I look down and see my two-year-old son face first in the mud. My instinct is to instantly scoop him up and hold him close to my chest. Tears flow across his muddy cheeks as his body stiffens and his hands tightly grasp my jacket. As his sobs decrease, he begins to shutter and shake and a deep breath emerges as he settles onto my chest. I continue to embrace him, letting him know that it’s going to be ok. In the days after this experience with my son, I wondered what would happen if a child did not have their father or mother to hold them through this intense emotional experience and the overwhelming physiological responses of their central nervous system. In the necessity to form attachment for survival, how does a child adapt in order to maintain attachment when parents are not available for their emotional needs? As this article explores these questions and asks you to look into your own attachment history, I will offer some techniques for creating new secure patterns of attachment for your own emotional experience.
Children are so often at the mercy of what is happening around them: they do not have a choice to leave their overwhelming homes, the power to control their environment, or the mental and emotional development to understand that what is happening around them is not their fault. Our emotions and body felt responses in relation to these circumstances tell the story of the imprints that these situations have left on our central nervous system. These emotional imprints exist as memory that is held in our physical body and is acted out in our current relationships. My mind instantly moves to a common childhood experience of watching an argument between parents escalate into physical and emotional violence. A child watching cabinet doors smash closed, the big voices crashing over one another, and the huge physical presence of parents attempting to overcome each other through aggression; this will elicit emotions of fear, sadness, and hurt as safety slips away into violence. The child may feel secondary emotions such as frustration and anger as they take up the responsibility of protecting the more vulnerable parent. They may also experience frustration at not being seen during this whirlwind of reaction. All of these emotions are examples of dis-regulated fight or flight responses to an unsafe situation. Just like my son as he lay helplessly in the mud, emotions call out for the environment to change so we can be held, acknowledged, soothed, and comforted. When the environment does not change to meet these emotional needs, the child remains trapped in these imprints as the nervous system moves into a pattern of freeze to protect ourselves from continued overwhelm. Freeze may look like a child curling up in their room as a fight breaks out, staring off into space in the midst of the escalating argument, an experience of emotional distance from their parents, or not feeling safe in being vulnerable around people. These responses protect us from the feeling of overwhelm in our body and keep us from continually being exposed to the environment that does not change to meet our emotional needs.
Children have to maintain attachment to their parents even in the midst of domestic abuse. Children learn how to maintain stability in these situations by developing a relationship with their own emotions in order to maintain connection to their attachment figures. A young boy may maintain attachment to a father through suppressing his vulnerable and sensitive emotions as he watches how his mother’s vulnerability is met with the father’s anger and frustration. The little boy will maintain an attachment to his father through portraying toughness and aggression rather than sensitivity and vulnerability. Attachment could also be maintained through aggression as a way that the little boy could have protected his mother, maintaining her safety and securing his attachment. In relation to the little boy’s situation, all of his emotions have a direct purpose of attempting to maintain safety and regulation. As the little boy has to freeze around these emotional experiences, they no longer fulfill their direct purpose in maintaining regulation and connection to his environment. Freeze continues these attachment patterns as the emotions become locked in our body to be played out within our current relationships. Some examples could be continuing the protective response of anger through portraying confidence and aggression around male relationships and suppressing vulnerable and sensitive emotions. Not allowing himself to be open and emotionally vulnerable with men at the risk of being hurt, creating a lack of strong, healthy, and intimate male relationships. In his intimate female relationships, a little boy who has matured into a man may protect and control his wife, needing to know where she is, what she is doing, and how she is feeling. In this dynamic, the man is able to protect his wife and the dis-regulated emotions that would result from her not being safe. These are absolutely innocent responses to insecure emotional patterns that can cause a lack of secure and authentic connection. Through protection and maintaining of old attachment patterns, this man is now able to suppress the vulnerable emotions of loss of connection and control that were key factors of his early childhood experience. In helping ourselves to reconnect with our authentic emotional energy and resolve some of our insecure attachment patterns, we have to create ways of connecting with our physical body, create new patterns of regulation within our nervous system, learn to hold and contain our emotions, and feel and track the regulated factors that bring us out of fight, flight, and freeze states.
The following technique describes how to safely connect with your physical felt experience in order to regulate emotions. Once we have a firm grasp on resourcing the body for regulation and utilizing techniques to hold our physical felt experience, we will then learn how to contain our physical and emotional energy in a safe and gradual way. My suggestion in learning this practice is to first focus on the first three steps; once you have a firm grasp on resourcing your body for regulation, move on to the remaining steps. The first three steps build a solid foundation to safely regulate, release, and then once again regulate the overwhelm that can exist in emotional processing.
Step 1:
Gently rub your hands together and feel the sensation of the hands. Sensations can be described as warmth, coolness, tingling, open, shaky, closed. Take your time rubbing the hands together and applying different types of pressure to the hands. Once you feel that you are fully connecting with the hands, move your hands up to the biceps and triceps as you continue to track the sensation. Be curious about the depth of your awareness at first, noticing the surface of the skin and then moving more toward the internal sensation. Just like you did with the hands, track the sensation of the arms.
Step 2:
Slowly move your hands up to your shoulders and apply pressure with your hands. Your arms should be crossing against your chest and notice this secure holding posture of your arms. Just like the pressure applied to your hands and arms, notice the pressure and sensation of the arms lying against the chest. Once you are engaged with this holding posture and the physical feeling of your arms across your chest, shift your hands to lie on your chest above your heart. If for any reason this experience becomes overwhelming, shift back to one hand applying pressure to the other. It is important to mitigate any exposure to overwhelming sensations as we gradually become familiar with body felt sensations. Once your hands rest on your chest, feel the sensation of pressure on the chest and track the response of your hands in contact with the physical body.
Step 3:
Begin to notice factors of regulation that have been developed through touch, presence, and tracking sensation. As you hands lay on your chest notice feelings of warmth, deeper breath, relaxation, changes in posture, more connection with the floor beneath you, more open and relaxed energy in the stomach. If you can find one aspect of regulation, then try to focus on this experience and be curious about other changes in your physiology. Try to encourage, expand, and stay connected to these sensations of ease, rest and regulation. Try to repeat these three steps until you feel the ease of resourcing your physical sensation before proceeding to the remaining steps.
Step 4:
Now that you have a firm grasp on the resources of physical touch, presence, and tracking sensation then shift your attention toward aspects of your body that might feel dis-regulated. Bring your attention to this area of the body and begin to notice the physical patterns. Dis-regulation can manifest as shaking, trembling, tightness, weight, bound, holding, withdrawn, numb, hot, hurt, painful, or raw. See if it is possible to bring your awareness to the specific area of the body in which you feel these tones of dis-regulation. This is a really good time to practice going toward sensation and then moving away from overwhelm and back to the initial three steps for stability and regulation. If it feels possible to stay with the more challenging physical experiences, then track and notice them in the area of your attention.
Step 5:
Shift your hands away from the chest and gently lay your hands on the area where your attention has landed. Apply pressure and holding to this area of the body and gently track and notice your posture, shaking, trembling, weight, tears, numbness, coldness, hollowing, heat, or withdraw in the physical body as your hands lay on the experience of dis-regulation. At this time it can be helpful to identify emotions that may accompany these physical experiences. You may identify sadness, grief, loss, anger, frustration, or loneliness. In identifying the emotions, it is important to stay embodied and not go toward a more cerebral process. If you feel contained, consistent, and present with the feelings and emotions, then try to stick with the experience. If your experience becomes too overwhelming then go back to the first three steps as it is important to take your time and not expose your nervous system to too much overwhelm. This process is about slowly building a safe container for your feelings and emotions.
Step 6:
As your hands lay on the area of dis-regulation and as you stay present to the responses of the body, is it possible to notice aspects of regulation that come from holding this experience. This is a re-bonding of safe and secure attachment within your own nervous system. Can you notice even the smallest physiological changes of warmth, more upright posture, a slight authentic smile, lightness, deeper breath, solidness in your legs, warmth in your hands and feet, or a natural rhythm of your breath? These are examples of the body coming out of fight, flight, and freeze and a re engagement with the parasympathetic nervous system. As you track these changes, lay your hands back on your chest as you notice the feelings and sensations.
Step 7:
Once you have more regulation in your nervous system, more emotional containment, and a safer process for connecting with emotion, it may be helpful to engage with a supportive person to speak about your attachment history and articulate your experience with someone who can hold a safe space for you. This will allow you to engage in a way in which you don’t withdraw into overwhelm, attachment patterns, or dis-regulation, but instead stay consciously engaged with connecting and sharing your experience. These steps can help you resource your inner capacity to resource your body through sharing your experience. Noticing the person hearing and staying with you is a step toward true and authentic attachment in relationship.
When a child is left alone without a parent to help them through their physiological responses of fear and overwhelm, their nervous system takes control. Patterns of freeze manifest as withdrawal, isolation, and disconnection from their physical experience. Withdrawal leads to disconnection from the regulated aspects of their own nervous system and within their environment. A child has to continue to form attachment even in situations that are chaotic and unsafe for their health and survival. In doing so, a child will suppress their own authentic emotions in order to maintain attachment. These patterns leave unprocessed emotions and patterns of attachment to manifest in our current adult relationships. Through a slow and gradual practice, we can restore the regulated aspects of our physical experience and learn how to gently hold and track the release of our dis-regulated emotional experience. Through release of the fight, flight, and freeze aspects of our nervous system, we can become familiar with the open, light, and free expressions of safety and regulation. Through this process we reattach and bond to our own natural rhythms. This allows us to share our stories and our emotions without slipping back into the dis-regulated experience of early childhood traumas. Through emotional holding, regulation, and engagement, we reform healthy attachment patterns that are lived out through our relationships. Emotional healing brings us out of the shadow of the past and into a more hopeful present and future.