Hello dear ones,
This week has been filled with conversations and reflections on intimacy. And with Valentine’s Day around the corner, and my webinar on disorganized attachment happening on Monday, I wanted to share some writing from my book manuscript on these topics.
This is just an excerpt. I’ve published the rest of this chapter from my book in my newest zine, “Chaotic Love: and Other Essays on Intimacy.”
Before I dive in, I also wanted to share that I’ve just launched a new coloring sticker collection: Valentines for Trauma BBs!
There’s a common story about those of us living with trauma: that we’re hard to love. But the truth is that it’s hard to love anyone in a world that tells us that our love must be unconditional; that love that isn’t cisheteronormative isn’t love; that love is feeling out of control, can’t eat, can’t sleep, can’t stop thinking about the other person. My trauma has taught me that the forms of love and intimacy and care that we’ve inherited are traumatizing. My trauma has helped me see that queer, radical, non-normative love is possible.
These valentines are for all of the humans living with trauma and/or those who love those with trauma. We have so many beautiful ways of loving and caring for each other. From the magic of co-regulation, to talking about trauma theory, to celebrating each other’s boundaries. You can give these to your friends, partners, and loved ones and do some self-regulation by coloring them in.
Okay! Now some reminders/FYIs before we dive in:
Become a paid subscriber! I’m so grateful for all of the folks who help support this newsletter. If you feel like you can spare $5/month (or a little less if you get the full year subscription), you can become a paid subscriber here. 10% of each month’s paid subscriptions are redistributed to a BIPOC mutual aid call.
Sharing is caring. Another easy way to support this work is to share this post with others who you think might benefit from this writing. You can hit the button below to share:
Thank you, as always, for being a part of the CARESCAPES universe! It’s such a deep honour to have you here with me!
I come back into my bedroom and Emily is standing looking at the bed.
“Ummmm, so I just saw a cockroach,” they tell me.
“On the bed?”
“Yeah….”
We pull out our phones and shine our flashlights until we find it: underneath the mattress, clinging to the bed frame. I scan around me for something I can use to kill it before it scuttles off. It looks like my phone is the weapon of choice. Emily holds up the mattress and in one fell swoop, the roach is dead.
“Wow, I’m impressed,” they tell me when I come back into the room after cleaning the remains of the roach off of my phone.
“To be honest, I am too.” I’ve never been the one to kill bugs. But in this moment, I’m the service top in this relationship.
“Did that just kill the mood?” I ask, moving closer to them.
We’d just moved upstairs after making out on the couch. Tonight is take two. The first time we had sex, we just weren’t in synch. Mouths and hands moving too fast. And it didn’t help that I was dissociating. It wasn’t that the sex was bad. It was ugly sex. I could tell that some part of me was turned on even as another part of me fled the room.
As I walked home afterwards, the laugh track known as my shame spiral cues itself up, with one question on repeat: “Am I broken?” This was not the first time this question has plagued me, but I’ve been asking myself this question more frequently since a therapy session a few months back. I was trying to make sense of how, once again, I’d found myself in a platonic partnership when I’d been looking for someone I could fuck and talk about my feelings with.
“Maybe there’s a part of you that wants that, and another part of you that believes that’s not possible to have a relationship with emotional intimacy and sexual connection,” my therapist proposed.
My stomach dropped. I knew that she’d hit on something.
Since then we’ve been working with my different “parts.” Parts language became popularized by a method of therapy called Internal Family Systems (IFS). In his book No Bad Parts, Richard C. Schwartz, the developer of IFS, explains that the mono-mind belief system has us thinking that “you have one mind, out of which different thoughts and emotions and impulses and urges emanate.” Schwartz’s work as a therapist taught him something different: each one of us has different parts or “sub-minds”: “Remembering a time when you faced a dilemma, it’s likely you heard one part saying, ‘Go for it!’ and another part saying, ‘Don’t you dare!’ Because we just consider that to be a matter of having conflicted thoughts, we don’t pay attention to the inner players behind the debate.” Schwartz notes how the mono-mind paradigm has pathologized the presence of parts, and the person who has multiple personalities is viewed as “sick or damaged” as a result of trauma, which has fragmented their supposedly unitary mind. But really, these parts are protectors, here to help us survive in a traumatizing world. As such, there are “no bad parts.”
IFS has informed another modality of trauma therapy created by Janina Fisher called “a mindfulness of parts.” This parts work approach combines an understanding of structural dissociation with somatics, IFS, attachment theory, polyvagal theory, and neuroscience. IFS depends on a metaphorical theory. Drawing on split brain theory and the structural dissociation model, Fisher explain how those of us who live in chronically traumatizing environments, where trauma remains unresolved, handle this stress through a splitting of our brains into the “going on with normal life” part and the “traumatized part of the personality.” This splitting helps explain how I managed to get nearly straight As in high school, while being high each day, and then going home to perform the role of mom for my younger brother. While the traumatized part of me was living in chronic nervous system activation, this other part of me was totally unaware of my trauma, making sure that I did all of the things I needed to do to be seen as functional. This is what’s called primary splitting, and it’s facilitated by an underdeveloped corpus callosum, the nerve that runs between the left and right hemispheres of the brain and is responsible for facilitating conversation and collaboration between the two.
For some of us, primary splitting isn’t enough to keep us safe, and secondary splitting occurs. Here, the traumatized part of the personality splits into sub parts, each with their own personalities, behaviors, and beliefs. These parts are called fight, flight, freeze, attach-cry, and submit. Fight keeps us alive through hypervigilance, judgment, mistrust, control, and self-destructive behaviors. Flight keeps us safe by creating distance from others, often relying on addictive behaviors such as substance use, gambling, and disordered eating to help us escape our reality. Submit believes that shame, self-hatred, self-sacrifice, fawning, and caregiving support our survival, and is ready to activate chronic pain flares and other symptoms of illness to keep us in a state of collapse. Freeze protects us through dissociation and panic attacks. And attach-cry supports our survival by ensuring that we’ll never be abandoned, accepting the scraps of connection and intimacy that others throw its way. This is the landscape of my structural dissociation.
I appreciate how Janina Fisher describes splitting as a utopian process:
To get up each morning and face death, abandonment, assaults, or imprisonment requires somehow disowning the horror and the fear left from the day before and the dread of what is to come. Disowning “the other one” inside is a survival response: the overwhelming feelings are no longer ours; that shame does not belong to us but to “[them]”; the white-hot rage and violent impulses certainly aren’t “me.” By disowning our traumatized parts and/or “not me” self-states, by disconnecting from them emotionally or losing consciousness of them via dissociation, we preserve our hearts and souls from growing as bitter as our circumstances. We hold out hope for the future and we keep going.
Fisher believes that we need to reframe so-called “self-destructive behaviors”: “unsafe behaviors historically labeled ‘self-destructive’ can be better understood as a desperate attempt to survive, a way to tolerate shame, rage, and fear, to inhibit flashbacks and nightmares, or to use endogenous and exogenous substances to regulate a traumatized nervous system.” Fisher’s depathologization trauma and dissociative splitting via utopian longing feels like a queer, crip, femme reimagining to me.
This splitting into parts saved me, at a cost. I can see how my freeze part helped me dissociate during sex after I was raped. My attach-cry part needed whatever scraps of intimacy and connection it could get, and that included having sex with whatever random boy showed me a modicum of attention. My flight part also participated, always ensuring that we were high during sex. Together, they helped me access connection. But in doing so, I learnt that it wasn’t possible to experience safety and connection at the same time. I’d always have to sacrifice one for the other. “When we disown needs that can’t be met or feelings that are unacceptable,” Fisher writes, “we protect ourselves from unbearable disappointment or punishment [...] One way to accomplish this challenging task is to split the sense of desperate needing and the refusal to need anything between two parts: one part that actively seeks proximity, comfort, or needs-meeting and one that just as actively pushes others away or keeps a hypervigiliant, suspicious distance.”
I can see how this splitting played out during my adolescence and into early adulthood. I was starved for connection, and sought it out from whoever might give it to me. On the rare occasions where someone expressed their desire to be in a relationship with me, I’d find myself repulsed and would pull away. To my trauma brain, safety equaled only getting the scraps. Fisher notes how “The discussion of safety is another topic that can trigger parts’ survival responses. Some parts might feel confused or frightened by the word ‘safety,’ having been told they were ‘safe’ when they were not.” This response to intimacy is called disorganized attachment.
Attachment theory was developed by John Bowlby, a British psychologist. During his time working with young children at Tavistock Institute in London in 1946, Bowlby found a direct correlation between the delinquent behavior of the youths he studied and a separation event from their primary caregivers. Bowlby would go on to argue that when caregivers are absent, emotionally unavailable, abusive, overbearing, or all of the above, children’s core developmental needs for emotional regulation and attunement, safety and security, aren’t met. These absences negatively impact how they will relate to themselves and to the world.
In 1950, Bowlby returned as the director of the children’s ward at Tavistock, and began work with Mary Ainsworth. By 1978, Ainsworth would define three attachment styles: secure attachment, avoidant/dismissive, and anxious/preoccupied. Jessica Fern, author of Polysecure: Attachment, Trauma, and Consensual Nonmonogamy explains how those with an avoidant/dismissive style tended to have caregivers who were “mostly unavailable, neglectful or absent,” with a parenting style that is “cold, distant, critical or highly focused on achievement and appearance.” The child in this environment learns that it’s best to not depend on others to meet their needs. When these children become adults, they pride themselves on being self-sufficient and will tend to distance themselves from others. On the other hand, those who’re anxious-preoccupied may have had caregivers who expressed love but were inconsistent. They thus come to fear abandonment. As adults, this fear results in “a disconnection or loss of self through over-functioning and over-adapting in the relationship in an attempt to maintain and preserve the connection.” Self-sacrifice and disavowal of needs are the terrain of the anxious/preoccupied.
It wasn’t until 1986 that Mary Main and Judith Solomon would define a fourth category: disorganized/fearful-avoidant attachment. Children who develop disorganized attachment vacillate between anxious and avoidant because they learnt that their caregivers were not safe. Main termed this response “fright without solution.” Fern elucidates:
The disorganized attachment style is most commonly associated with trauma and typically arises when a child experiences their attachment figure as scary, threatening or dangerous. When we are afraid, our attachment systems gets activated to seek proximity to and comfort from our attachment figure, but what happens when our attachment figure is the person causing the threat? This puts the child in a paradoxical situation where their caretaker, who is supposed to be the source of their comfort and the solution to their fears, is actually the source of their fear instead.
When we grow up in homes with neglectful or overbearing caregivers, we do not learn how to regulate our nervous system. “Regulation is the term used to describe our ability to manage our emotional state, to calm ourselves during times of heightened emotion–when we become fearful, deeply sad, angry, or frustrated,” Kathy Kain and Stephen Terrell explain. As infants, we have no idea how to regulate our emotions and rely entirely on our caregivers to help us co-regulate. If an infant hears a loud noise and gets startled, they’ll seek safety from their caregiver, who will hopefully come over, pick them up as they cry, and make soothing noises to calm them. As a young child, we may run into our parents room in the night, crying about a monster under our bed. If we’re lucky, a parent will take our hand, walk us back to our room, and search for the monster. If we’re not lucky, they’ll tell us that there’s no such thing as monsters and to go back to sleep. These consistent acts of co-regulation support the development of self-regulation. Kain and Terrell note that healthy attachment and bonding “allow us to develop the early ability to self-regulate our systems and trust the shared experience of co-regulation and connectedness.” In other words, if you’ve experienced anxious, avoidant, or disorganized attachment, your regulation skills will likely be under-developed.
One of the impacts of a low capacity for regulation is the development of a false window of tolerance. Dan Siegel coined the term “window of tolerance” to describe the state in which our nervous system is regulated. From our window of tolerance, or what polyvagal theory would call ventral vagal activation, we can access feelings of safety, connection, and self-regard. When we’re outside of our window, either in a state of hyperarousal (fight and flight) or hypoarousal (submit/collapse and freeze), our nervous system is dysregulated and it can be very challenging to recognize the markers of safety, to experience connection (with yourself or others), to feel a sense of self-regard.
And so we develop our own coping mechanisms, which give us the false sense of being in our window of tolerance. This is what’s called a “faux window of tolerance.” We might feel like we’re okay, when in actuality we’re in a state of collapse and we’ve mistaken numbing for regulation. We might turn to substances to help us regulate states of hyperarousal, and we come to believe that being high is being regulated. The faux window requires the use of what Kain and Terrell call “defensive accommodations”: “behaviors such as self-harm, eating disorders, compulsive behaviors–anything that substitutes for regulation, or anything that helps support a sense of control, safety, or connection.” For Fisher, these defensive accommodations are “survival resources”:
The most common error made by professionals and lay people alike in understanding high risk behavior is the automatic assumption that self-harm, suicidality, eating disorders, and substance abuse are destruction-seeking rather than relief-seeking … At the heart of all self-destructive behavior is a simple fact: hurting the body, starving it, planning its annihilation, or compulsively engaging in addictive behavior result in welcome relief from physical and emotional pain.
These defensive accommodations, similar to dissociative splitting, are a means of survival. While it may look like we’re barrelling towards annihilation, we’re in fact desperately seeking to live. Each time I got high, it’s as though I was saying I want to exist, but the world is so unbearable. I’d put myself in danger again and danger, whether with drugs, unprotected sex, or both, not because I was all death drive; rather, I wanted nothing more than to move towards pleasure, to escape the pain of my mother’s death, my rape, my father’s abuse, our poverty, the slut shaming, the bullying. I wanted something so much better than the reality I was given. And drugs and sex offered me that. But living in a chronic state of dysregulation has also come with its costs: physiological, behavioral, emotional, and relational. Memory loss, fear of abandonment, abusive relationships, the inability to feel my feelings, let alone speak them to another, and chronic pain.
As we grow into adults, the result is that the desire for proximity and closeness triggers fight, flight, freeze, and submission. Love becomes chaotic. Being too close feels dangerous as does being too far away. I think about all of the relationships I had as a teenager and young adult. The few that weren’t abusive, that offered safety and connection, never lasted long. For my nervous system, anything that wasn’t, at the very least, cold and withholding, was experienced as too much.
Making Parts Cards
Visualizing our parts is such a great way to get to know them. Parts cards can also be a great tool when we're in moments of overwhelm and we can't identify which part is online. You can pick up your cards and see which one is resonating with you in the moment, and/or you can write out prompts on the back of the card to help you remember the part in greater detail.
Materials List
Glue stick and scissors.
Collage materials: You can print out the collage kit at the end of this workbook and/or grab old magazines or books to use.
Fun coloured paper, such as origami paper.
Stickers, stick on gems, glitter, and/or washi tape.
Anything else you wanna use! You don't have to collage if there's another form of artistic expression that speaks to you. Grab your paints, markers, crayons, whatever!
You can download a free 15-page collage kit I made here!
If you’ve made it this far, thank you! If you have enjoyed this newsletter and want to support me you can:
Share a snippet of this writing on social media & tell someone to subscribe.
Forward this email to a friend you think would enjoy it.
PayPal me a one-time donation.
Sign up for my Patreon — and if you join at $5 you’ll get access to monthly book club and my IG Close Friends community.
Chaotic Love
Thank you for the good read! :)
I would love to make a collage, but could not find the card template in your Mail, where should i Look for it exactly? 💖