No one told me to get used to feeling so afraid.
On attachment, neural rewiring, and when the past is not the present.
“No one told me to get used to feeling so afraid.”
I’m passionately singing Eloise’s lyrics in my car alone and thinking about a moment past. With that line I am transported back to sitting on the couch clutching my own chest in fear & anxiety. It’s 2020 and I'm dating someone new & hating nearly every second of the insecure feeling of newness.
I am dating someone both reluctantly and eagerly. Eagerly because he is SO handsome and fun and funny and smart and he challenges me and I challenge him & we both embrace it. Reluctantly because my nervous system is in an extremely fragile state. I’m fresh out of a long and torturous emotionally abusive and manipulative relationship & still getting my bearings in my newfound freedom. I had every intention of being single for the foreseeable future to recover from what I had finally gotten myself out of. What the fuck did I do accidentally getting excited about someone else?
In this moment, I can feel attachment welling in my body. A feeling I am fearfully familiar with. A feeling that has been like chains to a prison I couldn’t escape. That same sick feeling that kept me stuck in neglect. At this moment of sitting on the couch & clutching my own chest, he is not responding to my text messages. And it’s been an hour. And I don’t know what to do. I don’t know what happened? What if he is losing interest in me? Should I text him again? No. That might annoy him and then he REALLY will lose interest in me. Should I call & play it casually? Anything to just ensure that nothing has changed and we’re still good and “on track” for more.
With these thoughts and the intense physical experiences that come with them, I am transported back to and through 100’s of times where I have felt this intense anxiety welling in my body in my past. Moments from relationships past and experiences from my childhood where the panic took over and completely possessed me.
![the feeling of panic](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%2Fad1c39f4-2da7-41a3-8edc-30f68f8dd3a9_236x236.jpeg)
![the feeling of panic](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%2F1775e3bf-cbaa-4561-b60a-ab1edf431f6f_564x845.jpeg)
This fear is ever familiar to me. It is the fear that floods an Insecure Attacher. More specifically the fear of a system that tends to insecurely anxiously attach. For me at the onset it starts as checking my phone for a response every minute or two. Weird. No response yet. This goes on for a bit until agitation starts to build. The agitation is at first only annoyed at his slow response time… but then it turns quickly into wondering. Racing thoughts. Going back to see what I said & reading into it. Did I say something offensive? Was our conversation particularly dry & boring?
From there, heart rate changes. Thoughts grow more fearful. More curious about what could be going on. And assumptions begin to form. The kind that keep the heart rate elevated. The kind that start to make your stomach clench and your chest ache and your throat tight.
He’s losing interest
He thinks I’m boring
He is probably talking to other women
He doesn’t really like me that much
Then the most important and devastating part kicks in. The impulses begin to arise in response to the question “What should I do?” The discomfort isn’t bearable. I can hardly stand it! I must know whats going on! He must be talking to someone else more interesting! He must not be that interested in me! I must secure his interest!
Impulses flood:
Text him again!
Call him!
Tell him you need him to text you back more consistently!
Ask him what he’s doing!
Make him define his intentions!
These impulses wreak havoc on my body and mind. I know what these impulses lead to. I have followed them before. I have followed them all the way down into the worst relationship I have ever experienced. I have followed them to my own abuse and demise.
And then it happens. The moment that every healing individual has to get to in order to increase the reach of their healing efforts. And I get to this place because I am waist deep in my own somatic work. I am also waist deep in Attachment Theory education. And so I have learned a thing or two about how to identify this intense state and what to do when it rears its vicious head within my own body.
I identify that I am at a fork in the road. And not just any fork. THE FORK. The one where I HAVE to put all of my good work and useful knowledge into embodied good use. I have to do The Thing that feels like absolute hell. The LAST thing I want to or feel capable of doing. I have to make a decision that is going to lend itself to true neural rewiring.
I have to lean hard into Self Regulating my anxious system. I must avert my attention away from what my system is sensing as possible abandonment and obliteration to my fragile heart. And I have to tend to myself instead of relying on this Other to make me feel better. This is the tendency for us Anxious Attachers (or Waves as Stan Tatkin, researcher, clinician, & creator of The PACT, method calls us). Our system has a very weak ability to self regulate. It does not have much practice self soothing. And so we rely on other nervous systems to regulate us. Leaving our sense of wellbeing and security outside of our own bodies and in the hands of usually unreliable Others.
So I get up from the couch. I grab my journal and I begin documenting what is happening inside. I begin writing down what is definitely true and real:
That things with this new person are going well
That we were texting
That he stopped responding for an hour
That I am worrying about why he is not responding
That is the end of what I ABSOLUTELY KNOW is true and real. Then I write down what my assumptions are. I write them all down no matter how crazy I know they sound:
He's bored with me
He is talking to someone else more interesting
He is offended by what I said
He does not care about me and is going to leave me on the line.
And then I look at it all and I turn to my inner self and I hold her. I hold her in her fear. And I begin to have a conversation with her as if she is my own little child. I name her fears back to her.
Relief wells as if that inner little one is so happy to realize that I’m listening. I ask her if she wants to tell me anything else. She tells me that she wants to be well and not feel like this. I imagine holding her tight now like a little toddler on my lap. And I tell her that I don’t want her to feel like this ever again either. I explain to her:
“We are going to try something different this time. I am going to be the one that gives you that sense of security that you need. And that when we feel this way we are going to hold each other for a little while and then we’re going to get up and go do something that we REALLY like to do by ourselves.”
On this day, we journal and then we go and skate to our favorite dance playlist we made. With the best music playing we move our bodies and for a while we don’t even think about that beautiful man and what he’s doing. And when I get back home, I feel settled. I feel calm. I feel something I am not used to feeling in situations like this. I feel strong.
I realize that I just did the most courageous act for my inner anxiously attached little girl. I just showed her that we can do this without relying on the Other to show up for us. FUCK. YES. We just did that. I just did that. I successfully did what Sarah Baldwin calls Internal Co-Regulation. I utilized my sense of my whole and embodied self to help that dysregulated part of me find regulation in her neural network.
Later that night that handsome man called me. He asked me about my day. I told him that I skated and kept the rest of the story to myself. We talked for hours into the night just like one does when they’re in that new budding love. And now 3 years later I look back at that moment and recognize it as the start of a long process of becoming securely attached for the first time in my life.
When we want to rewire our nervous systems, we have to begin taking the brave steps to do the opposite of what our survival strategies tell us we should do. Here’s why:
Our currently wired strategies made sense for those original experiences of stress and relational trauma. But they often are out of place when being used in any other setting.
The system clings to what worked in the past. But it keeps us from being able to meet the present. And sometimes…
Sometimes, the past is not the present.
Sometimes what happened then is not what is happening now. And in those moments when the past is not the present, we have to actively guide our system to go a different way than it’s used to going so that it can recognize that it has other new and better suited choices to meet this present moment.
When it comes to attachment, we have to confront those forks in the road often with so much internal intensity that it almost feels like we might die if we don’t complete the old strategy. SIMPLIFIED: When it comes to Anxious Attachment we MUST learn how to Self Regulate. If you have Avoidant Attachment tendencies then you MUST learn how to effectively Co-Regulate. In both cases we are having to go against what our system feels is the most safe. Not because it’s actually dangerous in the present moment, but because it WAS dangerous at some point in our history. For example, to be alone was to be abandoned and overwhelmed by our own internal experiences, or to be vulnerable in the presence of others meant ridicule or punishment. These types of experiences are catastrophic to a young system and leave long lasting “scars” on our neural networks.
This work has taught me so much. And one of those many and very important things is to be VERY curious about the impulses that come from heightened states of emotional arousal. Begin to track these for yourself. Meet yourself in those dark hours. And if you can, take an SEP into those dark hours with you so you can start offering your sacred system more aligned & empowered choices when you reach those important forks in your road!
Here are 2 places you can start if you want to learn more on attachment theory now:
The Attachment Theory & Nervous System Connection Podcast
The Power of Attachment — Diane Poole Heller
Have you ever looked into your attachment styles? Do you attach differently to men vs. women? Have you attached as anxious at one point and avoidant at another point?
Did you miss last weeks Essay?
https://open.substack.com/pub/wingedandrooted/p/do-you-even-realize-what-the-mundane?r=2knmcj&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcome=true
Thank you Zoe. I appreciate this more than I can say. I’m in deep, and doing my work♥️