Shifting from a complex PTSD attachment style into security is possible.
When the primary caregiver is predictable, consistent, and trustworthy, their child feels “securely attached.” Ideally, a parent is a source of comfort and safety. Exploration, information, and play are important parts of a lasting and meaningful connection to their child.
Yet, sometimes a child is left feeling “insecurely attached.” Those who were supposed to be the most caring, consistent, and trustworthy miss the mark. What about you? Do you feel unlovable, rejected, or abandoned?
What do you believe about yourself and your relationships (or lack thereof?) Are you sure people are generally untrustworthy, indifferent, or frightening? If so, you’re not alone.
Are You a Survivor of Relationship Trauma?
If you struggle with feeling alone or unprotected, you may very well be a survivor. But don’t beat yourself up. Indeed, you may be trying to live and love despite a deep sense of insecurity and anxiety. Many people who feel this way wrestle with a specific form of Complex PTSD. In general, this deeply affects their relationships with other people.
Due to problematic caregiver experiences, this anxiety disorder profoundly impacts your perception of love, safety, and reliability with other people. Those early attachments may have even infused a sense of helplessness in you. As a result, you may also carry a supply of self-protective behaviors into your adult relationships that don’t serve you well.
Is Your Complex PTSD Attachment Style Repairable?
Yes! You can recover, though you may not feel that way right now. Your “secure attachment” was disrupted early, possibly from infancy. Thus, shame, confusion, low self-worth, and frustration may be wearing you down physically and emotionally. This is quite common.
However, with the support of a qualified and compassionate therapist, you can connect with people successfully. Remember, childhood abuse, neglect, or endangerment compromised the way you give or receive love. This happened through no fault of your own. Your responsibility now is to move forward and find peace with the past. You deserve to feel secure, worthy and empowered in your relationships. You can learn to feel whole and secure.
How to Find “Earned” Security
The toughest thing about Complex PTSD is that it feels like who you are. Because a common response to early relationship trauma is personal inadequacy and patterns of inhibition, you may feel stuck in anxiety or isolated by a need to just avoid relationships altogether.
Fortunately, you can take steps toward more confidence, creativity, and success in your dealings with others. Help for Complex PTSD attachment style is “earned secure attachment.” Meaning, anyone without a secure attachment style can earn it through reflection, interaction, and relationship as an adult. Consider the following:
Narrate: Face the past and make sense of it
An essential part of overcoming your Complex PTSD attachment style is to face the impact of your relationship trauma. To earn security means first thinking critically about your childhood experiences, exploring the decisions you made because of them, and determining (likely with a therapist) how to break unproductive patterns and build emotional resilience. In other words, work at creating a clear narrative about your past. Such self-awareness will:
Help you reconcile the past and see how it affects the future support you seek from others.
Increase your capacity for authentic connection with others.
Elevate your ability to repair relationship misunderstandings with others.
Integrate: Rewire your brain and body
Fortunately, our brain can change and your body can release traumatic memories. We know that the brain can create new neural pathways (neuroplasticity). Additionally, the body is capable of overcoming stuck bodily responses in the nervous system created by abuse or neglect.
A qualified therapist can use both talk therapy and somatic (body-focused) therapy to help insecurely attached people integrate healthy, secure experiences into their lives. Mindfully and consistently, you and your therapist will address habitual responses. Together you'll identify them to deal with your insecurities and anxiety.
As you learn to recognize the triggers and sensations informing your perceptions, using more coping tools becomes possible. Eventually, those techniques become readily accessible whenever you need them thus developing your self-esteem and trust in others.
Relate: Recover through relationship
Earned security is achieved the same way early security is achieved. The difference is timing. Because attachment is disrupted via relationship, it can be repaired via relationship.
Security is possible through friendships, therapy and romantic connections. A committed relationship being key ingredients for significantly altering Complex PTSD attachment style and finding security. Quality experiences in all of these areas involve learning to give and accept care, support, respect, and love.
Because it takes time to develop an earned secure attachment, a good place to start is in therapy. Therapy offers a path to secure attachment through therapeutic connection. While establishing this relationship, you can safely develop your childhood narrative and challenge unhelpful mental and physical responses fueling insecurity.
Shifting Your Complex PTSD Attachment Style is Worth the Work
Finally, understanding your needs is vital for meaningful change to occur. Dealing with the impact on your nervous system and thought patterns is crucial. Shifting from the Complex PTSD attachment style to a secure attachment style requires support, self-compassion, and a clear understanding of your goal and the work necessary. Most of all, earned security takes time and space. Choose to give yourself those gifts. Therapy can help in the areas mentioned above. You really do deserve to feel better and love the way you’ve always wanted.
For a free consultation to find out how we can help, please get in touch with us.
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