My Attachment Styles and other Therapy Insights
My father was a volatile alcoholic. I avoided him when he raged. And when we felt the building tension, like we were all walking on eggshells. One parental attachment style.
My mother had major depressive disorder and would “check out,” or get angry and choose to deal with it by giving the silent treatment. Disorganized (Inconsistent). Another parental attachment style.
These undoubtedly impacted me.
I have not learned to self soothe. I have learned to become hypervigilant, to gage my surroundings, to manage others emotions.
I learned to perform well, act like everything is okay.
I am doing therapy and engaging in somatic healing to give myself a more secure attachment style. To re-parent myself, to give myself the childhood that I needed, to treat my wounded inner child better, to give her the love and safety, security and acceptance, to parent her the way she needed to be and was not.
Isn’t that the story of oh-so many of us? Healing from childhood wounds, from the scars imprinted on our bodies, even before we have memories or can consciously recollect them?
I also realize that part of my retreating to reading and writing is because it was my safe space, my sanctuary. It is little surprise that I read and write therapeutically and to escape, to manage my losses, trauma, and emotions. I have done so ever since I was little.
From therapy, conversations and reflections, I also realized— it is not surprising that I gravitated toward teachers and formed attachments to them all throughout my school years.
And—though I knew that I never wanted to be a K-12 educator, I did become a professor. Classrooms were safe spaces for me. They were where I got away from the chaos of my home environment. I gravitated toward them, my own safe space, and probably so I could provide that sanctuary for others as well.
My therapist and I also talked about the identity crisis that that can/has produced for me: Am I the way I am because of all of the family shit and all that has happened to me? Or did I consciously choose it?
I recall being in a theatre troupe in high school, learning about the roles of children of a family with an alcoholic parent. I fit the mold to the ‘t’ the role of the hero. My behaviors and thought-processes of performing well and earning love were just…textbook.
Even at 16, I thought, if this is true, I have no autonomy in how I am and who I have become. I felt like a puppet. A robot. It unsettled me, even then, at that age.
I also struggled greatly with that possibility, post-suicide, with all the shame and trauma it carried, considering all the ways in which their suicides and decisions must be shaping me and affecting me. I know I could author my own story, of what comes next, but I also felt deeply angry and deeply saddened that it had affected oh so much more of my adult life than I ever thought my family members could still have…now that I was no longer a child. No longer in that house, stuck in Panama, NY.
I felt deeply uneasy with the possibility that I am simply a reader and writer, what I like to do, and my profession, that I went to college for so long, was all just because of my fucked up family background.
But, as my therapist and I discussed,—that’s not all there is.
Stories and writing and reading is not only escapism and avoidance for me. It has been my ticked to survival. To getting through the trauma and the deaths. Both the active suicides and the passive one.
Finding other stories and sharing my own is what has helped me to survive.
I wholeheartedly believe that—in addition to my gender—my reading and writing, with what it has done for me, all that I have learned about it and done myself with it—it is why I am here now, today, and my brother is not.
Reading and writing and education has served me well.
And at the end of the day, I like what I do. I enjoy my time spent reading and writing. Though I do still long for adult, mature learners, and grow frustrated with apathetic 18 year olds, I do mostly enjoy teaching as well.
It can be baffling and dizzying to think about the ending points…where free will and autonomy starts and ends, and where environment and nurture and nature lines end and begins, as they appear to blur and meld in a hopeless puddle of “this is who we are.”
Again, though, I mostly take heart because the puzzle pieces to understanding why I am the way I am—helps me also to validate why I became this way. It’s critical to me, for myself, to affirm that I became this way as adaptation and survival. It is has served me well, to get me to this point.
And perhaps that is all that matters.
