This is an article in my Catholic Healing Series, where I talk about the most prevalent mental health issues of our time, who the best thinkers are, what the theory is, and how to heal the issue. If you enjoy this, feel free to check out other articles or videos!
The Issue
About 40 percent of people struggle with attachment wounds. These most commonly result from issues with neglect or emotional abuse from a parent. Recently, many cases of attachment wounds have resulted from emotionally immature parents. These are parents who focus on using their children to meet their needs, as opposed to focusing on meeting their children’s needs. The symptoms of attachment wounds often show as anxiety, paranoia, control, or avoidance in the context of a relationship. Often, there are issues with emotional regulation and low self esteem. Attachment wounds often do not just present as an issue for an individual. Often, they present problems for both spouses in a Marriage and for entire families. However, I have great news! There are tools that can be helpful in healing these wounds.
The Thinkers
Dr. John Bowlby, MD, who died in 1990, offers the concept of attachment theory to the world of healing. Bowlby did studies on rhesus monkeys, noting that the monkeys who were close to the Mother flourished and did well socially. Conversely, monkeys who were separated from the Mother tended to be outcasts. In the studies that he did, as well as studies that others did later, it was proven that the same phenomenon exists in humans. From birth through age five, the Mother’s body is the primary social teaching tool of babies! What an endorsement of Theology of the Body! This realization has given rise to the attachment parenting movement where closeness with both parents is encouraged, along with lots of affection and emotional expression.
Dr. Dan Siegel, PhD brings us neuroscience studies that demonstrate the power of attunement. Attunement is a phenomenon where the brains and bodies of two people form a special connection over time that profoundly impacts attachment.
Kelly McDaniel is the author of
Mother Hunger. Focusing primarily on the relationships between emotionally immature Mothers and their Daughters, she accurately demonstrates the profound impact of emotionally immature Mothers on their daughters. McDaniel documents not just the attachment wound, but its long term impact and practical solutions.
Dr. Lindsay C. Gibson, PsyD is one of the primary experts on emotionally immature parents. She is engaging and excellent at connecting with people, which I am sure does much to help with the healing of attachment wounds. Gibson helps people to identify what issues are with emotionally immature parents. Often, emotionally immature parents use their children to meet their needs, instead of focusing on meeting the needs of their children. Healing attachment wounds and developing healthy boundaries in relationships is pivotal.
Dr. Janina Fisher, PhD is a former Harvard Professor who likely has done more to help people understand and to heal from shame than any other figure in the field. In the world of psychology that is full of surprising and eccentric figures, Fisher could be the most surprising and most eccentric. A good friend of Dr. Bessel van der Kolk, MD, who also is known for his personality, Janina Fisher is soft and gentle in affect. Very importantly, she giggles a lot. At the same time, she makes jokes of all kinds of situations that can be darkly humorous. Then, she giggles more. What she is doing is, in fact, extremely therapeutic. Fisher has discovered how to help people laugh at themselves and situations so that they can confront them with courage and a healthy sense of experiment. She specializes in working with people who struggle with perspective, and laughter is the medicine that provides a healthy sense of objectivity. In terms of Borderline Personality Disorder, she artfully uses Internal Family Systems Interventions to help people understand parts of the self and to partner with them. This is particularly helpful in terms of helping people to bond with parts of the self that have good intentions but that offer destructive strategies as solutions. After people connect with these parts in curiosity and understand them, they are able to collaborate with them to pursue healthier strategies.
Dr. Richard Schwartz, PhD is the creator of Internal Family Systems therapy, which often is used to heal trauma. He began as a systematic family therapist and discovered that many of his techniques were effective with a person’s “internal family,” when a client is seen as having a series of parts or members. Richard Schwartz is calm, subdued, and thoughtful. Much of his approach has to do with creating a sense of safety and relaxation where parts of a client’s self are able to unburden and reintegrate. It is possible to see his sessions online, and the results are eye-popping. Internal Family Systems represents the greatest breakthrough that I have seen in therapy in the course of my life.
Healing Attachment Wounds, Father Wounds, and Mother Wounds
Disclaimer: these are just some of the tools that can be used to heal Attachment Wounds, Father Wounds, and Mother Wounds. Also, I cannot guarantee healing or benefit. This entire article represents my opinions and applications of the tools, nothing more and nothing less. This article does not constitute medical, psychological, mental health, or any other advice.
Different Attachment Styles
I first would like to being with the identification of each attachment style and its description:
1.The Secure Attachment Style
People with a secure attachment style can depend on their spouses and their spouses, in turn can depend on them. They have healthy self esteem, emotional regulation, emotional expression, priorities, boundaries, and relationships.
- The Anxious Attachment Style
People with anxious attachment want to be wanted and they desire to be desired. They fear abandonment and they hunger for affirmation, affection, and emotional expression. Sometimes, this hunger is insatiable. There can be paranoia or controlling behavior. In the extreme, anxiously attached people have affairs and feel justified. In the majority of cases, which are milder, there is a sense of significant relationship distress where the spouse feels controlled, picked at, and never good enough.
- The Avoidant Attachment Style
Avoidantly attached people do not want to depend on others, have others depend on them, or seek social connection. Avoidant attachment is, in many ways, an unhealthy sense of autonomy. In the extreme, avoidantly attached people feel uncomfortable with any physical affection and sexual intimacy is filled with discomfort. In less extreme situations, avoidantly attached people over prioritize work and needs meeting outside of the home, do not show much interest in her or his spouse, and do not focus on meeting their spouse’s needs and their needs in the context of the relationship.
- The Disorganized Attachment Style
Disorganized Attachment presents both a fear and a desire to have connection. It is noteworthy that our attachment, when thrown off, does not necessarily get thrown off in one way or another. In some situations, a person may be avoidant, and in some situations, a person may be avoidant. Sometimes, attachment is thrown off enough that it is difficult to predict how a person will respond in relationship situations. Emotional regulation often is particularly difficult for those who struggle with disorganized attachment.
Attachment Issues as a Spectrum Disorder and the Origin of Attachment Issues
Attachment Issues occur along a spectrum. When it comes to anxious attachment, people on the low end of the anxious attachment spectrum might just seem to be clingy, manipulative, and overly focused on emotional expression and affection. People on the high end of the anxious attachment spectrum might engage in affairs and treat themselves as justified. People on the low end of the avoidant attachment spectrum might be uncomfortable with affection and emotional expression, but they are more likely to be willing to work through that. On the high end of the avoidant attachment spectrum, people can be workaholics who refuse to focus on their spouse despite consistent negative consequences. Obviously, the intensity of the attachment wound greatly impacts the severity of the problem and what is required to treat it.
Attachment wounds begin as coping mechanisms that often help people to survive difficult childhoods. It is important to view them through this lens and to be compassionate. Janina Fisher refers to the process of shame in childhood as a process of taking the negative on the self in order to survive inhumane circumstances. She calls the process of shame the hero when it first shows up in people’s lives. This is insightful and has been confirmed by the experience of many of my clients. We need to be compassionate that attachment styles create relationship problems, but they often came about in childhoods where a child survived inhumane treatment that no human being should suffer.
Mindfulness and Relationship as Exposure Therapy
Mindfulness presents a healthy awareness of what is going on inside oneself and within one’s relationships. Spiritually, Ignatius is the founder of a lot of Catholic mindfulness. It is good for each of us to become aware of what we are thinking and what we are feeling. Journaling and tracking, as well as a daily Examen, can be good vehicles for developing mindfulness. A person should keep an eye out for triggers. Are there moments where anxiety spikes? What are those moments? What is a person doing to respond positively in those moments?
One of the most powerful ways to heal attachment is in relationship. A person’s relationship with God and a person’s relationship with her or his therapist can be two outstanding foundational relationships to aid in the healing of attachment wounds. In a sense, attachment issues often are phobia situations involving relationships. So, doing exposure therapy, which is the recommended therapy for overcoming phobias, can be quite helpful. A person can identify experiences that are stressful and then rank them from lowest to highest. It is helpful to do a graded exposure. So, starting with the least stressful situation, a person should try to go through the situation and replace the triggered response with a non-triggered response.
Here is an example. If a person is anxiously attached, that person’s spouse going out with friends and leaving them at home can be triggering. Or, if a person is avoidantly attached, having focused conversation with physical affection can be triggering. In each of these situations, the brain will enter into a state of hyperarousal (fight or flight mode). That is a triggered response. The key is to go through the experience and focus on getting the brain out of hyperarousal. There are three things that can achieve this: prayer, social connection with a friend, and muscular relaxation. A person needs to focus on these activities until the triggered response is replaced by a non-triggered response of relative calm. Then, the person can expose herself or himself to an even more challenging situation. Again, there will be a triggered response, and the person needs to focus on getting to a non-triggered response. Once a person has graduated all of the grades of exposure, attachment likely will be much more secure.
Existentialism and Pattern Awareness
Viktor Frankl’s Existentialist approach offers a focus on story in order to give us a sense of meaning. Frankl identified that finding deeper meaning was the key to himself and others surviving the Holocaust. In the case of attachment, people need to return to the story that unfolded when they were younger to identify both meaning and pattern. Often, key pieces of meaning include discovering that parents were emotionally immature. They used their children to meet their needs instead of meeting their children’s needs. Also, lies were told to children about themselves, sometimes explicitly in conversation, but often implicitly through actions. Rejection and abandonment are common themes. Parentification of children sometimes occurred. This results in the lies, “you are not worthy,” “you are not good enough,” “you are not capable,” and “you are trapped.”
Pattern is another key theme. Often, there is a pattern of children either sacrificing their own needs to meet the needs of parents or a pattern of total abandonment. The pattern of shame is common. That is the pattern where children take on all problems and responsibilities in a family system in order to be able submit to inhumane circumstances. An important thing to note is that issues with parents are systemic. That is to say, a person might think that they have Mother Wounds or Father Wounds. The truth is that most people have wounds from both parents in these situations. The most common parental dynamic is that one parent has toxic behavior and the other parent is an enabler. The enabler often is overlooked, but plays a central role. Also, there can be a profound negative impact on people’s spiritual lives. Our parents are the emotional face of God to us when we are young. How has a parental relationship impacted the way that a person views God? It can be very helpful for someone to go deep in prayer to seek the Truth.
Internal Family Systems and Deep Trauma Healing
Often, deep trauma healing needs to occur in the case of attachment wounds. To heal his or her inner child, a person struggling with attachment issues is able to use internal family systems. Internal family systems takes a parts approach to the self. It identifies that people have different parts of the self that have different roles and intentions. The key parts of the self to look at are the Conscious Self, the Wounded Exile, and the Manager/Guardian.
The Conscious Self is the best part of a person and the leader of the internal family system. It is the logical, virtuous, reasoning, and emotive self. Its job is to dialogue with the Wounded Exile and the Manager/Guardian to achieve healing.
The Manager/Guardian is the part of the self that keeps the person safe. It likely exists in extreme form. It likely fears rejection or abandonment and uses either avoidance in the case of an avoidantly attached person or control and manipulation in the case of an anxiously attached person. The Manager/Guardian needs to identify more moderate strategies that allow the person struggling with attachment to enter more deeply into relationship with others. Examples of effective strategies are taking accountability, making healthy judgments about being vulnerable, negotiating needs, and meeting the needs of the spouse. In the case of anxious attachment, it is particularly helpful for a person to realize that the person is able to receive love in a wide range of ways, and not just through emotional expression and affection.
The Wounded Exile originally was wounded in the person’s childhood. The Wounded Self is carrying negative emotions. The key negative emotion in many people struggling with attachment is shame, although sometimes there is loneliness, anger, sadness, or other negative emotions. The person needs to identify the shame and all negative emotions and then unburden these emotions. An example of an unburdening ritual is going to prayer and envisioning giving these negative emotions to Jesus, or going to Mass and envisioning all negative past experiences being taken to the altar where they are redeemed and received by the individual with the Eucharist. After an unburdening, the person can talk to the Wounded Exile and comfort her or him.
Then, she or he can mentor the Wounded Exile. This constitutes a reintegration of a part that was exiled (sent away from the self).
Gottman Therapy and Healing Attachment in the Marriage
Since a great way to heal attachment is through exposure to relationship, a great place for healing is within Marriages. It can be very helpful for couples to have a conversation about attachment in the Marriage and how it impacts the Gottman Sound Relationship House categories of Trust, Commitment, Intimacy, and Conflict Resolution. Often, there are issues where Trust is hurt because of needs meeting not being good, or because someone feels emotionally unsafe. In terms of Commitment, a common problem is an avoidantly attached person prioritizing a job over her or his spouse. Usually, when there are attachment issues, it is difficult to have the fullness of intimacy. Some spouses will say that they feel like roommates when in a Marriage with someone who is avoidantly attached. This means that there is little to no emotional intimacy. Sometimes, there is a push and pull dynamic with intimacy where one spouse feels like she or he cannot get a desired level of intimacy, and where the other spouse feels like nothing she or he ever does is good enough. Finally, attachment issues can throw off the conflict resolution dynamic, either through avoiding conflict or having conflicts that last a long time and do not achieve resolution.
To address issues with needs it is helpful to have each spouse identify her or his top three needs and how to meet them. To address issues with prioritization, a spouse needs to de-prioritize things like work and prioritize her or his spouse more. Spending 15 minutes in uninterrupted conversation daily helps with the establishment of intimacy, as well as weekly date nights planned by the husband. If a couple cannot go out for a date, it is fine to do at home date nights. Often, there need to be conversations about what a reasonable level of time together, emotional expression, and affection is. When it comes to conflict resolution, spouses need to identify their ineffective pattern and build a plan for breaking it.
Family Systems Therapy and Boundaries
Not only is the formation of attachment wounds systemic, but also the healing process needs to be systemic. Most importantly, each spouse needs to have great boundaries with her or his family of origin and boundaries within the Marriage need to be healthy. There is a myth that healthy relationships do not have boundaries. In fact, all healthy relationships have boundaries. It is very healthy for each spouse to have a separate identity, and boundaries are required for that. How do you set healthy boundaries? Identify what your needs are. Identify what are reasonable expectations. Then, communicate them clearly, along with positive consequences if boundaries are respected and negative consequences if boundaries are not respected. For example, “When we go to the family event, we expect that no negative comments will be made about my spouse. If no negative comment is made, we will come to more family events. If a negative comment is made, we will leave immediately and will attend fewer family events.”
Conclusion
All Sacraments are Sacraments of Healing. Marriage is no exception. Often, spouses have opposite attachment styles, but the styles result from the same type of attachment wound. For example, a husband might be avoidantly attached and his wife might be anxiously attached but both have themes of rejection in their family of origin. This is a beautiful example of how two people can come together in Christ through Mary to heal a common wound. This demonstrates the true transcendence of Marriage. May Mary, the Mother of Marriage intercede for you and your spouse, or for you and any of the loved ones in your life! May God love you in all of the ways that your family of origin did not!
Psychology Today has good resources regarding attachment:
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/compassion-matters/201802/healing-attachment-issues
Are attachment issues causing problems for your relationship or you? Feel free to reach out to the Catholic Healing Institute and Tom Weishaar for assistance from a professional with special training in healing Attachment Trauma, Mother Hunger, and Emotionally Immature Parent Wounds.
Tom Weishaar, MA LPCC CCTP-II is the Founder and CEO of the Catholic Healing Institute. He lives in Steubenville, OH with his wife and three children.
