Some thoughts on attachment trauma

This is a post I started some weeks ago…

Mark Wolynns work on ancestral trauma shows that attachment schisms and difficulties start in our original parental bonds but are impacted by what happened for our parent in theirs and their grandparents in theirs, reaching back across generations.. Today listening to some educative material on attachment, abandonment and co-dependency it is making me feel quiet frightened. Only lately have I been coming out of denial about my self imposed isolation being a good thing.. really I had to go there (ie into isolation) due to the wounds I had but I ended up replaying abandonment with others so often.. Even coming back home in 2011 was thorny as I had to reconnect with those friends Dad was instrumental in separating me from in not allowing me to return to my teaching degree after that traumatic year away in Queensland in 1981. It was wounding to have to go to secretarial college and then work three nights a week in a restaurant with an emotionally and sexually abusive boss.. Dad never knew about this as he encouraged and elevated the protestant work ethic to ridiculous levels.. The sad thing is that in the next year I met two lovely guys training at the military academy and they asked me to be part of a share house. it was only ever friendship between us but a few years ago I came across a letter one of them wrote to me about how concerned he was that I was working too much.. The sad thing is they wanted to spend more time with me, but I was working Thursday through to Saturday nights then as well as full time in my first secretarial job, so that pattern of emotional distance was inculcated in me very deeply..

Anyway its good to write this to know there were positive attachments in my life but in true Uranian fashion they never lasted for very long.. It was only for a year that Murray and Doug and I got to share a house.. and they left the following year go on to their respective posts and after that we lost touch.. The next year I moved in with my friend Jane who phoned me last week.. and then all the traumas happened at the hands of my first boyfriend who was an addict and ended up abandoning me twice, the first time a week after Dad died the second six months later in Greece when he made love to another girl after reconnecting with me.

No wonder relationships did not feel safe. Safety and security in attachments involves us knowing that we will be loved for who we are not for what we do or any skills we have which is an important point made in the teaching video I am watching today.. Children loved and made to feel good even if they fail at something go on to develop far healthier self esteem and a self sense of being good than others.. Those shamed repeatedly or put down for failures due to their own limitations do not do half as well.. Also a parent consistently trying to turn us into someone else may end up making us become someone who cannot accept ourselves as we are nor others.

For myself lately I am having to watch when unnecessary shame is being triggered for me.. I know now there some people I can reach out to but there is a sadness around so much of the time I withdrew into isolation.. I see it happening to my sister right now and I feel fear for her.. that said we can also attach to nurturing forces in the Universe and use imagination to give us a sense of safety… In a video yesterday Mark Wolynn was saying that as far as our mind is concerned there is no difference between visualizing and the actual real felt sense of connection.

I have waited some weeks to post this post as I just re-edited it from drafts .. I see that I have managed lately to connect more outwardly but that due to the things that happened that hurt me so deeply during the years 1979 to 1993 particularly withdrawal for healing was necessary, but its also important for me to share this stuff from my past that I am becoming more aware of us time goes on.. Even if it gets repetitive at times I need to keep covering over that old ground to embody and make sense of everything.. I share this later in my therapy too which takes place tomorrow.