As human beings, our needs for attachment and authenticity are frequently in competition with each other, and we may very often have had to compromise one of them for the other.  Attachment injuries teach us that when we FEEL bad, we ARE bad, and that we need to change who we are or hide aspects of ourselves, our true needs or feelings in order to prevent our badness from causing a rejection or abandonment. Inauthenticity is an attachment wound.  It is an injury that says we can't be who we truly are without risking rejection or abandonment.  This wound threatens to overwhelm us with feelings of fear and shame whenever we're faced with a choice of true expression.

Dr. Gabor Maté, an expert in the field of trauma and childhood development explains that, as human beings, we have two strong, yet often competing, instinctual needs – the need to be an authentic self and the need to establish and maintain attachment bonds with our caregivers.  Dr. Maté states, "When authenticity threatens attachment, attachment trumps authenticity".

We often learn in our early childhood to give up aspects of our authentic selves in order to protect our attachment relationships. 

Why do we choose attachment over authenticity?

As human beings, we are born into this world dependent on our caregivers for survival, and from day one, our instincts know it. If we cannot maintain an attachment to our caregivers, we will quite literally die. In this way, we are hard wired to secure an attachment to our caregivers at any cost, and we adapt in a variety of ways to assure that we do so. 

These adaptations involve making adjustments to any expressions of our authentic needs or emotions which threaten to jeopardize our attachment bonds.  For instance, if our caregiver is regularly unable to tend to us because they are highly anxious or overwhelmed, we might adapt by suppressing needs or emotions which could potentially place added stress on them, thereby making them less accessible to us.  We may make ourselves "easy", or not "too much trouble", increasing the chances that our caregiver will at least be able to stay in proximity to us.  We learn to suppress the expression of needs that may put our connection to our caregiver at risk.

Alternatively, we may adapt by escalating or intensifying our attempts to get our caregivers to notice and care for us, for instance in families with multiple children or with caregivers who are highly distracted.  In this case, becoming more visible may help us to get our needs for care met.  We may perhaps try to make ourselves stand out as "special" in some way to draw our caregiver towards us. Or we may develop particular tendencies, such as being super helpful, which our caregivers find pleasing or easy to be around.

Of course, adaptations such as these occur instinctually, through the felt experience - not through our rational deduction skills.  This is why insecure attachment patterns often cannot be fully healed through simply recognizing cognitively that our needs or emotions are valid.

Our primary attachment relationships and the way we adapted in order to maintain them in childhood, sets the stage for how we navigate relationships in adulthood.  We internalize habitual attachment responses, in which particular sensations, impulses, emotions, behaviors, and thoughts/beliefs become interwoven.

Our tendency as human beings is to interpret all experience through a “self-referential” lens - in other words, as we encounter experiences in life, we take away beliefs about ourselves or what the experience says about us.  Once these self-referential beliefs are formed, they are easily reinforced as each new experience gets filtered through the lens of this belief.  New experiences become additional evidence or proof that the pre-existing belief is true.

When our caregivers regularly leave or cannot offer the care that we long for when we express our needs, we may interpret that we are bad for needing or for expressing our needs...or that we are not helpful or good enough to get what we need. We may develop core negative beliefs, for instance, that it is not safe to need anyone too much or that abandonments happen because we are too needy, or not good enough. These beliefs may be experienced as conscious thoughts, or they may be experienced as sensations, for instance, a constriction in the chest and belly that tells us to "back off", "stay quiet" or make ourselves more helpful and pleasing.

No matter how well things go for us in our early lives, there will inevitably have been some ways in which we sensed that we needed to adjust or hide aspects of ourselves in order to protect our primary attachment relationships. Of course, the more regulated our caregivers are, the more likely we are to develop "secure attachment patterns", or to internalize the sense that it is safe to express our authentic needs without risking abandonment or rejection.

To the degree that we internalized adaptive reflexes to suppress aspects of our authentic selves, we carry these self-protective patterns forward with us, into our lives, and into our relationships, particularly with those we love, depend on, or need…aka, those we most fear losing. 

There are three primary types of "insecure attachment styles"; Anxious, Avoidant, and Disorganized.

• A person with an Anxious attachment style is inclined to worry about abandonments by others in their life.  They may likely seek out reassurance or proof that they are loved, seek approval, intently pursue others in their life, and often have revved up emotional energy.
• A person with an Avoidant attachment style tends to cut off from their attachment needs.  They are likely to avoid being dependent on others or needing others.  They may push away offers of support, block opportunities for deep connections with others, minimize or suppress vulnerable emotions, and view others as basically unreliable or likely to let them down.
• A person with a Disorganized attachment style may have highly conflicted impulses to both cling to and push away others in their life. They may have a difficult time regulating their emotions and may frequently suppress difficult emotions. They long for and yet fear closeness, struggle to trust others in their life, and may engage in sabotaging behaviors within relationships.

Each of these insecure attachment styles develops as a form of self-protection.  Though we become identified with our self-protective strategies, often seeing them as being "who we are", we can step back with mindfulness and begin to recognize that they arose, and continue to arise, out of our suffering...as a function of our human nature, in an effort to protect us.  It is through this mindful and self-compassionate view that we can begin to heal our attachment wounds and develop our capacity for secure attachments in adulthood. 

Dr. Janina Fisher, psychotherapist and trauma expert puts it this way, "Self-Compassion mimics the experience of secure attachment in childhood."  We can re-parent ourselves, bringing the qualities of Self-Compassion to the feelings of shame, fear, and self-doubt that were created by our attachment wounds.   Self-Compassion, which is the internal presence of Mindfulness, Self-Kindness, and a recognition of our Common Humanity, teaches us that when we feel bad, we are simply encountering the very human experience of suffering - and that, just as when any human being is in the midst of suffering, we need our pain to be seen, cared for, and offered kindness.  Self-Compassion offers a pathway to healing the pain of our attachment wounds, and a new way of meeting the struggles that arise as we begin navigating our lives with more authenticity.

Rebecca Foxx, LCSW-R integrates Mindfulness-Based, Compassion-Oriented, and Somatic modalities of psychotherapy, to support clients in healing attachment wounds and integrating secure attachment patterns into their lives and relationships.  Rebecca is trained in Compassionate Inquiry (CI), which is a trauma-informed therapy created by Dr. Gabor Maté which combines elements of mindfulness, neuroscience, somatic and attachment therapies. The process of Compassionate Inquiry allows individuals to safely explore, identify and release emotional, cognitive, and embodied response patterns rooted in childhood trauma. This allows for greater connection and expression of the authentic self.