Trauma and its Impact on the Development of the Attachment System Webinar

Date: Sunday, May3, 2026/11:30 am – 1:00 pm pacific time.  

Imagine, you are a 2 year old child, completely dependent upon your caregiver for food, drink, your very survival.  You are born completely helpless!  You rely, you depend, you trust that your caregiver will take care of you until you can do it for yourself.  You have internalized attachment to the caregiver as absolutely vital for your survival.  They are priority number 1 and you must always know where they are and not lose them.  You develop a need, you cry, you protest, you go toward the caregiver for your survival, and instead of having that need soothed and resolved, it is met with anger or rejection or even physical violence.  Now, we have a dynamic where there is a natural attachment system that relies on caregiving for survival and safety, and a natural fight or flight system that warns us of impending danger, energetically sending us far away from the perpetrator of that danger.  This creates an approach/withdraw system, and that is why the disorganized infants in the Strange Situation appeared to have no strategy, or would freeze.  There are two competing systems, attachment and fear, operating at the same time.  What can we expect a 2 year old to do with that?

In one study (Carlson et al., 1989), 82% of infants who were mistreated by their parents were disorganized.  Disorganized infants were common in high risk samples, including poverty, psychiatric illness, and substance abuse.  These infants had had caregivers whose fear would arise in response to the child.  Parents were frightening, frightened, or dissociated.

The Unresolved category could be used for any of the other attachment styles.  For example, Unresolved/Dismissing, Unresolved/Preoccupied, etc.  It is highly associated with severe psychopathology, borderline disorder, dissociative states, and post traumatic stress disorder.  There is often a lapse in reasoning, memory, or coherence when discussing grief, trauma, or loss.  The therapist must develop a secure relationship with the patient; one that is reliable, inclusive, and safe, before the trauma is exposed.  This is a criticism of certain Prolonged Exposure treatments, where traumatized patients are put back into the traumatic memory or scene without the proper secure base or safe haven in place.  At the offset, the relationship is the focus of the work.  The patient will unconsciously attempt to recreate the unsafe and unreliable attachment relationship of childhood.  The road to security with the patient is a rocky one, as they will generate all of their defenses to avoid feeling the pain of their trauma.  The approach/withdraw system well established in the Unresolved patient will play out in the therapeutic relationship.  Teach the patient to make the secure decision and then sit with the abandonment terror that arises.  Increase the patient’s ability to tolerate unpleasant affective stimuli, thus allowing the patient to make the conscious secure decision.  They primarily use dissociation and splitting as their primary defenses.  The more “intellectual” defenses like rationalizing and denial were not formed because the neurobiology was altered during childhood trauma.

BIOLOGY

When someone is traumatized, the hippocampus (the part of the brain in charge of meaning making) is temporarily deactivated and the memory is formed in the amygdala and other structures.  As long as memories are in the amygdala, patients tend to re-live the traumatic experience over and over, rather than find meaning in it and integrate it.