“In attuning to another being, we bring a feeling or empathy with another’s feelings as well as a kinesthetic and emotional sensing of another. The listener defixates from his or her experience and lets go of the mind’s thinking long enough to enter into another’s experience and world. We engage in a reciprocal interaction of emotional expression or affect and an exchange of felt resonance—we feel ‘felt.’”
(Friedman, 2012)
“The observed takes in the observer having taken her in, and the two become joined. This is resonance. The boundaries of oneself and another become permeable and the sense of being a separate self softens and loosens. … This is how we feel ‘felt,’ and this is how two individuals become a ‘we.’”
(Siegel, 2010b, pp. 54–55)
The terms “dissociation” and “integration” have long been synonymous with one another—meant to signify that the only reasonable goal in working with splitting and compartmentalization must be the fusing together of dissociated parts to create one single “homogenized” adult. Daniel Siegel, however, makes a strong case against defining integration as fusion. He asserts (2010a) a different view: “Integration requires differentiation and linkage.” Before we can integrate two phenomena, we have to differentiate them and “own” them as separate entities. We can’t simply “act as if” they are connected without noticing their separateness. But, having clearly differentiated them so they can be studied and befriended, we then have to link them together in a way that fosters a transformed sense of the client’s experience, facilitating healing and reconnection. A part can be connected to the past, to a physical movement or body sensation, to particular emotions. Another emotion can be noticed, related to a younger or older part, and then linked to the reaction of other parts to those same feelings. In the wake of trauma, individuals need to be able to connect implicit memory to trigger and link the trigger to an explicit context. New information about the present must be linked with old perceptions shaped by the past. To feel safe today, a felt connection must be made between the “child I was then” and the “adult I became today.” Trauma-related vulnerability feels less painful when it is linked to new body experiences of mastery or to a somatic sense that “it’s over—finally, now it’s over” (Ogden & Fisher, 2015). Using Siegel’s definition of integration, fusion is not necessary nor is it as empowering as coherence, collaboration, and overcoming self-alienation. In this chapter, we will focus on how to foster integration by differentiating parts previously denied, ignored, or disowned, connecting to them emotionally, and providing experiences that replace self-alienation and self-rejection with self-compassion and secure internal attachment relationships.
When the emphasis in the therapy is not on the recall of traumatic events but on identifying trauma-related parts connected to the implicit memories that still affect the client’s current experience, the need to disown the parts is diminished. When clients are helped to see their ashamed parts as “real” children of particular ages and to empathize with their littleness, their bravery, or their pain, disgust and fear give way to empathy.
“She looks so little,” clients say. “He is trying so hard to be brave, but he’s really afraid.” “He’s too ashamed to let me own anything nice—because if it’s too nice, he’s afraid that someone will take it away because he doesn’t deserve it.” Moments before they made these observations, all three clients had been blended with their parts.
Diane described being appalled that she had burst into tears when her boss criticized her performance: “I can’t believe I humiliated myself by being so weak.” Josh had been trying to replace his old car with a brand new one, only to find that his ashamed part could not let him buy something “nice.” Mark came to therapy to talk about his “speechless terror” of speaking in public and the impact of this deficit on his professional life. In each case, the problem could be traced to a young part connected to particular times and events in the client’s lives. Interestingly enough, I have a very clear sense of those young parts, but many of the events that wounded them were never described to me. I let the symptoms and the parts tell the client’s story.
Because the trauma treatment field has historically been focused on traumatic events and the roles of memory and narrative, therapists and clients alike often forget to listen to the story told by the symptoms and the parts. Taught to be stimulus-bound by the narrative, most therapists use the story to frame the treatment.
“It’s her mother,” my colleague said of her 55-year-old patient. “Really? She still is being abused by her mother??” I asked, shocked at the thought. “Oh no, her mother died 20 years ago, but she’s afraid to do anything because of her mother. She’s even afraid to go home after work for fear she’ll be criticized and ridiculed.” I thought for a moment and then had a realization: “Actually, it no longer has anything to do with her mother. It did once when she was small. But now what’s troubling her is how the effect of what her mother did lives on right now in present time in her child selves and in their body memories. It’s no longer about the past.”
My colleague had gotten inducted into the interpretation of event memories as described by the client. She hadn’t listened for what story the symptoms told—a somewhat different story. The client’s most troubling symptom consisted of intrusive shame connected to a yearning to feel “as one” with those she loved, usually her male partners. The client often sobbed for hours after a date that did not include moments of blissful closeness to the man taking her out. Her yearning for contact resulted in numerous close friendships and intimate relationships, but the accompanying rejection sensitivity created conflicts in those relationships and sometimes a self-fulfilling prophecy when they ended because of the boyfriend’s frustration over not being able to please her. As I heard the story “narrated” by the symptoms, I was struck that the story I heard had nothing in it regarding harsh criticism and frightening anger. The symptoms told a very different story of disrupted attachment, leaving a small child deeply hungry for contact, yet also frightened of her scary mother. The child who was in need of missing experiences of closeness and attunement was not being “seen” as she lived on in the client’s body and emotional life. The therapist encouraged the client to share her recollections of childhood experience but never realized that remembering the events that caused the little girl’s pain would not heal and comfort her.
Having listened carefully to the story told by Mark’s symptoms, it was clear events had taught him it wasn’t safe to speak or safe to express his opinions as if they merited a hearing. Josh often made references to the poverty and neglect he experienced, the humiliating verbal abuse, and being bullied by kids at school, but his symptoms added some details he hadn’t mentioned: he had had to survive by lying low, by pleasing his parents and placating the bullies. His intelligence, combined with a drive to learn and fear of failure, made him a superior student. Though it didn’t help him feel a sense of belonging anywhere, his intellectual resources “got him out of Dodge” and gave him the chance to start a new life. That was the story his symptoms told, just as Diane’s described a world in which it was imperative never to show weakness—even as a small child. In each case, the events were only important to create a context for understanding and empathizing with the parts. Trauma resolution occurred organically in the context of attachment repair with each part.
The essence of dissociative fragmentation is the ability to split off unbearable emotions from the memory of what happened, to encapsulate and disown “not me” parts and experiences, and to be guided by cognitive schemas that exacerbate self-alienation but help children survive and adapt. Most therapists and clients therefore do not realize that dissociative splitting is a mental ability, not just a symptom.
The ability to quickly retrieve information and act on it automatically and efficiently, without interference from emotion or intrusive thoughts, is central to the medical professional’s ability to save lives. Dissociative splitting is also a prerequisite for the athlete on whom the team depends at a critical moment; it contributes to the ability for peak performance enjoyed by actors, musicians, public speakers, and politicians. Dissociation becomes pathological only when it is unconscious and involuntary, under the control of triggers. As a mental ability, it can be used consciously, thoughtfully, and voluntarily. The goal is not to “cure it” or prevent it but to help clients use it wisely in the service of healing and recovery.
Often, the difficulty functioning reported by so many survivors of trauma, especially in work settings, can be traced back in retrospect to trauma-related triggers inherent in “normal life”: authority figures, work demands (whether reasonable or unreasonable), challenge and change, success or failure, visibility or invisibility, pressure, working in groups, lack of social support, feeling “too little” for the responsibilities being given to us. In each instance, the trigger stimulates a part or parts that hijack or blend with the normal life self, impairing its ability to function.
Frances was a distinguished-looking, well-dressed professional woman in her early 60s, known in her industry for the large and successful business she established providing services to corporations. Ironically, a divorce led her to therapy; her abuse history was revealed; and her first therapist embarked on a trauma treatment, unaware that she was highly dissociative and fragmented. Within months, she was struggling to function at work and curled up in a fetal position at home, sobbing for hours. “I knew I couldn’t do it anymore the day I went into work, and I didn’t know how to turn on the computer—I didn’t know how the copy machine worked—I couldn’t concentrate, and I didn’t know whom to trust.” Frances had been hijacked by child parts connected to the abuse memories she had been processing in therapy. The severity of her fragmentation, symptoms such as the dramatic “loss of well-learned functions,” gaps in memory, and preoccupation with suicide all suggested that she might have dissociative identity disorder (DID). As I began to treat her, evidence of parts’ activity was dramatic. She described coming home from work or a therapy session, collapsing in her front hall in sobs, and then having no recall of what happened until she “woke up” on the cold stone floor hours later. The suicidality was cleared related to a suicidal part that, she reported, had had a suicide plan for the last 40 years—along with the means to carry it out.
“I go to the firing range every 6 months to renew my license to carry,” she reported proudly as she walked in late to her therapy session. I smiled to myself, noting that this part did not have the same boundaries as Frances did. The latter was punctual to the minute. “She” referred to the gun as her “suicide kit” and assured me she took it everywhere. It was unnerving to hear Frances identify with the suicidal part, but I could not risk alienating that part by questioning this pattern. If she is identified with the suicidal part, I wondered, who has been disowned? Because Frances was so destabilized, I simplified the treatment to the bare minimum: she described her difficulties getting through the day, and I encouraged her to be mindful and aware of the parts whose feelings and symptoms overwhelmed her. One day, she was so blended with a young, grieving part that longed for her father (the father who had sexually abused her but had also loved her and been her “safe” attachment figure) that I spontaneously suggested that we stand up and “rock the baby.” We both stood up, facing each other, and rocked from foot to foot, each holding an imaginary baby in our arms.
I could see her body calming, her feelings settling a little bit, as we rocked: “How does she like being held, Frances?” I asked. “She loves it,” Frances reported. “Wonderful—she’s needed this, hasn’t she? She’s been so desperate these last few months, poor little thing.” “This is good for her—and good for me. It reminds me of rocking my babies 30 years ago—as much as it soothed them, it soothed me. I guess she must have loved it, too.”
The next week, she reported that she was rocking the baby part rather than let her cry herself to sleep on the hallway floor. “I guess I can’t ignore her anymore—she’ll play havoc with my life. … Oh, by the way, it’s my birthday this weekend, and the suicidal part is already thinking about how to celebrate it …”
Frances in her dignified professional normal life self had asked me a question at our first session: “Would you ever commit one of your patients to a hospital if he or she were suicidal?” And I answered, “I’m proud to say that I’ve never committed anyone to a hospital against their will in 30 years of practice, and I’m determined to keep that record until I retire. Patients of mine have gone to the hospital when needed,” I clarified, “but always on their own volition.” Now I had to discuss the suicidal part’s views on birthday celebrations still bound by my policy of avoiding involuntary commitment of any patient. I had told Frances that I “always work it out with each individual.”
ME: “I’m not sure the suicidal part’s idea of a birthday celebration is quite what the little parts of you are dreaming about, and their needs should be uppermost on a birthday. Older kids don’t care about birthdays, but little ones do. What were birthdays like in your family?”
FRANCES: “They were extravaganzas of my mother’s making—kids were always envious of me because of them. They didn’t know the price I paid: I used to dread my birthday. I’d get a party that just embarrassed me, and then I’d ‘get’ something ‘special’ from my father.” [She shuddered at the thought.]
ME: “It doesn’t sound like they ever got what a child wants! A child just wants to feel loved and special, to be the center of attention in a good way, or to get to choose what kind of party she wants, who she wants there, and to be in charge.” Then I had an idea. “Why don’t you give the child parts a special birthday? They have been waiting a long time to celebrate their birthday ‘their way.’ First, they need a present—from you. Just go to a nice toy store and walk through it, allowing your eyes to gaze wherever they wish and noticing where they stop and stare or the toy they keep going back to look at. That can be something special you do with them, too—they never had anyone do something special for them.”
The next week, Frances arrived, glowing and excited. “You’ll never guess what I bought for the parts—I can’t get over it! This is ‘not me’—it’s definitely for them.” Reaching into her purse, she proudly pulled out a beautiful pink pig, a stuffed animal representation of Olivia, the pink pig heroine of a children’s story. “Can you believe it? Me? A pink pig named Olivia?!! You know that I did this just for them …” And then she paused: “But I have to tell you: I love her, too. Isn’t she beautiful?” To this day, whenever I see an Olivia, I think of Frances and how Olivia changed her life. For the first time, the parts were given what they wanted instead of what their parents wanted to gratify narcissistic and pedophile impulses. Something fundamental changed in their sense of safety on that birthday: they could feel someone was there for them. Someone cared enough to buy them Olivia and brought comfort to the crying infant part and a smile to the little girl.
Just before her next business trip, Frances casually commented, “You know, I think I’ll take Olivia on this trip instead of my suicide kit …”
“That would be lovely for ‘the kids.’ Do you think that will be a problem for your suicidal part?” I asked.
“No, I don’t think so—he’s pretty calm as long as they are OK.”
Frances used her dissociative abilities to allow the eager eyes of the little parts a separation from her more critical eye so they could look around the toy store without her influencing their choices. Then, still maintaining a voluntary and deliberate split, the normal life part’s judgments about a pink pig could be kept separate from the little girl who fell in love “at first sight” with Olivia, allowing the purchase to be made. Frances had been a good mother figure: she put her child parts’ feelings first, thanks to the voluntary use of the dissociative splits.
Josh’s ashamed little boy part was asked to orient to the adult Josh’s environment: his business office, his home, wife, and three children. Josh asked the little boy to notice how people treated him now that he was an adult: “They act like you’re important!” the little boy noticed with awe. He observed how Josh was welcomed by his amateur baseball team, his church community, and his family of choice. It was clear to the boy that Josh “belonged.” “You’re with me now,” Josh kept saying. “No one here is going to take away something nice of mine.”
Mark and I realized that the frightened little boy “trying so hard to be brave” about his upcoming speaking engagement had not been asked to speak—the normal life Mark had! (Many traumatized clients report the same phenomenon: child parts that once had to be precociously adult often confuse adult roles and activities as “things they have to do.”) As I coached him, Mark explained to the boy that he was a grownup, and grownups like to speak in public because they want to tell people about their work and share their ideas. “Really?” said the little boy.
MARK: “It’s because no one will hurt a grownup like they hurt kids or say mean things, like the other kids do. Grownups like to do a lot of things that are scary for children, but you don’t have to do those things. You’re just a little boy, and kids shouldn’t have to do scary grownup stuff.” I asked Mark to propose a plan that might work for both him and the child:
MARK: “Would it be OK if I spoke at the meeting next week, and you could stay home. You don’t have to go to scary things grownups choose to do.”
“I guess so,” said the little boy.
“Maybe he’d like to watch you speak,” I hinted.
After a moment of silence, Mark’s face lit up. “He says he would like to stay home with the cat and watch me on TV!”
We both laughed: “Why not?” I said. “Dissociation is a wonderful ability. It’s just as possible for him to stay home and watch you on ‘TV’ as it is for him to still be trapped in that house in Virginia while you go on with life in New York.” Subsequently, Mark’s career blossomed: each time he encountered a “scary” challenge, at least scary to the boy, he would have the same discussion. “I know it’s very scary for you to get on a plane with so many people and feel trapped inside, but you don’t have to do that. Business trips are for grownups because they have jobs. Kids don’t have to have jobs, but grownups do. Where would you like to be when I’m on the plane and at my meeting?”
“I want to be home with the cat,” the little boy said. “But I’ll miss you.”
This simple technique (making conscious, voluntary use of the existing dissociative compartmentalization in the service of growth and healing) has allowed numerous clients of mine to undertake what otherwise would have been very triggering, even overwhelming normal life experiences. One client was able to take her husband and children to visit her parents, a thought that initially caused panic and nausea, communicating how alarmed the parts were at the very thought. By leaving them “at home,” she and her family had a short but uneventful visit, and the parts felt heard and protected.
Another client was able to finish law school when parts that were intimidated and terrified were allowed to stay home while “she” went. “Law school is something grownups choose—not a place for kids,” she told them each morning. She used the same technique when it came time to find a job, buy a home with her husband, adopt a rescue dog, and have a baby. Whenever aspects of her normal life were threatening, the parts were given a choice: “You can come on the job interview if you want—you can help me with the baby if you want … but if you don’t want to, you can all stay home.” The parts felt a sense of protection and understanding: they were little, too little for law school and home-buying and babies. For the client, it was an empowering experience: she continued growing as a mature adult without always having to battle her parts just to be able to function.
In research on earned secure attachment or “earned security,” attachment status is evaluated according to the degree of “coherence” in the subjects’ narratives as they reflect back on early attachment experience. Siegel, D. J. (2010b). The mindful therapist: a clinician’s guide to mindsight and neural integration. New York: W.W. Norton. “Coherence” is the opposite of having fragmented, conflicting, and polarized points of view within one individual. Coherence means arriving at a place where the sum of many views come together—as they did when Mark and the little boy agreed that the child should be spared having to participate in frightening, overwhelming grownup activities. Each time they made that agreement, Mark felt liberated from the past: he could pursue his career, unafraid that its demands would trigger incapacitating feeling memories. Rather than having to be a precocious miniature adult as he had throughout childhood, the child part was offered a very new, previously missing experience. Someone was taking care of him. He could be a little boy and still be safe.
“Narrative coherence,” the standard for adult secure attachment, whether continuous or earned, is defined as the ability to describe childhood experiences of insecure or traumatic attachment in an integrated, regulated way, just as those with “continuous secure attachment” do in describing their attachment histories (Roisman et al., 2002.) It is not that the earned secure have had “good” attachment experiences. The subjects in these studies reported failed or suboptimal early attachment, painful experiences with attachment figures, even traumatic experiences. Coherence reflects having come to terms with the past, repaired its worst damage, and found a way to accept the missing experiences or childhood wounding as “the best they could do,” “it wasn’t about me,” “they were lucky to have me—they just couldn’t see that.” Notice that coherence involves the ability to construct a “healing story” to explain what happened. A healing story is likely to be comforting, regulating, and to promote acceptance of “what is,” thereby increasing coherence. To the extent that coherence reflects a reconstruction or transformation of painful memories, it supports the encoding of new, more positive feelings.
What makes earned secure attachment unique, however, is its correlation with parenting that promotes secure attachment in the next generation (Roisman et al., 2002). This research challenges the prevailing view that suboptimal attachment in the parent generation predicts the likelihood of providing less-than-optimal attachment experiences for the next generation. Instead, it suggests that human beings can transform the implicit memories and explicit narrative of the past by internalizing healthy adult attachment experiences until they achieve the benefits conferred by secure attachment. The fact that earned secure attachment transmits the ability to offer the same to the next generation is a hopeful sign. It implies that we can help our clients bring a stop to the intergenerational legacy of trauma in their families and create a new legacy through the intergenerational transmission of secure attachment.
What either type of secure attachment endows is increased relational flexibility, the ability to modulate emotional up’s and down’s, to tolerate disappointment and hurt, distance and closeness, to have the capacity for interdependence, and to see the world in shades of gray. Most of all, earned or continuous secure attachment allows us to internalize reassuring and comforting voices or presences that help us tolerate the times when no one is there. And it helps us to keep our hearts open when the people in our lives reappear.
When the child part feels the loving gaze and shining eyes of the normal life self, experiences the visceral sense of being held in the arms of a strong, safe, protective adult, the building blocks of secure attachment are in place: a physical sense of being held safely, an emotional sense of closeness and specialness, “heartbeat-to-heartbeat communication,” the felt sense of “being with” this small being of our implicit memory. There is mutual attunement between a caring and committed normal life adult and the child who longed for moments like this, even if afraid to believe or grasp them now. In order to be mutual and reciprocal, this process requires both self-resonance and other-resonance. With our feelings and our bodies, we must convey that finally we do understand, and we want to make it right now. In this way, the human brain uses its inherent split to heal traumatic injuries to attachment. First, the left brain reconceptualizes the emotional distress as a child’s, then the right brain has a compassionate, caring emotional response to the child; the feelings of closeness and attunement become reciprocal, creating a more intensely pleasurable state; then the left brain encodes the “feeling of what happened”: the feeling of being held and safe and welcomed by smiling faces with open arms. We have just provided ourselves with a “missing experience” (Ogden & Fisher, 2015) of love and safety and retrieved the “souls” of the lost “not-me” children. Each of us is transformed.
Laura provides a good example of how a therapy focused on changing an alienated relationship to her parts provided them with an experience of secure attachment, and how that in turn transformed her relationship to the past, not just to the wounded places inside her.
Initially unaware of having a dissociative disorder, Laura experienced her stressful job as threatening, rather than triggering, and interpreted lack of concern for the threats she forecast as “denial.” When her superiors did not see the threats, she felt unprotected and at the mercy of incompetent authority figures—just as she had been as a child. I “knew” intuitively she was describing the distorted perspective of structurally dissociated parts, especially a frightened part that I sensed when she talked about how quickly fear could bring her high-functioning professional self to her knees. As I began to talk about the young parts of her that got so triggered by incompetent, unethical adults in her corporate world, I connected them to her descriptions of the daily stressors that triggered her. “No wonder they don’t feel safe in your job—no one will listen to their fears of attack.” At first, she could relate to the parts intellectually and/or connect them to narratives from her childhood, but she couldn’t relate emotionally to them because each emotional connection resulted in blending with their feelings so quickly that she and they both felt overwhelmed. But as Laura doggedly and persistently sought to connect to her young parts and to offer them a home with her, their fear and rigidity began to soften. The first time she felt their interest in her was through a series of images of her younger parts peeking out at her from behind trees and bushes, the same kinds of hiding places she remembered finding as a young girl. Like a secure attachment-promoting parent, Laura was attuned and creative. She trusted her intuitive sense that they weren’t yet ready to be seen but first needed to be acknowledged. So she engaged them in an imaginary game of hide-and-seek in which they had permission to seek her but she wouldn’t find them until they were ready! She would call into the woods to thank them for all they had done for her—the professional respect they had gained her, the honors she had won, the courage to leave home and build a life on her own. And as she visualized herself sitting in a clearing, talking to the children hidden in the woods, she could increasingly feel the sincerity in her voice and the emotions of gratitude, not just the words. Another day, as she was talking about how deeply grateful she was to them, she spontaneously reached out with her right hand as if to grasp the hand of one of the parts, and as I said, “Notice to whom you’re intuitively reaching out right now,” she could feel a small hand against hers. “It’s a little one,” she said.
Me: “Just feel her hand in yours, and sense what this child inside you needs.”
Implicit memory (the tiny hand) and implicit emotions (the longing she could feel in the little girl to be held) suddenly “met” adult presence: she could feel her need to convey that she knew exactly what this child had been through. Her other hand reached over and grasped the one reaching out, holding onto it as if to a lifeline. She could feel the little girl’s grief and pain but had no impulse to pull away from it. The moment felt like confirmation of the spiritual sense of certainty she had been increasingly having: that she could not heal until she finally brought all the children home again—home to her. I just echoed her mindful observations: “Yes, you’ve known for some time that you needed to bring them home … Let her know that—make her welcome. She’s never known what it would be like to be welcomed home. …” Laura sat holding the little girl’s hand in hers, while tears that seemed to belong to both ran down her cheeks.
I kept narrating the moment-by-moment experience as it unfolded, trying deliberately to articulate the feelings of both the wise compassionate adult Laura and the small Laura inside, wanting to make sure that this moment was remembered and could be called upon over and over again:
“Yes, someone is finally here, someone finally gets it—that’s why she’s crying. And you are crying for all she’s been through … She’s finally home, and someone is crying for her, not making her cry. What’s that like for her? … She snuggles in closer when you ask her that, huh? I guess that’s an answer for you … I think she likes this feeling—and how about you? What’s it like for you?” The softness of Laura’s face, the loving gaze, and the relaxation in her body told me the answer. It felt deeply pleasurable and special.
By putting words to the experience between the little girl and Laura, by asking both to notice “what it’s like” to have the other respond (i.e., to mentalize each other), I try to keep the focus on deepening the emotional attunement between child and adult, making meaning of the moment-to-moment transactions as attachment-building experience unfolding “right here, right now” (Ogden & Fisher, 2015) in present time, trying to create a word picture that can be encoded as a new memory connected to the felt sense of security, warmth, and closeness she and the child were enjoying in this moment. I kept trying to simultaneously convey attunement to the child’s “grief of relief” and to the adult’s grief on behalf of the child, while emphasizing their shared tears and sense of closeness. The therapist’s role is to be a “broker of secure attachment” between adult self and child self, helping each partner in the relationship attune more precisely to the other, deepening their mutual sense of closeness, conveying a sense of the future unfolding in a new way now that they are finally connected with each other.
This is how the healing of early attachment wounds can lead to earned secure attachment. By deepening and embodying the feelings and images associated with moments of felt attunement, we facilitate development and encoding of new implicit memories. The “earned” newly encoded experience includes body sensations of softness and warmth (contact comfort), emotions of pleasure yet also grief (what I call the “grief of relief”), the sense of being “gotten” and unconditionally accepted, a feeling of nourishment, safety and security, and “feeling for” and with the other. Attunement to one’s child parts creates a sense of closeness and peacefulness, an “OK-ness” that refuels clients to create more resonant attachment experiences even with their challenging parts. Attunement doesn’t just feel good to children—it feels good to parents as well.
Secure attachment is not an objective goal—it is a physical and emotional state that one can call by many names: “safe,” “close,” “connected,” “recognized,” “understood.” Secure attachment is cocreated and unintentional in its unfolding. It emerges from repeated moments of felt resonance, from the delighted feeling of “speaking the same language.” It thrives on pattern and consistency. This is why children love to play the same games of peek-a-boo and hide-and-seek that Laura played imaginatively with her parts in the woods. They thrive on hearing the same words repeated in the same tone over and over, hearing the same song or nursery rhyme or joke, having the same goodnight routine every night. Providing secure attachment experiences to a child requires flexibility of response, a spacious window of tolerance, and the ability to “coregulate,” to make little adjustments to the other as the other adjusts to us—until the “fit” feels “just right.” In parent-child relationships, this process is aided by the fact that there are two separate bodies, two separate smiles, two sets of arms and legs. It is perceptually clear to both that they are separate beings.
When it comes to attuning to their younger selves, traumatized clients are hampered by automatic tendencies to instinctively recoil from the parts’ painful emotions and fears. The fact that these emotions and implicit memories are not separate is also challenging: both sets of feelings arise within the boundaries of one body. That biological fact creates difficulties in knowing whose feeling is whose and supports the tendency to “blend” with each other’s emotions. As clients often say to me when I notice an emotion and name it as a part’s feeling memory: “No, I am having the feeling, and I am having it now.” When they identify with the feeling, it usually intensifies—as it also does when they disown the feeling, believing that it’s not theirs, and disown the part whose wounding it tells us about. The same thing happens when they are flooded with a tsunami of intense feelings without words that seems to be theirs, no matter how much they would prefer otherwise. Blending and disowning are different strategies that both serve a survival function. Blending enables quick actions and reactions in response to emotions. Disowning preserves the sense of self and allows a parallel “not trauma” track in the midst of the worst moments in our lives.
Attunement to another requires that we neither reject nor merge: we retain our own sense of selfhood while resonating at the other’s frequency and allowing them to resonate at ours. This generalization is equally true in romantic relationships, parenthood, or in relationship to our younger selves. The tendency to merge or to become enmeshed with traumatized or abandoned young parts is natural: we sense a feeling or bodily reaction and we naturally give it a name preceded by the word “I.” “I’m tired—I’m anxious—I feel very alone—I am furious.” The more intense the feeling state and the more frequently experienced, the more likely we are to preface it with an “I,” the more likely it is to be contagious, and the more likely we are to merge with it—a challenge encountered on a daily basis by parents of young children. Equally problematic is the disowning or rejection of some parts (e.g., the vulnerable ones) and/or the identification with the parts who are hostile (e.g., controlling, judgmental, aggressive parts) or hopeless, regressed, and childlike. When either occurs, there is a loss of balance in the system—as well as a loss of reality-testing, perspective, and compassion. If our client identifies with ashamed, submissive, compliant parts, he or she runs the risk of failing to perceive signs of healthy anger or defensive responses; if the client identifies with angry or suicidal parts, he or she runs the risk of anger management issues, self-destructive behavior, or internally recreating the early hostile environment.
Helping clients to attune to parts they loathe or feel intimidated by is just as important as bringing secure attachment experiences to young child parts for whom empathy is easy. It is more challenging to foster empathy for judgmental or scathingly critical parts and harder for clients to want to reach out to an angry part whose sharp tongue and intimidating manner costs them jobs, friendships, and neighborly relationships. Because earned secure attachment is dependent upon acceptance and compassion for all of our “selves,” the therapist must insist that clients at the very least thank those “harder to love” parts for their protection. The therapist, like a parent or coach, must often be creative in brokering attachment relationships between the normal life self and more dysregulated or disowned parts.
Linda had come a long way—from suicidal despair to stabilization, from accepting her traumatic childhood to realizing what happened thanks to the parts who finally told her about the events she had not remembered. What was missing in her life was the ability to have needs: she could be generous, but she could not accept generosity; she could be kind, but she couldn’t accept kindness. Her 11-year-old parentified child part wanted nothing for herself: kindness was for those who deserved it. The other “missing person” was an angry part. She knew about her suicidal part and had thanked it for its offers of help during the darkest of days, but she insisted repeatedly that there was no angry part, no feelings of anger, and she was glad! Her stance was: anger is destructive; I am not a destructive person; therefore, I have no anger. Ironically, this was the only stand she had ever taken in opposition to me over many years of therapy! “No,” she said, “I am never angry.” Then, one day, as we were talking about the issue of anger, she heard a rough, scathing voice inside, saying, “Oh, isn’t she [referring to me] so ‘nice’?—this bitch is just too nice! I want to puke!” Linda startled.
“What are you noticing?” I asked.
“Some part just called you a bitch!”
“Hooray! That’s cause for celebration—the angry part is in the house! [Laughing] You were wondering if you really had an angry part—I think it just showed up. But before you dismiss it, hear me out: some part of you has to be cynical; some part has to keep an eye on the people who act “so nice” and then knife you when you’re not looking. Who else is going to have your back? And furthermore, that part is right—I can sound too sickly sweet sometimes.”
The next week, Linda came back, excited to tell me something. She had recently been promoted to CFO of a large corporation, a mixed blessing because the job came with the challenge of dealing with the competitive behavior of male colleagues who repeatedly sabotaged her efforts to work with them as a collaborator. “Do you remember I told you that they schedule meetings and deliberately don’t include me in the email announcements?” “I do.” “Well, luckily, the secretaries are on my side, so they’re letting me know when it happens. This week, something amazing happened. As the time for the mystery meeting came up, I suddenly felt powerful—like I didn’t have to let them get away with this shit! So I marched myself down to the conference room, walked in, sat down at the table with all the confidence in the world, and said ever so sweetly, ‘I knew you’d want me in on this.’ What could they say?! I won!”
ME: “And are you having the same thought I am?”
LINDA: “You mean, was that the angry part? You better believe it was! I felt so calm, powerful, determined, and clear-headed. I could be fake-sweet, but I felt like I had steel inside me. That was definitely not me!”
ME: “Then a high five to the angry part …”
LINDA: “No, not enough. The angry part gets an Olympic gold medal!”
In the weeks and months following, Linda matter-of-factly challenged her male colleagues by simply taking her place among them, no matter how hard they tried to prevent it. Simultaneously, she began to feel more deserving of the life she had worked so hard to achieve, better able to take pleasure in its perks rather than blending with the 11-year-old submit part who felt worthless and undeserving. The angry part of her had brought to the system a much-needed sense of having rights and boundaries. Linda had always gotten ahead by working harder than everyone else. The fight part helped her learn to get ahead by standing her ground, holding her head high, and refusing to take responsibility for others who were not doing their jobs. While the angry part contributed “backbone,” the sweetness of her attach part and the collaborative willingness of submit made it hard for her peers to react angrily. By accepting the angry part and trusting it, despite her wish to disown it, Linda created safety for herself and her parts even in the corporate “jungle.”
“The fact that these adults [with earned secure attachment status] are capable of sensitive, attuned caregiving of their children, even under stress, suggests that this ‘earned’ status is more than just being able to ‘talk the talk’; they can also ‘walk the walk’ of being emotionally connected with their own children, despite not having such experiences in their own childhoods. We may serve a vital role for this and future generations in enabling each other to achieve the more reflective, integrated functioning that facilitates secure attachments.”
(Siegel, 1999, p. 11)
If helping traumatized clients “earn” secure attachment by forging bonds of affection and connection to their young selves can help prevent attachment failure in the next generation, then the work described here will also serve a preventive function. Therapist and client can take pride in knowing that they are not only healing old wounds but also protecting their children from another generation of parenting by dysregulated, attachment-disordered adults.
Whereas disorganized attachment is associated with autonomic dysegulation, controlling attachment strategies, internal conflicts between distance and closeness, and difficulties with identity formation, both earned and continuous secure attachment are associated with resilience. Studies report an association between secure attachment and greater affect tolerance, as well as increased ability to bounce back from hurt, stress, rejection, or disappointment, tolerate both closeness and distance, and internalize positive attachment figures. In studies of earned secure attachment, two findings are particularly relevant to a parts approach: first, although earned secure attachment was associated with depressive symptoms and emotional distress in some parents studied, they nonetheless evidenced an ability to provide good attachment to their children, suggesting that their earned secure attachment status allowed them to tolerate higher levels of internal discomfort without their parenting ability being compromised. The second finding was that the benefits of earned secure attachment were virtually indistinguishable from the benefits of what researchers called “continuous secure attachment” (Roisman et al., 2002), that is, childhood secure attachment. These findings fit well with the model presented in this book. Long after internal attachment bonds have been established, clients and their trauma-related parts may still periodically suffer distress, still be vulnerable to depression and anxiety, and even have destructive impulses. But earned secure attachment provides a stable base that enables individuals to tolerate grief, loss, betrayal, and other stressful normal life experiences—without loss of their capacity to parent the next generation or to soothe and reassure themselves—or their “selves.”
This is very good news for trauma survivors who have struggled with the painful effects of disrupted, disorganized attachment. As they overcome trauma-related self-alienation, their internal sense of safety and well-being will be equal to that of adults born to securely attached parents. So often, clients fear that they have been irreparably damaged by the abuse and attachment failure. The research says otherwise. If trauma survivors are willing to overcome trauma-related tendencies to fear and loathe some parts and over-identify with others, if they can welcome all the “children” without having favorites or scapegoats, the ending can be different. If traumatized individuals are willing to embrace intimidating judgmental parts, frightening suicidal parts, and parts who wound the body or “pour whiskey in the baby bottle” to silence the little parts, the seeds of earned secure attachment are sown. There need be no pressure to love or nurture hostile or aggressive parts because that would be to fail them empathically. An adopted teenager would need different kinds of experiences to feel safely attached than a 3-year-old. Attunement arises from a sensitivity to each part and to the “missing experiences” necessary for each to transform and heal wounded or broken places. The “missing experience” (Ogden & Fisher, 2015) for a fight part, as Linda demonstrates, is not being held and soothed; it is the experience of control over threat, the feeling of being respected for its strength and its need for clear boundaries that ensure safety. When the normal life self of the client overcomes the tendency to ignore the fight part’s injunctions against vulnerability or caretaking of others and instead works to develop increasing ability to set boundaries and insist on fairness in relationships, the relationship between the two begins to shift. When the safety concerns of the fight parts are heard, when they are treated as heroes rather than perpetrators, they become committed, loyal, and bonded. Being ignored or engaged in a power struggle inflames them; being heard and taken seriously tames them. The same is true for the flight parts: attempting to force closeness or commitment on them pushes them away; acceptance of their needs for control over interpersonal distance relaxes their guard.
No matter how their implicit memories and animal defenses manifest, all parts, like all human beings, desire acceptance and attunement. Even though a mother might find one child temperamentally easier to parent than another, her job is to forge an attachment bond to both the “easy” and the “hard” babies equally. For individuals to experience the internal stability and well-being endowed by earned secure attachment, all parts must be embraced—from the grouchy, distancing adolescent flight part to the endearing and innocent attach part to the always depressed and hopeless submit part to the silent, terrified freeze part and the “take no prisoners” fight part. When the client can find something to love about each and every part, the internal world begins to transform. Just as therapists are not trained to ask clients, “How did you survive? How did you do it?” they are also rarely trained to ask, “What could you love about that part that won’t let you sleep? That won’t let you eat? That won’t let anyone get close to you?”
Earned secure attachment, according to researchers, is most often built through healthy, meaningful relationships in adulthood (such as that with a spouse or therapist) or through the vicarious experience of secure attachment available through parenting one’s own children. To add to that list, earned secure attachment can also be cultivated through healthy, attuned relationships to our “selves.” The ingredients are the same: the willingness to prioritize the needs of the other, the ability to communicate welcome and acceptance, attunement and coregulation, emotional closeness, compassion, loving presence, and the ability to maintain a felt connection to the other even when one is dysregulated, frustrated, or overwhelmed. Whether we bring these capacities to a newborn baby of our own, or to an infant or child self, they have neurobiological effects. The cornerstone of infant attachment is what Allan Schore (2001) calls “adaptive projective identification.” That term refers to the way in which the infant’s distress, projected via dysregulation, is experienced by parents as their own distress. The baby cries; the parent is dysregulated by the cries. She feels uncomfortable, so much so that she is driven to pick the baby up, soothe, comfort, and distract, until the repair effort hits on the infant’s unmet need and the baby calms and settles into the parent’s arms. Only then does the parental nervous system calm and settle. All is well now—both are regulated and soothed. Sometimes, the infant’s unmet need might be for up-regulation made possible by the parent’s making funny faces and sounds, eliciting infant smiles and laughter, until the point at which the parent also feels an uplift in mood. Parent and child feel a shared, reciprocal pleasure hard to capture in words other than to call it “attunement bliss.”
Child parts, too, feel distress, and they too “project” their discomfort to signal for help. In a two-person system in one biological body, it is more difficult for child parts to be heard, other than via blending and/or reciprocal dysregulation. For that reason, practice of the skills described in Chapters 4 and 5 is the crux of the treatment. Having mastered these skills in the therapist’s office, the normal life self can hear the child’s cry as a signal to unblend from the distress, recognizing that “she” or “he” is upset. Curious because of the discomfort of her own state, the client is motivated to be interested in this child self who is so unhappy, rather than avoidant. Curiosity helps regulate the mutual dysregulation and distress and keeps adult and child in contact, challenging habitual self-alienation tendencies to ignore, disown or reblend with the part’s feelings.
Then the normal life self learns to do what any good secure attachment-promoting parent would do when a small child is crying: he or she experiments to find a repair for the child’s distressed state. The measure of a successful repair lies in the body: if a repair is successfully made, the little boy or girl will take a breath, heart rate will slow, the nervous system will settle, and there will be a sense of relief in the body. If the therapist allows the client to identify that state of relief as “I feel better now,” the opportunity to build secure attachment will be lost, at least for the moment. Only by staying “present” in relationship to the child can the client foster a secure attachment experience. Soothing distress or evoking positive feelings does not build resilience in young children or parts when it is followed by a quick, “OK, that’s done. Now I have other things more important to do.” Even securely attached children need to feel “held in mind” by their parents, even when they are not physically present.
To heal the fragmented selves of traumatized clients entails a therapist willing to “see” the parts in an individual’s whole physical body, able to be “relentless” in helping clients learn to interpret distress as “theirs,” and skilled in gently and non-coercively insisting on a focus on the needs of wounded children. Just as therapists do in treating traumatic attachment in children, clients have to be helped to consistently provide reparative interventions to parts whose presence is felt “now” because some stimulus has activated their implicit memories, causing pain. Each repair reclaims a part that was once left behind, “retrieves” a lost “soul,” no longer disowned and phobically avoided. There is no need for parts whose job was to loathe and fear the vulnerable parts to ensure the self-alienation. There is no need to fear the vulnerability and no need for self-loathing as a protection. Better yet, by helping clients identify the somatic signs that “the little one feels better,” sharing in the felt sense of “better,” communicating the shared enjoyment of “better” back to the child, and continuing to deepen the mutually felt sense of safety, closeness, and welcome, there is an unexpected reward. There is an experience of relaxation, safety, and “attunement bliss” that pulls not for avoidance but for embracing the child, making her welcome, finding a place for him at the table of the client’s life.
Healing the fragmented selves of traumatized clients requires only that the positivity-oriented left brain-related normal life self befriend right brain-related parts, both “owned” and disowned, and become curious about their ages, stages, fears, and strengths, and learn to be in relation to them. This is an apparently small, non-threatening step but it challenges trauma-related conditioned learning by increasing communication and collaboration between the two hemispheres, the opposite of splitting. Healing our broken places and fragmented parts happens naturally as an organic process—much like plants grow toward the light. All that is needed is the willingness to “see” the parts, hear their fears and feelings, and be curious even if not yet compassionate. Guided by a therapist who can speak for all the parts and for the system as a whole, the normal life self’s conditioned avoidance of the parts is challenged. Mindful dual awareness decreases the automatic tendency to disown the parts by regulating autonomic arousal and facilitating being able to “see” each other.
Like nations at war, like families in conflict, sitting down together elicits the commonalities and prevents “demonizing” each other. With a therapist who facilitates dual awareness, who is determined to repair the fault lines between the emotionally driven parts and logic-driven normal lfe part, who is willing to see each side as worthy and deserving of a place at the table, and whose own compassion and attunement is palpable, there is a softening toward not-me parts. When both client and therapist can appreciate the ways in which every part has supported the survival of the whole, how the internal struggles that still occur are simply a reflection of parts trying to defend against the threats “then,” there is more softening. Much like planting and tending a garden, internal attachment-building involves patience, repetition, and a deep conviction that healing is normal, natural, and cannot be rushed. It requires only the right “soil” and patient, compassionate “gardeners” to evoke innate healing tendencies in even the most wounded of living beings.
“I am still every age that I have been. Because I was once a child, I am always a child. Because I was once an adolescent, given to moods and ecstasies, these are still part of me, and always will be. … This does not mean that I ought to be trapped or enclosed in any of these ages, … but that they are in me to be drawn on … my past is part of what makes the present … and must not be denied or rejected.”
(L’Engle, 1972, pp. 199–200)
Friedman, W.J. (2012). Resonance: welcoming you in me—a core therapeutic competency. Undivided, the Online Journal of Unduality and Psychology, 1(3).
L’Engle, M. (1972). A circle of quiet. New York: Harper Collins.
Ogden, P. & Fisher, J. (2015). Sensorimotor Psychotherapy: interventions for trauma and attachment. New York: W.W. Norton.
Roisman, G. I., Padron, E., Sroufe, L.A., & Egeland, B. (2002). Earned-secure attachment status in retrospect and prospect. Child Development, 73(4), 1204–1219.
Schore, A. N. (2001). Neurobiology, developmental psychology, and psychoanalysis: convergent findings on the subject of projective identification. In Edwards, J. (Ed.). Being alive: building on the work of Anne Alvarez. New York: Brunner-Routledge.
Siegel, D. J. (2010a). The neurobiology of ‘we.’ Keynote address, Psychotherapy Networker Symposium, Washington, D.C., March 2010.
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