Learning to Trust in the Uncertainty: Healing My Disorganized Attachment

[Image ID: A collage made by Margeaux. At the bottom is a vintage illustration of a triangle and two hands, with long fingernails, facing up with the backs of the palms facing the viewer. Above is a stone birdbath with bright pinks flowers floating in the water, and two tropical birds, with blue and green plumage, are perched on the edges, facing one another. Behind them is a grey ocean and sky, as if in a storm.]

I’m in the corner of my living room, crouched down in an upright fetal position. It’s dark and I’m hiding.

My therapist and I are doing a visualization. I can see my partner, Jaime, with a giant question mark hovering over their head. When my therapist asks me where I am in the room, I’m surprised to find myself in the corner. Normally, my anxious attachment would have me standing right beside my partner, arms wrapped around them, pleading them to not go. And so I’m not entirely sure why I find myself tucked away in this corner, out of sight.

“It’s like as soon as that question mark appears, a giant gust of wind blows me away, the pressure too strong to resist,” I tell her.

“Like you’re no long visible. Like there’s no space for you,” she responds.

“Yes, exactly.”

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For most of my adult-human-in-therapy-life, I’ve assumed that I have an anxious attachment style. I find myself in relationship after relationship with people who tend to pull away (a.k.a avoidant attachment). They take two steps back and I run right after them. Hands wrapped around their body. Begging them not to leave me. But after reading Jessica Fern’s book Polysecure: Attachment, Trauma and Consensual Nonmonogamy, I learn that there’s another attachment style that I haven’t heard of: disorganized attachment, or the fearful-avoidant style. And it is here that I find myself.

“The disorganized attachment style is most commonly associated with trauma and it typically arises when a child experiences their attachment figure as scary, threatening or dangerous. When we are afraid, our attachment system gets activated to seek proximity to and comfort from our attachment figure, but what happens when our attachment figure is the person causing the threat? This puts the child in a paradoxical situation where their caretaker, who is supposed to be the source of their comfort and the solution to their fears, is actually the source of their fear instead” (Fern 43).

Disorganized attachment shows up in families that have experienced lots of chaos. For me, this looked like the loss of my mom when I was 11; my dad developing ALS just a few years later; our descent into poverty, which brought with it unstable housing and two winters without heat in our home. It also develops when our caregiver is unpredictable, when we’re unsure of whether we’ll receive their love or their punishment. What do you do when the person who’s supposed to comfort you is the person who is causing the harm in the first place? You vacillate between the desire to be close and the desire to pull away.

Jaime and I both experience disorganized attachment; they tend towards the avoidant side of the spectrum, and I tend towards the anxious side. But there is much that we share in common. For our trauma brains, with their disorganized attachment, ambivalence or uncertainty equals danger. When we feel uncertainty in our relationships, our trauma brain gets activated because it’s looking for a pattern, collecting the evidence to show us that this time will be like all the others.

Two days ago, we talked through some of the ways that Jaime’s disorganized attachment shows up in the form of uncertainty, of questioning. We come to realize that there’s a difference between the uncertainty that exists in any partnership (and, especially, one in which the two people in love have yet to be in the same room with one another), and the uncertainty that brings with it a story about who we are. For Jaime, this kind of uncertainty leads them to feel like they are not enough for me, that it’s only a matter of time before they disappoint me. When uncertainty brings an old story with it, it’s a good sign that our trauma brain is activated.

My disorganized attachment and fear of uncertainty brings a different story with it: uncertainty leads to abandonment and it’s only a matter of time before Jaime walks away from our relationship. Because I’m too much. I’ve learnt that I can’t trust uncertainty, that it is a warning sign that I must listen to at all costs.

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Trust. According to John Gottman, the nation’s leading marriage expert, “Trust is one of the most commonly used words in the English language—it’s number 949.” Gottman explains that “when social psychologists ask people in relationships, ‘What is the most desirable quality you’re looking for in a partner when you’re dating?’, trustworthiness is number one. It’s not being sexy or attractive. It’s really being able to trust somebody.” I came across Gottman’s research during a google search. The night before, Jaime and I had talked through how my disorganized attachment had shown up that week, and their fear that I don’t trust them.’

“It’s not that I don’t trust you,” I told them. “It’s like my adult brain is 100% on board and sees your commitment to me and our partnership. But my trauma brain can’t trust you, this, us. I’m trying to get it on board.”

Being me, I put my researcher hat on. I wanted to better understand why trust was so hard for Eileen (the name I’ve given to my trauma brain) to trust Jaime and their commitment to our partnership. I figured it probably had something to do with my disorganized attachment.

As I continued reading Gottman’s article, I learnt that "the basis for building trust is really the idea of attunement. In Polysecure, Fern defines attunement as “a state of resonance with our partners and the act of turning towards them in an attempt to understand the fullness of their perspective and experience. Attuning to a partner does not mean that you have to agree with them and take on their experience as your own, but it does mean that you are willing to join them in their internal emotional world and inner state of mind in order to empathize with what they are going through. Attunement is meeting your partner with curiosity, wanting to understand their feelings and needs. It is the feeling of being seen, understood, and ‘gotten’ by the other” (183-4).

Gotten offers another way of understanding attunement through the acronym ATTUNE, which stands for:

• Awareness of your partner’s emotion;

• Turning toward the emotion;

• Tolerance of two different viewpoints;

• trying to Understand your partner;

• Non-defensive responses to your partner;

• and responding with Empathy.

Our experiences with attunement begin when we’re infants. We cry out for our caregivers when we’re hungry, tired, or need a diaper change. As children, we run into our caregivers’ bedroom at night when we’ve had a bad dream. Ideally, our caregivers will go through the motions of trying to discern what we need when we’re crying, responding to us with care and compassion. When we run into our caregivers’ bed in the middle of the night, crying out “There’s a monster in my room!” we’re looking for them to grab our hand, tell us that it makes sense to be scared, and they’ll search our room for the monster.

I look at Gottman’s acronym, replace the word “partner” with “child” and here’s what I find:

• Awareness of your child’s emotion; maybe?

• Turning toward the emotion; “you’re over-reacting”

• Tolerance of two different viewpoints; never. he was always right. i was always wrong.

• trying to Understand your child; i don’t even know what this would have looked like. i was always an anomaly, an annoyance

• Non-defensive responses to your child; rage, silence, punishment

• and responding with Empathy. see above

I’m now beginning to see how the absence of attunement growing up has shaped my capacity (or lack thereof) for building and experiencing trust in my partnerships. Despite the fact that attunement is absolutely present in my partnership with Jaime, my trauma brain doesn’t know how to trust that. For in recognizing the ways that I’m getting to experience attunement now, I must acknowledge lack of attunement in my home, and when I do that, I open myself up to all of the grief that comes when you see what you never got to have.

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“Trust allows us to take risks together, to grow together, to know and be known, and to create big visions” Staci Haines writes in her book The Politics of Trauma (250). “In the process of regenerating safety,” she continues, “in all aspects of healing really, we’re expanding our ability to grant trust and be trustworthy” (250). This is what I want: for myself and in my partnership with Jaime. I want us to grow and expand alongside of and with one another. I want us to heal our attachment wounds. And to do so I know that I must learn to trust that disconnection, rupture, and uncertainty may occur. But like those two birds, we’re committed to returning to each other.

After reading Gottman’s essay on trust, I returned to the section in The Politics of Trauma where Haines talks about the importance of declarations and commitments to our healing: in generative somatics, “we begin by exploring what and whom you care about, what you want and long for. And then, we’ll craft this into a declaration--an imagined future that is compelling to you. This declaration becomes an internalized rudder and sense of direction. It becomes a commitment” (166). When crafting your declarations, you use the phrasing: “I am a commitment to…” This is because “when we speak this to ourselves, we are identifying with it. We are becoming it and embodying it. Our declarations, our commitments are who we become” (172).

I start a new a shared google doc with Jaime and send them a text:

“My morning has looked like reading about trust in The Politics of Trauma and thinking about the commitment declarations I wanna make so that there is more space for trust to be present in our relationship. I’m gonna writes some of my commitment declarations today and in the book, she also talks about co-creating declarations. I thought it could be really nice to do some of that together, so that we both have our individual declarations to help anchor us and our co-created ones for the moments where we need some counter-evidence for our trauma brains.”

“That sounds super nice,” they respond, punctuated by the mega cry emoji.

And so I start to write out my list:

• I am a commitment to unlearning the belief that uncertainty or fluctuation is a sign of danger.

• I am a commitment to unlearning the belief that my partner experiencing uncertainty or fluctuation is a sign that our relationship is in danger.

• I am a commitment to healing my disorganized attachment so that I can better demonstrate that I do trust Jaime and their commitment to me/us.

• I am a commitment to letting go of my tendency to look for evidence that confirms my worst fears and prevents me from experiencing the stability and security that is present.

• I am a commitment to trusting that Jaime isn’t going to abandon me when things feel hard.

• I am a commitment to trusting that my needs are not “too much” and to not hiding them out of fear that I’ll be rejected.

• I am a commitment to reparenting my inner child/adolescent so that I can heal those wounds and be the most expansive version of my adult self.

• I am a commitment to nurturing more playfulness in my life.

• I am a commitment to extending compassion towards the parts of myself that I feel ashamed of.

• I am a commitment to opening myself up to receive the love, care, and connection that I’ve always deserved.

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“Can you imagine sitting somewhere else in the room? Somewhere with light?” my therapist asks me.

I pause. “I mean, sure, I can imagine it in theory, but…”

“Why don’t you try and see what happens?” she gently suggests.

I look from my spot in the dark corner towards the window that floods the living room with light. In front of the window is my favourite chair: covered in a pink velvet with beautiful wood carvings in the legs and arms. I can see myself sitting there. And so I get up, slowly, move towards it, and sit down. Now, I’m facing Jaime and their question mark. I no longer feel afraid. With the sun on my back, I can sit tall.

So much of the healing process involves reminding your trauma brain that you’re not a child anymore. You can make different choices now. Sitting in my pink chair, I can ground myself in what I know: uncertainty is a part of life. Uncertainty doesn’t have to result in disconnection.

Later, on the phone, I tell Jaime about my therapy session and this visualization. I tell them how beautiful it feels to recognize that they name their uncertainty in service of our connection. They want to come back to me, to themself, to us.

“This wild thing happened right after the visualization,” I tell them.

“I wish you could see what I just saw,” my therapist told me. “Outside of my window, two birds were sitting on the same branch. Then one of them took flight — and a moment later returned to sit beside the other bird again.”

I’m reminded of how, during our conversation a few Sundays ago, I sat there crying, looking out my window at the tree in the front yard. And I listened as Jaime asked me to stay with them, to be a part of their process. After we moved through the fear and uncertainty, to a space of reconnection, they told me that they felt like a bird, spreading its wings and flying.

“It’s like the two birds are this metaphor for us.”

I cannot expect Jaime to not feel uncertain. That’s an unreasonable expectation. But what I realize is that I can hold space for their uncertainty so long as there’s space for us to return to one another. That’s the commitment that I need and want. That we’re committed to moving through the disconnection and fear and uncertainty in service of returning to ourselves and to each other.

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