Sorry for being a week late on this blog. I had some medical issues.
Attachment theory and classification was at the core of my PhD Dissertation research. At the time, I was not aware of my own DID. I knew that I could not classify my own attachment as secure, but I didn’t think that it was as insecure/disorganized, as it truly was.
Why Did I Split?
It was hard for me to accept that I had an insecure/disorganized attachment. After the time in therapy when I mentally reexperienced my two-year old trauma, I wondered what really happened and how I responded to the events described in my first blog. When I asked my Dad about what I did at that time he said, “You were too young to have feelings.” In his day some may have believed this, but research has clearly shown how mentally and emotionally active the minds of young children really are.
Learning later that my mother was narcissistic, I wonder how secure my attachment was prior to my initial childhood trauma. Since my mother was experiencing her own trauma, I don’t believe I was given much attention at all.
Actually, I lived in a world swirling with anger, confusion and abandonment. In fact I was physically hurt (spanked) because I was too afraid to go to bed at night. My young mind was dealing with images of death, blood, and guilt and my attachment figures felt that I was too young to even be a person with feelings and needs. I did not feel safe or significant and I was left in fear with no solution. The attention that I got from my attachment figures was to be punished for being afraid. My psyche had to split to survive. The events of that experience have created PTSD triggers that have I carried throughout my life. Too young to have feelings? Think again!
Accepting My Own Attachment Issues
When I began therapy for my own DID, I explored my childhood feelings of confusion about relationships and traumatic memories. My years of professional study made in impossible for me to deny my own insecure/disorganized attachment orientation It was difficult to reconcile truth with the fantasy I wanted to hang on to.
More recently, I found a research article entitled, “Dysregulation of the Right Brain: Fundamental Mechanism of Trumatic Attachment and Psychopathogenesis of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder” (Austrailian and New Zealand Journal of Psychiatry, 2002,36,9-30). It provides insightful research about the important relationship between attachment security, early trauma, neubiological development, and adult PTSD and DID.
He shows neurological evidence of how brain development in young children (especially in the first two years as well as in preadolescence) is impacted by trauma and an insecure/disorganized attachment which he calls a “traumatic attachment.” The neuropathways created by unresolved trauma lead to difficulty in coping with stress and PTSD triggers later in life. This can make it difficult to regulate emotion, modulate stress, and develop efficient coping mechanisms. DID has been discribed as an extreme expression on the continuum of anxiety disorders and PTSD (VanderKolk, The Body Keeps the Score,2014).
Attachment and Coping With Trauma
From birth we actively perceive our physical, social, and emotional environments. Our young minds seek out what is consistent and what is different about our ongoing daily experiences. Feeling safe and significant with an attachment figure may be the most protective factor for the young child who experiences stress. Studies of children who eperience even the ravages of war suffer much less trauma if they can rely on a secure attachment figure.
When a young child experiences trauma and/or abuse, it is hard for them to make sense of their overwhelmming fear and sense of danger. If the child’s caregiver is sentitive to the child’s needs and feelings, the pain and confusion is minimized and the child can reorganize and cope with the trauma much better. The fear is alleviated by the sense that “someone will keep me safe from what I feel so afraid of and cannot undertand.” Children with insecure/disorganized attachment find it much harder to regulate stress. This is especially true if the attachment figure is also a source of fear. Then child is left in fear with NO solution.
Young children who are repeatedly left in fear with no solution become mentally and psychologically overwhelmmed. Their sympathetic nervous system escalates to the point where extreme survival mechanisms must be employed. Oft times these children will show periods of hyperarousal and periods of dissociation. Actually they are just trying to survive overwhelmming pain and confusion. This is when PTSD pathways are laid down, and in extreme cases the psyche must resort to the total dissociation that results in a split and the creation of a new alter ego. This is typical of DID. Next blog I will write about my second split.