Polysecure: Attachment, Trauma and Consensual Nonmonogamy

by Jessica Fern

Compersion The state of happiness, joy or pleasure that comes from delighting in other people’s happiness. In nonmonogamy, this term is more specifically used to refer to the positive feelings experienced when your lover is having a positive experience with one of their other lovers.

Polysaturated The point at which the thought of another relationship leaves one feeling more exhausted than excited. When a polyamorous person has as many significant and insignificant others as they think they can handle at a given time.

Attachment theory offers an important—even revolutionary—framework for understanding the biological and psychological necessity of being securely bonded to others. The psychological model also allows insight into how disruptions in attachment can create significant challenges in the giving and receiving of the love and affection we so desire with our partners.

As infants, we can’t yet meet any of our own needs. So, in order to survive, we have to bond and attach to caretakers who can provide us with food and shelter, as well as meeting our biological and psychological needs for emotional attunement, warm responsiveness and calming physical touch. Popular parenting culture often calls this “skin time,” and it’s known to be a crucial part of early childhood development.

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.

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, caregiving is asymmetrical: a child under secure circumstances receives care from their attachment figures but does not provide it in return. But as adults, caretaking becomes more symmetrical and shared between partners. Sexuality also becomes an integrated part of the attachment and caregiving behavioral systems.

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.

Children who experienced an insecure attachment environment, regardless of which style they adopted, can internalize the beliefs that to some degree the world is unsafe and people cannot truly be relied on. 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.

Attachment styles are not rigid identities to take on. These different insecure styles are not how you relate all of the time and they are not the totality of who you are. I often hear people describe themselves as “I am an avoidant” or “I am anxiously attached,” seeing themselves wholly through this one lens. We can also do this to our partners, labeling them and everything they do as a result of them “being an avoidant” or “being preoccupied,” etc.

The styles of our partners also have an impact on our own attachment expression. 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 who had parents who were mostly unavailable, neglectful or absent adapted to their attachment environment by taking on a more avoidant style. 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. When a child does not get enough of the positive attachment responses that they need or they are outright rejected or criticized for having needs, they will adapt by shutting down and deactivating their attachment longings.

In adulthood, the childhood avoidant style is referred to as dismissive. A person who is functioning from a dismissive style will tend to keep people at arm’s length. Usually priding themselves on not needing anyone, people with this style will tend to take on an overly self-reliant outlook, valuing their hyper-independence and often seeing others as weak, needy or too dependent. Although they may present as having high self-esteem, people functioning from a dismissive attachment style often project unwanted traits onto others and inflate their sense of self to cover a relatively negative self-image.

This overdevelopment of the logical brain can also create challenges with certain aspects of autobiographical memory—people with a dismissive attachment style might have little memory for childhood experiences, as well as simplistic narratives about their parents and childhood being “just fine.”21 In my therapy practice, I often notice that people who are relating from the dismissive style initially describe their parents or current romantic relationships as being great, even ideal, but just a few minutes of deeper questioning into their actual childhood experiences or current relational patterns reveals that things aren’t actually so perfect. This occurs because the deactivation of their attachment system has made it difficult for them to access and consistently stay in touch with their true feelings.

When someone with a dismissive style starts to work on healing their insecure attachment, they must begin by no longer dismissing and distancing from themselves. This requires that they no longer deny their desires and needs, allowing the longings and wants for connection that have for so long been forbidden.

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.

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.

The partner of someone with a preoccupied attachment style may then feel like this constant tracking of relational misattunements and mistakes is controlling of them. But for the person with a preoccupied attachment style, this behavior is less an attempt to overtly control their partner than it is a symptom of their attachment system being overly sensitive to even the slightest sign they might be left. 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.

Frequently consumed by fears of abandonment, people functioning out of a preoccupied style will easily give up their own needs or sense of self, yielding to the needs or identity of their partner in order to ensure proximity and relationship security. Due to their history of unpredictable and inconsistent love, they can have considerable challenges with trusting that their partners truly love them.

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.

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.

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. Being in a relationship can cause me to become dysregulated, dissociative or confused. There are times when I look fine on the outside, but I am actually a complete tsunami on the inside. I frequently experience the conflicting internal drives of wanting to be close and share myself but fearing that closeness or vulnerability will be dangerous or cause the relationship to end.

Someone who is equally high in avoidance but higher in anxiety can feel an enormous amount of internal conflict and distress. Their avoidance does not necessarily feel like a safe refuge for them, but can feel more like a freeze response. This person feels two things at once: desire for proximity to a partner but fear of what that closeness might bring.

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.

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.

When this goes too far, straying from its healthy expression, a person’s communing drives can become unhealthy forms of enmeshment and fusion. They may lose themselves in a relationship and see a decreased ability to truly know themselves or even make up their own minds.

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.

Our boundaries are the ways we protect ourselves physically, mentally and emotionally. They are how we establish our sovereignty, as well as how we open ourselves to others. Our boundaries are the meeting point between ourselves and another—the point at which we can be both separate and connected. Our boundaries guide us in navigating our relationships and they are directly related to the ways in which we are able to give and receive love.

It can be extremely vulnerable to try to let people into the deeper places and we may not even allow ourselves to go there. Soaking up the love from our partners and allowing it to penetrate into our bones and cells can be foreign and frightening.

Giving love can be just as vulnerable as receiving it because when we give, we are taking the risk of revealing our hearts. We’re declaring our desire to be close to someone and we are potentially exposing our limitations in the process.

Rigid boundaries are a sign that we are overfocused on protection without allowing sufficient connection. When our boundaries are rigid on the input, we are blocking and when they are too rigid on the output we are restraining. When our boundaries are rigid from the inside out we are obstructing input from others, whether that is their love, attention, feedback or requests. When blocking, we are guarding what comes in and disallowing the influence of others, usually from fear of being hurt or attacked. When blocking, we can come off as prickly, abrupt, edgy, defensive, frozen or withdrawn.

Regardless of which level our attachment wounds first take place in, our insecure attachment styles can be healed through this relationship level. This can occur by having our needs met from attuned responsive partners or even having reparative experiences with the ones we have been hurt by.

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.

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.

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?

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.

Secure attachment is created through the quality of experience we have with our partners, not through the notion or the fact of either being married or being a primary partner. The narratives people have about love, marriage, primary partnership and how to achieve relationship security are powerful, so much so that just the idea of being in love, married or in a primary partnership can lead us to think we are experiencing attachment security when in reality we might not be.

Here are some signs that might indicate that you are relying more on the structure of your relationship for your attachment and security than the emotional experience of your relationship: You theoretically know your partner loves you and is ultimately committed to you, your marriage and/or your family, but you don’t feel personally valued, seen or cherished. You share many forms of structural commitment with your partner, but don’t have emotional or sexual intimacy (and one or both of you is not OK with that). When you ask your spouse or partner for more of their time or affection they get defensive and point out all of the professional, financial or domestic things that they do to show their commitment. You often feel alone in your relationship even though you live together or are around each other a lot. You or your partner defer to gender stereotypes to make the absence of certain forms of emotional or sexual connection more tolerable, such as “that’s just how men are” or “well you know how women can be.” In your relationship, the ideal of the marriage or the greater purpose of the family have become more important than the direct experience of how you treat each other. You’re married or in primary partnership, but feel like you’re always getting the short end of the stick when it comes to your spouse or partner’s time, affection and attention. You know your partner is committed to you, but you don’t know if they actually like and enjoy being with you.

For many, the transition to poly (whether solo or with a partner) brings up forms of insecurity, anxiety and even panic attacks that they may not have experienced before. It is not uncommon for me to hear people say that they theoretically want to be poly, but emotionally they don’t know if they can do it because they feel like they are losing their mind.

The skills and abilities that people used to keep their relationship healthy and happy in monogamy are no longer sufficient in a nonmonogamous context, so couples find themselves with only a percentage of the skills they need to be healthy, happy and functional in the paradigm of polyamory.

The paradigm shift creates an awakening of the self, where what was previously unexpressed and unrealized is now awakening in someone, potentially turning their entire world and relationships upside down. People may not just be waking up to their nonmonogamous desires or orientation, but also aspects of their sexuality, important identities or forms of oppressions that have previously been denied, exiled or completely unacknowledged.

Attempting to do CNM with an insecure attachment style or having attachment insecurity arise as a result of becoming nonmonogamous can seriously disrupt a person’s sense of self, as well as their inner and outer safety in ways that can feel unbearable and be unsustainable.

For some people, monogamy can serve as a stand-in for actual secure attachment. Since the rules and structure of monogamy are so well-known and so strongly reinforced, many times all you have to do is fall back on the structure of monogamy itself to create a sense of safety in a relationship. The very fact of being monogamously exclusive, verbally committed or legally married can be sufficient enough for some people to feel secure in the relationship. When these people then remove the structure of monogamy by going nonmonogamous, their own insecure attachment style can get exposed. In such cases, being monogamous shielded the partners from having to face their own insecure attachment history.

In CNM we may not be the only or first person that our partner turns to or the last one they say goodnight to. In CNM we are less likely to meet new partners when they or we are single and able to create a new life together. Instead, we often have to figure out how to fit together alongside pre-existing structures and commitments with other partners. Furthermore, in CNM we are opening ourselves up to people who could become game changers for us or for our partner.

As the relationship opens, a partner’s actions with other people (even ethical ones that were agreed upon) can become a source of distress and pose an emotional threat. Everything that this person is doing with other people can become a source of intense fear and insecurity for their pre-existing partner, catapulting them into the paradoxical disorganized dilemma of wanting comfort and safety from the very same person who is triggering their threat response.

People who wake up to themselves as being nonmonogamous as an orientation can have a similar coming-out process as people who come out as gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgender. Even though the realization that someone is nonmonogamous by orientation may come with much personal clarity, relief and alignment of who and how they are, the coming-out process can also bring with it an enormous amount of pain and confusion.

You and your partner transitioning together to CNM, which you are happy about, but experiencing a real loss of the old relationship that the two of you had together. Even though you might still be together, the relationship has changed, and it’s common to have grief about the past relationship with your partner that is no longer, as well as grief and loss about the monogamous future you had envisioned with them.

Nonmonogamy can be a pressure cooker for growth. It is commonly and playfully known in the nonmonogamous world that you shouldn’t enter CNM unless you are ready to process, communicate, grow and then process, communicate and grow some more. This is because having multiple partners will expose all of your relationship baggage, your blind spots, shadows and shortcomings, and all the potential ways you’ve been asleep to social issues. Because of this, I’ve seen how nonmonogamy can actually become an accelerated path to growth, specifically when it comes to attachment, where it offers a path to healing that many people would not experience otherwise.

Both consciously and unconsciously we are looking to know: If I turn towards you, will you be there for me? Will you receive and accept me instead of attack, criticize, dismiss or judge me? Will you comfort me? Will you respond in a way that calms my nervous system? Do I matter to you? Do I make a difference in your life? Can we lean into and rely on each other?