Attachment and the Nervous System: How early attachment experiences can show up every day in your body, and how Nervous system-informed therapy can help.

Attachment is the process by which infants get their needs met. Because human babies rely on parents/ adults completely to meet their needs in the first years of life, a child is born with an innate capacity to elicit care (via crying, being cute, getting angry etc). In the early days, attachment is not about love or connection.

IT IS ABOUT SURVIVAL.

These innate, nervous-system informed communications (crying, shouting, coo-ing) are hopefully effective at getting needs met quickly. But the clever mammalian nervous system also has many back up options, should attachment not go exactly to plan: if a caregiver consistently misses, ignores, delays, gets angry or punishes attempts for care, the infant will quickly adapt their strategy accordingly. They learn what works and do it more.

Some little nervous systems will increase energy: get cuter, perform more, be funny or entertaining, demanding, or find other ways to “ask”. And some will preserve or shut down energy: learn that being as small and quiet and as “easy” as possible is the most effective way to get needs met and keep the caregiver close. All of these “attachment strategies” are variations of energy patterns driven by the nervous system.

Traditional attachment

In attachment research we have categorised these patterns as secure, insecure-anxious, insecure-ambivalent and dismissive. This is helpful for scientific purposes, but in reality we can all lean into aspects of all of these styles, depending on who we’re with and what has worked for us before.

Attachment is nervous system energy

These energy patterns/ strategies set in the earliest stages of development form the foundations and building blocks for the maturing nervous system. This system both regulates your attachment strategies, and RECORDS the ones that “work” (keep you alive) to use as a blueprint for the way you are in relationships. These aren’t always explicit, conscious memories, but are recorded in implicit, unconscious ways.

The way that you got your needs met as an infant becomes almost inarguable as you mature. Because this whole process was about survival – and you survived – your nervous system records your strategy as successful, and does not question using it as a template again and again.

“Useful” until its not…

Until the strategy that worked so well as an infant stops working for you as an adult, or worse, begins to cause problems in your relationships and life generally. This is where becoming much more familiar with your nervous system, which is as individual as your fingerprint, can be really illuminating. A great introduction to this process is by increasing your body awareness generally. But change as an adult is hard and slow.

Extra help from a therapist

A Nervous system-informed therapist can guide you in the process too. They will partner up with you to explore the shape and patterns of your body activations and shut downs – looking as deeply into the manifestations of stress in your physical body as stress as a mental/ emotional state. And together you will follow the breadcrumbs back to how these patterns were created, then look for evidence to gently show your nervous system that there can be another way.

Contact me on [email protected] to set up a free 15 minute discussion about working in this way together.