Polysecure: Attachment, Trauma and Consensual Nonmonogamy

by Jessica Fern

Parenting that is cold, distant, critical or highly focused on achievement or appearance can create an environment where the child learns that they are better off relying on themselves.

As they got older and more social, they felt too embarrassed to have friends over and would often spend more time at friends’ homes to avoid their own. The shame and embarrassment that they experienced at the self level because of their home-level environment contributed to higher levels of attachment avoidance and discomfort with intimacy at the relational level.

You are the source of your happiness, love, courage, emotional regulation and purpose, and the sooner that you can release your partner from being the source of these experiences the better for everyone involved (metamours included).

Secure attachment with yourself means being aware of your feelings and desires, as well as being able to tend to your own needs and knowing how to advocate for them in relationships. In the absence of this, your relationships can be built upon a false premise, or, at the very least, will struggle to be sustainable.

People functioning from a dismissive attachment style steer clear of trying to emotionally regulate with others because, in many ways, they don’t even see it as a possibility. The co-regulation that a child needs and would experience with an attachment figure was not available to them, so they learned to take care of themselves by disengaging from others and taking space to regulate. From the outside, it may look like people with avoidant attachment are able to self-regulate well since they are comfortable on their own, but usually they are not actually self-attuning and self-soothing as much as they are autoregulating—that is, partaking in activities that are more about zoning out or tuning out in order to dissociate from their internal states than tuning into and intentionally working with their internal states.

People with a preoccupied style learned that in order to survive they needed to be vigilant about reaching out towards others, often at the expense of losing their sense of self, whereas people with dismissive or fearful-avoidant attachment styles learned the danger or futility of reaching out to others and so in retreating into themselves they lose their sense of other.

In this case, my inner critic is trying to keep me from getting further hurt based on the fear that if I reveal myself, I won’t be cared for and listened to in the way I need and I will ultimately lose the relationship for having needs (yes, this is a history of neglect speaking).