Polysecure: Attachment, Trauma and Consensual Nonmonogamy

by Jessica Fern

The hierarchical relationship structures that were the norm in the online circles I frequented (and nearly all media representation of polyamory) kept some of the feeling of security offered by monogamy by protecting attachment needs, and often masking potential attachment disruptions, for those who were in so-called primary relationships.

Andie Nordgren published “The Short Instructional Manifesto for Relationship Anarchy” in 2006, questioning the need for relational hierarchies, and by the early 2010s, an increasing number of popular bloggers—many building on Nordgren’s work—were pushing for recognition of a wider range of relationship styles, and in particular, of the needs of secondary partners.

It was Nora’s blog, where in 2016 she proposed that “The Opposite of Rape Culture Is Nurturance Culture,”

I devoted my life to the investigation of how we change, evolve and develop, how we can communicate healthily and effectively, how we can heal and become safely embodied in the wake of trauma, how we can unshackle our hearts from our survival-based reactivity and defenses, and how we can liberate our minds from bigotry, ignorance and internalized oppression.

We experienced changes to each of us individually, changes to our marriage, immense growth in each of our capacity to experience more love, honesty, closeness and pleasure, as well as all the changes that resulted from significant losses, heartbreaks and attachment alterations within our own relationship and with family, friends and other partners.

insecure attachment styles can also be expressions of the healthy drives for autonomy and connection.

HEALTHY ATTACHMENT IS A DEEP BOND and an enduring emotional closeness that connects people to one another across space and time.

When our attachment needs are being met, this system enables us to feel comfortable and free to explore ourselves, others and the world around us.

If our attachment figures were absent or scary to us as children, we didn’t develop our ability to freely explore and to learn about the world and about our own abilities. When this happens, we develop insecure strategies for engaging with others—we may become more vigilant and anxious or more avoidant and dismissive.

A caretaker being present, safe, protective, playful, emotionally attuned and responsive is of paramount importance to a child developing a secure attachment style.

As children, if we reach out with our body and use our voice to get the help or connection we need to mitigate our distress, and if our parents usually meet these attachment bids, we learn that we matter and are worthy of love. This builds the foundation for healthy self-esteem and a sense of competence in the world. As adults, this helps us be more flexible when our partners can’t meet our needs. We’re better able to weather hearing no, to wait for our needs to be met at a later time or to seek an alternative means of having our attachment needs met without shaking the foundation of our relationship.

Bowlby conceived of the parent-child attachment relationship as having four essential features: proximity maintenance, separation distress, safe haven and secure base. We can see many parallels between the parent-child attachment relationship and the adult-adult attachment relationship. For instance, adults seek physical contact with each other, engage in dreamy eye-gazing, and even use baby talk or cooing sounds to nurture and encourage bonding. We feel separation distress when apart, and we turn towards our romantic partners as a safe haven in times of need. We also see them as a secure base from which to explore the world and our sexuality, and we feel able to share important discoveries with them.10

Of course, there are differences between the parent-child attachment bond and the adult-adult attachment bond. As adults, even though we seek regular and consistent proximity to our partner, we can tolerate much longer periods of separation from our partners

We learn how to self-regulate through our connections with our attachment figures. So, if our parents were unable to regulate their own emotions (whether from their current stress levels or their previous unresolved trauma), and therefore couldn’t support us in regulating our own emotions, we lost a foundational developmental experience.

Since relational object constancy is the ability to trust that your connection and bond with someone will persist beyond an initial separation or conflict, as an adult, having a compromised relational object constancy can make it extremely difficult to get through the disappointments, uncertainties, healthy conflicts, and natural ebbs and flows that adult romantic relationships inevitably produce.

From a narrative therapy perspective, this would be a form of essentializing in which someone takes one part of their identity or experience and sees it as the entirety of who they are.

For some, reading about a certain attachment style can literally put their entire life and relationship history into context, liberating them from the idea that they are broken or helplessly doomed to never have relationship success. Instead, they can see themselves as a person who has wisely taken on a certain attachment adaptation and they can feel empowered to change that adaptation and choose a more secure path from which to move forward. Conversely, labeling or receiving a diagnosis can also confine us into rigid categories that may restrict our sense of self or obscure the fullness of who we are. Labels can easily keep us stuck in the mindset of this is who I am, and so this is who I will continue to be.

You might function from a more secure style most of the time, but then act out a particular insecure style while under stress, or you might experience different attachment styles depending on who you are relating to.

A partner with a dismissive attachment style might provoke more anxious/preoccupied behaviors from us, or being with a more anxious partner might polarize us into being more dismissive. Our attachment styles can change from one relationship to the next and they can also change within a specific relationship with the same person.

A child in this scenario learns that, in order to survive, they need to inhibit their attachment bids for proximity or protection in order to prevent the pain and confusion of neglect or rejection. In this situation a child often learns to subsist on emotional crumbs, assuming that the best way to get their needs met by their parent is to act as if they don’t have any. In adulthood, having a deactivated attachment system includes not only minimizing one’s own bids for care and attention, but also having a diminished ability to pick up on and register attachment cues from others.

Too much emphasis on task-based presence. That is, where caregivers are only present when they are trying to educate or teach something to their child that is practical, academic or skills-based.

Oftentimes, their own painful emotions or experiences are placed below the radar of their emotional awareness in order to avoid the discomfort of feeling pain. This in turn creates a disconnection from their own feelings and needs.

They usually find it difficult to tolerate emotions related to intimacy, conflict and different forms of emotional intensity. When someone who is functioning in this style either feels vulnerable or perceives vulnerability in their partner, they will distance themselves to avoid discomfort. Signs of potential rejection or criticism from others will also create a quick withdrawal.

For the dismissive style, the journey from insecure to secure attachment is one of returning to the body through bringing feelings and sensations back to life and learning how to be with oneself in this process.

I want to be in relationships and have some closeness with people, but I can only tolerate closeness to a limit and then I need space.

Over-involving the child in the parent’s state of mind, where the parent’s emotions or state of mind is more central to the parent-child interaction than the child’s. In this case, the child might be asked (whether explicitly or implicitly) to be responsible for meeting the parent’s needs, making the parent feel better or supplying the parent with meaning and purpose. This is often due to a parent’s own level of anxiety, stress or unresolved trauma, or their own anxious attachment history. When the state of mind of the parent is the centerpiece of interactions, the child is left to constantly monitor and be concerned about their parent’s state of well-being, which can encourage a role reversal in which the child is acting more like the parent in the relationship. As a child, being responsible for a parent’s well-being is a misplaced, confusing and overwhelming responsibility.

Overstimulation. We live in an increasingly stimulating world, with fewer spaces to rest physically and mentally between interactions with people, technology, billboards, ads and the like. Our nervous systems need breaks from such stimulation in order to develop properly, and parents can impede this process when they force constant contact, require attention or presence from a child that might be beyond their developmental capacity, hover over the child, interject themselves when the child is calmly playing independently or enjoying time with others, or even push physical boundaries through tickling or affection that is unwanted by the child in that particular moment.

Parents who discourage autonomy. Some parents discourage their child’s agency and autonomy through comments or suggestions that insinuate, whether subtly or overtly, that the child is incapable, less than or not enough in some way. Even well-intentioned parents can question their child...

Even though people with this style tend to sacrifice themselves for the relationship, the ways in which they are preoccupied and compulsively give care are not necessarily attuned. In such cases, the caregiving is more of a strategy to keep a person close than an actual response to what their partner genuinely needs. If someone with this attachment style perceives even the slightest possibility that their partner is disconnected or disinterested, they can become demanding, possessive or needy for approval, reassurance, connection, contact, and greater emotional or sexual intensity.

Someone with a preoccupied style has more awareness of both their feelings and their partner’s feelings, but they still struggle with differentiating and communicating their feelings and with managing their emotional responses in healthy ways. Also, although they’re aware of their partner’s feelings, they’re not necessarily reading those feelings accurately. People with this attachment style might be very precise in detecting even the slightest change in their partner’s mood or state, but they’re more likely to assume that the shifts are personal to them and that they are negative, when neither may be true.

For now, I’ll just say that someone with a preoccupied style must first come back to themselves. I will often guide clients to tune into where their sense of self is. Is it within their own body or out there in someone else’s body? If it is with someone else, we can then focus on calling themselves back to establish a sense of inner authority and self-trust.

The disorganized attachment style is most commonly associated with trauma and it typically arises when a child experiences their attachment figure as scary, threatening or dangerous.

This client recalled how she wasn’t the only one who fell into a freeze response when her stepmother had these outbursts; all of the adults in the house did—including her father. They would freeze up, unsure about how to handle the situation. This left her additionally abandoned by the other adults around her, who could have stepped in to mitigate the situation in some way that was responsive and protective for her at a crucial time.

Family chaos. Factors such as illness, financial stress, job insecurity, parents who are imprisoned or handling addictions, and even a culture of overachieving in which every minute of a child’s life is scheduled with extracurricular activities can all create a home of chaos.

Well-intentioned parents who push their child into more and more enriching activities can cause children to feel destabilized from the lack of rest, downtime and free play time that is needed to feel settled and soothed in the nervous system.

people around them can quickly experience sensory overload. My clients who consider themselves to be HSPs often report experiencing a certain type of disorganized attachment because the world itself is too much. Due to their increased sensitivity, even normal everyday events can feel too intense, too chaotic or too stimulating, leaving little respite to feel settled, safe and secure. In relationships, HSPs are often unclear as to whether what they are feeling has its origin in themselves or if their partner’s feelings are creating that “one foot on the gas, one foot on the brake” experience in their nervous system. They want to be close to people, but being close can be a sensory assault that is confusing or that dysregulates them for days.

When trauma occurs, there is a rupture with the foundational relationship a person has with their self. This severed internal relationship with the self needs to be restored so that the person can go on to trust and value themselves, as well as begin to trust others again. When this type of healing has yet to occur, people functioning from the fearful-avoidant attachment style will tend to see themselves as broken and unworthy and will expect that others are untrustworthy or will only hurt them in the end.

Someone lower in attachment anxiety will approach a partner from a more secure stance, moving towards them with a sense of openness, flexibility and interdependence, whereas someone who is higher in anxiety is more likely to seek proximity to their partner in order to grasp at or control them, be overly dependent on them, or simply to alleviate their own fears and anxiety.

I also think that the ways someone might experience being low in attachment anxiety will vary greatly depending on where they lie in the attachment avoidance dimension. For example, both the secure and dismissive styles would be considered as being low in attachment anxiety, but I don’t think they are felt in the same way. Someone who is more secure and lower in attachment avoidance probably experiences little anxiety, whereas for someone who is more dismissive and higher in attachment avoidance, low anxiety is probably related to the repressing or evading of anxious feelings rather than not having them.

Each of the different styles comes with its own strengths and values. The insecure attachment styles are not just survival strategies that kick into gear in response to attachment rupture or relationship distress. At their root, they can also be expressions of the essential human desires for autonomy and connection. On one hand we have the need for agency, independence and choice, and on the other hand we have the need for closeness, connection, support and union.

The pursuer never catches up, while the distancer never fully gets the breathing room they need. The pursuer fears that they will be abandoned, while the distancer fears being engulfed. In this dance, both partners are left frustrated and unable to get their needs met, often missing that this archetypal pattern has more to do with their inner self than their partner, who is just serving as a mirror reflecting back the parts of them that have been exiled and disowned.

The distancer has cast off the parts of their self that yearn for closeness and connection and that desperately fear being abandoned. They are drawn to the pursuer, who will act these needs and fears out for them so that the distancer doesn’t have to. The pursuer, in turn, has projected outward the parts of their self that crave autonomy and independence and that are actually afraid of truly being vulnerable, being seen and being close. The pursuer is drawn to the distancer, who will act out these needs and fears for them so that they don’t have to. They are both trying to achieve wholeness, which is what keeps them dancing, but it’s the dance itself that prevents them from taking responsibility for the parts of themselves they have disowned; they instead blame their partners for enacting these elements of themselves.

To best respond to whatever arises in front of us day by day or even moment by moment, we sometimes need to tighten up on the reins of autonomy, while loosening the reins of connection. In other moments, we tighten the connection reins, moving in closer to our partners while releasing the autonomy reins.

Giving love can also feel problematic when we have attachment wounds. We are unsure whether our partners will receive it, see it as enough, reject it, take it for granted or take advantage of it.

In the book Loving Bravely, Alexandra H. Solomon defines healthy boundaries as the balancing point where you are able to both connect to another as well as be separate from another, maintaining your own energy and sense of self while your partner maintains the energy that is theirs.

Similar to how we need both autonomy and connection to be in secure functioning, we need to have connection and protection in concert with each other to maintain healthy boundaries. Our boundaries begin to become unhealthy when we’re either underprotected or overprotected towards others, as well as when we’re being too connected or not connected enough.

Porous boundaries arise when we are connected but not protected, and rigid boundaries stem from being protected, but not connected.

Traumas are the events and situations that overwhelm us, leaving us feeling out of control, helpless and alone. Not everyone experiences trauma the same way, and not everyone who goes through the same events will necessarily be traumatized. Trauma occurs on a continuum of stress, and the difference between a traumatic experience versus a bad or stressful experience is the impact on our body’s ability to recover. When something stressful occurs, our bodies are wired to release an entire cocktail of chemicals into our bloodstream to activate the sympathetic nervous system’s fight/flight/freeze/appease defense response. This is meant to be a short-term strategy to keep us alive. Once the event is over, our bodies are supposed to return to a state of parasympathetic nervous system balance, where we can function as usual in a calm and clear-minded way.

when left untreated, trauma can interfere with our ability to inhabit our bodies, exhibit mental flexibility, function in everyday ways, learn, grow, love and securely attach.

enormous stressors or big overwhelming events are not the only ways that a person’s nervous system can be activated and overwhelmed to the point of experiencing trauma. We can also experience smaller but ongoing stressful events that have a cumulative harmful effect.