Assessing for attachment wounding: When you were young, who was really and consistently there for you?

At the core of EMDR therapy and the AIP model, the difficult stuff has to connect to and metabolize into right now adaptive information.  Shapiro is clear that enough of the needed adaptive information must be present for the difficult stuff to metabolize into it.  You cannot connect a lie to a lie.  Attachment figure resources can help rehearse and model what it might look like for more adult parts to connect with and bring information to younger parts.  Of course, everything that we know about attachment wounding is that starting life in survival mode often increases the chances that survival mode will continue well after childhood finally ends.  Absent opportunities to learn disconfirming information in tolerable ways, the most adult parts often share judgment, blame, or disgust toward child parts.

Attachment figure resources have something important to bring to the most mature and right now parts, but the main point is to bring the possibility of what didn’t happen to the child parts.  The deficits of attachment trauma may be neurobiological.  The absence of attachment may not have allowed the creation of the very pathways that are needed and leveraged by EMDR Therapy.  EMDR Therapy is always parts work.

While this can be a powerful resource, there are a wide range of protective responses against its introduction and absorption as a resource.  My attachment figure script, which is referenced in the notes below anticipates and tries to get ahead of many of these difficulties.  But, there are some categories of blocking beliefs that may make it nearly impossible to develop attachment resources without additional work: I am dispositionally bad, I don’t deserve love/kindness/to get my needs met, and I don’t want to be loved/receive kindness/get my needs met.

With these clients, we may need to try the exercise from the perspective of meeting the needs of someone else other than the client.  This is a dip your toe in modification.  I may ask if the client has a niece or nephew, or knows of a child (or can imagine a child) that could use some additional support.  I try to avoid the client’s own children, since this can bring up a lot of parenting guilt and reinforce themes of defectiveness or unworthiness.  We then develop the attachment figure script using the proxy of this other child, in place of the client’s younger parts.  We are “trying on” these qualities using a less triggering personae than the client himself, the way a child in sand-tray therapy may perform his or her emotional experiences through the persona of a dinosaur figure.

To review, attachment figure resources are a dip your toe in resource that can help facilitate healing in EMDR Therapy and other approaches.  If the client simply can’t resource the selves, find something that it can resource as a substitute for the selves can be helpful while we continue helping the client develop the needed assets for the EMDR journey.  Again, the protections against self-care, self-nurture, and self-directed compassion are survival strategies.  They exist for reasons.  We can’t go at them too directly.  We sometimes need to introduce disconfirming experiences carefully.  We need to dip our toe in.  Get information from that. Sometimes we need to dip our toe into something even smaller first. Leverage that.

Attachment figure resources can be difficult to develop for many clients.  In other episodes I’ll discuss many of these difficulties.