Since more than thirty years, the attachment theory based on the research of John Bowlby and Mary Ainsworth belongs to the central concepts of relationship psychology and forms a crucial background theory for psychotherapy. This theory labels three types of insecure attachment and one secure style, which according to several studies around half of the mother-child-relationships can be attributed to. In this article, I want to differentiate the secure attachment style.
Secure attachment is characterized by the ability to keep the needs for closeness and distance in a fluid balance. Neither being alone nor being close triggers fears or tensions. Separation is not experienced as existentially threatening abandonment, and being together does not contain a drive to unresolvable melting.
Elements of Insecurity
Yet there are also secure attachments, which contain elements of insecurity. Probably that is true to all secure attachments, for there are rarely parents who can grant secure attachment to their children on all levels.
There is an interesting variation in the following example: Parents can use the security in attachment as a mental and emotional construction for suppressing their own insecurity in attachment. Security of relationships in the whole family system is held up with ostentation. This is often the case in relationships, which started under insecure circumstances on the outside so the founding of a family was meant to form a nest of security, e.g. during or after war or economic crisis. People withdraw from an unbearable reality and build up sheltered refuges for regenerating life.
Still there is a price to pay: For the sake of security, individual freedom has to be given up. Freedom is considered as threat for this stability. In this system, people want from the others to be accountable, and this is why they try to behave accountable themselves. To keep up this in itself shaky network of reliable expectations, a lot of subtle pressure and covered manipulation is required.
Members of these systems are not acknowledged and safeguarded against loss of love because of their individuality, but only insofar as they adapt to given expectations. Parents demand from their offspring to give them a safety they did not have themselves – and all this happens on an unconscious level – and the children give in to this role, because they do not have an alternative, and refrain from self-centred aspirations.
Tribal Roots
This structure of sacrificing individuality in favour of the system as a whole is well known from the tribal organization of society. Tribal communities in early human history only could allow a small amount of individuality, as the social frame was closely woven and traded knowledge had to be sacred and unchangeable. In the course of history, new developments emerged, which broke the narrow confinements of tribalism and offered more space for individualities to unfold. Yet the remembrance of the cosiness and security of this early phase was never forgotten, and so it can easily be instrumentalised by different ideologies.
Ideologically Faked Securities
Interesting for the history of Middle Europe is the connection with the presumed security, national socialism and other fascistic movement have promised 90 years ago, a security guaranteed by an accountable racially unified community („Ein Volk“). As a precondition served ethnical purity, “one” blood without strange ingredients, so that any deviations from an unconsciously created consensus of “the people” would be impossible. This context explains the brutality, with which all that should be eradicated that was racially alien. In reality, what was threatened was not the “purity of race” but the safety of a net of prejudices and preoccupations, which was meant to grant inner security. Successfully, anything strange was equated with unpredictability, which was considered the same as dangerous. The efficacy of this ideology is evidently unbroken up to today and still attracts many people.
Subtle Dependencies
It is impossible to erect a functioning tribal community (except in the heads of right-wing national populists), just as there is absolute safety in family attachments. Under the guise of love and communion, often subtle dependencies are created, fuelled by the unconsciousness of parents due to their unfulfilled needs for attachment in childhood. The soul wants to get back from the won children what has been missed long before. The secure attachment, parents offer, serves the purpose of receiving love, which was absent in the beginning. Children cover this deficit and start to suffer themselves from the flaw of love, which can only be perceived on an unconscious level.
Yet the conflicts of emancipation in adolescence can be very grave in such cases. For the parents, the securities are at stake, which they have created via their children, and for the children, their own life is at risk. They want to retrieve their birth right of recognition of their true self.
Every soul wants to set free. Adolescents, who break out of the guidelines of their families, pay a service to themselves and to their parents to check the concepts of love and to define them anew. As long as love is mixed with dependency, there are inner forces, which surface in conflicts. When these tensions can be resolved in a constructive way, dependent attachments can be transformed into free flowing relationships. Thus, a deeper wisdom is revealed, that safety can only be found in inner freedom.
Further recommendations:
A Start With a Welcome
Developmental Trauma
When we invite and welcome friends, we see it as our duty as hosts to accept the people who come as they are and enjoy them as such. When children come to this world, we are enchanted and mesmerized (in case we are connected to ourselves). We do not even consider that this tiny being could be different as to how her/she is, in his/her perfect charm.
Whenever we set off with something new, it needs this warm welcome. We need the feeling that we get a place where we can feel safe and which can serve as a base for expanding into the new realm. We need encouragement and assertion that the new project is good and appropriate for us and that we are on the right path.
Even more so, this need is active at our earliest start, at the moment of conception. New life
i
s created, and as scientists have found out, the fertilized egg cell celebrates by releasing billions of zinc atoms to create radiant light. This is as if nature performs a firework to transmit the message of this terrific beginning to the whole world.
Yet not all future parents are excited about the new life that is coming into their lives, out of different reasons. So in these cases, a proper welcome is disturbed. As we know from prenatal therapy, the tiny beings feel how their closest environment reacts to their appearance – full of joy and excitement, or full of worries or even fright. Rejecting pregnancy, as much as it might be understandable from the actual circumstances of the parent’s lives, casts a lasting shadow over the young being, which he/she will carry on as a burden throughout life.
Especially in this fragile beginning, new life is reliant on safe and trustworthy surroundings for its survival. Yet this survival is in question, when there are doubts or fears in the parents concerning the existence of the child, equal in the mother, the father or both. Even rejection from the parents of the parents or other close persons can trigger fears of survival in the child. For it is totally dependent on goodwill and being wanted by its close environment. It does not have any power over its own fate, no capabilities of communicating its anguish and no means to cope with the fears of annihilation.
According to research in prenatal psychology, there are especially two moments in which such a traumatization can happen: Right at conception, when the fear of pregnancy is inherent in the sexuality of the parents, and a few weeks later, when the mother notices her pregnancy. Of course, subsequent attempts for abortion additionally inflict the growing life in a disastrous way.
A secure attachment to both mother and father is crucial for the wellbeing of the child. When the parents question the pregnancy, the parental attachment is severely compromised and the existence of the child is overshadowed from its very beginning creating feelings of unsettlement. This blueprint of unsecure attachment can exacerbate and complicate all future relationships. It can form a basic attitude towards life (not to belong to this world, having no place), connected with a strong longing for some magical place in fantasy, where happiness could eventually be found. Fears, doubts and longings are projected onto parents, partners in relationships and friends, who are declared as responsible for covering the enormous needs for security and safety, and usually they will be overstrained by these demands and will react accordingly. When little needs in daily life do not get fulfilled immediately, emotional dramas full of despair can be triggered.
Putative Welcome
Some parents tell their offspring how much they were wanted and welcomed. This can be good for the children and enhance their feelings of safety in life. Yet what does it mean when the children cannot accept or believe the message in the depth of their soul and still feel unsafe in their world? Every well-meaning parent also possesses subconscious motivations and impulses, usually without noticing. Children have a sense for these levels and the ambiguities resulting from them. Yet they cannot understand what is going on. It often happens that the fears of the parents are suppressed by their feelings of obligation. It also can happen that children are glutted by unconscious expectations of the parents. There are strong urges in the subconsciousness of the parents to use the new life for its purposes. Unresolved inner conflicts, unlived endeavors, unattained goals and ideals easily get delegated onto the child. This tiny being is a rather blank page offering itself for the projections coming from the subconsciousness of the parents.
It can also occur that parents who tell their children how much they were looking forward to their arrival, unconsciously want to compensate for their own unsecure prenatal attachment. By doing so, they want to reaffirm their own safety, of which they lacked in their early phases of life. Maybe they want to tell their children that they are trying to accept them in the way they would have needed to be accepted by their own parents. Maybe they want to be especially good parents as they could not experience these qualities in their childhood. There are lots of variations about how to incorporate children into one’s own unconscious life agenda and to thus exploit them for one’s own purposes.
Unconditional Giving
From the start of their lives, children need unconditional love and acceptance from their parents for thriving well from a sound fundament: We welcome you as you are, and we wish that you can grow and develop in a way appropriate to your disposition and being, and we promise to support you as good as we can. This is the message, which grants trust and security, as a basis for further physical and emotional growth.
Free of ambitions, expectations, projections – this is how the welcome for new life should be ideally, and this is a high claim. For it means that parents have to relinquish their own egos as radically as possible. They should be aware of their claims. They should be attentive to all their unconscious tendencies to burden their child with their own plans, and they should give up these impulses. Thus a great beginning of life can be launched.
This attitude includes the further program for raising children – or for cooperating in the grow process of their offspring. This program consists in unconditional service, in giving without counterinsurance, in presence with and for the little ones. Children reciprocate anything they receive, but often not in the form expected by the parents. In the view of the whole, everything comes into balance, but only when the attitude of the parents they have to develop for themselves, is appropriate. The genuine remuneration for being a parent lies in the incomparable joy offered by the new unique being by its very existence, which is nothing but an immense ongoing present.
This is what Khalil Gibran shares with his famous poem:
Your children are not your children.
They are the sons and daughters of Life's longing for itself.
They come through you but not from you,
And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.
You may give them your love but not your thoughts,
For they have their own thoughts.
You may house their bodies but not their souls,
For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow,
which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.
You may strive to be like them,
but seek not to make them like you.
For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.
You are the bows from which your children
as living arrows are sent forth.
The archer sees the mark upon the path of the infinite,
and He bends you with His might
that His arrows may go swift and far.
Let your bending in the archer's hand be for gladness;
For even as He loves the arrow that flies,
so He loves also the bow that is stable.
Further recommendations:
Insecurities in Secure Attachment
Breathwork and Developmental Trauma
The common understanding of trauma refers to a single experience of shock which was so terrible that the inner balance gets severely affected over a longer period of time – a traffic accident, the sudden death of a family member, a violent assault etc. Such events are called mono traumas and are connected to the posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). When working in therapy with such cases, it is important to resolve the shock state which is stored inside and to complete the fight/flight-reaction which was disrupted by the trauma.
When such traumatization happen frequently, for instance like abusive violations or aggressive attacks, we talk about sequential traumatization. In the therapy of such cases, the focus has to be on establishing a stable therapeutic relationship, connected with building up inner strength and a reliable access to resources before the resolution of the traumas can start. Then the work can focus on freeing the feelings which have been blocked around the traumatic situations.
The relatively new term of developmental trauma addresses ongoing experiences of neglect and frustration of needs in early childhood. It is closely connected to the extensively documented concept of attachment disorders. Unsecure attachment causes chronically malfunctions in the autonomic nervous system and interferes with the development of the brain, the hormonal system and the memory. These different forms of unsecure attachment (avoidant, ambivalent, disorganized) develop in an atmosphere of ongoing and repeated miscommunication between the child and its caretakers. This is exactly the atmosphere for creating developmental traumas.
There do not have to be single significant traumatic experiences but uncertainty, threat and distortion happen very often or constantly. Many studies have shown that traumatization caused by human relationships have a much deeper impact as traumatization by natural sources (like natural catastrophes). It seems that we humans are so strongly designed as social beings that our healthy emotional and physical development depends to a high degree on a loving and stable social environment, especially in the early phases of growing up. Developmental traumas can cause physiological, emotional, social and cognitive disabilities.
For the unborn and the baby are totally depended on the grownups for their survival. They have nothing to give in exchange for what they get except their love. Is the safeguard of this survival in danger, panic breaks out. And a baby does not have more that total defense, tensing up, freezing and inner withdrawal as mechanisms to survive the panic. The ultimate defensive reaction is rigor and numbness. When the traumatization has happened before birth, it is the only possibility of reaction. In this state, dissociations, splits in consciousness and loss of body perception happen easily. When someone has difficulties in gaining access to feelings and emotions up to palsies can have their origin in such early childhood grievances.
When this inner state of stress becomes chronified, it can be seen in slighter symptoms like a rigid gaze, deficits in concentration, disability to listen or different health problems. Trivial reasons can trigger a shock reaction: the breath is held, all irrelevant actions stop. The total awareness goes to the outer senses, especially to hearing and looking. Such symptoms can be active throughout a whole lifetime and intensify in situations of stress. These persons do not even realize that they have adopted this reactive behavior at one point in time for protecting themselves, but they assume that this is just the way they are.
A further result of this kind of traumatization is the delay, deceleration or even inhibition in developing the Social Engagement Systems resp. the smart vagus system according to the polyvagal theory. In these cases, even low degrees of stress in social situations can lead to intensive emotional reactions which impede any empathic clarification of the situation. When the stress mode passes another level, blocking is the only possibility. Socially compatible reactions are no longer accessible in this state. It is not possible to regulate the emotions, they flood the consciousness without any respect to the situation and the involved persons.
A nervous system which predominantly switches between sympathetic nervous system and parasympathetic nervous system without using the newer and more intelligent vagus systems comes into deregulation and overstraining. Various health problems can result from that. The sympathetic system does not know about relaxation, and the parasympathetic system can only relax in exhaustion.
Researches in the US estimate that three million newborn babies per year are affected by developmental traumas (which are 70 % !) so that this distortion is one of the most crucial health issues in the world. This category is not yet contained in the current diagnostic classifications (DMS IV, ICD 10). So symptoms with a developmental trauma background get often wrongly diagnosed, e.g. as Attention deficit-hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) or as bipolar (manic-depressive) illness. The standard treatment is medication instead of working therapeutically on the developmental deficits.
Breathwork and Developmental Traumas
Many elements for a successful treatment of developmental traumas are part of the basic repertoire of integrative breathwork when applied with all the skills from a profound training. These elements which will be discussed in the following sections and they can be used as a checklist if there is any need of further training to work efficiently with breathwork in cases of developmental trauma.
Vegetative Regulation
Developmental traumatization causes ongoing deregulations in the whole area of the vegetative nervous system. This can lead to over activity on the one side (chronic tension and nervousness) or lack of drive and motivation (passivity, depression). Sometimes there is a constant shift between these poles. These clients cannot react in a relaxed way to challenges from the environment.
By relaxing the exhale and by strengthening the inbreath, improved vegetative regulations can be built up and trained. The breath “education” which means the restoration of the original breathing functions on the level of the vegetative nervous system consists in opening the space for the new, smart vagus when the rhythmical and regular change between sympathetic nervous system and parasympathetic nervous system on a low level of arousal is established. When the breath is flowing deeply and relaxed, this is an indication of a well regulated nervous system. In this state, the skills for social engagement and the openness for inner feeling are accessible. Additionally, self-confidence and self-esteem are strengthened on the organismic level.
De-Dissociation
When we breathe consciously, we open the way for inner perception, for strengthening the inner sense and for feeling body sensations. As breathworkers, we guide the client to feel the body all the time during the breathing process, to feel sensations and emotions. With eyes closed, the attention can easily stay with the inner universe.
Dissociation is a central mechanism of traumatization which is the splitting off of the awareness from the physical level. It is as if the consciousness would emigrate to a secure place so that the threating situation to which the body is exposed can be observed from a safe distance. When the traumatization goes on, the ability to feel the body and its signals can get lost totally.
The simplest way to reconnect body and consciousness is by giving the attention to the breathing. By this, one can dive consciously into the permanent stream of the organismic process in which a lot of information comes up from the inner world and its memory. The therapeutic value lies in establishing the trust in this channel of information and to help to relieve the dissociation, the split between body and consciousness. Thus, the tendency to step out of the present experience is reduced and the awareness for the demands of the momentary situation is strengthened. To feel the breath consciously and to connect to the body by doing this is a practice which can be done anytime and everywhere.
Yet we have to be aware of dissociative flashbacks which can happen during a breathing process when it becomes difficult for the breather to keep the attention with the breathing and to slip into unconsciousness. Although this state of unconsciousness can have different reasons it is important to clear whether it has to do with tiredness or exhaustion so that the body reacts with a need for sleep to the lying position or whether it is an unconsciously directed evasion into a parasympathetic state which can be the result of an early traumatization. Especially when this drifting off happens at the point of entering a deeper level of inner experience the assumption is close at hand that it is a protective reaction to safeguard the original traumatizing experience.
Bottom-Up and Top-Down
We work „bottom-up“, when we aim at the root of the distortion and let the healing happen until it can be experienced on the “upper” level. When we work with conscious breathing, we reach deeply into the preverbal area. As soon as we focus on our breathing, we access realms of experience which took place beyond or long before the cognitive processing was possible, and which have left their traces way under the regions of language.
Working top down is secondary, yet equally important. It is less represented in breathwork. The rule is often told: Let the breath do its work, that is enough. Talking during or after the process is unnecessary and can disturb the inner process. Still, the rise of deep emotions must be balanced with the ability to integrate them. We should not neglect this aspect. Working top down means to provide a frame of understanding for what happens or what has happened. When the client is able to understand the inner experience she can relax on the cognitive level as well. It is also important to stabilize healing which has happened on the physical and emotional level by changing cognitive patterns which could inhibit the integration and consolidation of what has been healed.
Filling Up the Container
Developmental traumatization causes a permanent alert state in the organism which has to run on an emergency program. There is a lack of time and space for regeneration for mending the damages and for filling up the resources. Often not even sleep provides this function of regeneration as it is restless and disrupted. This leads to irritability, hypersensitivity and lack in stress resistance. Small incidents can cause strong emotional reactions and alterations in the mood.
Breathwork sessions should ideally lead towards a state of deep relaxation either after processes of intensive emotional discharge or after a calm and smooth course. Clients often report after a session that they never before felt as relaxed as now. This is the state in which the depleted energy containers get replenished.
To be able to relax better also in daily life with the help of mindful breathing is one of the pleasant side effects of breath therapy as well as the use of conscious breathing for coping with sleep disorders. This helps to improve the energy balance sustainably because the body gets the required amount of regenerative phases.
Anchoring in the Present
Traumatization is an experience in the past with impacts on the present moment. In the present we know that we have survived the trauma and that we are stronger and more capable than we were as children. So it is important that we keep the consciousness in the present moment when elements of the trauma experience emerge. So the original experience can be relived in a secure framework.
The breath offers an excellent way to return to the present moment again and again. As therapists, we encourage the breather to notice the flow of the breath in every moment, even when tough and dreadful memories and intense feelings come up. The breath acts as safe fundament of the re-experience of the trauma situation. We help the client to establish a bridge between the bad experience of the past and the safety in the present. This way, a new imprint in the brain is established.
Conscious breathing can easily be connected with grounding exercises which play an important role in anchoring in the present. The energetic contact to the floor strengthens the internal safety, the feeling of being carried by the huge mother earth.
Working with Catharsis
Developmental traumas create complex patterns which go back to unfinished fight-flight-reactions. When a baby is frustrated in its needs it starts to react with irritation, then with anger and with aggression and finally, when there is still no adequate response from outside, with resignation, withdrawal and blocking. In these cases, the potential of activation of the sympathetic branch cannot be completed in its natural course. It is halfway stuck. Before the aggressive energies can be expressed and outlived, they meet a massive barrier which turns into a prohibition: I am not allowed to be angry because I would lose the love of the people who care for my survival.
By intensifying and deepening the breathing, often body impulses arise to the surface which urge towards expression in order to complete unfinished cycles of aggression. So it is helpful to trust these impulses and express them so that the blocked energy can be set free. This can be connected with screaming, kicking, pushing etc. and has to take place in a very safe environment, including the therapist. She needs a deep rooted trust in the power of the feelings so she can give all the safe holding the client needs in this process. She has to act like a parent who holds the helplessly angry child with the message: Yes, you are allowed to be angry now and you are allowed to express this feeling with all its strength, and I love you with all of this feeling.
But we have to be cautious to force the breath, because accessing the sensitive trauma moments to quickly can overwhelm the client and cause retraumatization. It is crucial in time to slow down the breathing when the root of the problem is approaching so that the experience can be integrated carefully step by step.
Healing and invasive body contact
A form of traumatizing neglect can be found in the lack of body contact between the baby and its caretakers. Newborns feel contact and love mainly via the body. They perceive on this channel what a relationship they have to their most important contact persons. When this channel is not used they lack of indispensable information and they do not know whether they are wanted or not, whether they are accepted or rejected. So they feel totally unsecure in a no man’s land where there is threat and danger any time possible. This is the cause for developing a constantly active vigilance and sensitivity for the smallest sparks of contact which often get charged up with unconscious interpretations like: When I smile, my mother takes notice of me.
Breathwork is a form of body therapy, so it provides different forms of body contact. As proven scientifically already, empathic touch can ease pain, relieve stress and release happiness and attachment hormones. Touch is one of the most important ways of communication for empathy and acceptance.
When working with clients with developmental trauma who suffer from lack of touch, it is crucial to be aware of the enormous importance and significance of body contact as well as of the huge insecurity connected with it. Touching in a tiny way can have a big impact which should be perceived clearly and exactly and processed verbally. So it should be clarified again and again how the body contact is received so that any overflow or invasion of contact signals is omitted.
Mindfulness Training
Mindfulness therapy is gaining positive recognition as helpful tool with different problems, mainly stress disorders and diseases related to that. It is based on the Buddhist meditation practice which, of course, uses the awareness of the breath as one of its key methods. This is an assignment from mindfulness therapy: When learning mindfulness skills, it is usually recommended that we start practicing mindfulness of the breath, then mindfulness of the body, before moving on to mindfulness of thoughts.
When we work with the conscious breath, we practice mindfulness therapy. We keep our attention on the breath (as therapists and as clients), observe the inflow and the outflow, whatever sensations and impulses come from inside. Thus we connect to the experience of the present moment and pay less attention to the thoughts. The world of mental constructions withdraws to the background. This is a valuable tool to be able to cope with the challenges of life more calmly and even-tempered. For someone suffering from developmental trauma, this is a considerable aid for improving one’s quality of life.
The Therapeutic Relationship
As mentioned above, developmental traumatization predominantly results from an atmosphere of unsecure attachment. So the relationship between breathworker and client has a crucial role in healing. As a client with this burden comes with an unsecure attachment pattern, it is important that the therapist can offer the specific remedy in a new form of relationship with consistency and safety which the client missed during childhood. The therapist should be able to cope with typical pendulum movements in opening and closing, in trusting and mistrusting which are common for unsecure attached clients. As soon as they notice that they are accept whether they are open or withdrawn, they can relax more in contact and start to build up a new internal model of relationship step by step.
As congruent relationship experiences have occurred very rarely in the history of these clients, they have a high expectancy in the therapist. They notice immediately when something is wrong and they react highly sensitively to that, often without mentioning. When e.g. the therapist answers the client’s question that she is not tired (because she wants to be an attentive and present companion), although she is tired, it creates mistrust in the client, which can be so subtle that not even the client is aware of it. So there is no possibility of clearing it up unless the therapist becomes aware of the change in the relationship atmosphere.
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Many of the elements which are needed by clients with developmental traumas for an effective healing process are part of the basic repertoire in breath therapy. And a lot of additional learning can take place to improve the professional skill by looking more accurately at the backgrounds of the distortions and problems with which the clients come to the session. We can trust the merits and healing power of the breath and we can work together in enlarging its possibilities. For this it is important that we encounter new concepts and insights.
References:
Laurence Heller: Healing Developmental Trauma. How Early Trauma Affects Self-Regulation, Self-Image, and the Capacity for Relationship. Berkeley: North Atlantic Books 2012
Bessel van der Kolk: Developmental trauma disorder: Towards a rational diagnosis for children with complex trauma histories. http://www.traumacenter.org/products/pdf_files/preprint_dev_trauma_disorder.pdf 10.12.2012
www.developmentaltrauma.com 7.1.2013
http://www.getselfhelp.co.uk/stream.htm, 8.1.2013
Wilfried Ehrmann: Entwicklungstraumen und Atemtherapie. In: ATMAN Zeitung 1/2013
