Disorganized Attachment Behaviors, Explained... by a Trauma Therapist

Disorganized Attachment feels like an internal mind f*** of learning connections, that's perceived externally as a stack of 'wild cards' people need to be weary of.

A disorganized attachment style is often the result of learning from a series of contradictory-feeling patterns of thinking, feeling, & behaving that each, in their own right, somehow successfully fulfilled or protected at least one of a person's emotional needs.

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Attachments are sources of emotional fulfillment that worked reliably enough for a period of time, that our minds to decide to build habit-forming learning shortcuts to accessing them more efficiently.

For those of us who less consciously learned that inconsistency in the environment is to be expected, and that if consistency is desired, we must find it within our own style of responses, circumstances made it easy for developing attachment issues.

In the case of disorganized attachment, these issues tend to involve having a fight or flight response to BOTH increasing emotional intimacy AND increasing fears of impending loneliness.

Now, in our fully cognitively developed adult minds, this should sound like a big deal right? At least to me, the solution appears to be simple, DON'T react in extremes to either of the above fight or flight responses, to normalizes healthier responses patterns.

But, it's not that easy... I know this, because I've lived it.

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Emotional response patterns picked up as children can be hard to change.

The real problem that holds us back in sustainably changing this stressful habit of emotional responses is that..

[emotional responses] were originally encountered, learned, and stored in somatic memory in the context of triggers our underdeveloped child brains had to try their best in responding to.

So what does that look like?

For disorganized attachment, coping in terms of black and white, more simplistic thinking and feeling styles, that were actually developed at the time. Aka. if one thing didn't work in getting us what we wanted, we'd naturally just turn to trying the opposite kind of thing.

Our more complex, social-emotional reasoning skills, including our ability to attribute certain things to circumstances vs people, developed later on.

When thematic memory networks store information in the developmental stage in which they were originally learned, some of our minds will naturally update them with time and more developmentally advanced interpretations of social experience, while other minds will kinda just leave the (usually impractical learning as adults) habitual learning as is...

For children who grew up to be adults feeling out of control and confused by their emotions, it can feel like a timeless version of reliving the chaos they once experienced externally, but now more internally- until acted upon externally again and so on.

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Acting upon chaos: the Must in Seeking Control

For individuals experiencing disorganized attachment patterns, what's desired is control over something, anything, and most often in how they respond to the fight or flight triggered by either fear of loneliness or fear of losing oneself, in the equal and opposite fashion of where it came from.

Running away from one emotional fear= Running towards a different one... in an ongoing cycle.

One's attempts to rule over internal or external chaos, by exercising a semblance of control within the opposite, often opposing emotional response, can end up turning into a toxic, often overlooked form of complex trauma, rather than the emotional balance that is subconsciously craved.

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Yes. Disorganized Attachment at its core is the result of complex trauma.

Not necessarily multiple, complex traumatic events, rather conflicting learning strategies reinforced at early ages (through any number of experiences), when we were unknowingly trying to making sense of what certain situations meant to us, about us, and how to approach changing those meanings if we wanted more of something else instead.