  Listen for them in our background thoughts and self talk.  Then we have to challenge their validity.  Is it true I am idiot?  A fat pig?  This challenge immediately softens the energy these phrases carry.  Next we have to go into the early scenarios that began this self talk.  Go into the living room and feel how much you wanted your Dad’s attention and how he was not interested in you.  As you feel this also allow yourself to feel how this really happened to you.  You were a cute, creative kid.  You deserved attention and support.  You needed it.  Once you allow yourself to feel your feelings and really validate what happened, you are on your way to healing.

And we can get stuck here.  We can shift from self-contempt to contempt of the other and what they did and how bad it was.  This is a step in the right direction but not the end goal.  Staying in the loop of “it is me that is bad” or “it is you that is bad” is strong and compelling.  Self-contempt or contempt of others is self-betrayal.  It is only when we accept our selves and what really happened on our own terms and for ourself that we are free.  Then we can move to the next step.

Given what happened to you, anyone would have some of the problems you have.  It is real that we need support and attention when we are young and we will be left with deficits without this.  Pride or self-will may make coming to terms with our deficits difficult.  “I was humiliated for this as a child.  I do not accept the limitations.”

Pride and “you are a fucking idiot” often dance back and forth in a lockstep.

Try this exercise given by the Guide in Pathwork Lecture #240.  In meditation, bestow tender love upon every aspect of yourself, every neglected part, every attitude, no matter how distorted. Face yourself in truth and see if you can then find your true divinity and perfection.  This love must come from and to yourself and not by means of hating or rejecting parts of others.  Self hate is a prison for all of us.  See if you can make it conscious and know that it is not caused outside of you.  You alone can change this hate to love by accepting all of yourself without conditions. When we are in truth and love this is never indulgent.

The only way out is compassion. Compassion for our deficits and what really happened, and compassion for those who hurt us.

Then we can build a life based on what we need now.  My client is working on finding the attention and support he needs to focus and complete what he begins — to move through life with more ease and grace.