Polysecure: Attachment, Trauma and Consensual Nonmonogamy

by Jessica Fern

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.