Polysecure: Attachment, Trauma and Consensual Nonmonogamy

by Jessica Fern

“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.

I also reframe the attachment styles based on their strengths and desires (not just their dysfunctions),

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

and even use baby talk or cooing sounds to nurture and encourage bonding.

and therefore couldn’t support us in regulating our own emotions, we lost a foundational developmental experience.

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.

can internalize the beliefs that to some degree the world is unsafe and people cannot truly be relied on.

They also face challenges when it comes to commitment, whether they tend to commit too soon or not commit at all.

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. Many of us have different attachment styles in relation to each of our parents, for example—we might have felt very secure with one parent, but insecure with another. The styles of our partners also have an impact on our own attachment expression.

avoidant attachment style

Too much emphasis on task-based presence.

Emotional neglect where emotional nourishment is low or absent and parents are unable to effectively read the child’s signals. Such parents might respond in insensitive ways or be completely unresponsive to the child’s emotional states and needs.

Parents who might have the best intentions, but have a child who is so different from them that they are unable to understand or connect with that child in attuned ways.

People with the dismissive attachment style will also tend to be highly linear and logical, showing many forms of competence and ability in the practical or professional realms of life. 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.”

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 children’s actions and decisions in ways that are shaming instead of encouraging. Some parents who are struggling with their own anxiety can easily get overwhelmed by children who want to explore and discourage or overprotect the child in ways that undermine their interests or abilities.

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.

From their partner’s perspective, the needs of the person with the preoccupied attachment style may seem insatiable. The partner may feel they can never do enough, which can in turn create the very pulling away or even breaking up that the person with the preoccupied style is so desperate to avoid. Compared to people with a more secure attachment style, people with the preoccupied style report increased jealousy and relationship conflict,24 as well as feelings of ambivalence about their sex life, since they are less likely to use consistent contraception and more likely to engage in sex they don’t fully want.

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.

The child may be a Highly Sensitive Person (HSP) or have a challenging health condition. While disorganized attachment is often associated with parental abuse and neglect, this isn’t always the case. Certain traits or experiences specific to the child can also prompt a disorganized experience. Approximately 15 to 20 percent of the population has a nervous system wired to be more sensitive. These people are more attuned to the subtleties of their environment and process that information much more deeply compared to others without this trait.28 While being more observant might be a survival advantage, it can also be overwhelming. Someone who is constantly aware of the subtleties of the environment and of the 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.

Death or loss of a close friend can create massive shock waves in our attachment systems.

This level also includes the physical environment, such as whether or not you liked your childhood physical home and bedroom (if you had one) and felt safe there. If the home was too messy or too clean, too quiet or too noisy, or otherwise not well-matched with you, it could potentially create stress and tension in the nervous system, prodding us into survival stress responses.

Culture can be rich, complex and contrasting, and we may find ourselves within several different cultures and communities that each have a different set of social rules, ways of relating and expectations for what it means to be an accepted member. People who do not fit into the norms of their communities can experience attachment insecurity and trauma if they feel that being themselves or expressing who they are will cause harm or be dangerous.

People’s lives are complicated, confined or even lost because of heterosexism, classism, racism, ableism and sexism.

Structural violence may be less obvious and direct than physical violence, but it is just as impactful and harmful. It creates a disparity between a person’s potential reality—the life they could conceivably live—compared to the limited reality that they find themselves in.

These societal experiences can then trickle all the way down to the self level, where social-level issues become internalized as forms of shame or self-loathing, again hindering one’s ability to bond, attach and connect.

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.

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?

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.

For many of us, our relationship to the environment is dissociative and overly abstracted. Even though the earth is the very ground upon which we move, we still see it as separate, unaffected and removed from our daily existence.

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.

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.

When ruptures occur at one level, we can focus our healing on that specific level, but we must also utilize the repair and respite that the other levels have to offer us—whether through self-compassion, a warm embrace from a loved one, a home where we can relax, being acknowledged and accepted within a community, receiving legal rights or benefits that were previously denied, or a quiet walk in nature to restore our inner equilibrium.

monogamy has mostly stayed unchallenged as a social construct, with those who do not fit within its constraints finding themselves alienated from a profound social revolution.

As Esther Perel points out,40 even the monolith of the family has evolved with the proliferation of alternatives to the nuclear family. The emergence of stepfamilies, blended families, sperm and egg donor families, single-parent families and surrogate families have expanded our acceptance of what a family can look like. However, the romantic ideal of the monogamous couple has mostly stayed intact as the dominant model for love and relationships.

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.

found that over 20 percent of people in the United States admit to having participated in CNM at some point in their life, regardless of race, age, religion, class, political affiliation or level of education.44 Other researchers estimate that 4 to 5 percent of people in the US are currently engaged in a CNM relationship.45 That’s over 16 million people. When comparing people in monogamous relationships to people in consensually nonmonogamous relationships, researchers have found that CNM relationships have similar levels of commitment, longevity, satisfaction, passion and love as monogamous relationships do.46 Additionally, despite what people might presume, CNM relationships have also been found to have greater levels of trust and lower levels of jealousy than monogamous ones.47

However, people in CNM relationships additionally expressed having the distinct relationship benefits of increased need fulfillment, variety of nonsexual activities and personal growth. Instead of expecting one partner to meet all of their needs, people engaged in CNM felt that a major advantage of being nonmonogamous was the ability to have their different needs met by more than one person, as well as being able to experience a variety of nonsexual activities that one relationship may not fulfill.

To me, this is an unfortunate symptomatic expression of our sex-negative culture that shames us for our basic human needs, desires and sexuality. There are people who genuinely need and want sexual diversity and it is not because they are sexually deviant, avoidantly attached, addicted to sex or noncommittal. Instead, they are people who embrace their sexuality and the diverse desires and expressions that it may encompass and require. There are also many couples who love each other deeply and have a wonderful partnership, but may have very different sexual needs.

This group is more nonmonogamous as orientation than nonmonogamous as lifestyle.

People who identify as nonmonogamous by lifestyle step into nonmonogamy as an intentional choice. They are often proud of and committed to this choice, but nonmonogamy in their case might be something that comes and goes depending on the partner or partners

People who identify as nonmonogamous as orientation describe their nonmonogamy not as a choice, but as who they essentially are and how they are fundamentally wired. I often hear these people say that they feel most themselves when they are with multiple people, be it sexually or romantically. Some people who identify as nonmonogamous by orientation are fortunate enough to have been nonmonogamous from the time they started dating or being sexual. But many people come into their nonmonogamy orientation a bit later, often after having suffered from the belief that ...

(a considerable amount of the mono-romantic ideal can actually be codependency in disguise),

If someone is pursuing multiple partners to avoid intimacy or using sex in an attempt to secure intimacy when they feel insecure, then in those cases such behaviors can be seen as an expression of insecure attachment. But many people engage in these very same behaviors from a secure place, where they are able to have multiple sex partners, one-night stands or BDSM play in intentional, highly attuned, connected and meaningful ways.

In a survey conducted with over 1,300 people, Moors, Conley, Edelstein and Chopik examined whether there were any differences in attachment styles for people who were either in monogamous, swinging or polyamorous relationships.55 They found that there was no difference in attachment anxiety levels between people who were monogamous versus those that were CNM, and that people in CNM relationships were actually lower in attachment avoidance than the people in monogamous relationships were. This research suggests that people in CNM relationships exhibit characteristics of secure attachment, maybe even more so than people in monogamous relationships. A smaller study of 179 gay men similarly found no difference in attachment styles between the participants who were in monogamous relationships and those in nonmonogamous relationships.

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. 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.

Relationship structure does not guarantee emotional security.

You share many forms of structural commitment with your partner, but don’t have emotional or sexual intimacy