The interview covers:

• How developmental and cultural trauma impact our relationships
• How to interrupt trauma cycles and have healthier relationships
• The importance of honesty and kindness

The conference airs on July 21st to 27th. You can sign up for the conference from today, using this link.

The book is out now and you can order it here.

And this zine also covers some of these ideas around relationship struggles.

The post Reset Your Nervous System Super Conference appeared first on Rewriting The Rules.

Now that our new book, How to Understand Your Relationships, is out in the world (the last book in our How to Understand Your… series), Alex Iantaffi and I are made up that two of our interviews about trauma and relationships (and one that I did without Alex) are being included in the Attachment, Trauma & Toxic Relationships Super Conference.

There are three interviews in total, covering:

• How to understand toxic relationships,
• How to understand relationship trauma, and
• Healing from developmental and cultural around relationships

The conference airs on April 28th to May 4th. You can sign up for the conference from today, using this link.

The book is out now and you can order it here.

And this zine also covers some of these ideas around relationship struggles.

The post Attachment, Trauma & Toxic Relationships Super Conference appeared first on Rewriting The Rules.

In our conversation, we cover:

• Why traumatic dynamics arise in relationships,
• The role of both cultural trauma and developmental trauma in our relational patterns and dynamics,
• How our responses to traumatic/traumatising relationships can risk furthering the problem and how we might respond differently,
• How important it is to broaden out our understanding of relationships, to consider traumatic dynamics that show up in all kinds of relationships, not just intimate partnerships, and
• How plural understandings of selves, and somatic approaches, can be helpful in addressing traumatic/traumatising relationships.

The conference airs on January 29th to February 4th, and our conversation goes out on day 4 as part of the Relational Trauma day. You can sign up for the conference from today, using this link.

Or wait for the book which should be out later this year.

Meanwhile, here’s a zine which introduces some of these ideas around relationship struggles.

The post Traumatic/traumatising relationships for the Trauma Super Conference appeared first on Rewriting The Rules.

In our conversation, we cover:

• Why toxic dynamics arise in relationships,
• The role of cultural trauma and developmental trauma in our relational patterns and dynamics,
• How our responses to toxic relationships can risk furthering the problem and how we might respond differently,
• How important it is to broaden out our understanding of relationships, to consider toxic dynamics that show up in all kinds of relationships, not just intimate partnerships, and
• How we might know when it is a good idea to remain in a relationship, when it’s not, and what the spectrum of options may be in relation to this.

The conference airs on November 6th – 12th and our interview goes out on Day 1. You can sign up for the conference from today, using this link.

Or wait for the book which should be out next year.

The post Healing toxic relationships summit appeared first on Rewriting The Rules.

In our conversation, we cover:

• Why toxic dynamics arise in relationships,
• The role of cultural trauma and developmental trauma in our relational patterns and dynamics,
• How our responses to toxic relationships can risk furthering the problem and how we might respond differently,
• How important it is to broaden out our understanding of relationships, to consider toxic dynamics that show up in all kinds of relationships, not just intimate partnerships, and
• How we might know when it is a good idea to remain in a relationship, when it’s not, and what the spectrum of options may be in relation to this.

The conference airs on November 6th – 12th and our interview goes out on Day 1. You can sign up for the conference from today, using this link.

Or wait for the book which should be out next year.

The post Healing Toxic Relationships Summit appeared first on Rewriting The Rules.

I thought it’d be a good time to share the write-up of an interview I gave earlier this year to the Association for Cognitive Analytic Therapy conference about working with outer and inner relationship diversity.

The interview was aimed at therapists, but is hopefully relevant to anyone interested in working with their own outer and inner relationships. Alex and I will be covering many of these themes in more depth in the new book.

Who are you and where are you at in your journey?

I’m a full time writer now, but my background is in academia, activism and therapy. I write therapeutically. By that I mean that I write about therapeutic topics for a general audience (to make them more accessible than they are in a lot of books aimed at therapists) and also that I focus on writing of various kinds as a therapeutic practice.

I felt some sense of dislocation being asked to talk at a therapy conference, having spent the last four years on the other side of that room – as a client. But I have a feeling that perhaps I’ve learnt more from this recent period than from the previous twenty years, especially about inner and outer relationships.

Why are we having this conversation with you?

Probably because it was Dominic Davies – of Pink Therapy – and myself who came up with the acronym GSRD (for gender, sex and relational diversity) which I consequently wrote the free BACP resource about (hopefully useful starting point for anyone who is unfamiliar with these areas).

One of the many reasons we decided on that acronym was because we wanted to highlight that relationship diversity was just as important for therapists to consider as gender and sexual diversity – and also interrelated with them.

Relationship diversity means the diverse ways in which people understand and conduct their relationships – usually focusing on romantic relationships. For example, it includes whether people are single or coupled, monogamous or non monogamous, and whether they experience romantic attraction or not, or prioritise romantic or other kinds of relationships.

What is your approach?

I was initially a fairly mainstream psychologist and my main therapeutic learning (in my psychology degree) was cognitive behavioural therapy, with a person-centred counselling counselling certificate on the side. Then I shifted academically into a more critical form of psychology informed by feminism and social constructionism – eventually into intersectional understandings.

I trained therapeutically in existential therapy, and more recently have been mainly informed by trauma and somatic approaches. These days I see my approach as plural – I try to consider everything on (at least) four different levels, and let those understandings ripple through and influence each other. These levels are: 

• The existential level of addressing the challenges of being human and making meaning. 
• The sociocultural level of living in a world of certain norms and the systems and structures that enforce these. 
• The relational level that we are brought up in relationship in ways that impact our relationships with others and ourselves now.  
• The internal level that we are embodied beings who manifest all forms of bodymind diversity (sometimes called neurodiversity) based on the differences we are born with and the ones we develop due to our experiences.

What are we going to cover in the rest of our conversation?

I thought we might explore:

• A bit more about why we need the R in GSRD
• What relationship diversity looks like
• How it impacts mental health
• What an affirmative approach to relationship diversity might look like
• How we might engage people in ‘how’ they relate rather than ‘what’ relationships or relationship styles they have
• Relationship trauma as a form of cultural and developmental trauma
• Working with our inner relationships – as a key way of addressing our outer relationships

Why do we need the R in GSRD?

Most therapy books and trainings tend to cover LGBT issues, or gender and sexuality (often as shorthand for LGBT – focused on how therapists can work with people with minority genders and sexualities).

We added relationships because gender, sexuality and relationships are inextricably linked. Dominant culture has a binary/hierarchical model of all three: gender wise we can either be a man or a woman, sexually we can be attracted to the opposite/same sex (making us straight or gay), and we act out that attraction in the form of a romantic and sexual relationship. The normative monogamous coupled relationship is the key place in which we’re expected to play out our gendered role and manifest our sexuality.

This can also lead us to question the idea of gender, sexual and relationship minorities – as there are actually many many people who do not entirely fit this binary/hierarchical model of gender, sexuality and relationships. This includes those who don’t take on traditional gender roles, those who don’t have kids, those who divorce, those who stop being sexual in their relationship, and those who live alone, for example. It can be more useful to talk of marginalised gender, sexualities and relationships; to consider the degree to which each person is marginalised by the gender/sex/relationship norms and ideals, and whether they embrace or resist that marginalisation. Like the term neurodivergence, we could also use GSR divergence to name those genders, sexualities and relationship forms that diverge from normativity.

We can trace the roots of current dominant culture normativities – and their impact – through gender, sex and relationships and how these intersects with race, class and disability. The focus on being normal is actually pretty recent historically and has its roots in scientific projects of categorisation in the 19th and early 20th century. 

At the same time that scientists and doctors were conducting research and writing books trying to determine which races were inferior (to justify colonisation and/or enslavement), the eugenics movement was taking hold in many countries to try to stop people deemed inferior – generally by race, class and/or disability – from reproducing. Essentialist arguments were also being made for gender differences to justify women remaining in the home and looking after and reproducing the workforce unpaid – something that capitalism relied upon. 

It was in this environment that we saw the origins of detailed classifications of sexual and gender ‘deviance’, as well as the first classifications of mental disorders of course. We can’t tease these intersecting forms of oppression apart; they’re all rooted in the scientific assumption that normal is important and that anyone deemed less normal is also less valuable, less human, and less deserving of compassion – or that they need to be fixed or cured and brought in line with normal.

The legacy of such approaches continues today and has a massive impact on where we’re at now.

How does relationship diversity impact mental health?

From a trauma informed and shame sensitive approach to mental health, we need to be mindful about the relationship styles and statuses of everyone.

Shame is all about normativities. We’re taught what it is and is not ok to be and we internalise that – from the cultural messages we receive, and from the people who were around us (growing up and in the present).

Relationships are a key area where this plays out (like gender, sexuality, race, class, disability, and more) because they’re  seen as so fundamental to successful selfhood. As with gender and sexuality, this impacts everyone: those who fit normativity, those who’re marginalised, and those who are invisible

Impact on those who stay within relationship normativity (whether because it feels like a good fit or because they fear doing otherwise)

As with the pressures on straight and cisgender people around sexuality and gender there is huge pressure on people in normative relationship styles to do relationships right, and often a lot of fear and shame around getting it wrong. Given the precariousness of relationships these days – and everything that gets bound up with romantic love and sex – many people are constantly in fear and shame of becoming suddenly single, of getting caught up in secret non-monogamy, or of finding themselves in a ‘sexless’ or ‘loveless’ relationship (i.e. the ‘others’ of the ideal of coupled monogamous love). Trying to fit rigid cultural or personal rules – rather than being authentic and flexible – also takes a massive toll on mental and physical health.

Impact on those with marginalised ways of doing relationships 

As with lesbian, gay and trans people, single/solo, openly non-monogamous, and asexual/aromantic people face all kinds of subtle and overt discriminations, from constantly being expected to explain themselves, through to questions raised by social services over their capacity to parent, lack of media representation in any positive way, attempts to convert them, and lack of legal recognition of their relationships (everything being set up to favour romantic couples and nuclear families). All this takes a toll on mental health, from daily micro aggressions, to having to constantly come out and educate others – or stay closeted and hide, with the sense of precariousness this involves.

Impact on those who are invisible in their relationships

Those who are non-binary or a- in their gender or sexuality are often invisible within cultural binaries, with questions posed about whether they are even ‘real’ or exist. Think about the common assumptions that bi people are really gay or straight, non-binary people are going through a phase, or asexual people are confused and just need a good sexual partner. Invisibly marginalised people generally have worse mental health than visibly marginalised people, likely due to the struggle to find supportive community (double discrimination from both normative and visibly marginalised communities), and having to constantly justify their lived experience to self and others. We’re brought up against the fact we’re not seen as valid by others constantly. For example, you might experience this every time a form or professional asks ‘do you have a partner’ and you have to say ‘no’, rather than the honest answer of ‘yes I have three’, or ‘yes, I’m self partnered’, or ‘no but I have several people who occupy the role that partners take in partnered-people’s lives’.

What does relationship diversity look like?

When I was writing the BACP resource I included a paragraph or two for each major gender, sexuality and relationship style I was aware of. In a previous book I’d only thought of monogamy and non-monogamy for ‘relationship style’, but writing this document helped me realise there are at least as many relationship styles as there are sexualities and genders. 

Like sexuality and gender it’s helpful to conceive of relationships on multiple dimensions. Some we’ve already considered are where people are at on a dimensions of: monogamy to non-monogamy, single to partnered, aromantic to highly romantic, asexual to highly sexual. We could also add dimensions  around whether people are engaging in sex and/or relationships for emotional and/or transactional reasons, and more.

Dimensions are important because none of these things are binary, for example many people occupy a position somewhere between lifelong monogamy and open non-monogamy, including monogamish relationships, affairs, dating, hook-ups, friends-with-benefits, etc.

Sexual Configurations Theory – by Sari Van Anders – is a useful theory that distinguishes between ‘erotic’ and ‘nurturing’ connections, and how these can be separate or connected, and more or less important or unimportant in people’s lives, in addition to being conducted in diverse ways with the same, or different, others.

When considering relationship style with clients we also need to be aware of the way they intersect with race, class, disability, and other intersecting axes of oppression – for instance in terms of what relationship styles are available within a particular community or culture, and how people are seen if they take up various styles. For example, Nathan Rambukkana has written about the ways in which white polyamorous people are afforded legal rights which are still denied to polygamous immigrants (polygamy actually being a majority set of relationship styles across much of the world) – with white western polyamorous people being represented as authentically choosing their lifestyle, while polygamous people are often assumed to be coerced or inferior. Forms of non-monogamy associated with people from working class backgrounds – like swinging or dogging – are also often regarded as inferior to middle class associated ones. And the ways in which disabled people navigate their sexual and intimate relationships are often denigrated – related to the view that disabled people aren’t attractive and shouldn’t be sexual.

What might an affirmative approach to relationship diversity look like?

It would recognise that different relationship styles work for different people (and at different points in their lives). 

It would treat all relationship styles as equally valid. 

It would bring these themes into the therapy room with those in normative relationships just as much as those in non-normative ones. 

As with gender and sexuality, relationship normativity can have just as detrimental an impact on people within normativity as outside of it, and they are also the least likely to have reflected on their relationships styles or to have considered other options which might be a better fit for them. So there is an argument for bringing the diverse ways of doing relationships into the room with people in normative relationships. For instance, we might ask ourselves if we would ask a polyamorous person whether they had ever considered being monogamous, might we also ask a monogamous person whether they had ever considered being polyamorous?

As with gender and sexuality, if a therapist wants to work in more relationship affirmative ways, the most vital thing is to do their own personal reflective work around their relationships. And, as with all intersecting axes of oppression, it is particularly vital that those within the norm do this work because we can be unintentionally retraumatising/oppressive when we’re in the assumed norm and haven’t examined that position and its impact on ourselves and others. 

Staying clued up about relationship diversity by reading or watching relevant material can also be useful so clients aren’t required to educate you – although, as always, it’s important to check out what a particular client’s meanings and experiences are rather than assuming.

Generally relationship diversity is taken to mean how people conduct their intimate relationships, for example whether they are monogamous or non-monogamous, but we could usefully expand the concept out to include all of the diverse ways in which people relate with themselves, with other humans, and with the non-human world. We might gently challenge the culturally dominant norms that prioritise some forms of relationships way over others (e.g. romance over friendship, exclusive over casual, with-others over with-self, with-humans over with-animals, objects, projects or passions). We could relate this to how we value some lives so much more highly than others – and the implications of this for global injustice and climate crisis.

How might we engage people in ‘how’ they relate rather than ‘what’ relationships or relationship styles they have?

Too much focus on the ‘what’ of relationships (e.g. single/partnered, monogamous/non-monogamous, romantic/friendship), can take us away from possibilities between or beyond these binaries, as well as from the more important question of ‘how’ we relate. 

There’s a free zine on my website – relationship struggles – that covers this in more depth. My sense is, that across all people of all relationship styles there is a real lack of knowledge of the ways in which people develop – and enact – relationship patterns. This means that people are often searching for the ‘right’ relationship (the one), or the ‘right’ relationship style (the poly grail) – as I did myself for many years – in order to solve the problem of painful relationships, rather than exploring what their relationship patterns are or how they might develop relationships in ways that are a better fit for them.

We’re often looking for safety, belonging and dignity from a particular relationship, or community. These come to represent – to us – things we lacked or lost previously, putting them under greater pressure and making them more precarious.

How is relationship trauma usefully seen as a form of cultural and developmental trauma?

There is significant cultural and developmental trauma around relating which plays out in relationship struggles and abusive dynamics.

We might think of cultural trauma as the normative social messages we receive about what ways of being are acceptable, good and right, and what are unacceptable, bad and wrong. Developmental trauma includes the messages we receive growing up about what aspects of ourselves are acceptable, good and right, and what are unacceptable, bad and wrong. These forms of trauma are highly interconnected, of course, as families and education systems often pass on culturally normative messages – about what emotions are acceptable to experience/express for different genders, for example, or what desires it is acceptable to feel or not feel and how it’s acceptable to act upon them – or not.

In his book, therapist Dwight Turner writes about how this operates in terms of intersecting oppressions – how we project out what we don’t want to acknowledge in ourselves onto individuals/groups and Other them (projective identification), and how we – when we are marginalised ourselves – kill parts of us in order to survive every day in normativity (internalised oppression).

In relation to relationship diversity, then, we could attend to the projections we – and others – make to those who are relationally different from ourselves. How do we/they talk about older spinsters/bachelors, for example, or the imagined relationships of young people these days, or cultural others? What aspects of our own intimate lives do we feel we have to kill off – our hide – in order to be accepted around the water cooler or at the family gathering?

To support everyone to  move towards more mutually nourishing relationships I think it’s useful to help people tune into their relationship patterns – in order that they can be more conscious of these and how they play out and gradually try to shift them (for example, we might think of patterns around fight/fawn/flight/freeze trauma responses, or blame out/blame in/avoid/withdraw shame responses).

It’s also useful to help people tune in – honestly and kindly – to the ways their bodyminds work (due to inherent neurodiversity and/or trauma and/or chosen values), and to learn what kinds of relationships – and ways of doing relationships – work for them. They could practise how to communicate this with others and focus on close relationships where there is a good fit. For example, they might consider speed of relationship development, preferences for types of social contact, boundaries around behaviours, etc. This applies regardless of type of relationship, of course, not just to conventional partnerships.

In all of this though it is vital to keep hold of the understanding of relationship diversity and the sense that all consensual relationship styles as equally valid, rather than being tempted to pathologise (e.g. thinking that people are polyamorous, aromantic, or sex workers because of their trauma, attachment style, or neurodivergence).

Why are you so keen on working with our inner relationships – as a key therapeutic process and to address our outer relationships?

One – increasingly popular – way of helping people with their trauma patterns or relationship patterns  is to work with their inner relationship diversity, exploring their plural systems, internal families, inner teams, or constellations. 

You might be familiar with Dick Schwartz’s Internal family systems model, for example, or the work of Mick Cooper and John Rowan, or Janina Fisher in relation to trauma, or Philip Bromberg in a psychoanalytic context, or Miller Mair in personal construct theory. 

This is the approach that I’ve taken to myself – or rather ourselves! – over the last decade, and particularly in grappling with the traumatic last few years – there are two free books and two free zines on the topic of plurality on our website.

When it comes to relationships we can usefully see our foregrounded – and disowned – trauma patterns or relationship survival strategies as selves or parts. For example the fight, fawn, flight and freeze ones mentioned before. It may be that we have a tendency to foreground one of those in relationships, or different ones in different kinds of relationships. We may be drawn to continually reproducing a fight/fawn, controlling/hypervigilant, or a needy/avoidant dynamic, with others – for example. Or we may find ourselves on opposite sides of familiar dynamics in different relationships

Plural work is about becoming more conscious of all parts of the self – or selves: welcoming them all in, balancing them out, and improving communication between them so we are not eclipsed by them when triggered, for example.

It can involve gradually understanding the masking mechanisms which kept the parts of us we weren’t allowed to be hidden, loosening these, bringing split off selves home, hearing and holding the feelings they protected us from, and learning who and how they can be now that they’re home.

We may well find selves that map on to all the things we’ve disliked most in others. Certainly we’re likely to find inner oppressors and abusers, as well as survivors and victims. We can also find things that we’ve delegated to others in the past (e.g. parts of us who can be strong or vulnerable when we’ve tended to try to make others into ‘the strong one’ or ‘the vulnerable one’ in relationships).

In addition to therapy, we think it can be helpful for people to do their own work/play to get to know their selves and to communicate between them. We write a lot – and try to model – journalling between selves, talking to each other, drawing our selves, exploring them in dreams, fantasies and creative writing, and inviting them explicitly into different aspects of life (e.g. cooking, inner rituals).

Plurality is absolutely not just a queer thing – straight and cis people have just as complex self systems as queer and trans people – and often also have selves who are differently gendered and/or have different erotic and/or relational desires. However people from various queer communities – in addition to cultural or spiritual communities – may have more available understandings and practices for exploring plurality. For example, some trans and non-binary people embrace multiple gender positions, some polyamorous people seek out different relationships for different selves to be foregrounded, some kinksters explicitly play with dominant/submissive parts or engage in play in order to experience child selves, or animalistic selves.

Compassion is not a relationship between the healer and the wounded. It’s a relationship between equals. Only when we know our own darkness well can we be present with the darkness of others. Compassion becomes real when we recognize our shared humanity – Pema Chödrön

The post Working with – outer and inner – relationship diversity appeared first on Rewriting The Rules.

Free Books

The first three free books I’ve created are largely based on the writing I did last year as I navigated learning about trauma (personally, and in general), and considering how my relationship with my (plural) self, and other people, might work (consensually) under this new understanding – all during a global pandemic! So there are now three free books on these topics of trauma, plurality, and consent.

In future I hope to add free books of my best writing on gender, sexuality, love, and mental health, along with one about writing itself.

I thought I’d announce each free book over the coming weeks for people who follow my blog or twitter but don’t regularly check out the website.

Trauma

The second free book is all about trauma. What do I mean by that? As I say at the start of the book:

In this collection the focus is on trauma as the impact of what happened to you. As Steve Haines points out in his great little overview Trauma is Really Strange, bodily trauma responses such as mobilising into fight or flight, or going immobile or dissociating, are the same whether we’re talking about developmental trauma from the past, a recent traumatic event, or the cumulative impact of stress.

When we consider what causes us to be traumatised, I like this definition used by Bonnie Badenoch in her book The Heart of Trauma:

‘Any experience of fear and/or pain that does not have the support it needs to be digested and integrated into the flow of our brains’

This helpfully highlights the point which many trauma experts agree on that there are two elements to traumatising circumstances:

1. A key event, or accumulation of events, which is frightening, shameful or otherwise painful to us (whether or not it would be to other people in similar circumstances, it’s about the meaning for us)
2. Not receiving the support we need in order to process the event or events (which usually means having somebody to hold us and hear us in our distress, reflecting it back to us in ways that reassure us that it is understandable and help us to tolerate it)

The book considers personal forms of trauma as well as cultural forms, and the interconnection between the two.

We hope you enjoy this first free book. More about the other ones to come…

The post Free book 2: Trauma appeared first on Rewriting The Rules.

If you haven’t read one of my plural blog-posts before and aren’t sure who these people are, feel free to check out my Plural Selves zine, and my previous post about plurality. But hopefully you don’t need to get that part in order to find the content here useful.

James: Hey again Ara.

Ara: Hey James. So good to talk with you again so soon.

James: I thought about writing this as a regular post, but I realised I could really do with somebody to bounce off: to ask me questions to help me clarify my thoughts.

Ara: I’d love to do that. I’m aware that in our last post together you asked me a lot of questions. It feels good to balance that dynamic by doing it the other way around.

James: Mm like you are more of the expert around feelings and embodiment, but perhaps I have the expertise on this more intellectual piece: weaving the various theories together.

Ara: I like that.

James: I also feel like I need you as a kind of anchor. I feel so excited about the puzzle pieces that seem to be slotting together here. I want to zoom off in a hundred different directions at once.

Ara: How can I help to ground you?

James: Remind me to breathe, to slow down, I don’t have to do it all at once. You could ask me questions to lead me through one step at a time. Are you up for that?

Ara: Absolutely. Want to breathe before we start?

James: Sure *laughs* *breathes*

Overview

Ara: Okay. Can you start by giving us an overview of the terrain you want to cover in this piece? If the terms we use here are unfamiliar to people, we’ll define them in the next section.

James: Absolutely. It’s something I’ve been building to ever since I did that Bowlby Centre event last month which I wrote up here, about attachment theory. My sense is that perhaps everyone contains all of the different attachment styles – or at least the capacity for them – within themselves. Rather than aiming at some kind of static secure attachment, perhaps there’s more value in getting to know all our different attachment potentials very well. Maybe that even is the way that we get to ‘earned secure attachment’.

Ara: A kind of paradox? We’ve tried to get to ‘secure attachment’ by getting away from ‘insecure’ attachment styles, but perhaps the way to get there is through them, not away from them?

James: Precisely. And there’s this sense that it also maps onto emotions and the ‘window of tolerance’. The only way to expand the window of tolerance and get to a place where you can be with all emotional states is through experiencing (tough) emotions, not by trying to avoid them or get away from them.

Ara: So that’s attachment and emotion, what about plural parts work?

James: We’ve reached these conclusions by getting to know all of the parts of us deeply. I’m suggesting that we can do this work by befriending the three parts of us who map on to the three ‘insecure’ attachment styles, and the emotions that they hold. That’s the way to both earned secure attachment and an expanded window of tolerance.

Ara: Wonderful. So you can explain to us how we now understand our parts having operated together in the ‘old’ system, that we had our whole life. And you can describe how we’re working with them now to reconfigure the system towards more secure attachments in our inner and outer relationships, and towards an expanded window of tolerance. How am I doing?

James: This is really helpful, thankyou Ara. 

Ara: Another breath before we continue?

James: Mm. *breathes*

The faux window of tolerance, faux secure attachment, and faux parts

Ara: So one thing that we read which helped you click together on all of this was the concept of the faux window of tolerance in Kathy L. Kain and Stephen J. Terrell’s book ‘Nurturing Resilience’. Do you want to explain that, and how it relates to attachment?

James: That’s a great place to start, yes. So Kathy and Stephen explain that many, if not most, people develop a ‘faux window of tolerance’ when they’re growing up, in order to handle intense emotions. The window of tolerance is Daniel Siegal’s term for the space in which we can be present with – and regulate – our emotions, rather than being overwhelmed by them. 

Growing up if our caregivers and others can meet us in various emotional states and help us to know that they are okay, understandable, and manageable, then we will develop that window of tolerance. We’ll learn in those early relationships that those feelings are okay, and we’ll learn from experience with others what we can do to soothe ourselves when feelings are really intense. We’ll end up with a nice wide space in which we can welcome a variety of different feelings at different intensities.

Ara: So that’s how it relates to secure attachment? The window of tolerance is developed within secure relationships?

James: Right, a secure attachment refers to that kind of nurturing relationship where we have a ‘secure base’ or ‘safe haven’ to return to when emotions are unfamiliar or overwhelming. As a child, if we learn that we can return there and be welcomed, understood, soothed, have our needs met, then we’ll be more and more able to extend out from that base to explore our world with openness, curiosity, and creativity. We‘ll have more of a sense that we can tolerate any tough experiences and regulate our own emotions, as well as a strong sense of trust in that base we can return to if it gets too hard.

Later in life that would translate into building strong, secure relationships with other people in our lives – friends, partners, mentors, communities, etc. – so that we still have a place to return where people can help us coregulate around the tough feelings, where we can express our needs and have them met, and so on.

Ara: So what’s the ‘faux window of tolerance’.

James: Most of us carry some degree of developmental trauma: a sense of key relationships not being very secure and of not all emotions – or all intensities of emotion – being tolerated and regulated by those around us. Kathy and Stephen suggest that what therapists call ‘defences’ are what we develop in order to have a ‘faux window of tolerance’: the impression that we are tolerating our emotional states, but really we’re defending against them.

Ara: That resonated for us.

James: So much. This last year or two we’ve often wondered how we’ve done so seemingly okay in life despite clearly carrying so much developmental trauma, such that we’ve been plunged into intense trauma periods and overwhelming emotion several times over the years. The idea of a ‘faux window of tolerance’ makes so much sense. It might have looked like we were handling difficult experiences and the emotions they brought up pretty well, but really it was more that we were adept at various defences, or survival strategies, to avoid or sidestep them.

Ara: I think that fits well with what we discussed last time about emotions James. The sense that we thought we were pretty good at ‘staying with feelings’ but have lately realised that there were several vital emotions that we were barely feeling at all.

James: Exactly. So what we were generally doing was repressing feelings, or reacting out of survival strategies in ways which made the difficult experience and/or feelings go away. Part of why the last year or two have been so intense is that we’ve finally been feeling many of the feelings – and the experiences they resulted from – which we hadn’t allowed ourselves to feel along the way.

Ara: And you think it may be useful to conceptualise this as a ‘faux secure attachment’ as well as a ‘faux window of tolerance’?

James: I do. We – and I suspect many, many people – were able to do a pretty good impression of functioning in the world, and relating with ourselves and others, for much of the time because we’d developed pretty remarkable defences and survival strategies. However, the ‘faux-ness’ became apparent any time something retraumatising happened – beyond the capacity of the defences and survival strategies to cope with – which put us into periods of intense PTSD where the feelings were terrifying and overwhelming and we couldn’t function. 

The ‘faux-ness’ was also revealed in most of our close relationships because eventually it became apparent that we – and the other person – weren’t really securely attached – in ourselves or with each other – and the relationship ended. Maybe they became more insecure and needy over time and we had to get away, or vice versa, or the level of conflict became unbearable to us. Often it was revealed how much we’d been shaping ourselves to fit that person, and how much we’d lost ourselves in the process, and we finally began to struggle with that.

Ara: I notice that I feel some resistance to the word ‘faux’ here.

James: Me too. It does feel rather harsh and judgemental, and there’s also a sense in it of having been a ‘false self’ covering up a ‘real self’ which is something that I would question.

Ara: Being seven selves all of whom are a work in progress definitely raises questions around any sense of a real ‘authentic’ self!

James: It does indeed.

Faux selves?

Ara: Do you want to say how all this relates to plurality?

James: Well, if we were to use those terms, we would say that we developed a ‘faux part’ – Max – who was to the fore for most of our life. She was the one who formed that ‘faux window of tolerance’ and who formed those ‘faux secure attachments’. She would likely have looked pretty happy and successful from the outside, except for the few times – when traumatic things happened and/or relationships ended – when it became very hard for her to maintain that facade.

Ara: We find it so interesting that we chose the name ‘Max’ for her, given that it sounds a lot like ‘mask’, which is kind of what she was.

James: And her survival strategies were to dissociate a lot, not that she realised that at the time. Throwing herself into work, and into helping others, both enabled her to keep our own intense feelings, and traumatised parts, very disowned and buried. Busy-ness and distraction was her main ‘faux window of tolerance’. Focusing on becoming something for others – rather than bringing herself openly and vulnerably to relationships – was her main ‘faux secure attachment’.

Ara: And this is why we don’t love ‘faux’ for her, although it is accurate in a way, because these survivor parts – in all of us – are something we should be deeply grateful for, and celebrate, not dismiss as ‘false’ or flawed.

James: Agreed. We simply wouldn’t be here now were it not for Max. She protected the other parts of us through some truly horrific early – and later – experiences. And she kept searching for answers to all of the tough stuff that we encountered with our mental health, and in our relationships, and that she saw others around us struggling with too. Ironically if she hadn’t had the survival strategies of workaholism, and trying to help others, we would not now have this huge foundation of knowledge and writing to build upon. 

Ara: We can feel deep gratitude to Max, and huge grief for what she had to go through. One image of her is of the ‘parentified child’: an inner child or teenager who has to act like an inner parent in order to survive and look after the other parts of the inner system who are even more vulnerable. It’s rather like the way a big sibling might have to look after the other kids in a family where parents are struggling, or unable to handle tough experiences and emotions.

James: How it feels at the moment is that we have finally freed Max of that burden and she is off walking in the hills alone somewhere.

Ara: Mm I always think of her when I read the Mary Oliver poem, The Journey. By finding/developing our own inner parents – you and me James – and by working with our three traumatised child parts directly, we have liberated Max.

James: Which brings us on to those parts and how they function in terms of attachment.

Insecurely attached parts under the faux secure attachment

Ara: Go for it James.

James: Right, so this is the idea that all of us have all of the attachment styles present within us. Parts work gives us a nice easy way of working with this. Our experience is that we literally have members of our plural system who map on to each of the forms of insecure attachment.

Ara: I sense a table coming on!

James: How did you guess?

Ara: A lot to unpack there James. How about getting a drink before we start?

James: Hot chocolate?

Ara: You read my mind.

James: I was going to say that’s not so hard when it’s the same mind, but given how poorly parts of us knew each other in the past perhaps I can’t say that.

Ara: We’re getting to know each other better and better now thankfully. Also I feel like we both do and don’t share the same bodymind, given how differently each of us think, feel, and inhabit our body, but perhaps that’s one for another blog post!

…

James: Okay then. So to explain the table. We’ve introduced these four ‘traumatised parts’ before in various places, although our understanding of them – and how they fit together – has definitely clarified over the past year. Mapping onto attachment theory we’d now say that Tony was our anxious-preoccupied part: needy, clingy and desperate for connection. Morgan – who we used to call Beastie – is dismissive avoidant: struggling to trust others and pushing them away. And Jonathan is fearful avoidant: terrified of that other people will hurt or shame him.

Ara: And the ‘okay’ bit of the table?

James: Transactional analysis is another therapeutic approach which seems to map fairly well onto attachment theory. The anxious-preoccupied part – Tony – believes that other people are okay, but he’s not, so he craves others’ love, approval, and attention, and he fears their disapproval, dismissal, and disgust. The dismissive avoidant part believes that she is okay but other people are not, so she tends to blame others and push them away. And the fearful avoidant part believes that he isn’t okay and neither are other people, hence Jonathan’s fear/shame trauma response: other people are dangerous and he is wrong and unacceptable.

Ara: But most of our life these three parts have been disowned?

James: Precisely, which does not mean they haven’t had an impact. Now we understand it that Max was constantly responding to others’ demands inside and out. On the inside she was constantly getting, often rather desperate, messages from Tony, Morgan and Jonathan, about what they needed. She tried her best to balance and meet those needs. On the outside she was very tuned into what other people wanted of her and tried to balance and meet those demands. No wonder she’s off in the hills these days taking a well-earned break!

Ara: So dismantling Max’s defences and setting her free, as we did last year, left us with a much clearer sense of the other three traumatised parts. They have been gradually revealing themselves more and more as they’ve come to trust us. They’re gradually feeling more securely attached to us, and to other people, and they’re gradually sensing that their feelings have a more expanded window of tolerance to be held in.

James: Nicely put. What just clicked with me this morning is that not only did Max have her set of defences – or survival strategies – that covered over the others, but each of the ‘insecure’ parts also have a set of defences that we need to get underneath in order for them to show themselves fully and to feel all their feelings.

Ara: This is so exciting, and it makes so much sense. Do you want to take me through it?

James: Please. The thing that struck me was about Tony initially. He didn’t seem to make sense. On the one hand we experience him as this cocky, hot, humorous part of us: very extrovert and craving connection with others. On the other hand we know that he holds the Deep Yearning of the Soul (). When he does feel his feelings they are often feelings of unquenchable thirst, desperate need, and longing. So how can this seemingly confident part also be the part who feels that he isn’t okay and will be abandoned by others?

But with this sense of defences it all makes sense. If Tony is driven by not wanting to feel the traumatic level of neediness and loneliness that he holds then it makes all kinds of sense that he would fling himself into connections by coming over as charming, sexy, funny and so on.

Ara: Mm yes. As he and I recently discussed, tragically that often fetches him up with just the kind of rejection and loss of belonging that he deeply fears. But it does make all kinds of sense as a defence, just like Max dissociating from recognising just how trapped she’s been in work and relationships. What about Morgan?

James: Again initially confusing. The part of us who holds anger, even hatred, towards others has manifested our whole life as the inner critic, turning that anger and hatred inwards. But if you look at it from the defence perspective that, like Tony, Morgan was disowned all our life, then it makes sense.

Ara: So growing up we learnt that we must never be needy and desperate as Tony can be, or rageful and resentful at others, as Morgan can be. So both of them defended by becoming the opposite – when they were allowed out at all. 

James: Tony faked confidence and made light of his pain, Morgan turned anger in against us rather than ever allowing herself to feel it towards others.

Ara: And our chalkboard boy Jonathan did something similar.

James: I think so. Deep down he holds that incredibly vulnerable fear and shame, and it wasn’t acceptable to admit to those things. So he became the people pleaser who pretended to be fine – in order to keep others happy – and who hypervigilantly figured out what others wanted from him and tried to give it to them.

Ara: Expanding out from our particular experience, do you think there’s something for other people in all this?

James: I suspect so. It probably manifests very differently for different people, but it would be worth everyone exploring what their ‘faux secure’ part looks like, and whether they also have all three ‘insecure’ parts in them somewhere. How do those three influence the whole system? How do they impact how they relate with other people? How repressed or available are they?  What are their defensive behaviours and what are those covering up?

Ara: You’ve done a great job at overviewing the theory, and how it applies to us, here James. I’m wondering if we might dig into practice a little more now?

James: I’d love to. What did you have in mind?

Ara: I’d like to reflect more on how we’re working with this internally and externally. How are we building that ‘earned secure attachment’ with each of the ‘insecure’ parts, and how are we bringing awareness of the three different ‘insecure’ styles into our current relationships? 

We’ve had this radical sense lately that strong relationships are not ones in which we’re just securely attached, but rather the ones in which we can honestly and kindly recognise all the different attachments in play.

James: Yes! 

Ara: A little stretch first?

James: Also yes.

…

Working with insecure parts internally

Ara: We covered some of this territory in our last post James, about how we’re working to help each part to expand their window of tolerance and feel their feelings safely enough, which is also how we’re building our earned secure attachment with each of them.

James: You’re doing the big space ‘drop the storyline and feel the feeling’ work with them, and I’m trying to hold them close, love them and hear them when they’re struggling. We’re also checking in with the ‘insecure three’ at least twice a day to see where they’re at with everything. Because they’re so used to hiding themselves and their feeling, it’s important to keep encouraging them to deliberately tune in and share where they’re at.

Ara: So what else do we need to say here?

James: I guess the new piece is recognising those defences that each of those three holds. Perhaps it feels obvious to go to Tony when we feel yearning, Morgan when we feel anger, and Jonathan when we feel fear, to help them really feel it and be held and heard in it. But there’s now this extra piece of recognising that we need to go to them at least as much if Tony is pinning that yearning onto somebody else or falling into over-excited connection or fantasy, if Morgan is going into inner critic anger-inward type noise, or if Jonathan is chalkboarding.

Ara: Those experiences often feel more dissociated – now that we understand what that means. It often doesn’t feel so apparent that there is a feeling present. There may not be clarity around which part of us is doing their thing, or what has triggered them. There’s just a general sense of unease, confusion, or of being a bit scattered or vague.

James: That’s right. I think we got it first with Jonathan because we clearly identified him with hypervigilance and chalkboarding. Last year whenever we found our brain going over and over things in that familiar way, I would go to Jonathan and encourage him to go closer to the ‘traumado’ of fear/shame feelings instead of desperately trying to solve impossible equations. It had to be very slow and gradual, but eventually we could sit together in the eye of the storm and let it swirl around us, finding a way to settle him there instead of trying to figure everything out which usually made it worse and worse.

Ara: And lately we’ve taken any – even fleeting – ‘noisy’ anger in/out thoughts as an opportunity to go to Morgan and encourage her to sit with her feelings of anger. Tony can be very dissociated, but again we’ve been noticing the kind of thing that’s likely to make him feel rejected or lonely when it happens, and encouraging him to drop down into the yearning feeling, with one of us holding him through it.

James: From a trauma-informed perspective it has to be gradual doesn’t it? Feeling the feelings in the times when it feels possible to do so, gradually expanding the window of tolerance so more and more of it is possible to feel. Slowly these parts can drop the defences more and more, creating a ‘secure base’ of more gentle time with us every day to return to. And very gradually they can share those feelings with trusted others too.

Ara: More on that in a moment. Anything else to say on the inner work?

James: One thing is how each part’s go-to fantasies helped us to understand their resistance, as well as the feelings they covered up. There’s a lot more to write about how we us our erotic imagination for such exploration. We sketched out some of it in this zine with Justin. 

Lately we noticed that Jonathan, Tony, and Morgan kept going towards a fantasy where they were welcomed into a home with me. But the way that fantasy played out was very different for each of them. With Jonathan it was about being in a terrifying situation, rescued by me, and taken somewhere safe where he had a lot of time to recover before having to do anything else. With Tony it was about coming to live with me but being convinced that he would mess up and be sent away. He kept acting out until he could admit those feelings and believe my reassurance. With Morgan she came to me very reluctantly. She kept wanting to fight me and walk away, struggling to trust me to really be up for being with her rage.

Ara: So fascinating how those fantasies – and many of the dreams we’ve had too – echo the processes we’re going through in our outer life. Anything else?

James: I guess that the process feels reciprocal. The more the ‘insecure’ parts learn to trust us, the more of the previously disowned ‘unacceptable’ feelings they can bring. And the more they bring those feelings, the more trust is built. Welcoming them in those feelings seems to help all of them to become more real, more fully fleshed out. That is partly why Morgan wanted a ‘real name’ rather than being called ‘Beastie’ which felt like a caricature. 

But on the way towards that more ‘secure’ attachment with us they often balk at it. They try to resist those feelings, like they can’t really believe it’s really okay to say that they hate somebody – or us (Morgan), or to beg not to be left (Tony).

Ara: Mm which is perhaps why they have to practise in fantasy before they’re able to do that in reality. We’ve described it as encouraging them to bring the whole palette of feelings, not just the not palatable elements of themselves.

James: We like a bit of word play don’t we? 

We also find it useful to notice which old experiences keep returning to our mind, and which current ones. With old experiences we can ask where each part of us is at with those. Often it seems that one of them needs to return to that memory and to complete it somehow – by really feeling it, or by saying how they wish they’d been able to respond, for example, if they’d been more available back then. You and I can hold and hear them through that process, instead of our old pattern of despairing that we kept churning round and round old memories. 

With current experiences it’s similarly important for all of them – or the one who is particularly struggling – to be heard and heeded. For example recently we deeply listened to Morgan’s angry response to how someone treated us and found a response that sat well with her. After that she felt a lot more welcome and ‘at home’ in us.

Ara: It’s not about directly reacting to any ‘insecure’ impulse they might have, as Max might once have done. Rather it’s about engaging in conversation, taking them very seriously, and thinking together how we might respond – giving ourselves a lot of time around it.

James: Right, so instead of Tony leaping into a connection with someone the minute he feels drawn to them, we can notice that feeling and consider how we might move cautiously towards that connection, or whether it’s really speaking to a general desire for more contact, or to be looked after internally. Instead of Morgan deciding never to engage with somebody again we can investigate what she’s responding to negatively in them, and what might be a safe-enough, boundaried way of relating with that person, given what they bring up in her.

Ara: I’m thinking that all these ways of being with them are about demonstrating how loved and respected they are.

James: Which is very easy to do. It’s when parts or feelings are hidden that they feel murky or threatening or hard to love. Brought to the surface and into the light they become far easier to love and understand.

Ara: Which brings us onto the final part because I suspect the same is true in relationships with others. When parts of us – and their feelings – are hidden and murky, others may well respond to us with aversion, or by trying to grasp onto the more appealing defensive versions of us. When it’s all available – and clear – to ourselves and others, we stand a better chance of having mutually nourishing, open, relationships.

James: Right. But so hard for the parts of us who have survived for years by employing those defences to believe that.

Bringing all our parts into relationships

Ara: So let’s explore this. How is it useful to bring the ‘insecure’ parts into relationship with others? I can imagine people thinking that doesn’t make much sense. Surely the last thing we want to do is to relate with others in an insecure way?

James: Mm well part of it is that Pete Walker bit we find so useful: reparenting ourselves and reparenting by committee. We can’t do all this work alone because humans are relational, interconnected and interdependent. There’s only so far we can get as an individual (albeit an individual who is also seven people!)

Ara: There’s only so far our inner relationships can take us.

James: Right. I’m thinking that therapy is like an in-between between the inner work and the work of relating to the people in our life. We can gradually bring our ‘insecure’ parts into the therapeutic relationship in order to notice how they relate with another person, and to experience a different response to the damaging ones they’ve received in the past.

Ara: It often feels like that doesn’t it? That me, you or Fox is taking Morgan, Jonathan or Tony to therapy to give them an hour of practicing doing this with another person.

James: Right, they practise with us at home, and with our therapist in that room. Doing similar things. Like the therapist will point out their defences and encourage them to drop into their body, communicate how they’re feeling, etc. They can practise revealing the things that they assume other people will reject in them – because that’s what’s happened in the past – and experience somebody just being okay with them.

Ara: Maybe a couple of examples?

James: Well like whenever Morgan allows herself to talk about what she’d really like to say to somebody who has treated us badly, our therapist clearly enjoys her energy and her capacity to see through people’s bullshit and protect us. And Tony is gradually feeling safe enough that if he shows up in therapy with the energy that he’s scared will be ‘too much’ for people, she’ll help him to stay grounded. She’ll be up for seeing the vulnerability he’s covering over, while encouraging him to go slowly instead of revealing ‘too far too fast’ as he has in the past.

Ara: And you’re thinking that this kind of therapy is a bridge to bringing those parts into more open relation with others?

James: I think that’s where discernment comes in perhaps. Who is it safe enough to openly engage with from those parts? Who might we be able to speak about these parts with, without actually bringing them out? What situations might we want to be cautious around, perhaps only bringing you or me to Ara, at least while this is all so new?

Ara: I’m thinking that maps nicely onto what Tony and I wrote about Dunbar’s number too. Discerning where a relationship is at, in our life, and what that means in terms of how open and vulnerable we’re able to be in it.

James: Heh our computer just told us it was ‘establishing secure connection’. I thought, ‘you and me both mate’!

Ara: *laughs*

James: What were we saying? Oh yeah. So we’re finding it hugely useful to recognise that Morgan, Tony, and Jonathan are already engaged in all our relationships – of course. And now we continually check in where they’re at with them. There’s a sense that, instead of denying that we feel any anger, yearning, or fear towards the people in our life, perhaps it’s more useful to assume that we will feel all of those things – to some extent – in all our relationships, and to name that – to ourselves, and even with that person.

Ara: Absolutely. There’s this paradoxical sense that the more we can allow all of that, the better we’ll be able  to love that person.

James: The more we know how we hate them, fear them, and want something from them, the better the relationship will be! It is surprising indeed, but it’s true. We’ve navigated recent potentially tricky moments in relationships much better, I think, being able to name to ourselves what those attachments – or potential attachments – are with that person.

Ara: Again an example?

James: Well with one friend we noticed how Tony wanted to fling himself into closer relationship with them, while Morgan had flickers of anger that perhaps they weren’t being mindful enough of how vulnerable we are. With another we noticed Tony wishing for more time with them, and Morgan wanting to dismiss them for not making more time for us. 

Those two things happened with friends who we talk about this stuff with all the time so we could name it, and they could reciprocate naming the multiple different parts of them in play. It makes it much easier to be able to say ‘this part of me feels…’ because there’s no blame in it. Not ‘you’re treating us badly’ but ‘I notice that part of me longs for more time with you and another part of me wants to distance from you because we’re not getting it. Can we talk about how we might do time together in future so those parts can have a bit more clarity about where we’re at?’ 

Ara: Mm that’s a good example because it turned out that it wasn’t that we really wanted lots more from them, or to reject them, we just wanted to understand where they were at more clearly, and what we could expect from them.

James: Discernment is important in knowing who will be up for those kinds of conversations and who won’t. Sometimes it’s more of an implicit sense – once we’ve named it all to ourselves – that we need to pull back a bit from this person, or to have a different kind of conversation, perhaps just from one of us Ara.

Ara: Yes, in the deepest relationships we might encourage Tony, Jonathan or Morgan to have the conversation directly, in order to experience that part of us being met well. In less close ones we could report on where our parts are at. In even less close relationships – like a professional exchange – we would talk from one of us as if we were a unified ‘I’, once we’d come up with our boundary, or request, or whatever it was. It feels important to have at least some relationships where all parts of us are welcome, just as we welcome them within ourselves.

James: I think we’re nearly there with this piece Ara.

Ara: One more breath to feel whether there’s anything more to add?

James: *breathes* Okay yes I want to say that it’s important to give these processes a lot of time. That’s why slow, spacious relationships are so essential for us at the moment. Often we need time to notice that an exchange with somebody has brought some of those ‘insecure’ feelings up in us, to find the part – or multiple parts – in us who are triggered, to fully drop into what they are feeling, and then to consider together what kind of response, if any, is necessary. We tend to keep ongoing notes on our phone about each of the current situations in play, and keep returning to them over days, or even weeks, until we have a clear sense of the appropriate response.

Ara: Mm right, and not jumping too quickly to that last stage is so important. As we’ve said, it might be that the feeling just needs to be held and heard inwardly, or that some kind of communication or clarification is important, or that we need the relationship to shift in some way. We often can’t tell which it is till we’ve had time to go through the whole process. And the more we do this – giving it time, and asking that other people give us time – the more those parts of us relax into the process instead of freaking out and trying to solve it immediately.

James: Criticism and conflict are a particular challenge of course. Morgan, Jonathan, and Tony would reactively go into a blame, shame, or tame response – respectively.

Ara: I like that. Blame the other, collapse in shame, or tame the situation by glossing over it or making it okay for the other person without attending to our needs. But taking time, as a team, helps us find more of an ‘I’m okay, you’re okay’ response, where we value ourselves and the others involved equally.

James: This whole thing also helps us to see much more clearly when we’re on the receiving end of other peoples’ reactivity: when they are foregrounding their equivalent of Morgan, Tony, or Jonathan – or their Max cover up. We’re not there yet of course, but there’s a strong sense of building compassion for others – even when they do react against us – because we’re so familiar with those parts of ourselves, and we know the incredibly tough feelings – and the painful experiences – that they come from. On the way to that compassion, though, we need to fully feel our attractions and aversions to those things in other people.

Ara: The sense I’m left with is that ‘earned secure attachment’ requires us to hold – and even share – all of our ‘insecure attachments’. Without that it would just be ‘faux secure attachment’ again.

James: Which meshes nicely with Bonnie Badenoch’s ‘radical inclusivity’, Janina Fisher’s ‘no part gets left behind’ and Richard Schwartz’s ‘no bad parts’. The answer is never to try to eradicate any part, or the less palatable elements of any part. The answer is to welcome them all fully, reach an inner secure attachment with them, and bring them all to all of our experiences in a safe-enough, secure-enough way.

Ara: Nicely put James.

James: Thank-you. And thank-you for doing this Ara. I’ve loved it, and your reminders to pause have definitely helped me both to enjoy the process throughout, and to not stray into the unwieldy lengths of some of our blog posts.

Ara: Mm there’s definitely more to be said about applying this same approach to our relationship with work James, but not for now. Let’s keep it a succinct little piece (for us!) at under 7000 words. Time for a walk *smiles*

More on this:

For more exploration of these themes check out our recent pieces on attachment, slow relating, and big feels and the other work on trauma and plurality on this website.

Patreon link: If you enjoyed this please feel free to support my free writing on Patreon.

Plural tag: This post was by James and Ara.

The post Attachment, emotion and plural parts work appeared first on Rewriting The Rules.

If you haven’t read one of my plural blog-posts before and aren’t sure who these people are, feel free to check out my Plural Selves zine, and my previous post about plurality. But hopefully you don’t need to get that part in order to find the content here useful.

Staying with the Big Feels Theory

James: Hey Ara, a first time for us I think.

Ara: The inner parents blogging together at last.

James: That’s one way to see us. I’m increasingly preferring ‘containing parts’ to ‘parents’ though. For one, we have three such parts rather than two, and for another I’m pretty sure Beastie would question a hierarchical parent/child model, or a normative internal nuclear family model, as a useful basis for anything.

Ara: I imagine she would. In your previous posts with her she pointed out that all parts of us are capable of containing others at times, and all parts struggle at times. That’s important. However there is a sense in us that we have four parts who hold a lot of trauma from our past, and who have been running the show for much of our life – whether more foregrounded or more in the background. That’s Max, Tony, Beastie and Jonathan. Now we also have access to three parts – you, me and Fox – who feel less impacted by the past, and more able to care for, and protect, the others in the present.

James: I think that you and I are still finding our way too: to who we can be in our inner and outer world. Perhaps that’s another blog post. In this one we want to focus on staying with intense emotions.

Ara: We wanted to write this one together because we have been the parts who have done most of the work of containing the other parts through such feelings over the last six months or so – since we last wrote the previous plural blog posts.

James: This is an update on what’s happened during that period, in a way.

Ara: What we’ve learnt during that time. 

All The Feels

James: Let’s start with what happened last August: it feels pivotal.

Ara: Good plan.

James: It amuses us now – when we can take a big perspective on it – that we wrote that Staying with Feelings zine back in 2016. Back then we thought we had a pretty good handle on being up for feeling our difficult emotions – and some great practices for doing so – which we shared in that zine. We had no idea what was coming!

Ara: Everything that we put in that zine still holds though. I don’t want to dismiss how well that version of us back then – mostly Max – was doing: finding ways to stay with feelings at all. And in many ways what we’ve done this past few months builds on the basic ideas in that zine.

1. The evidence is clear that people do best – in terms of mental and physical health – when they can tune into their bodies and feel their feelings, and live their lives on the basis of that self-awareness: expressing their needs, desires, boundaries, and so on.
2. Most of us struggle to do this because our culture discourages any experience or expression of emotions, particularly ‘negative feelings’, and because traumatic experiences growing up give us the message that such feelings are unsafe to express, or even to feel.
3. In order to address this, we can learn practices – like focusing and forms of meditation – which explicitly involve tuning into our feelings, welcoming them, and learning what they have to tell us.

James: This hits very personally for us. Pretty much everybody receives the message  – from the world around them, and in close relationships – that certain feelings aren’t acceptable. But for us – growing up in the 70s – we received specific behavioural training from teachers and caregivers to try to condition us out of crying. There was a strong sense that it was vital to control your emotions and to disallow the ‘difficult’ ones. The message that sadness, fear, and anger, in particular, were unacceptable was very strong. We wrote about that in the emotions chapter of Life Isn’t Binary.

Ara: That’s why we ‘re so grateful for the Pixar movie Inside Out. It shows vividly what happens to a person when there’s an attempt to eradicate any of their core emotions. They become unbalanced when only certain emotions run the show, and eventually end up numb and grey with little access to feelings at all. 

There’s a sense of an inauthentic version of yourself operating in order to survive in a world where it doesn’t feel safe to show how you really feel; to the point that you don’t even know that there is more to you than that, or that those emotions still exist inside you somewhere.

James: We still can’t handle the scene when goofball island collapses.

Ara: In many ways you could see our process in the last few years as one of welcoming back in those core feelings – and the parts who hold them – and beginning to reshape our inner landscape with all present, and working together as a team.

James: Return to goofball island!

Ara: We feel that sometimes for sure. But we were going to start with last August…

James: Right, so I think that prior to that we had thought that we were pretty good at staying with the feelings. But in 2019 things fell apart for us – bringing us back up against a lot of the most painful times of our life which I think we hadn’t really felt at the time. Pandemic saw us locked in with all of those memories, and gradually the really big feels returned.

Ara: I see it in two ways simultaneously James. 

James: Of course you do, you’re all about the non-binary thinking *smiles*

Ara: We can tell the trauma story where we went through a series of events so confronting that we finally had to feel all of the times in our life which those events re-awoke in us. We can also tell a healing story where we were on a journey – for the last few years up till now – towards greater self awareness, more embodied practices, and sharing more vulnerably in relationships. 

It feels like it was both simultaneously. Deliberately opening up space enabled us to feel what happened to us more deeply. Feeling it so deeply enabled us to finally make those connections through the events of our life and to learn how to welcome the various parts of us – and their feelings – more fully.

James: It’s like our experience of the lockdown, that bothness. Was pandemic the final retraumatising experience that cracked the whole thing open, or was it the situation which gave us the space and solitude we needed to finally do this work? Probably both.

Ara: So to August.

James: In August we found ourselves in the grip of one of our regular bouts of post-viral chronic fatigue. It was one of the hottest weeks of the year and we were experiencing pain throughout our body, exhaustion, fever, vertigo… Somehow it felt like the final straw and suddenly all four traumatised parts of us were feeling their feelings turned up to eleven, as if our whole life finally caught up with them. It was a lot to hold. It honestly felt like we were two parents – also with sick bodies! – trying to juggle four sick screaming children during a heatwave.

Ara: And again with the bothness. Before that point we had not had a consistent sense of our presence had we James: you and me I mean?

James: Since then there hasn’t been a single time where we haven’t been accessible to the rest of them when they’ve needed us, and we are a lot more present in our everyday life. Like much of the day it feels like one of us is around, generally with one of the others either getting on with life, or caring for them.

Ara: It’s as if that week demanded us to come forward more fully because the need was finally clear. Or was it that we’d finally brought us forward enough that all parts of us finally felt able to express those long-hidden feelings? 

James: Mm I hadn’t seen it that way before.

Separating out the feels

Ara: Shall we talk about separating out the feelings next?

James: Sure, because one reason that week was so challenging was that they were feeling the feelings of our various parts all mixed together. It was really confusing. Back then we weren’t completely clear on who felt what, so we were working with a huge tangled mass of emotion, and it was loud!

Ara: This is one reason that parts work is so valuable. The more fully that we can get to know the individual parts of us, the more quickly we can locate a feeling in the part who is feeling it and work with it, perhaps at the flicker stage rather than it becoming a fire. Or even if it kicks off as a full blaze, we know who is blazing, and the kind of thing that generally helps them when they’re struggling like that. 

As Janina Fisher says, for everybody it can be more helpful to say ‘a part of me feels…’ than ‘I feel…’ because that enables it to be held rather than taking over. Also it allows for contradictory feelings to be present, rather than the common view that it’s not okay – even crazy – to have both desire for something and fear of it, or both anger at someone and yearning for them, for example. 

Even if people don’t experience themselves as vividly plural, as we did, they could use the Inside Out metaphor of imagining the different emotions as different characters in their bodymind.

James: That separating out the feelings is one of the biggest shifts I’ve noticed since last summer Ara. That sense of more clarity. ‘Oh that feeling is around, that belongs to Jonathan, let’s go check out how he’s doing before we do anything else.’

Ara: Absolutely. I would say that identifying feelings where they reside, and a radically inclusive commitment to welcoming all of them, are the two biggest shifts we’ve made. We may not always know what parts need, and we may still feel that resistance in them to bringing their feelings forward. But we generally have that clarity about whose feelings they are, and we have a pervading understanding that everything is welcome: However we feel is okay, not a problem to be fixed.

James: How does all of this relate to trauma?

Ara: Mm we’ve been thinking about plurality and trauma even more. There’s an idea in some of the literature that being vividly plural is a result of trauma. We’ve written before about the need for caution with that idea. For one thing, few people escape trauma in our non-consensual culture. For another, the sense of yourself as one coherent self is very culturally specific, and could even be the result of trauma where you’ve internalised that strong message that only a certain version of you is acceptable. Many therapies and spiritual practices deliberately help people sense their plural parts as part of healing.

James: It seems that where trauma comes in is in splitting different parts off from one another so thoroughly that they can’t communicate with each other. For some this is to the extent that they have little memory for one part when they are in another. For others there’s complete disavowal that the disowned parts of them exist.

Ara: How would you say it was for us James?

James: There was a strong sense that parts of us split off to hold those feelings which felt both unacceptable to others and unbearable to us.

Ara: Mm well put, and perhaps those go together. When you’ve been taught young that certain parts of yourself – or the feelings they express – are unacceptable then those feelings do become utterly overwhelming and intolerable. You become used to being punished by others when those feelings are around, or to being alone with the huge weight of them because you know it’s not okay to share them. For kids that kind of punishment is felt as annihilation, and that kind of aloneness as abandonment. Both can be felt like the danger of death, because a small child can’t survive if they are unacceptable to those around them and/or left alone.

James: *exhales* a lot of the early memories we’ve been with these last months have been like that. A young part of us alone in bed completely destroyed by the waves of this terrifying feeling crashing over them.

Ara: You’ve done such a good job at holding them through that James, giving them some sense of safety at those times.

James: Thank-you. I love doing it, and I hate them being there.

Ara: You asked about trauma. My sense is that the impact of trauma on us was that splitting off – not the dividing into different parts, but splitting off to the extent that those parts – and their feelings – were hidden to us. It was as if they’d all gone to different rooms in our bodymind in order to hold those feelings: to keep the part of us who was carrying on with life safe from feeling them.

James: But that meant that we weren’t able to get the important things that humans need from those hidden feelings. We were operating in life without a lot of key information about ourselves and the world. And when the feelings did leak in or break through, they often did so in damaging ways.

Ara: Let’s take those two pieces one at a time James…

Why are the feelings so vital?

James: So the big feels that surprised us in August were these ones:

• Max (flight): Trapped fear and deep grief.
• Jonathan (fawn/freeze): Terror of dangerous others and of being plunged into shame.
• Beastie (fight): Furious rage.
• Tony (fasten/attach): Desperate yearning for love/connection.

So I guess we’re saying that, previously in our life, we hadn’t really allowed feelings of fear, sadness, shame, anger, and loneliness. We tried to avoid those feelings, or at least some aspects of them. Like maybe we’d allow sadness in ‘appropriate’ situations, but not inexplicable waves of grief. We’d let ourselves be – often very – angry with ourselves, but not with others. That kind of thing. To be honest I think our story of ourselves was that we barely ever felt angry feelings, or any of those yearning feelings like loneliness or jealousy.

Ara: And that maps onto the sense of those feelings being held by our most disowned parts: Tony and Beastie. A bit like when feelings are cast out of the control room in Inside Out. We were more familiar with Max and Jonathan. Max was our foregrounded ‘getting on with life’ part who tried to work hard and be ‘good’ in order to protect Jonathan from ever having to feel that deep fear and shame that he holds. But even Jonathan was split off because Max wasn’t aware that she was protecting him, just that she had to be good and keep busy. 

A lot of Max’s grief now is the realisation that she was dissociated a lot of the time – whether in the busyness of work, or going into a kind of ‘faking through it’ mode when dangerous things happened. There’s a sense of her as a kind of puppet performing through everything, hence her horror of being trapped now.

James: How would you say the hidden feelings are valuable Ara?

Ara: Well putting it simply it’s something like this:

• Fear enables us to know when a situation or relationship is risky for us.
• Anger enables us to protect ourselves from non-consensual or unsafe behaviour.
• Loneliness, longing and related feelings move us in the direction of connection with others, which is a vital human need.
• Sadness and grief help us to process the painful things that happen to us so that we can move through them rather than holding onto them tightly forever.
• Shame – when we are able to feel it as regret, rather than collapsing in the unbearable sense that there is something fundamentally wrong with us – enables us to look at our potentially harmful behaviour and make changes to act with more integrity and compassion.

The first two feelings are vital for protection. Without fear and anger we are at great risk of continually placing ourselves in harm’s way, because we find it so hard to discern when things are unsafe, and so hard to protect ourselves when they are. 

Yearning and sorrow are vital for connection: without them we won’t relate with other people and can’t handle the loss of those relationships. 

And if shame can’t be felt safely – without the sense it will destroy us – then both connection and protection are very hard because other people feel dangerous (they might see that we’re fundamentally not okay) and we don’t feel deserving of protection (because we believe that we’re fundamentally not okay).

James: Ah that makes sense of our feeling that shame is at the heart of everything. We had to work on shame for a long time before it felt possible to welcome in anger and yearning particularly.

Ara: The trauma literature is really helpful for understanding the terrible impact that not feeling the feelings – and therefore not being able to connect and protect – has on mental and physical health. But I’d love to get onto the process of how we actually go about welcoming the feelings James. I feel like we’ve learnt so much about that during this period. 

First though can we briefly touch on the other reasons why it’s so important?

Leaking out and breaking through

James: What you said about how otherwise those feelings can leak out or break through?

Ara: Right. Now that we know our parts – and the feelings they hold – so much better, we can see that they didn’t stay completely split off throughout our life. Rather they leaked out in ways we didn’t recognise, and occasionally broke through in ways that were extremely confusing and destructive.

James: Tony’s yearning leaked out by propelling us towards connection in ways that weren’t very conscious or considered, to say the least. Beastie’s rage – unable to be known or expressed – reflected back on us in the form of a vicious inner critic, and occasionally leaked out in the form of a desire to ‘tell the truth’ about things, which got us in trouble more than once. And Jonathan’s terror of shame meant that we’d often act in hypervigilant and people pleasing ways which were exhausting for us, and probably felt as inauthentic by others.

Ara: Again I’d emphasise how valuable all of those parts and feelings are. Even in their hidden/leaking forms it has been wonderful that we’ve been so driven to connect with others through our life and work. That truth-telling impulse has been behind much of what we’ve written about the problems with cultural norms and oppressive systems, which has been helpful to other people as well. And the care and compassion for others inherent in our little people pleaser is a beautiful thing.

James: The sense is that the more we can welcome them – all of them, and all their feelings – the more we may be able to connect, to create, and to care, without getting ourselves in the kinds of trouble that come with doing those things unconsciously.

Ara: Our other past experience with those feelings was that they could come crashing in in ways that were disorienting and overwhelming for us and for others. I expect it’s a common experience when you hide these things that they break through in situations when your guard is down, or where something intense enough happens that you can no longer hold them at bay.

James: Right. So common ones for us were that when we really let another person in close – or spent a lot of time with them – generally a partner, we would start to have melt-downs where those huge intense feelings suddenly spilled out.

Ara: It was terrifying when we had no understanding of it, like a sudden plummet into overwhelming fear, rage, shame, and/or yearning. That’s why it felt so hard for us to be around another person 24/7: the horror that they might see that, and that we might hurt them with those feelings.

James: It’s been incredibly hard to finally be living alone and to experience those kinds of plummets by ourselves, without much access to support. But it also feels like a vital part of the process of finally learning how to be with those moments, rather than desperately wanting somebody else to make it better, at the same time as being deeply ashamed that they saw us that way, and terrified that they’ll abandon us – or harm us – because of it.

Ara: There you go, right there is a great example of why it’s so helpful to separate out the feelings and to feel them in the various parts of us. All those times we did plummet with another person we were also having all those contradictory feelings about it at once: Tony clinging and desperate for them to prove we were loveable in spite of it, Max full of shame at being seen that way, Jonathan fearing attack, Beastie expecting abandonment.

James: Ah yes, I hadn’t seen that. No wonder it felt like such an impossible spiral of emotion to be stuck in. 

Ara: When parts and their feelings are very disowned, the other impact is that any situation that triggers old trauma can bring them up very vividly. 

James: And that would be what we experienced as periods of post traumatic stress in our life: times when something so terrifying and shame-inducing happened that we couldn’t hold those feelings at bay and they crashed in for a while, making everyday life incredibly hard. Basically we’ve just been going through the fourth period like that that we’ve had in our life, but this time with the gradually increasing capacity to tease out the different parts and to hold them through it.

But even now it is incredibly disorienting, because we know that we are this person with all our experience, knowledge, and support to draw on, but – because the parts are still to some extent split off – we can quickly drop into feeling like the terrified child again, for example. It’s very hard to navigate life at such times, or to plan for the future. Hard to know whether to ask people to treat us as they always do, or to treat us as an extremely vulnerable person.

Ara: Because we are all of that, trying to learn how to hold all of that! Onto how we’ve been trying to do it…

Staying with the Big Feels Practice

How to feel the feels

Ara: Okay so that’s the theory – and how it works for us. Shall we get to the practice?

James: Let’s. Usual caveat that different things work for different people at different times. This is what we’ve found useful during this period, but other people will need to find their own path through it I’m sure.

Ara: That’s vital. So easy for hearing somebody else’s experience to become yet more fodder for the inner critic – like somehow we should be doing everything that everyone else suggests. We’ve found that it’s vital to adapt suggestions to work for us, to reject those that don’t work right now, and to trust our inner wisdom to guide us on our path, which will be different to everyone else’s.

Where would you like to start James?

James: I’d love you to help me think through some paradoxes that are really confusing to me in all of this.

Ara: I’m so up for that.

Big space and close up work

James: Okay so a major one for me is that you and I seem to approach being with the big feelings in very different ways, and I’m wondering how they can both be ‘right’.

Ara: Go on.

James: The way it’s shaken down between us is that you’re ‘in charge’ of holding our parts – and their feelings – in the big space, or the gap. I’m ‘in charge’ of what we think of as ‘close up work’: holding and hearing the parts in their feelings, exploring them in that more ‘focusing’ or therapeutic kind of way.

Ara: Both approaches involve ensuring that whatever part we’re in – and whatever feelings they experience – they are now accompanied, which is the vital piece I think. But you’re right that my approach and yours towards accompaniment feel very different James. 

James: Do you want to say a bit more about what you do, and I’ll do the same?

Ara: Certainly. So it seems that I’m around when we meditate – which is something we’ve come back to, having struggled with it in the past. In an average session what that feels like to me is that I’m sitting in this wide open space, and then one of our parts will surface and I can observe them, and notice the feelings they are having and how they’re responding to those. The whole thing is infused with the sense that anything that arises is welcome, and that we can simply notice it together and come back to the present moment – perhaps the sunlight on the roofs opposite, or a bird flying past.

When a much more intense feeling is around, my big space approach is to take the part who is feeling it on a walk, maybe sit up in the hills, and we keep noticing how they go into big spirals of tough thoughts and feelings, and how it’s possible to recognise that they’ve been swept up in that, and return to right now.

James: I remember you doing that with Jonathan one time and it was eventually even possible for him to get quite excited at the next spiral: seeing it as an opportunity to practice this new superpower of getting swept up and coming back to ground.

Ara: Several nights with him we sat looking out at the night and just focused in on one small lit up window and the way the telephone wire moved across it. Somehow we could return to that in brief moments throughout the tumultuous mass of traumatic feelings.

Do you want to describe your approach James?

James: Sure. So when I feel any part of us having strong feelings I engage in conversation with them. If they’re feeling bad I often lie down – so it feels like I’m lying holding them, even with a hand on their belly, or stroking their arm. Hm I notice that this feels way more vulnerable to describe than your practices Ara.

Ara: Interesting. We’re not encouraged to love ourselves in such close, tender ways are we? Talking with ourselves or giving ourselves nurturing touch? Meditation is somehow more culturally palatable. What kinds of conversations do you have? 

James: I guess it’s something like focusing – which we described in the feelings zine – or the ‘befriending questions’ that Janina Fisher uses. I try to tune into what that particular part needs on that occasion. So I might ask them to describe the feeling, to tell me where it is in their body, to do a stream of consciousness about what comes up with them around it in terms of images or memories. Sometimes it stays in the present, exploring what fears are going on for them, and reassuring them, or reminding them how we’ve got through such things in the past. Sometimes we go back in time remembering all the times we’ve felt this feeling before. Occasionally we’ve zeroed in on an earlier time and gone over that memory in our mind, maybe bringing you or me in to act it out differently in our imagination – what it would have been like if we’d been there to hear and hold them back then. We got that from Sarah Peyton’s work.

Ara: Maybe we can say a bit more about how we use some of these tools later James. For now d’you want to say what you’re aiming for with your approach?

James: It’s what some authors call regulation, but we’ve preferred to call attunement. There’s often a click moment with ‘close up work’ where the struggling part feels really held and heard in their distress. We’ve heard people compare it to the ‘attunement bliss’ or ‘coregulation’ that can happen between a parent and child, or between therapist and client, or close people when they feel really understood by each other. It can happen, for example, if the part finally feels able to express their feelings and I hold them as they cry. Or it can happen if we get to an understanding of what happened that has eluded us before. Or it can happen if we remember that we’ve been here before and what got us through.

Ara: Going back to our earlier understanding of the big feels residing in split off parts, each moment like that seems like welcoming that part home, even more, and demonstrating to them that nothing that they bring with them will be rejected or unwelcome – quite the opposite. Some call it a kind of ‘soul retrieval’: fragmented off parts of us being brought back into the whole. We think it’s also what can give us that ‘earned secure attachment’ over time: welcoming all those parts back into us fully and sharing them with safe enough others in our life.

James: And it seems to be a gradual process. We know all of our parts now (unless we’re in for another big surprise!), but it seems like each of them is slowly bringing more and more of the feelings they’ve been keeping to themselves, perhaps as they trust more than those feelings can be held and heard here.

Ara: We often feel an initial resistance. They are so used to having to repress those feelings, and so scared that they will ‘ruin’ things for us by bringing them. But the more you encourage those conversations, and the more they end in that ‘reward’ of attunement, the more it feels safe – even good – for those parts to bring their feelings.

Which approach to take?

James: I’m still confused though Ara. Our approaches seem so opposite to one another. Is it better to hold feelings in the big space and watch them bubble up and drift away, or is it better to go towards them and explore them in the way that I do? I guess I worry that my approach encourages our parts to be in these incredibly tough feelings more, when they could just have let them go if they’d gone to you.

Ara: Mm, my strong sense is that both approaches are necessary and that they work very well alongside each other, whereas one without the other might be risky.

James: Say more.

Ara: Can we touch on the theory behind them first? I guess my approach is rooted in the Buddhist / mindfulness theory that suffering happens when we struggle against what’s happening: either our outer circumstances or our inner experiences. The big space is about welcoming all of it, and noticing how pain of any kind passes if we don’t escalate it with storylines about how bad it is, or with our struggles to escape it.

James: Whereas my approach is rooted in the therapeutic understanding that we lock trauma in our bodies when painful things happen which are not regulated – or heard and held – at the time. I’m ensuring that they are heard and held now – both present pain, and the past pain that underlies it.

Ara: So I think the risk of my approach without your approach is a kind of spiritual bypassing James. We could take every tough feeling to the big space that way, but perhaps we would then never have fully felt it, understood where it comes from, shown it that it is welcome now – that we can hold it and hear it. I can imagine a me-centric version of us who got attached to spiritual practice but still struggled to be back in the world with other people, where these things got triggered, because they hadn’t really been dealt with.

James: I’m trying to think what the equivalent is for me. What does a James-centric version of us look like?! I’m thinking that, in recent times, parts have got edgy when a flicker of a tough feeling has come up – like it means that they’re due another two hours on the couch with James looking into it! Occasionally we’ve had a shorter meditation at those points and sensed that it didn’t need such intense work, just to be acknowledged and move on. I wonder if my approach without yours could get quite heavy going, or keep us quite mired in the pain of our life past and present.

Ara: I don’t know for sure, but I think that might be part of the need for balance. And of course our third ‘containing’ part does something different again. 

James: Fox. They are the part who can simply delight in whatever is going on right now. They don’t go towards the feelings at all. They’re just with the immediate sights, sounds, smells, sensations around us – being present. They can bring that sense equally to a walk where they notice everything, or to gentling up and enjoying a good meal and a TV show. When another part is around and struggling they welcome that part alongside them with whatever is going on, sharing the wonder with them.

Ara: Pema described something like this in a recent talk we heard: accessing a part of yourself who is patient and kind, another part who has deep trust in your capacities, and a final part who can appreciate those fleeting times of contentment in the moment.

James: We should say it’s taken nearly 50 years for us to have full access to those three. Five years ago we’d only experienced the tiniest glimmers of these parts of us. Somehow we patchworked ‘us’ together from those glimmers, from other people who modelled this for us, from fictional characters…

Ara: So going back to your question I don’t think that any of those three approaches – mine, yours, or Fox’s – is ‘better’. It’s more about tuning into each time feelings are up and asking what they seem to need. And being up for trying one thing, and then another, if that doesn’t work.

James: Rupture and repair is important too isn’t it? Where we try something and it doesn’t help, and we can acknowledge how painful that is to a part who is feeling desperate, and suggest trying something else. We actually build trust between us through such moments.

Ara: Being up for acknowledging our imperfection, and having got it wrong, rather than making them feel bad for not feeling better. Again that’s healing for times in the past when people have protected the blame onto us when they haven’t been able to be around our feelings, or have felt inadequate for not being able to help.

James: Mm, and I’m also thinking there’s something here about us being alongside our other parts rather than doing this for them. There’s a sense in which rage is Beastie’s, grief is Max’s, longing is Tony’s, and terror is Jonathan’s. It’s important that they get to learn what works for them, and to apply it, with us helping them, but not taking over for them. Does that make sense?

Ara: Yes, empowering each one rather than taking over for them. On an inner level it mirrors the outer level. Bonnie Badenoch says that people need others to believe in them and support them in finding their path. It can be really damaging if a therapist, friend, or other person decides they know better, or gets into ‘fix it’ mode because they can’t handle being around the pain.

James: Right, but again with the paradox, because it’s also felt helpful to remind those four parts that they don’t have to do anything – like figuring things out or fixing them – they just have to be: bringing their feelings when they are around and trusting us to hold and hear them, and eventually act upon them if need be.

Escalating emotions or taking them seriously?

James: Okay here’s another one for you, related perhaps. We were just reading Pema’s ‘Living Beautifully with Uncertainty and Change’, which references a finding that feelings only last one and a half minutes unless you fuel them. The idea is that the thing to do is to let them pass through, to recognise their impermanence. You do that by ‘dropping the storyline’ you tell yourself about them. You try not to escalate the feelings with your stories about how bad they are, and how that means you’re bad, or somebody else is bad, or something like that. All those thought spirals somehow make the feeling fixed and solid, instead of allowing it to pass like a cloud in the sky.

Ara: Mmhm.

James: How does that fit with the trauma therapy idea you shared earlier that these emotions are vital motivators towards connection or protection, and that our problem in the past has actually been not feeling them enough?

Ara: I wonder whether there’s almost two phases to feelings-work James. There’s the phase of just being with the feeling – whether in the big open space, or in the kind of close-up description work that you do. Then there may be a second phase for more exploration of what the feeling brings up. Sometimes all that’s necessary is to welcome the feeling, fully experience it, and let it go to get back on with daily life. Other times the feeling is pointing to something important that requires more attention. 

James: Right, I’m thinking about how therapy tends to have components of helping clients to finally feel their feelings, and components of talking about the events of the past and present, for example. Or how Buddhism emphasises mindfulness practice and also applying the teachings to your everyday life.

Ara: So, for example, I recently meditated and Beastie was there feeling angry several times. Afterwards I chatted with her and we thought through together what the different angry feelings were about – why they were of value. We were able to see some that were a response to having repressed anger for so long – turned it in on ourselves. Some were about injustice – others having access to freedoms we don’t have. Some were about the specific pain of people offering something they don’t really have to give, and we could link current examples of that to early experiences. 

Beastie is very concerned, at the moment, that the capacity to feel anger more vividly doesn’t flip us from turning it in against ourselves to turning it out against others. We wondered about how we might ensure that it remained more of a counterbalance to shame. In the past we’ve too readily accepted others’ stories of everything as ‘all our fault’. Perhaps we can use the opportunities of Beastie’s anger to see other people’s stuff that might be in the mix, and wider cultural stuff.

James: I sense another blog post coming on! But if I can draw something out of that for emotions in general, you’re saying that it’s another both/and. There’s a place for noticing how we escalate emotions, and practicing doing something different to that. And there’s a place for getting curious about the feelings that come up regularly – and what triggers them – and using that as an opportunity to learn.

Ara: About ourselves and others. The first time Beastie felt hate outwards vividly she had a huge flash of understanding for those who have hated us. Previously we’d struggled to connect with how horrific hatred feels, and how people can act so violently out of it.

I think the difference is intentionality James. Taking emotions seriously is very different to escalating them. Instead of letting the storylines spiral round and round we’re deliberately reflecting on the feelings. And we also try to refrain from speaking or acting out of the feelings until we’ve reached a better understanding of them, and considered whether such speech or action is the wise and compassionate thing to do in that situation – for us and the others involved.

Different practices for different intensities?

James: I realise I’m asking a lot of questions here!  Another one I’m with is about the intensity of feelings. When we wrote ‘Staying with Feelings’ we didn’t have much trauma understanding so we just suggested practices for staying with feelings no matter what they were, or how intense. 

Since then we’ve come across trauma-based understandings which suggest that it’s all about the intensity of the feeling. Ideas like the emotional thermometer or zones of feeling suggest that we might want to do very different things in different zones.

Ara: A helpful way to see them is concentric circles with the comfort zone in the middle, the challenge zone after that, and the overwhelm zone as the outer circle. The trauma idea of ‘expanding the window of tolerance’ encourages us to keep moving from comfort zone into challenge zone and back again with our feelings, without pushing into overwhelm. In overwhelm we retraumatise ourselves – which may well shrink the window of tolerance – which is how spacious the challenge zone is.

James: We learnt that one well before we read any trauma literature. We decided to list all the traumatic events of our life so we could go through them one after another. That’s a fast track to overwhelm right there!

Ara: It can be really hard to learn that we have to go slowly, and that pushing into trauma tends to make it a lot worse. It’s much more about learning how to tune into our bodies so that we have a much better awareness of where we are in those zones. What are the signs that we might be heading towards overwhelm? Can we learn to notice those and pull back at such times? Can we learn what we need when we have tipped over to bring ourselves back?

James: So we shifted our perspective, last year, from ‘always feel the feelings’ to ‘feel them in the challenge zone’, but in overwhelm just focus on bringing yourself back to a more settled nervous system: using grounding practices and that kind of thing.

Ara: But you have a question?

James: I suppose it’s sometimes felt more complex than that. Like a big feeling has come up and been with us for several days, and by continuing to be with it – gently but thoroughly – we’ve eventually got to some major revelations about our life, and a huge sense of relief.

Ara: It feels like the process Brene Brown described in ‘Rising Strong’: being prepared to be with the messy middle.

James: It’s happened for us when it simply doesn’t feel possible to ‘bring ourselves back’, the feeling is so intense, so it’s more about weathering it and trying to have faith that it will get clearer at some point: that it likely has some pretty important learning for us if we can just hang on in there with it.

Ara: I don’t think those views are incompatible James. What we’re committing to is to not repressing feelings or trying to resist them.

James: Is the overwhelm zone what happens when we resist them? 

Ara: Sometimes I think so. They get louder and scarier when we resist them, in an attempt to be heard. But sometimes it’s more that we’ve reached an experience which is too much for us to deal with – at our current capacity – and it’s tipped us over.

James: Non-resistance then is more about recognising we’re in overwhelm and that’s okay, it happens. And being as gentle as possible with ourselves while we’re there, trying to remind ourselves that there probably is a big learning here: about what things are still an edge for us in the present and/or about how things were for us in the past.

Ara: We’ve found ‘reminding ourselves this is okay’ to be gold in all this. Instead of punishing ourselves for having got overwhelmed again, we remind ourselves that this is just okay. Even on the worst days there are moments that are calmer, or more connected.

James: I remember one time I held Beastie and we found this dot. Like the comfort zone had shrunk to a tiny dot, but if we stayed on that dot she could feel okay. Any attempt to think about what we were going to do next, or how we were going to handle some situation, would tip her directly into overwhelm, but we kept coming back to the dot over and over until eventually there was some buffer zone around it again.

Ara: I like that sense of all the concentric circles expanding and contracting over time. Long term, and even over the course of an hour or a day.

James: I wonder if it’s ever possible to convey this to those who haven’t experienced trauma feelings so starkly. Like we had whole weeks when Jonathan kept being pushed into overwhelm by the thought that our IPad battery might not last the whole day for an event we’re doing in several months time. When the comfort zone and challenge zone have shrunk that much, we’re in incapacitating overwhelming emotions for much of the time and anything can re-trigger them. Sometimes the whole day’s work is just bringing ourselves back from overwhelm for a moment or two. It is exactly like being a terrified child stuck in an adult’s body, but still as convinced – as he was back then – that terrible danger is about to befall him.

Ara: And there’s another huge paradox to all this. While it was agonising and debilitating, there is also a sense that it was a helpful thing to go through. For example it stripped away all the strategies we used to use to avoid painful feelings – like working too hard or wanting somebody else to ‘make it better’. It made those vital feelings far more accessible to us than they ever were before. 

James: I do feel a sense that when those young/traumatised parts of us are around it’s a kind of miracle, that we kept them safe enough all this time that they can now be here and share their feelings. And we’ll be able to live our life so much more wisely and compassionately now we have access to them. Also this whole thing has given us so much empathy for other people who are collapsing under the weight of these big feels. And for all those who are racing around in various ways trying like hell to avoid them.

Ara: Mm we notice how easy it is to go back to that avoidance too. To talk the talk of ‘welcoming the feelings’, but as soon as a flicker of one of the tough ones is around, viscerally that sense of trying to push it back down or pretend it’s not there. And if we manage to do that, there’s this sense of dissociation: being a bit vague or fake or performing.

James: Those times the feeling often comes back with a vengeance afterwards, and in confusing ways so it’s harder to know whose it is or what it’s about. Our sense now is that the more we can go towards all the feelings as soon as they arise, the more we can make our inner landscape safer, so there’s not that sense that we might stumble across something that is ‘too hard’ – because we know it all and are familiar with it all.

Learning from the big feels

Ara: Shall we finish with a bit more about our daily practices with this James, and what we’re learning from them? I’m aware that this changes somewhat week by week for us though. Maybe that’s one of the biggest learnings. One day it feels important – when we can – to be with the feeling all day long. Another day it feels right to get on with life, with pauses to be with whatever feeling is around every now and then. One week we seem to need huge amounts of rest. Another week we have big energy for getting out moving, or for creating things like this.

James: Yes, flexibility to go with that seems helpful, and another way of trusting the feelings – and the parts that hold them – to know what they need.

Ara: But we do have a few standard practices now.

James: Right. Every day you do a meditation sit in the morning and in the evening. After that one of us does a check in conversation with the ‘big feels’ parts to see if they have anything they’re feeling that we didn’t notice in the meditation.

Ara: That seems a great way to encourage regular feeling, and to check if there’s something there we haven’t noticed. If there is a bigger feeling present in that check-in, you might do some close-up work with that before we move on. Or we might journal about it, or go for a walk if it feels like it needs to move.

Another practice that has been helpful for just showing us that we can bear an intense emotion is feeling it in the body as a kind of vibration, trying not to even label it or understand it but just feel it as pure energy or something. Occasionally even an intense feeling has ended up feeling almost soothing when we’ve managed that.

James: And our therapist shared one about imagining the feeling as just one cell of our body and picturing it in front of us – seeing what texture, colour, size, and shape it is. 

Another one that’s been great when it feels stuck is to lie down and breathe in to the chest, then the belly, then exhale. That kind of breathing often seems to allow a kind of release, often tears.

But it isn’t always those more formal kinds of practices that are needed. Occasionally the thing to do has been to find a song that matches the feeling, and listen to it and allow the feeling to come. And we got a lot out of re-reading the Stephen King book, The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon, so we can flash on the way she went still and steady in the face of fear, when fear comes up for us.

Ara: Again there are so many possible ways to be with feelings. The main point is that we are welcoming them – not resisting them or reacting out of them.

James: It’s moving from resisting to responding, and reacting to refraining (from action) until you feel clearer and calmer.

Ara: There’s a couple of nice metaphors about welcoming feelings and how vital it is. One is the Tibetan Buddhist story of Milarepa in his cave, and how he had to fully welcome all of the demons – or feelings – who came to stay with him there – big or small, subtle or overwhelming. The other is the Islamic poet, Rumi’s, famous poem The Guest House. Again that sense if you can welcome all fully then there’s nothing more to fear in our inner world, and perhaps also in our outer world given that we’re familiar with it all in here. 

Often the parts with the feelings are convinced you’re going to send them away, or become overwhelmed by them, because that’s what’s happened in the past. So it’s a practice of showing them – gradually over time – that you don’t need to eradicate them or merge with them, you can just be with them patiently.

James: A couple of other learnings I’ve noticed. We’ve found that what we learn from one feeling often helps with others. We started with sadness. We did an irreverent reverse version of the behaviour modification of our childhood and decided to award ourselves a gold star whenever we cried! We’ve got really comfortable with sadness, sorrow and grief, where in the past we struggled so much with those feelings. Sometimes when we’re struggling with another feeling we can at least access that sadness about how painful it is, and release it in that way. 

Lately we’ve also found that many of the practices we developed with fear and shame last year work well for being with loneliness and rage too, as well as developing some new practices for those.

Ara: What else did you notice?

James: That fear and shame aren’t the only trauma feelings, as we’d previously thought. Loneliness and rage are trauma-related feelings too, just more about abandonment – for us – than annihilation. And that each part holds a whole cluster of related feelings. Like Beastie holds self-hatred, blame of others, self-protection, and anger at injustice. Tony holds loneliness, yearning and jealousy, but also a kind of ‘high’ joy when he’s pinned that on a particular person or situation, shame around being ‘too much’ and getting ‘sent away’, and a more steady joy when he’s allowed to be himself in the world: open and connecting. 

Ara: It’s useful to understand how the different feelings they hold work together. Like Beastie’s self hatred is often a sign something non-consensual happened to us and we didn’t give her a chance to get angry about it. Tony’s joy is more steady when we help him grieve for the losses of the past.

James: There’s something about the need for a pendulum swing I think. If you’ve tried to only feel ‘positive’ emotions much of your life, or if you’ve repressed and covered over tough feelings a lot, it seems like there is a period where you feel all the feelings you didn’t feel at the time. Perhaps you have to swing into recognising how bad some things were that you didn’t recognise back then, maybe because they were gaslit by yourself and by those around you. 

I think one of the very hardest things is taking that leap of faith, repeatedly, that having done this process things will become easier, now that we have access to the feelings and can act on them. It’s hard to make that leap of faith when right now all you’re feeling is way more pain than ever before.

Ara: There can be some nostalgia for the more ‘covered over’ time when things didn’t feel this intense, disorienting, and incapacitating. My sense is strong though that being able to feel the hard feelings will make them less overwhelming over time, and that it will make the other feelings more accessible too. That Kahil Gibran quote: ‘The deeper that sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain.’

James: We experience that in the way long periods of tough feelings often end in much deeper understanding of ourselves, and/or others. Also there’s an intense relief when we crack through to some grief or gratitude, by being up for hanging out with a tough feeling.

Ara: I’d like to end with the multiplicity of learnings that are possible each time a big feeling is present. 

James: Please do.

Ara: We find it helpful to remind ourselves of this when we’re in them:

• This is an opportunity to learn how to be with this feeling more readily, so we’ll be more able to do so in future, expanding our window of tolerance.
• This feeling being touched and awoken right now gives us a chance to go back to our earlier experiences – when we didn’t get heard or held in such feelings – and do so now, perhaps putting that memory to rest finally.
• This feeling gives us the potential to do the general practice of dropping our storylines and being with whatever is present.
• This feeling – if we can allow it – gives us deep insight into what others with similar feelings are up against, and why they act in the ways they do, increasing our sense of compassion and connection.
• This feeling has something of value to teach us about the current situation if we can listen to it without repressing it or reacting quickly out of it. For example, it may be that something has reached the limits of what we can deal with right now, or that a situation or encounter was ‘off’ in some way.

For more on this topic check out my new book with Alex Iantaffi: Hell Yeah Self Care.

Patreon link: If you enjoyed this please feel free to support my free writing on Patreon.

Plural tag: This post was by James and Ara.

The post Staying with the Big Feels appeared first on Rewriting The Rules.

Initially I had some reticence around my involvement because, while I know plenty about gender, I’m no expert on attachment theory, which is the therapeutic approach that The Bowlby Centre focuses on. I learnt about it back in my psychology degree and taught the basics of it as a psych lecturer, but never went much further than that. My own psychotherapy training was existential, so I drew on other theories for understanding how people tick. 

While I’m always happy to do gender 101, having written Gender: A Graphic Guide with that aim, I felt like I wanted to do more than that here: to find some ways to weave gender and attachment together. While all therapists need to be mindful of gender diversity, aware of their own gender, and practice affirmatively, I wanted to explore what attachment therapists, in particular, might gain from exploring gender in depth.

Attachment

Fortunately, in the weeks leading up to the event I realised that I have actually been engaging deeply with attachment understandings over the past couple of years, just without always naming it as such. During my deep dive into trauma many of the authors I’ve been reading have been informed by attachment theory, in addition to more recent understandings of trauma. In fact it could be argued that John Bowlby was one of the first theorists and practitioners to highlight what we now call developmental trauma which is when – for whatever reason – parents are unable to regulate their children’s emotions and to help them get to the point of being able to self-regulate.

My most recent trauma read – Nurturing Resilence by Kathy Kain and Stephen Terrell – sets out the somatic experiencing approach to working with trauma. This, along with sensorimotor psychotherapy, is one of the main embodied trauma approaches, and it is grounded in the attachment theory of John Bowlby and Mary Ainsworth. So I now have a greater appreciation for how what I’ve been working with is, in fact, all about attachment. 

One way of understanding the plural work that I’ve been doing throughout lockdown is as a journey towards what’s called ‘earned secure attachment’. This is the sense that if we did not have secure attachment – and the eventual capacity to emotionally regulate – as kids, we can develop this as adults. It relates to Pete Walker – and others’ – idea that we can reparent ourselves, and be reparented by committee (therapists, groups, and/or friends with whom we practice securely attached relationships and coregulation of emotions).

The rest of this post will begin with a brief overview of attachment theory, in case you aren’t familiar with it, explaining why it’s useful to explore it alongside gender (and sexuality, and relationship style). I’ll then include my answers to the questions which Jane and I explored in our conversation at the conference.

What does attachment theory say?

I was fascinated to read in Kathy and Stephen’s book that Bowlby was spurred into his work by his own experiences as a kid. He was mostly cared for by a nanny when he was a child, and she left when he was four years old, which devastated him. He was then sent to boarding school when he was seven, which he grew to believe were detrimental for children’s well-being: something born out by much subsequent research and therapeutic work on boarding school syndrome. 

It was useful to read that, right from the start, links were made between attachment style and the wider cultural norms around how kids were treated. Bowlby also worked closely with boys who’d been arrested for criminal behaviour. I’d previously assumed attachment theory to be quite an individualistic approach: locating our struggles purely in early childhood experience.

This linked, for me, to Gabor Maté’s more recent work on trauma. Maté argues that current cultural norms of child-rearing result in the high levels of developmental trauma and troubled attachment that we see, and that we should be addressing these at a structural and systemic level, not just the level of individuals or families. He suggests that the pressures on parents in the culturally normative forms of nuclear families, under neoliberal capitalism and economic crisis, mean that most are simply unable to provide secure attachment and the kind of emotional regulation that their children need.

Parents need far more practical and emotional support themselves in order to raise kids in ways that meet their emotional and relational needs. However, our culture has moved far away from models of extended families and sustainable communities of care which might provide this. One consequence of the current system is that many kids end up looking to peers (and, perhaps later, partners) to meet unmet early attachment needs, who are ill-equipped to do so, and often act in retraumatising ways.

Attachment theory argues that children need a safe haven with their caregiver/s: a caring, protective space they can return to to be soothed when they are stressed. They need a secure base: a stable attachment relationship with one consistently available caregiver which provides a template for their later relationships in life. Over time the child becomes more and more able to move away from this secure base. It is the knowledge that they can move away and come back that means that they gradually develop the capacity to be more independent and look after themselves and their own emotions in the way they were looked after in their secure base.

Bowlby’s colleague Mary Ainsworth developed attachment theory in her research with infants who were left alone with a stranger by their caregiver. She found that those who did not have this kind of ‘secure attachment’ developed different forms of ‘insecure attachment’. An ‘anxious-ambivalent’ attachment is where the child is highly distressed without their caregiver and may be either angry or helpless when they return. An ‘anxious avoidant’ attachment is where they avoid or ignore their caregiver and don’t show distress at them leaving, or much reaction to them returning. ‘Disorganised attachment’  was added by Mary Main and relates to more inconsistent attachment behaviour.

Later theories mapped these attachment styles onto adult relationship behaviours, delineating between secure attachment (flexible, good at connection and at discerning nourishing from risky relationships) and insecure forms of attachment including: ‘anxious preoccupied’ (needy and dependent), ‘dismissive-avoidant’ (independent and not wanting intimacy), and ‘fearful avoidant’ (desiring close connection and finding it very difficult).

So both attachment theory, and the more recent trauma theories which develop it, propose that a key role of caregivers is to regulate the child’s emotional state, meaning that the child can learn how to do so themselves long term. This means learning how to calm ourselves in times of heightened emotions such as fear, sadness, anger, and frustration. Coregulation is when caregivers attune to how their child is feeling, and engage in back and forth interaction to understand – and meet – their needs, soothing them when stressful events occur. 

If we are met in such a way we learn how to soothe and calm ourselves when tough things happen and our bodies go into more reactive modes (self-regulation). We’ll also find it easier to form good connections and to reach out to them when we need to. Without such an early ‘secure attachment’ we’re likely to be overwhelmed by tough events and emotions, to engage in survival strategies to avoid them, and we may well struggle to discern nourishing from risky relationships, and to reach out to others when we need support.

Why do we need to think about attachment in relation to Gender, Sex, and Relationship Diversity (GSRD)?

Attachment theory already clearly understands that our relationships are utterly interwoven with our mental health. Mental health struggles are rooted in our early relationships because this is where we learn to be okay with ourselves and our feelings, or where we get the message that we – and our feelings – are fundamentally not okay. Mental health difficulties like addiction, anxiety, and depression can be understood in terms of survival strategies which we develop to deal with otherwise overwhelming emotions. Also our current relationship experiences are utterly interwoven with our relationship with ourselves and our emotions. Problems in those relationships – due to our attachment and emotional capacity – can easily retraumatise us, replicating those early dynamics, and reinforcing our negative experience and understanding of ourselves.

Here are a few initial thoughts about why it’s useful to think about attachment alongside gender, sexuality, and relationship diversity. I’ll go into more detail on all of these in the rest of the post.

Cultural norms

First, the culturally normative way of doing relationships and families, which is linked to attachment struggles and developmental trauma, relies on a certain – interlinked – understanding of gender, sex, and relationships. The model of a heternormative romantic/sexual couple meeting all each others’ needs and forming a nuclear family is actually relatively recent and culturally specific. It relies on a binary understanding of ‘opposite’ genders where men are breadwinner-protectors and women are caring-nurturers, which developed in a capitalist context that relied on women working unpaid in the home and reproducing the workforce. Many of the strains on relationships today can be located in the cultural ideal of getting all your needs met in one person (best friend, co-parent, hot lover, etc.) as well as in an economic system where most people in such relationships are under huge financial stress and having to work long hours in addition to partnering and parenting, or face poverty.

Doing it differently

Relatedly, many people are now doing gender, sex, and relationships in different ways to this cultural norm, all of which may afford some possibilities to relate differently with ourselves and others. For example, Jessica Fern’s recent book Polysecure: Attachment, Trauma, and Consensual Non-monogamy explores the ways in which forms of consensual monogamy may open up different attachment possibilities. Different ways of relating may work better for different attachment styles, or may enable more secure ways of relating and attaching.

Likewise those who are intentionally addressing or shifting their ways of doing their gender, and/or their sexuality, may also move in the direction of greater emotional regulation and/or more secure attachments. Consider how entwined gender is with emotional expression, and how stepping outside of the culturally normative way of doing romantic/sexual relationships may offer possibilities of slowing down and/or prioritising different kinds of relating which may be more stable and secure.

Similar things apply

It also occurred to me that many of the things that I often emphasise about gender, sexuality, and relationships also apply to attachment. 

These days most attachment theorists and therapists emphasise that attachment style is not fixed from birth, but that we can experience ourselves in different attachment styles in different relationships, for example, or ‘earn’ a secure attachment through therapeutic work and self reflective practices. Similarly, although once understood as fixed and singular, gender, sexuality, and relationship style are all fluid and plural. They may shift over time and/or be different in different relationships.

The trauma/attachment literature emphasises that attachment is biopsychosocial. Our way of attaching comes from a complex mix of the wider cultural way of doing child-reading (social), how that played out in our particular family (psycho), and how early attachment experience became engraved on our bodyminds or nervous systems (bio). Similarly, gender, sexuality and relationship style are all biopsychosocial.

All are interwoven

Finally, we can question the fact that our current culture separates out gender, sexuality, relationship style, and mental health as if these are discrete things. Many cultures, and historical times, would not separate out gender, sexuality, and spirituality – for example – seeing all these things as utterly interwoven. In the same way that we might usefully question our current normative way of doing relationships and family, we might recognise that regarding gender, sexuality, relationship styles, and mental health struggles as fixed identities that we have is a relatively new phenomenon, and possibly not a very helpful one.

Moving on to gender 101, let’s define some useful basic terms first – because lots of therapists are worried about getting it wrong…

I think it’s important to recognise that reality. Laurie Penny wrote that ‘the way we think about gender is moving so fast you can feel the breeze in your hair’. This is fraught terrain for many people. I’m always reminded of what Simone de Beauvoir wrote about how threatening it can be for mothers to see their daughters doing gender in different – more liberated ways – than were available to them, and how they may try to stop that. We see a lot that kind of thing playing out intergenerationally. There are all kinds of deep fears, losses and shames in play when relating across generations and genders: all kinds of reasons why people may want others to support – and not challenge – their gender worldview. Perhaps it gives them a sense of safety, of knowing who the ‘good guys’ and ‘bad guys’ are, and which side they are on, for example.

This is why I always emphasise, first and foremost, that therapists reflect deeply on their own experience of gender and how it has impacted their lives. As with all other intersecting aspects of identity and experience (e.g. disability, race, class, sexuality, age), we really need to feel how it operates within us, and through us, if we’re to work with other people around it.

What ARE some the terms therapists need to be aware of?

I would say it’s useful to recognise the multiple different aspects of gender. So gender identity is whether you identify as man, woman or non-binary, for example. Gender expression is how you present your gender in terms of appearance, clothes, voice, etc. Gender experience is your lived experience of your gender. Gender roles are the roles you take on in life and how they relate to gender: father, feminist, waitress, widower, etc. Then there is how your gender is read by other people. There may be more or less match between identity, expression, experience, role, and how others read your gender, for different people.

In terms of gender status people are generally divided into cis and trans. Cis – or cisgender – people remain in the gender that they were assumed to be by those around them at birth. Trans people shift from that in some way. Trans can be seen as a big umbrella encompassing trans women, trans men, and non-binary people. And non-binary can be seen as another big umbrella encompassing all the people who are a gender other than male or female. For example they may be both genders, or between genders, a further gender, no gender, or move between multiple gender positions. Of course the category of cis is also a big umbrella encompassing many different cis masculinities and femininities. 

People often associate trans with social transition (changing names, clothes, pronouns, etc.) and medical transition (taking hormones and having surgeries). It’s important to point out both that many cis people engage in social and medical gender transitions, and that many trans people do not. Think about name changes for choice, or at marriage, for example, or the huge gender-related shifts that can come with menopause, retirement, or treatment for prostate or breast cancer.  I personally prefer a sense that we – as therapists and medical practitioners – should be helping all people to come to a congruent and comfortable place with their gender, regardless of whether they would be categorised – or see themselves – as cis or trans.

We often think of trans people as a small minority of people, when we’re focused on social and medical transition. However, Daphna Joel’s research has found that over a third of people experience themselves as being to some extent ‘the other gender, both genders, or neither gender’.

Historically, many psychanalysts have conflated gender, biology and sexuality, and when it comes to trans, non-binary and folks with variations in sex characteristics, some still do – so can you explain the difference and the way they interact?

Intersex people, or people with diverse sex characteristics (DSD) have bodies which are difficult to categorise in the current western binary sex model. Historically medics have intervened with those bodies in order to attempt to make them conform to a binary, and heterosexual, norm (i.e. penises and vaginas of a certain length). Activists and practitioners are increasingly speaking out against this and encouraging more consensual practices.

It’s important to know that what we think of as biological sex – as well as gender – is diverse. What are we talking about when we talk about sex? Is it chromosomes? Level of circulating hormones? Bodily features like genitals, breasts, or hairiness? Or is it brain structure and capacity? On all of these levels humans are actually diverse rather than binary. 

Many biologists now prefer to talk about sex/gender rather than separating these out, because it’s really impossible to disentangle the biological, the psychological, and the social. Personally I find the concept of ‘biopsychosocial’ very useful here. Gender is biopsychosocial for all of us meaning that we can’t tease apart these three elements. All are in play and all influence each other. For example, what we now know about neuroplasticity and endocrinology suggests that the ways in which we learn gendered behaviours – from the world around us – shifts our brain and body patterns. So, as well as the way our brain and body are – from our early years – shaping how people read our gender and how we experience it, the ways in which we are read, and experience our gender, also shape our brain and body.

When we think about all the different elements of sex (chromosomes, hormones, body shape and size, brain structure and function) and all the elements of gender (identity, expression, experience, role, etc.) we can see how the concept of the snowflake might actually be a useful one, because with all of the different elements, all changing over time, we each end up with a pretty unique sex/gender. If we add in sexuality – which is about way more than just the gender we are and the gender we’re attracted to – we have even more diversity and uniqueness.

Virginia Goldener notes that historically psychoanalysts have considered working towards and/or achieving a stable gender identity as an indicator of a successful outcome – and that this is neither possible nor desirable. Consistency around gender identity is for many a cis myth or as Goldener suggests, a pathology. Do you agree? 

I’m really grateful to you for putting me onto the Goldener paper and I like a lot of what it says. I do completely agree with her argument that ‘gender coherence, consistency, conformity, and identity are culturally mandated normative ideals that (therapy) has absorbed uncritically’. Really we only have to look back through time and around the world today to see the truth of this. The current binary opposite understanding of gender is very recent, and it is utterly interwoven with heteronormativity and family structure under this particular form of capitalism. 

There have been many places and times where gender was not seen as binary or opposite, where very different characteristics were associated with different genders, where there were multiple genders, and/or where gender wasn’t considered an important feature of a person, or separable from other aspects of their personhood. It’s certainly highly ethnocentric to believe that binary gender in the way our culture currently understands it is any kind of universal truth.

Goldener takes her argument further to suggest that adhering to a consistent gender could be seen as a pathology. She comes close to my view here as well. In my BACP GSRD resource I highlight the strong links between trying to conform with rigid ideals of masculinity and femininity and significant mental health struggles. Think about rates of suicide and addiction amongst men, for example, or body images issues which are highly normative among women, or the kinds of depression and anxiety associated with women basing their identites around being-for-others, as de Beauvoir put it. This is why I always say that therapists should be talking about gender with all clients, not just gender non-normative ones. In fact gender expansive and creative folk are perhaps more likely to have already dealt with this stuff.

Goldener makes the argument that people come to a consistent gender by disowning anything about themselves that doesn’t fit with the ideological pressures of gender coherence. Think about the ways in which masculinity is defined by anything that isn’t feminine, for example, and how boys and men are encouraged to repudiate any ‘feminine’ feelings, appearances, desires, etc. This argument fits nicely with my understanding of plural selves – drawn from various therapeutic approaches. This is the idea that we are all plural, rather than singular, but have to disown, or split off, aspects of ourselves in order to survive in our families, communities, and wider culture. I think it’s useful to see gender as part of this.

I also found Goldener’s use of double binds very compelling. This is the sense that we receive confusing and contradictory messages – in families, communities, and culture – about gender which take a huge toll on mental health. Goldener gives the example of such contradictions in a woman’s family gender story: ‘Mom didn’t stand up to Dad, and she was always silently angry and depressed. But whenever I was argumentative, she would say I was ‘too masculine’ and no man would ever want me.’ So the woman faces the contradiction that if she does femininity like her Mom she will suffer as she did, but if she does it differently she faces rejection by her Mom and potentially by all men. We might also think about school messages that men need to be successful but also not show any interest in studies, or cultural messages that women must be empowered and desiring, while still seeing their worth as bound up in appearance and being in a relationship with a man.

Goldener ends by saying that a more critical therapeutic tradition ‘could promote resistance to the normative construction of gender polarities and hierarchies by documenting how the exploitation of gender distinctions in the inevitable struggle for power in society and in domestic life produces untenable relationship binds and unbridgeable psychic splits, which damage the human spirit in all of us and in the next generation.’ This understanding of cultural gender as a form of intergenerational trauma comes close to my own sense of things, and that of my co-author, Alex Iantaffi, who recently published the book Gender Trauma.

Currently people are expected to remain in the same gender throughout their lives. There is still a moral panic and ‘debate’ over people who do not, and trans people are expected to promise to remain in the same gender forever once they have transitioned. There is a huge sense that people should be consistent in their gender, despite the fact that everybody clearly experiences and expresses their gender in very different ways over time, from being a child, through a teenager, adult, and older person, and as cultural gender norms also shift radically over the course of their lives. 

I think we need to shift this whole sense that gender, sexuality, or self fixity and consistency is something to be aimed at, or somehow superior over flexibility and fluidity. All of these things can – and do – shift over long periods of our lives, and we also experience and express them very differently in different situations and relationships. Think about how you behave with the store clerk, a loved one, and a child, for example, or how you feel at this conference, out for a drink, or last thing at night.

One note of caution I would add here though is that we don’t flip the binary such that we privilege fluidity over fixity and regard that as, in some way, superior. Most of us experience some aspects of our selves, our gender, our sexuality, and more, as relatively stable, and other aspects as more changeable. I’d like us to get to the point where all of this could be equally respected and supported as somebody’s lived experience of themselves, rather than there being attempts to fix what is fluid, or to change what is stable.

Trainings often fairly uncritically reproduce cis and heteronormative value systems – so that the lens through which we’re taught in the psychanalytic or psychodynamic model is often devoid of exposing how systemic structural issues impact on clients. Why is it important for us to explore gender with all clients, not just with those where it might seem an obvious issue, such as trans and gender expansive clients? 

It’s very troubling to me how little most therapy trainings include considerations of social structures and cultural messages when we know these things are hugely impactful on people’s emotional well-being, and cannot be disentangled from individual life experiences. There’s a real danger in therapy that we reinforce a sense that mental health should be understood and addressed purely at the level of the individual and their interpersonal relationships, when it’s the wider societal systems and structures that are the problem in so many ways.

So yes I would say that heteronormativity and gender norms impact all clients, not just trans and gender expansive ones, and that it’s a vital part of the picture to unpack with clients who may not have considered normativity and how much it is part of their distress. Just to give a few more examples to the ones I’ve given already, the NATSAL survey finds that over half of people consider themselves to be sexually dysfunctional in some way. Clearly the issue here is with the narrow cultural view of what counts as (hetero) sex rather than half of individuals having this individual problem of sexual dysfunction. Few men manage to resist the cultural messages that they mustn’t show vulnerability or seek support, and we know the toll this takes in terms of their impact both on others and on themselves.

It’s very important that therapists are able to mirror, accurately, people’s sense of their own gender, given that many people will have experiences of only certain aspects of their gender being affirmed by those around them, if that. 

In your writing on gender you say that we can’t really understand gender without taking an intersectional perspective. What does that mean, and how might we work with clients in this way?  

Intersectionality is an idea from the Black feminist Kimberlé Crenshaw to capture how we are all impacted by multiple axes of oppression, and how these intersect. An example that I like to give was when I did a bisexuality training in a workplace context. People there were sharing their thoughts on being out as bi. A couple of white bi women said that it felt like an accepting environment to them. Some black women shared that there was no way that they would be out as bi there. They were already sexualised and harassed as black women, and to be openly bi would exacerbate that to intolerable levels. Here we see the intersection of the treatment of black women as hypersexual – and their bodies as the property of others – with the understanding of bisexuality as promiscuous and available to all. This creates a unique experience for black bi women which neither white bi women, or straight black women, had.

I think intersectionality is hugely important in therapy with all clients, because we have to understand how our clients are uniquely positioned in relation to these axes of oppression to have a full sense of their experience. To give another gender example, the experience of considering embarking on a trans journey is very different depending on age (a teenager versus a 50 year old), disability (having to downplay disabilities to access trans services and vice versa), sexuality (whether transitioning will involve you now being read as gay, for example), and race (whether transitioning will involve you now being read as a race/gender combination who is seen as dangerous and/or subject to violence, for example).

Your co-author, Alex Iantaffi, just published a book called Gender Trauma. How might we see gender as a form of historical, intergenerational, and/or developmental trauma? What are the implications of this for trauma-informed therapists?

Alex’s book is a must read for all therapists I would say. Although the focus is on gender it takes this intersectional view whereby all of those axes of oppression can be seen as having a traumatising impact. I find this understanding of trauma useful: that it is historical, cultural and intergenerational, as well as being developmental and/or resulting from specific traumatic experiences over our lives.

Alex points out that gender is a form of historical trauma in the ways that attempts have been made to eradicate certain genders through settler colonialism. We could also consider the ways in which white western understandings of gender and sexuality have been imposed on colonised countries, and the ongoing legacy of this, and the gendered sexual violence that was involved in slavery. All of these historical forms of gender trauma pass down through the generations, and linger in damaging myths, norms, and stereotypes.

Gender can be seen as a form of intergenerational trauma in the way that gendered ways of behaving are passed down through families – the kind of thing that Goldener was referring to. Gender reveal parties could be seen as a recent example whereby kids are assumed to be all kinds of things because of their genitals, even prior to birth. Consider the impact of this on intersex kids, on gender expansive kids, and on all kids who don’t entirely conform to the ideals of genders their famlies expect, or who might not if such rigid expectations were not imposed from so young.

When it comes to developmental trauma, we could wonder about the gendered ways in which babies and children are treated in relation to their emotions, from a very young age. Developmental trauma occurs when kids aren’t soothed when overwhelmed, or supported to learn how to emotionally regulate themselves. I think we could see this, for example, when boys are punished for expressing emotions other than anger, or when girls are expected to care for others’ emotional states, even as infants. I was so struck by the documentary No More Boys and Girls, where 7 year old boys could not come up with words for any emotions other than anger, and all the kids agreed that boys were ‘better’ and that girls’ main aspiration in life should be to be ‘pretty’.

Much of your writing these days is about plural selves and parts work. How does this concept relate to gender, and to attachment, and what are the implications for potentially working with all clients as plurally gendered?

For me personally, it was my journeys with sexuality and gender which eventually led me to an understanding of plurality. Initially I was aware of having several different sets of sexual desires, and enjoying sex or play the most when I could sink fully into one of these different headspaces. Then I had a sense of being non-binary, which could enable me to hold the feeling that I was masculine and man without letting go of a sense of knowing that I was also feminine and woman. These explorations eventually led to a realisation that I have a vivid experience of multiple parts, who certainly have different gender expressions and sexual – or asexual – desires, but who are about much more than that.

In terms of parts work I’m weaving together the work of people like John Rowan, Hal and Sidra Stone, Richard Schwartz, and Janina Fisher, as well as what I’m learning with people within plural communities. My sense is that everybody – to some extent – disowns parts of themselves and foregrounds other parts, in order to conform to their family, community, and culture, for example. Significant developmental trauma is not what causes people to be plural, but it does seem to result in more significant splits between the parts, such that some are inaccessible, unknown, or dissociated from.

My own experience is that I created a pretty well functioning feminine self in my teenage years, in order to survive. I experienced myself as purely that self for many years, but often with a confusing sense of incongruence that this person who was all about fitting in, helping others, and being independent, fairly regularly made it their business to tell uncomfortable truths in public, suddenly leapt into relationships and communities, or became overwhelmed by shame and fear when tough stuff happened.

So, for me, plurality is entirely interwoven with gender and with attachment, given that other parts of me hold gender-related behaviours, attachment styles, emotions, and survival strategies, which were too dangerous for me to hold or express as a child. It was confronting, for example, to realise that there’s certainly a needy ‘anxious preoccupied’ part when I would probably have checked towards the avoidant end of the attachment spectrum. It’s also been helpful, and painful, to finally be in touch with a ‘fight’ survival strategy that was almost entirely turned in against myself for much of my life.

With a plural understanding we could usefully explore how gender, attachment styles and emotional experience are highly interrelated. For example, boys are generally encouraged culturally to be at the avoidant end of the spectrum and to express feelings in the form of anger, disowning more dependent attachment styles or fearful feelings. Similarly girls are still generally encouraged to be highly relationally oriented, even dependent, and to express emotions as distress rather than anger. These things do not come together for all people, of course, given our specific family systems and life trajectories, but they are bound to be linked to some extent in terms of what we disown and foreground in ourselves in order to survive.

In addition to bringing all parts forward, and to improving communication within the system, I find the concept of earned secure attachment extremely helpful here. For me this is the idea of creating and developing inner parents, or containing parts, who can hold and hear disowned or traumatised parts, building trusting relationships with them which can – over time – enable them to feel safe-enough in the world, and to grow from the traumatised places they have been stuck in.

For me the vital thing is what Bonnie Badenoch calls ‘radical inclusivity’, Janina Fisher ‘no part gets left behind’, or Richard Schwartz ‘no bad parts’. It’s about welcoming, befriending, and forming loving relationships with, and between, all aspects of all parts of ourselves. The aim is not a kind of integrated singularity – the cultural norm – nor is it reaching that sense of consistency that Goldener warns against, whether on gender or attachment style or anything else. Rather it’s about helping all parts to be in the world, to bring everything that they have been holding and to share it, and to continue to grow and become, as a vital part of both inner and outer systems.

Patreon link: If you enjoyed this please feel free to support my free writing on Patreon.

Plural tag: This post was by James.

The post Gender, Attachment and Trauma appeared first on Rewriting The Rules.