The Attachment Trauma We Don’t Talk About
Healthy attachment requires much more than our parents
As discussions of trauma and psychological development become increasingly more mainstream, we’ve begun to see how much our upbringings shape our health and functioning later in life. We don’t know what the ideal of parenting is per se, but we know that when our primary attachment figures drastically miss the mark, it can scar our psyches for life.
Despite our cultural obsession with independence, humans are not born with any ability to fend for ourselves. Unlike most other animals that have some ability to survive on their own from birth, humans are born completely and totally dependent on those around us to provide for our needs. If our caregivers do not provide for us in infancy, our needs will go unmet and we’d pretty quickly die.
Dependence, and having caregivers we can safely depend on, is absolutely essential to our survival.
Not only are we dependent on others for our physical needs, but we require healthy attachment for our minds to develop. Our patterns of thinking, and along with them, our neural wiring, organize themselves according to our early life relationships. The mind, like the body, cannot provide for itself independently of others.
