Safety is an intelligent attachment to healthy, consistent, and loving connection to the present moment. This relationship between safety and attachment is perfectly illustrated during the beginning phases of life. From the time we are in our mother’s womb, we are engaged in a process of safety. Our mother’s health, nutrition, emotional state, rest, and relaxation of her nervous system is felt and processed by the infant. The infant’s physical processing of safety is a slow and gradual attachment to the natural rhythms of the mother’s body, which is stimulated and woven into the natural cycles of the baby’s physical sensations and expression. When the mother experiences stress, the baby processes this with twists, turns, and flips in order to find a place to relax. The baby searches for the rest and digest aspects of it’s own parasympathetic nervous system through the sympathetic fight or flight responses of twisting and turning. The natural rhythms of the mother that trigger the parasympathetic rest and digest responses of the infant exist as a gentle rocking of the mother’s slow and steady movements, the mother’s nutritional choices that stimulate gentle digestion, the smooth rhythm of the mother’s heart and lungs, as well as settled emotions that lead to more relaxed tones of the physical body. This relationship with mother and baby tells a story: safety is an internal connection with our body as well as an external connection with our environment. Disruption of the body’s natural rhythms speaks to the circumstances in which we lost an internal and external connection, which develops as an insecure attachment in our own body and environment. Safety that has been reinforced in our personal relationships gives us access to our physical body and more availability to create positive and supportive relationships. In this article, we will go over how safety is woven into our physical experience and leads to healthy emotional attachment in our relationships; how a lack of safety in our past is derived from the absence of another person for regulation; how this impacts the trajectory of our personal relationships; and ways that you can connect with yourself in order to reestablish and maintain healthy attachments.
Healthy Attachment
Safety is impactful in that we are dependent on it from the moment our nervous system begins to form and develop in the womb. In the womb, safety is stimulated through the mother’s natural rhythms. Once born, a child is dependent on the parent for regulation as calm, settled, and secure body expressions are developed through our parents’ responses to our physical and emotional needs. There is one memory that instantly comes to my mind when I think about secure attachment. This experience from my childhood reinforces a profound sense of regulation and security provided by my mother. I remember lying by the tub in my childhood bathroom’ the room was warm from the heater and my body was cold and shivering from being feverish. I was scared and overwhelmed by the experience as I lay on the floor, my head rested on my mothers lap while she rubbed my back. I can recall her gentle presence, soothing words, and the smooth and rhythmic stroke of her hand. As I recall this memory, it still elicits a feeling of warmth in my stomach and a sense of rest and expansion in my chest. This physical presence of my mother gave me access to a safe connection to my body. With my young and still-developing nervous system, I did not know how to calm myself down, relax my fear, vocalize my need for support, or tell myself that everything is going to be ok. I was engulfed by the experience of being sick, and without my mother I would be laying on the floor alone, shivering, and shaking from my illness. These physical responses in my body become the totality of my experience and, if too overwhelming, will lead to a shutdown or freeze response. Shutting down occurs as we automatically disconnect from the physical feelings of overwhelm and from the environment that is causing us harm or neglecting us. Shut down or freeze leaves the reaction of my autonomic response in the form of coldness, numbness, shivering, and shaking trapped in my nervous system and contained in this memory of the event. Fortunately for me, my mom was holding my head and rubbing my back, which gave me access to the experience of regulation. I felt the warmth in my chest, the calmness in my belly, and the contact with my environment in the form of her soothing voice, the rhythmic stroking of my back, and the warm heat of the bathroom. My mom’s care and attention in this moment brought me down from the heightened sympathetic fight or flight reactions of panic, fear, and overwhelm and into the parasympathetic rest and digest aspects of warmth, comfort, and gentleness.
How can a moment like this transpire into healthy emotional attachment later in life?
Because of my mother’s presence, I gained a physiological response and emotional memory of love and support when I needed a source of regulation. Attachment such as this can lead to so many competencies later in life. I may search for relationships that are consistent and present for my needs; I may be more able to articulate my feelings because connection is familiar and expected; I will be more capable of calming down my reactions and less likely to feel a sense of abandonment. These capacities help me have healthy strategies for attuning to my own emotional states and help me to form healthy, safe, and trusting attachments in relationships. It speaks to the ways in which our physical expression and health impacts the trajectory of our personal relationships. On the opposite side of this equation, if my mom was not present, I would have to manage my overwhelm through suppression of my emotions and through the physiological response of freeze.
Insecure Attachment and Freeze Response
Freeze is a physiological response that kicks in when we feel that there is no source of release or integration from the overwhelm that we are experiencing. If I am left alone on the bathroom floor in a state of shaking, trembling, coldness, fear, and physical illness, then I will begin to disconnect from these physical feelings. This response helps me to come down from my overwhelm through a pattern of separation from my physical body as well as separation from the environment that is not attending to my needs. This type of suppression leaves the physiological response of fear, overwhelm, shaking, numbness, illness, and coldness locked in my nervous system because of the lack of regulation from my parents. Shutting down in this instance is not a choice that I make, but an automatic response of my nervous system to protect me from continued harm. This type of suppression leaves the physiological responses unregulated and will resurface in my personal relationships in the form of patterns of disconnection.
In relationships I may suppress my emotions and feelings because my experience is that they are not cared for or attended to by others; I may lack an orientation to my physical body because it was so overwhelming in this instance of physical illness; I may choose relationships in which my partner is absent and not attentive because of my parents’ neglect; I may be overly aggressive, angry, hurt, fearful, and reactive in instances where I perceive my partner is neglecting me; or I may be quick to disconnect and look away from others when they attempt to connect with me. In all of these manifestations of my relationships, disconnection and suppression become the historically familiar pattern for establishing a sense of safety.
In my private practice, I have seen so many instances of a lack of safety and regulation impact clients’ current life experiences. Examples include being alone in a household with an alcoholic parent, not having a parent to speak to in the midst of sexual abuse, having an overwhelmed parent that feels distant, or not having a conscientious doctor during a medical procedure. In these instances, my approach is always the same: find the sources of regulation and safety that can reestablish attention and connection back to the physical felt experience. Connection with the body and safety gives our nervous system capacity to feel and inevitably gives us the capacity to connect, heal, and regulate as we touch on past instances of trauma.
What can you do to reattach to safety, heal, and form secure attachments?
Reattaching to safety is how we let go of the insecure patterns in relationships and begin to open up to more physical and environmental aspects of regulation. In insecure attachment our whole experience is overwhelming because we had no source of regulation. We do not have access to the gentle rhythms of a regulated nervous system. This is where we can utilize safety in our environment to be able to access our physical experience and to bring more regulation into our nervous system. I have heard clients speak of childhood experiences of neglect who express safety in the forms of a pet, being in nature, a feeling of safety with a grandparent, or in their current life with a partner, friend, or family member. Once we identify sources of safety, we then turn our attention to the body to notice physical sensation in relation to safety. In my story above, this was the warmth I feel in my belly or ease I feel in my back as I recall my mother’s gentle rubbing. If you can access something in your environment in the past or present that feels safe, then begin to notice where you feel this in your physical body. You may notice expansion in the chest or warmth in the hands. Experiences of safety in the body give us more capacity to feel, and with time begin to connect and regulate tension in moments in which we feel unsafe; they give us the ability to turn our attention toward our body in order to notice experiences of numbness, coldness, shaking, trembling, hollowness in the chest, or intense emotions of sadness or loss. These experiences exemplify the reactions of the autonomic nervous system in relation to events when we did not receive attention and regulation. My mother’s affection allowed me to move through cycles of shakiness, overwhelm, and coldness, while maintaining a sense of safety. As you access your physical and emotional responses, time and attention leads to the reintegration of the body’s responses to trauma, and through being with these physical responses, we create a reintegration into the natural rhythms of safety. Safety and regulation can be noticed through the examples of a deep breath, opening of the throat, warmth in the chest, strength in our core, and relaxation of our stomach.
We are engaged in creating safety from the moment we begin life in our mother’s womb. Family support systems strengthen our sense of safety and connection to our physical body. Patterns of safety that are formed in our childhood allow us to have access to our own internal resources in order to form healthy attachments in our adult lives. In situations where safety and regulation were not received during childhood, there is a natural disconnection from internal and external stress, making it difficult for the child and adult to gain access to the natural rhythms of the parasympathetic rest and digest aspects of the central nervous system. This unregulated state ultimately leads to patterns of freeze and suppression that manifest in insecure attachments in our personal relationships. As a step toward healing, we can open up the door to safety in our environment as a first step to reconnecting to our physical experience, gaining more access to the body and supplying our nervous system with more properties of regulation. As we learn reconnection, we are then able to feel our tensions and emotions while maintaining connection. The result is the connection and regulation that was missing in our life and to find more capacity to engage without the patterns of fear, limitation, suppression, and protection in personal relationships. Safety is an intelligence that, when harnessed, can lead to an internal and external connection to health and wholeness.