Insecure Attachment or Losing My Goddamn Mind?
On navigating insecure attachment flares, calling our states by name, & moving back into the land of higher cognitive functioning.
Here is the recording for this essay if you prefer to listen :)
Racing mind.
Ruminating repetitive thoughts.
Unable to go to sleep.
Wow. ok this is really bugging you.
Waking up with a racing heart.
A tight jaw from clenching all night.
Mind racing before I am even fully conscious.
Damn. girl, ok, this got you fucked up. We’re in it. We’re all the way in it.
Big flee energy comin’ in hot.
Checking flight prices to anywhere in the world.
Checking airbnb prices.
Daydreaming about moving to Europe & living a different life.
This is becoming more familiar. We know this long standing flee response when things get hard. (In retrospect this should’ve given it all away. This should've been the biggest and most obvious clue. Noted for next time).
Writing a hurtful text message.
Deleting it all & not sending anything.
Not responding at all. (For 5 minutes)
Don’t punish them. Don’t do this.
Responding short, simple, & sweet enough to go unnoticed.
“Turn your phone off.” I hear from within.
No, don’t do that. Thats not a healthy impulse.
Do not disturb?
No, just leave it.
Don’t ruin this.
Don’t ruin this.
Don’t ruin this.
Mind is completely hijacked by triggering stimuli.
Unable to be present with myself or any other thoughts.
Seeking distraction & spending too much time numbing.
What do I do? I feel like I'm losing my mind.
I feel like I'm losing my sense of self.
Having conversations in my head.
All in which I am crying. Screaming. Yelling.
I can see it. I can feel it.
Flashes of past connections long lost from use of these tactics.
Don’t do it, baby. Don’t do it.
Let’s just distract ourselves with something else.
Blame them for everything.
This is their fault! They’re making you feel these things.
How dare they!
No, baby. No one is making you.
Question my own personhood,
my own existence,
my own worthiness,
Am I an absolutely boring, sad, human with no life?
*Picture becoming more clear.*
Ohhhhhh, I think I see what’s happening here.
And then… These words came out onto the page:
“I feel unable to regulate myself and this experience is stirring this monster inside of me. Object permanence and object constancy glitching. But I'm the thing that feels like it’s disappearing. My existence is the one in question.”
Oh Beloved.
There you are.
I see you now.
It took 4 days of torment and feeling absolutely insane.
But I found you. It’s been a long LONG time since you’ve had this type of reaction.
No wonder we didn’t recognize it sooner.
Baby. You’re having an insecure attachment flare & it’s triggering you into an avoidant state.
FUCK. An avoidant state? That’s wild.
What do we know?
What do we know?
What do we know about this state?
This fascinates me. My typical go to is anxious attachment tendencies. But I understand insecure attachment & I recognize how these things can shift depending on the nature of the other people involved as well as the nature of the relationships involved.
I’ve called her by name. And a road map appears from within.
“Beloved, you’ve done this before. You can do this again.”
Memories of my divorce.
Memories of being in emotional abuse.
Memories of getting myself out of it all.
Memories of entering into a new relationship & watching my anxious attachment flare.
Memories of discovering secure attachment in my system.
All flash in my mind.
My heart softens.
“Beloved, we’ve done this before. We know what to do.”
In an instant I am calm. I’m so thankful for the years of study & work I have done to renegotiate security within myself. But I know just as is the case with anxiety & dissociative states that these things have already been constructed within me… and that no matter how long it’s been since I’ve crossed that bridge, the bridge is still there.
Ok, so we crossed the bridge before we even realized it was there.
Sweet love. Let’s walk home. We got this.
Here’s the terrorizing thing about attachment insecurity.
Regardless of the kind of insecure attachment we might be experiencing, we often have to do the opposite of what every survival instinct & impulse is telling us to do.
I’ve written about this before HERE:
No one told me to get used to feeling so afraid.
When we are feeling anxiously attached, we must lean on our self regulating skills. Anxious attachment often leads us to heavily rely on others to regulate us. We feel as though we need the other or else we might die, or not recover. The antidote then is to show up for ourselves in loving kindness & remind ourselves of our ability to hold our own wellness in our hands.
When we’re feeling avoidantly attached, we must learn to allow others in so that we can co-regulate. Avoidant attachment often leads us to flee, cut people out, and self isolate because connection feels unsafe. The antidote then is to allow safe and reliable others in to see us in our vulnerability & to allow them the chance to show up for us. Communication feels extremely vulnerable & we might freeze a little when we try, but pushing through will help our system to learn that it can be safe to be seen; it can be safe to stay.
Ok. I know what to do.
I need to call a friend.
I need to talk this out.
And then I need to tell the truth.
And the truth does not have to be mean, hurtful, or defensive.
It does not have to be softened, shaved, or changed.
Truth is truth & how it is received is not up to you.
Right, ok.
Tell the truth.
When we can stretch towards the opposite of what our attachment insecurity WANTS us to do, we begin the journey towards secure attachment. Being able to self regulate AND co-regulate. Being able to do both is imperative to having healthy relationships. And it is a stretch. This process is not easy. It’s not comfortable. It’s us reaching to our edges & feeling into options that our systems might believe will end in disaster, abandonment, rejection, or deep pain.
I think of Pëma Chodron & when she talks about how pushing to our edges is a process of continuously falling out of the nest, over and over again. She’s talking about something deeper. She’s talking about neural rewiring. We have to push to our edges over and over again until the edge expands and it no longer feels like we’re near death.
We fall out of the nest only to realize we can fly.
So… this week as I watch my system swing from avoidant to anxious and back again…
That has meant answering the phone instead of ignoring the calls.
That has meant not lashing out when I want to cause pain.
That has meant turning towards my self regulating practices.
That has meant rediscovering my joy.
That has meant being kindly honest about the impacts things are having on me.
That has meant giving myself a SHIT TON of kindness, extra rest, friend calls, & movie nights for good measure.
That has meant spending time painting for the joy of it (I made 10 new book marks).
That has meant journaling to continue to unearth deeper knowledge.
That has meant being a loving witness as more of myself is revealed to me.
That has meant not believing every thought.
It has meant discerning between wounded vs. healthy thoughts & impulses.
It’s meant becoming a full time witness of what is rearing its head within my being; on a physical, mental, emotional, & behavioral level.
And this week it has been my full time job.
![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_720,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F71cdeacc-9133-4ff8-9fbe-984897ec08be_4032x3024.jpeg)
![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_720,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fcde9bb90-0d7c-4692-b72a-f722b9ed9bac_3024x4032.heic)
![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_720,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fe405cdae-18d4-4339-85d7-fa6c336e070c_3024x4032.heic)
![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_720,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F0eb3e0b6-1a31-44a1-8436-7c03069d96cf_3024x4032.heic)
To be a witness to myself in a way that fully allows me to tend to & foster deep healing has been exhausting. But once I called this experience by name; insecure attachment, it took 30 seconds to calm my system and 2 days to fully disarm the screaming fire alarms & to come back home to myself.
It took only two days to cross back over the bridge.
I’m reading Tantra Illuminated whilst experiencing this massive surge in insecure attachment tendencies. What a combo. I’m thankful for the juxtaposition of the two. Both gifts on their own. A true tender kindness to experience them together.
In my line of work as well as my personal approach to life generally speaking, I find trigger moments to be of high importance. That being said, I am not a fucking alien, it’s not like I get pleasure from the pain of my triggers. But I am truly grateful for the moments that deep, unprocessed, or unacknowledged samskaras (impressions of our past actions that influence our thoughts, speech, and actions) become visible to my conscious mind. Something important is presenting itself to me. And in moments of being resourced, I am thankful for the opportunity to see myself & my unconscious beliefs with more clarity. The more I witness them the less power they have over me. The more I bring them up to consciousness, the less havoc they can have in creating unconscious beliefs that affect the way I inhabit this world.
This week has been a humbling reminder of how gripping insecure attachment tendencies can be. I remember being in a previous relationship that I knew through and through was not right for me & yet not having the ability to leave. As if trapped, but not by any measures I could fully understand.
This is the nature of insecure attachment; it is an invisible force often not cognitively understood but on a physiological level is very very real & very very powerful. Its roots go way deep down into our evolutionary biology & connect to our need for belonging. Our need to belong is directly linked to our ability to survive. Our survival has always been dependent on the group with which we belong. And specifically to our ties to family & the ones we pair-bond with. If we were to not belong, be outcast, lose our mate, or our ties to our tribe, we would likely die.
While in modern life & largely in our culture, things have drastically changed & we do have the ability to shift in and out of relationships without our survival being directly threatened, the framework for the absolute need to belong still lives within us and still has a VERY LARGE impact on our behaviors.
Not only is this our evolutionary history but in our society this ability to shift in and out of relationships, away from family, or removing oneself from one's community is not always a given option for everyone ESPECIALLY children & socio economically insecure individuals. And so this framework still has a great deal of importance even in modern society.
Our desire to belong is not a want but a need & is high on the list of importance when it comes to our nervous systems responses to threats to our survival.
With all of that being acknowledged, we have the ability to directly interface with this infrastructure within us. And our ability to do so is crucial for our ability to stretch into new ways of being so we can relate to others in a healthy and relationally secure way.
My motto this week has been
“This is now, this is not then.”
“This is this. This is not that.”
It helps my system remember that this affront that it’s responding to is NOT those deeply hurtful experiences from my past, in fact it’s not even CLOSE to them. Crossing the bridge from a full blown survival state hijack back into the land of higher cognitive functioning has been empowering and a reminder again denoting this amazing body & minds ability to create a powerfully aligned life.
What are your relationships like for your nervous system?
Do you tend towards a specific way of attaching?
Have you ever seen your attachment style change within the same relationship?
Have you noticed how it can change from one relationship to the next?
Want to submit a question to be answered from a somatic experiencing, polyvagal, or attachment theory perspective? Send one in!
Wow this was such a great essay. I'm definitely the avoidantly attached person, and I'm realizing that I have some work to do around my current state of being.
Looking after ourselves is such a full time job, I love the insight you bring the attachment in this essay.