Welcome to this space—we’re so glad you’re here! We wanted to take some time together to lay the attachment theory foundations for attachment theory with this five part series. Each week, we’ll dive into one of the five components of healthy attachment: safety, attunement, soothing & comfort, support & encouragement, and delight. We’ll talk about why this component is critical for building healthy relationships, and the work we can do to actively re-pattern our internal systems to form more secure attachments within each of these components.
We want to take the time to do this foundation work because our own attachment blueprint guides how we approach rearing humans. Whether you’re a parent, educator, or caregiver taking on the sacred work of rearing humans, the work of raising young people is deeply relational. That means that doing own inner work in understanding how we approach relationships is fundamental to anyone tending to young people.
A note: This is not medical advice or therapy. It’s intended for people who currently have access to relative physical and emotional safety. If you need medical or professional support, please contact your primary care provider or therapist.
Lastly, this is a reader supported publication. If you appreciate our work, please consider supporting by becoming a paid subscriber. It makes a huge difference for us and we’re thankful for it!
Attachment theory cliffs notes
Let’s start with a quick primer on attachment theory. We humans are born with an expectant attachment system; our mammalian systems expect a nurturing primary caregiver. We all have an implicit memory of being one with the uterus, and so the transition to being born comes as a bit of a shock to us humans. Suddenly, we have to transition from simply being to also doing (even if, as babies, doing is, for example, as simple as making sounds in order to meet needs for nourishment).
What that means is that we humans, as babies, are born primed for connection. We are a prosocial species, wired for deep relationship. When babies receive the connection we’re all innately wired for, that’s called secure attachment. Secure attachment, when done right, looks like wiring our brains with “good enough” parenting across the five components of attachment: safety, attunement, soothing & comfort, support & encouragement, and delight.
What that means is that we humans, as babies, are born primed for connection. We are a prosocial species, wired for deep relationship.
But the reality is, many of us don’t receive the connection we’re wired for in our formative years, so we become insecurely attached. There are three types of insecure attachment: anxious, avoidant, and disorganized. And those attachment patterns, formed primarily in our first three years of life, create a wobbly internal blueprint for how we navigate all our relationships throughout our lifetimes.
It can feel daunting at first to learn you might be insecurely attached. But an insecure attachment doesn’t mean individuals can’t form healthy adult attachments later in life. Our brains magnificently malleable. And we can retrain them to build healthier, more secure internal blueprints. We can train them to become more securely attached.
Today, we’ll talk about safety as a component of secure attachment, why it’s important, and what we can do to create healthier internal safety blueprints.
Safety
Safety is a significant component of attachment because it forms the stable place from which humans can launch out into the world. Safety is the prerequisite for exploration in life. Both in childhood and later in adulthood, safety is the foundation for each person in a relationship (whether caregiver and child or, later in life, two adults) to have freedom to be fully themselves. By not blending into each other or extracting from each other, two independent people can become safely interdependent without causing harm to each other. When we feel safe, the takeaway internal message is “Who I am is allowed and respected.” The end result of a secure attachment based on safety is threefold:
“Being alive is good”
“Being interconnected is good”
“Exploring the world in a safe way is good”
Safety isn’t present if there are either physical hazards or interpersonal fear in the developmental environment and caregiver relationship.
Why Safety Matters in Relationships
Critically, people who have a nervous system that has been organized around a stable sense of safety—whether through caregiving they received or through later re-patterning—can then go out and create safety with others, both in their families, in their relationships, in their communities of their choosing/making and with dependents in their care.
Truly “safe” environments and communities– with zero threat of harm to mind, body, or spirit– can’t be fully created: we are imperfect humans. We can, however, create systems that are mindful of individual and collective safety. We can create communities that intentionally look for safety ruptures and repair them. We can create communities where individuals work to restore safety when safety is ruptured. And we can only do that when we know and recognize an internal sense of safety.
Importantly, those with less structural privilege and power in a given system will always carry the most burden of lack of societal safety, and be at most risk for potential harm. This means that having a secure relationship with safety baked into your internal blueprint, while by no means guaranteed, is more easily afforded to families rearing humans who live closer to the epicenter of power and privilege. If, for example, you are raised in a context in which you are historically excluded, marginalized, or live in a destabilized societal context, you are systemically afforded less safety, which makes the external conditions around you a much harder environment to imbue internal safety as a component of healthy attachment than for those who live in relative societal safety.
Keep in mind that it’s not just the experiences of life that matter, but the strategies and beliefs we form in order to adapt to those experiences. When we experience safety in our formative years, we develop healthy strategies for getting our needs met. When we experience a lack of safety, we develop protective strategies to survive. Those strategies were necessary for our survival in our young years, but left alone, they may become maladaptive—burdens we carry until we tend to them and form alternative ways of being that affect our mindsets and beliefs about the world around us.
Vulnerability, for example, is often a litmus test for degree of safety one feels. “Choosing vulnerability,” therefore, will not be safe or even advisable in instances where folks are not afforded their basic safety. Many of us learned in our early years, for example, that vulnerability was unsafe. So we developed protective strategies like masking, stoicism, etc, to protect our vulnerability. For some, those strategies are still very much a necessity for safety in our world, particularly those of us walking around in black, brown, LGBTQIA+, neuroqueer, or otherwise historically excluded bodies in a world that lacks societal safety for those communities. For others, those protectors may no longer be necessary.
Internal Safety is necessary for building societal safety.
While our inner work will not immediately change our outer societal safety constructs, remapping our inner relationship to safety will give us a grounded inner space from which to collectively face threatening or potentially destabilizing situations. If we know what internal safety looks like, it’s easier to both weather and shape the world to create systemic outer safety.
An embodied understanding of safety, then, is critical to building a world of collective safety.
Within the lens of interdependent community and activism, we may feel strongly connected to values and ideals, but not know practically how to create environments that center and protect safety because we do not yet know what safety looks or feels like in our bodies. Likewise, we may not know how to scaffold or be present with others’ experiences without losing ourselves in the process.
Recognizing insecure attachments as they relate to safety
If we did not experience safety with our caregivers growing up, but in adulthood we now have relative safety, it may not be obvious how to leap from our old strategies and adaptations to new, healthier ones. We may not even recognize the feeling of lack of safety in our bodies.
So the first step is to begin to consider signs for lack of safety. The list of questions below can help us begin to surface whether we have an insecure attachment as it relates to safety. Some of these questions might bring up strong internal responses. It' might be good to go slow engaging with them, check in with yourself, and consider finding a quiet time to journal your answers to explore them in greater depth.
Here are some questions to ask as you consider whether your relationship with your primary caregiver(s) may have been safe or not:
Did you have to contort yourself in mind, body, or spirit to be allowed to take up space?
Did your caregiver have the capacity to pay attention, hear, and understand when you had something important to express to them? Did they respond in an effective and timely manner, if at all?
Did you have consistent access to choice? Did your desires and needs impact the choices you were allowed to make?
Were you alone in your distress?
If yes, did you blame yourself for this?
Did you have inconsistent availability to a safe relational space to process distressing events or big feelings?
Were you granted consent when it came to your body?
Was there a cost to you if you had big emotions?
Did you stop feeling a long time ago but you act like you do feel?
Did you learn to control your outward responses and detach from body sensations?
When you needed help outside the home, did you feel safe to ask for it?
Do you feel an urge to control situations because you don’t know what is going to happen?
Did the rigidity of your caregivers leave room for the messiness and unpredictability of childhood?
Do you have curiously few memories of childhood that revolve around you?
Did your caregiver respond to your distress or needs with an emotion that didn’t make sense or was confusing? (e.g. you were distressed because you were hungry but they came to you with anxiety or anger)
If you have dependents, does a part of you wish there were another adult in the room when things get chaotic?
Building healthy safety blueprints
Once we recognize lack of safety as part of our internal model, we need to honor and make sense of that. Making meaning of our past stops us from unconsciously living out patterns that no longer serve us. It also stops the transgenerational passage of strategies that don’t work or are harmful. Doing the deep work of making sense of our life’s experiences is in service of liberation for bot ourself and those we are in deep relationships with.
One offering we’ve co-created to support doing this deep work is our Inner Child Meditation series on Safety. In it, through guided visualization, we journey into an internal remapping of our safety blueprints, where we’re invited to imagine with specificity a secure feeling of safety with ideal parents. This visualization allows your brain to wire in new experiences, forming new neural pathways that are more supportive than our old ones. With practice, we can deepen the groove of this new pathway, which gives us an updated felt sense of safety, peace and freedom to explore life with.
In order to bring more specificity and integration into the meditation, the accompanying integration journal helps us consider how our relationship to safety was formed, how it has developed in adulthood, how it impacts our relationships, and how we may want to gently shape it moving forward. Framed in the nonviolent communication framework of feelings and needs, the integration journal allows us to really flesh out what safety did and did not look like at its root.
Closing words
When children endure fear without a solution, or at least without a satisfactory solution, the brilliant strategies they employ to manage their reality do not usually work as effectively in adulthood. More often than not these strategies come at significant cost to ourselves. We know that those who create secure attachments in adulthood do so by creating an integrated, coherent story of their lives. They know what they went through, how they survived it, the cost that had on them, who they are now, and how they want to move forward.
There are infinite ways to do this work—therapy, listening partnerships, books, podcasts, community circles, meditations. Most importantly, healing work is done in relationship. Find your people, find your accountability buddies, and take this journey together. If you’d like to join a cohort looking to do this work together, let us know.
In gratitude,
Em & Sara
A note: The coursework above, as well as any of these writings, are not medical advice or therapy. The following information is intended for people who do have access to physical and emotional safety in their current state. The following is also not appropriate for those who are experiencing a psychiatric emergency or working through intense trauma. Lack of safety in childhood can range from confusion all the way to terror. If you experienced terror and have not sought professional help, please do not use our materials until you do. If you are experiencing domestic abuse, please consider seeking help (on a safe computer!) from The National Domestic Violence Hotline.