Polysecure: Attachment, Trauma and Consensual Nonmonogamy

by Jessica Fern

As children, we want to know that our attachment figures are nearby and accessible. We need to know that they will provide us with a safe haven to turn to when we need them, which then gives us a secure base from which we can explore our environment. Bowlby called this the exploratory behavioral system. 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.

But if they experience their parents as inconsistent, inaccessible, unresponsive or even threatening and dangerous, they adapt by developing more insecure attachment styles. 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.

As children, when we feel afraid, threatened or in need, and seeking closeness with our parents is not a viable option because they’re not available or because turning towards them doesn’t make things better, we learn to rely more on ourselves. We become more self-reliant and we minimize our attachment needs. When we deactivate our attachment system, we suppress our attachment-based longings—not because we don’t still want closeness and connection, but in order to adapt and survive. If we experience discomfort or danger and closeness to a parent is still somewhat of a viable option, we might learn that we can get their attention by intensifying our attachment cries. If our caretakers did not respond to our initial bids, but ramping up our demands and hyperactivating our attachment system did get their attention in some form, we then learn that this is an effective strategy.

Not necessarily all of the time but enough of the time, when the child has an attachment need, they reach out to their attachment figure and that attachment figure moves towards them in an emotionally attuned way that calms the child’s nervous system.6 This in turn teaches the child that allowing themselves to feel their needs and communicating those needs to others is an effective strategy. A caretaker being present, safe, protective, playful, emotionally attuned and responsive is of paramount importance to a child developing a secure attachment style.

People with a secure attachment style experience a healthy sense of self and see themselves and their partners in a positive light. Their interpersonal experiences are deeply informed by their knowledge that they can ask for what they need and people will typically listen and willingly respond. It’s empowering to know that our actions are effective. 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.

Bowlby conceived of the parent-child attachment relationship as having four essential features: proximity maintenance, separation distress, safe haven and secure base.

For securely attached people, “dependency” is not a dirty word, but a fact of life that can be experienced without losing or compromising the self.

Conversely, securely functioning adults are also comfortable with their independence and personal autonomy. They may miss their partners when they’re not together, but inside they feel fundamentally alright with themselves when they’re alone. They also feel minimal fear of abandonment when temporarily separated from their partner. In other words, securely attached people experience relational object constancy, which is the ability to trust in and maintain an emotional bond with people even during physical or emotional separation.

People with secure attachment are able to internalize their partners’ love, carrying it with them even when they’re physically separate, emotionally disconnected or in conflict.

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. In the absence of the foundational neuropsychological experience of receiving soothing and emotional regulation from our parents, as adults we then have to learn these difficult developmental tasks on our own. We have to figure out how to identify and articulate our emotional states and then find ways to self-soothe as a healthy response instead of pulling away, shutting down or lashing out in emotional reactivity. We also need to learn how to healthily rely on others and to figure out when it’s appropriate to seek support from them to help regulate our emotions.

These children will also struggle with having a sturdy relational object constancy. 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. Research also demonstrates that people with insecure attachment styles in adulthood struggle with relationship satisfaction.16 They find it hard to trust their partners, forgive them and respond intentionally instead of reacting out of habit. They also face challenges when it comes to commitment, whether they tend to commit too soon or not commit

Parents who are loving but inconsistent can encourage the adaptation of the anxious style. Sometimes the parent is here and available, attuned and responsive, but then other times they are emotionally unavailable, mis-attuned or even intrusive, leaving the child confused and uncertain as to whether their parent is going to comfort them, ignore them, reward them or punish them for the very same behavior. This unpredictability can be very dys-regulating for a child who is trying to stabilize a bond with their caregiver so, in an attempt to cope, they then learn that hyperactivating their attachment system through getting louder or needier achieves the attention they need. In this scenario, the child can become dependent on their hyperactivating strategy in order to survive, fearing that if they let their attachment system settle and rest then their needs will never be met. This in turn can lead to a chronically activated attachment system that exaggerates threats of potential abandonment, which may or may not actually be there.22

From their perspective, they’re not trying to control their partner; they’re just grasping for a relationship they’re afraid is slipping out of their hands.

such cases, the caregiving is more of a strategy to keep a person close than an actual response to what their partner genuinely needs.

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.

But it makes sense if you look a little closer. 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.

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. It is difficult to feel safe and secure when the home that we live in and the people we rely on are unstable, unpredictable or even erratic. 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. In such cases, attachment figures may not be engaging in direct mistreatment of their child, but the surrounding environment or some of the parents’ behaviors can create fear and chaos for the child, disrupting their ability to feel safe and secure.

People with this style are easily overwhelmed by their feelings or subject to what I call emotional flare-ups, where their intense emotional states can take over, disrupting their ability to function and, at times, taking others down with them. Due to their history of trauma, their sense of self and others have been impaired. 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. In more extreme cases, this attachment style is associated with high relationship turmoil, dissatisfaction and toxicity, self-destructive behaviors, relationship abuse, mental illness and addictions.

When in distress I have acted in ways that have been harmful to myself or my partners. I often expect that the worst will happen in a relationship, even when things are going well. I have elaborate negative fantasies about what will go wrong or how my partner will inevitably hurt me beyond repair, even if things are mostly going well.

It also helps show the common ground between the different types; for example, both the fearful and the dismissive attachment styles share a higher level of emotional avoidance.

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.

is important that we recognize the significance of these different attachment categories and acknowledge that they are shining a beneficial light on specific patterns that arise for people. But we also need to hold these categorical descriptions with some flexibility.

Let’s take a person with a dismissive style as an example and look at how negative framing works. Because they’re high on the avoidance axis and low on the anxiety axis, someone with a dismissive style is likely to use distancing and deactivating strategies when faced with relationship challenges. On the other end of the spectrum, someone in the preoccupied style sits low on the avoidance axis and high on the anxiety axis. Their strategies look more like hyperactivation and pursuing their partner in moments of relationship pain.

To navigate our relationships from a place of health and wholeness, we need to learn how to manage these seemingly contradictory drives. We need to find ways to feel sovereign without losing our connection to others, and to be in communion with others without losing our sense of self. The healthy range on this spectrum corresponds to the skills and abilities of the secure attachment style, where a person is able to embrace their autonomy without fear of abandonment, as well as dive deep into intimacy and connection without the concern of engulfment.

A common predicament that arises in relationships is referred to as the distancer-pursuer dance. In this type of relationship, a person pairs up with their ostensible opposite from an attachment perspective, so one partner (the distancer) constantly seeks more space, while the other (the pursuer) constantly pursues more connection. As the distancer attempts to take physical or emotional space, the pursuer moves in closer to try to bridge the gap. The closer that the pursuer comes, the more the distancer pulls back, which then provokes the pursuer to move in even more. 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 pursu...

With time and practice, we gain the ability to simultaneously tighten and loosen the reins without tightening so hard that we hurt or jerk the horse, or loosening so much so that communication and direction are lost. 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.

With practice, we learn that autonomy and connection aren’t an either/or experience but a both/and experience. We can be both different and connected. With practice we can also learn how to ebb and flow between the two states with more skill and grace, using both reins simultaneously to embrace both our independence and our dependency, our autonomy and our connection.

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.

Absorbing is when we take in what is not ours, when we lack enough self-definition that we leave ourselves underprotected while being over-connected.

When our boundaries are porous from the inside out, we become intrusive to others, trying to inhabit their skin or meddling too much in their business. We are intruding when we give unsought advice or tell people what they should or shouldn’t do in the name of helping them. Usually the help we’re offering was either unsolicited or not a match to what the other person actually needs.

Questions to Consider How do you find yourself over-giving in relationships? What beliefs about yourself play into this? What beliefs about others play into this? How do you find yourself under-giving in relationships? What beliefs about yourself play into this? What beliefs about others play into this? In what ways do you find yourself over-receiving or over-taking in relationships? What beliefs about yourself or about others play into this? In what ways do you find yourself under-receiving in relationships? What beliefs about yourself or about others play into this? In what ways do you experience your boundaries as porous, whether by being absorbing, being intrusive or both? In what ways do you experience your boundaries as rigid, whether by blocking, restraining or both? Do you need to focus more on tightening up your boundaries and protection of yourself, whether on the input or output? How can you do this? Do you need to focus more on softening the rigidity of your boundaries and allowing more connection, whether on the input or output? How can you do this?

Trauma can result from a single event, a series of events or multiple sets of circumstances that cause physical, emotional, psychological or spiritual harm. Single-incident traumas include one-off events such as robberies, assaults, accidents or natural disasters. Complex and relational trauma are terms used to describe the experience of multiple traumatic events that are ongoing, such as abuse or neglect, and that are interpersonal in nature.

However, 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. Instead of getting a single massive blast of the survival cocktail into our bloodstream when we experience a car accident, a natural disaster or a physical assault, we can get little blasts throughout the day from experiences like demanding work environments, relationship tension, health issues, life transitions, traffic jams, parenting, etc. Our bodies need time to metabolize the chemical cocktail released from stress and when we are in a chronic state of stress—whether big or small, physical, emotional, psychological, environmental or existential—we can get pushed over the edge into a state of sympathetic nervous system dominance. This means that the survival response that was meant to be temporary has now become constant. The threat that we experience does not even need to be real, but the repeated perception of a threat, day after day, can push our nervous system into a traumatized state. When this happens, we are living in survival mode, stuck in sympathetic dominance and unable to access our ability to recover and thrive.

In many ways, we can see attachment as a nice feedback loop in which relationships shape the individual and individuals then shape their relationships, with relationships further re-shaping the individual and so on repeatedly.

We could easily keep the discussion limited to these two levels, but there are additional facets to our experience of attachment and trauma that are important to explore. The levels of home, culture, society and the collective all factor into how safe and secure we feel in the world, with others and within ourselves. If we fail to include these levels in our understanding of attachment and trauma, we run the risk of either reducing experiences that impact attachment to the self or relationship levels when they are actually occurring at another level, or we run the risk of missing these factors altogether. For example, consider poverty, gender expectations or institutionalized birth practices, and how each of these may impact attachment and trauma. Since all of the levels of experience are not actually separate from one another—each level interacts with and influences the others—I have chosen to present them as nested.

Culturally, in the West, we tend to see romantic and parental relationships as superior in influence to others, and studies have shown that adult attachments are mostly directed towards a romantic/sexual partner over adult friendships.31 But our relationships with siblings or close friends can function as some of the most important attachment bonds that we have. For many, a friend or sibling can serve as a primary attachment figure, and when there has been attachment wounding with partners or parents, it is these very connections that can provide the corrective attachment experiences and healing from the attachment disruptions we’ve had with others at the relational level. Friendships that function as a primary attachment can also leave a painful mark on one’s heart and a significant attachment disturbance when there is betrayal, dishonesty, ghosting or drama that ends in the loss of the friendship. Death or loss of a close friend can create massive shock waves in our attachment systems.

Although the alcoholism and drug addiction were treated, his trauma, shame and deep-rooted feeling of unworthiness to be loved—even from his own child—remained for decades. My father had a strong desire to be available to me, but the absence of healing from his high school traumas and the ensuing shame left him, in many ways, incapable of bonding, connecting and responding in the nurturing, present and attuned ways that both of us wanted.

parental work hours.35 Is it honestly possible to feel safe and secure in a capitalist society that defines our human value based on what we do and how much we make, rather than who we are? Is it honestly possible to feel safe and secure in a society that bombards us with messages asserting (even aggressing) that in order to be secure in our self or with our place in the world we need to acquire more money, more religion, more objects, more products, more body-altering procedures or more property? Society teaches us how to love and who is worthy of love via the media, commercials and through institutionalized practices such as tax benefits for married couples. Relationships are defined as valuable and potential partners are evaluated as worthy based on how much money is spent on dinner, date nights, vacations, diamonds and wedding arrangements. Flipping to the other extreme and thinking that money doesn’t matter or is unimportant in a relationship can also be damaging, since we live in a society where money is a basic requirement for survival. It’s difficult to show up and thrive in relationships when we can’t feed ourselves, pay the bills or afford basic health care.

In addition to the ways that capitalism can influence who and how we love, in couples therapy I regularly witness how patriarchal values and gender discourses eclipse intimate connection and attachment. Developing healthy relational attachment requires feelings of safety and security. While significant achievements have been made for women over the past several decades, many women still experience sexism, objectification, invisibility, exclusion or even servitude within their most intimate relationships. My generation was taught that girls can do anything that boys can do, but most of my peers still feel the need to have to shave, pluck, color, tint, laser, push up or add extensions to parts of their bodies just to achieve baseline attractiveness and feel good enough to walk out the door every day.

cisgender, able-bodied white women. However, Tina Fey points out, these changes did not necessarily emancipate all women to embrace their body as it is, but rather, … added to the laundry list of attributes women must have to qualify as beautiful. Now every girl is expected to have: Caucasian blue eyes, full Spanish lips, a classic button nose, hairless Asian skin with a California tan, a Jamaican dance hall ass, long Swedish legs, small Japanese feet, the abs of a lesbian gym owner, the hips of a nine-year-old boy, the arms of Michelle Obama and doll tits.36 In addition to inflated beauty standards, women are now also expected to be career-driven, achievement-orientated, financially independent, and a competent badass in the boardroom, bedroom, kitchen and nursery.

On the flip side, the plights of men are often dismissed and unseen, since men are regarded as the ones wielding all the privilege and power. But what happens when the same societal structures that grant men superiority also deny them the full range of human emotions and threaten their status as men if they experience even the slightest form of sensitivity, vulnerability or indication of their needs for love, emotional safety and tenderness (basically, if men admit to having any attachment needs at all)? What happens when men are paralyzed by shame and made to feel unworthy of love and partnership unless they meet certain masculine expectations around financial or professional success? And what happens to a person’s ability to feel safe and connected when they are transgender or do not fit in the gender binary at all? Many of the personal problems and relationship struggles that we face are actually societal issues impairing our ability to bond, connect and love in secure ways.

Not everyone is currently or directly in harm’s way of natural disasters, but many of us still experience climate trauma or a preoccupied attachment to the earth by living in daily anxiety about the state of our water, air pollution, the state of forests, the loss of biodiversity and the extinction of animal species, just to name a few. For one of my clients, the bulk of our therapy has revolved around her environmental anxiety and its impact on every area of her life. When she wakes up every day, she looks through her window to what she sees as a world in peril. She is personally pained by the manifold ways that humans are mistreating the planet.

With both of these clients, I found that by treating their attachment anxiety with the environment the same way I would work with relational attachment trauma, they were both able to rebuild an inner sense of safety and security. Each of them developed a larger felt sense of trust in the wisdom and support that the earth has to offer, while also feeling more empowered, rather than overwhelmed or complacent, about their environmental efforts.

Thomas Hübl is the cofounder of the The Pocket Project, a nonprofit organization dedicated to the healing of collective trauma. He posits that we currently exist in a traumatized collective and the main symptom of being in a traumatized world is that we feel separate from each other, from the world, from spirit and from the natural world as a whole.39 These symptoms are not just present in the collective or even individual psyches, but can become evident through actual changes in our genetic expression. Unresolved trauma from previous generations can alter the expression of DNA, making subsequent generations more susceptible to certain health issues, increased anxiety, PTSD and wariness to danger. This means that certain mental health or physical symptoms that you are experiencing today at the self level may have actually been inherited from collective traumas that your ancestors went through generations ago.

People practicing CNM value transparency, consent, open and honest communication, personal responsibility, autonomy, compassion, sex positivity and freedom for themselves and others. Moreover, people practicing CNM typically embrace the following ideas and principles: love is not possessive or a finite resource; it is normal to be attracted to more than one person at the same time; there are multiple ways to practice love, sexual and intimate relationships; and jealousy is not something to be avoided or feared, but something that can be informative and worked through. Mystic Life, author of Spiritual Polyamory, states, “This path requires owning jealousy as it arises, accepting others as they are, developing [one’s] own sense of personal wholeness, and letting go of the belief that loving someone more means loving someone else less.”43 Using two separate US Census

In addition to the feedback that the audience has to offer, my critique of this article is that it is relying too much on the structure of the relationship to ensure and safeguard secure attachment instead of the quality of relating between partners to forge secure attachment. When we rely on the structure of our relationship, whether that is through being monogamous with someone or practicing hierarchical forms of CNM, we run the risk of forgetting that secure attachment is an embodied expression built upon how we consistently respond and attune to each other, not something that gets created through structure and hierarchy.

The takeaway message here is not to abolish all relationship hierarchies or shared bank accounts, but instead for people to procure secure attachment from their relational experiences instead of their relationship structures. Allow your direct experience with a partner to be the vehicle to secure attachment instead of having certain relationship concepts, narratives or structures be the vehicle.

But their protest can actually be a healthy sign of their attachment system detecting too much disconnection and therefore acting up in order to course-correct. It’s the body’s inner guidance system indicating that important needs are going unmet.

In any relationship, whether monogamous or nonmonogamous, abuse, neglect, aggression, violence, manipulation, control or gaslighting can also contribute to a fearful-avoidant attachment experience where the one you love and trust is also the one you fear and shouldn’t really trust.

Emotional and physical isolation from attachment figures is inherently traumatizing for human beings, beginning with it as a heightened sense, not simply of vulnerability and danger, but also helplessness.62