Memory…Memorial Day…and Secure Attachment: Earned & Learned
In his deeply illuminating and meaningful foreword to my book, A Brilliant Adaptation: How Dissociative Identity Disorder & the Power of the Therapeutic Bond Saved Me, my former therapist Dan Siegel writes about how our minds are shaped by our relationships,
“This unique offering reveals how our minds are shaped by our relationships, the traumatic ones early in life leading to a fracturing in how our emotions, thoughts, memories, and even sense of self can become disconnected as a dissociative identity. This powerful adaptation of dividing the mind in order to conquer an overwhelming family experience also remains open to growth and change, through the healing power of relationships.”
I’ve been thinking about this over the holiday weekend – how our minds are shaped by relationships, the traumatic ones early in life leading to a disruption in how we live our life – and how that same power of relationships, when arriving in healthy and attuned ways, is what can heal us.
Memorial Day traditionally is when people gather – the beginning of summer…kids out of school…family vacations…backyard barbeques…trips to the beach…families and friends gathering in relationship. For many, simple ordinary events. For those who grew up in homes where relationships were the source of danger rather than of comfort and safety – nothing about summer was ordinary. No school for daily escape. Just family time.
My mind adapted in the best way it could to survive my childhood by developing DID. That was the solution to fear without solution – a brilliant adaptation for life as a child in a family where being seen, soothed, safe and secure was not available. But such childhood adaptations don’t always translate well as the child becomes an adult. No longer living in that family, the dissociation that had once protected me was no longer serving me in the same way.
As an adult at the age of 37, what was transformative for me was the therapeutic relationship with my therapist. The experience of feeling seen, of feeling felt, by someone who understood what I’d been through – and knew what DID was. That’s where I was able to develop what the field of adult attachment now calls earned – or learned security. It’s possible to get there long after childhood is over.
I’m 72 now. I have a good life with close healthy connections to people I care about and who care about me. While I’ve lost some people I love, what I’ve come to understand is that the people I’ve loved well, and who loved me well in return, are genuinely with me always no matter where in the world we all may be. These relationships changed me at a level that doesn’t disappear. The connection rewired something. This isn’t sentiment – it’s neurobiology.
This is what was missing in my early life – not just safety, but the experience of being changed for the better by another person. Carrying someone with me. Interpersonal and embodied. Forever.
So this weekend, as summer kicks off and people gather all around me, I find myself feeling something the younger version of me couldn’t have known – connection. Full. Accompanied. Grateful. Safe and secure.
The healing power of relationships is real. It rewires us. And if you’re somewhere in the middle of that journey, I just want to say the same capacity for connection that may have been used against you can also be the thing that heals you. Not by returning to or repairing those early relationships, but through the same fundamental human wiring, finally achieving the feeling of being seen, soothed, safe and secure.
That’s worth celebrating.