Somatic Attachment Therapy - Healing Attachment and Developmental Trauma
You may already know your attachment style, and you may be doing your best to show up in your relationships in a healthier, more secure way. This may work well until something deeper gets triggered by the other person’s actions, words, tone of voice or silence. It can set off a cascade of automatic reactions where your conscious brain gets hijacked, and you end up acting like a small, scared child who desperately wants to protest or escape.
It’s common to think of attachment in terms of attachment styles, such as anxious, avoidant, disorganised, or secure. And even though somatic attachment therapy works with those patterns, attachment encompasses much more than just the styles we recognise and talk about.
It is reflected in how we relate to people around us, whether we can ask for and accept help, maintain boundaries, express our needs, or stay connected to others without losing ourselves – the abilities that we start to develop early on in life, sometimes even before we have conscious memories or learn to speak.
Here, I’ll help you understand the developmental processes that affect our embodied sense of safety in relationships, what helps cultivate greater security, and how somatic attachment healing can support it.
The intersection of development and attachment: our first experiences of safety
Attachment patterns are like powerful undercurrents or tides, invisible, yet governing everything else. Dr Peter Levine says those tides are where most of the energy is, and they form the foundation on top of which everything else is built.
But what exactly is attachment? Attachment is an evolutionary mechanism that makes babies form bonds with their caregivers and seek their proximity for safety and survival. It is a part of human development, and developmental trauma can profoundly affect attachment because it happens during the very periods when our vital capacities, including the capacity for connection, are developing.
John Bowlby’s Attachment Theory is based on the idea that the relationship with our mother or primary caregivers creates a blueprint of how we relate to others throughout our life.
For a child to feel secure, their primary caregivers need to provide a sufficiently safe and nurturing environment. This includes meeting the child’s fundamental developmental needs, such as protection, comfort, attunement, support for exploration and autonomy.
Those needs don’t need to be met perfectly or every single time, but they need to be met consistently enough. This is when a child develops implicit expectations about themselves, relationships and the world: “I’m safe, I’m loved, my needs are important”.
When this is chronically missing due to repeated experiences of misattunement, neglect or abuse, the expectations for what is possible in relationships are very different.
In response to those missing experiences, insecure attachment patterns develop as protective adaptations or strategies to regain a sense of control and safety.
How insecure attachment is expressed through the body
If you have ever experienced an attachment-related trigger like the one described at the very start of this article, you know that it can be a full-body experience when your rational thinking fails.
It may look like:
- Urgency, hypervigilance, tension and a need to pursue when someone doesn’t respond or withdraws – typical in anxious attachment;
- Shutdown, contraction and an urge to escape or distance oneself when another person gets emotionally close, or conflict arises – common in avoidant attachment;
- High alert and flip-flopping between reaching towards connection and wanting to push the other person away or withdraw from connection – describes disorganised attachment.
The question I hear most often is:
“Why do I understand my attachment pattern but still act the same way?”
Insecure attachment patterns are psycho-physiological reactions to relational threat. And when early attachment and developmental trauma are involved, this threat can feel existential, as if your survival is at stake. For an infant, this is exactly how it feels, because an infant cannot survive without their caregiver
So knowing your pattern intellectually doesn’t necessarily change what happens in your body when it gets activated. Your nervous system may respond automatically before you even have time to think about what is happening.
In those moments, sometimes I hear my clients describe feeling overwhelmed, out of control, losing the ability to think clearly or act as an adult during arguments with their partners. They may notice their heart racing, hands sweating, or shoulders lifting – a sign that their body shifted into a protective state.
Attachment patterns outside romantic relationships
But insecure attachment doesn’t only show up in romantic relationships. In other interactions, it can look like:
- shame or guilt, wanting to disappear or quickly fix things and appease when a family member or colleague is upset;
- inability to speak or stand up for yourself or for the people you care about when facing disrespect or injustice;
- difficulty understanding your physical and emotional needs, or never asking for or accepting help;
- feeling like you are always an outsider and don’t fit in anywhere.
When we explore those feelings with my clients, they sometimes describe having a gut-wrenching sensation in their belly, a sinking feeling or a dull ache in the chest, a lump in their throat, a disorienting feeling of free-fall, or numbness.
As you see from these examples, even though insecure attachment certainly affects our behaviour, thoughts, emotions and beliefs, it is also deeply embodied. Working with these patterns therefore needs to include not only the mind, but also the body, as well as the presence of a regulated and trusted other.
Moving towards secure attachment with somatic attachment therapy
Diane Poole Heller, an expert in somatic attachment healing, says that we are all designed for secure attachment. She describes attachment styles as adaptations to the environment, and when the environment is right, secure attachment emerges naturally. Equally, when trauma gets resolved (not necessarily attachment trauma), positive attachment experiences emerge.
Does it mean attachment styles can change?
They can. That doesn’t mean you will never get activated or show anxious, avoidant or disorganised tendencies. As you work with the body and nervous system, these patterns can gradually become less automatic and more flexible
This is the understanding behind what is often described as somatic attachment therapy – a body-oriented approach informed by attachment and developmental perspectives.
What is somatic attachment therapy?
Somatic attachment therapy is not a single therapeutic modality, but can include therapeutic methods such as Somatic Experiencing® that work with the embodied patterns underlying attachment and developmental trauma.
So let’s take a closer look at how somatic therapy can facilitate the right environment and conditions for attachment healing.
From co-regulation to self-regulation
Early relational experiences shape our nervous system’s capacity for self-regulation.
A baby cannot fully self-soothe when overwhelmed or meet their own physiological needs and is fully dependent on the adult to comfort and offer relief. In other words, the parent or the primary caregiver acts as a regulator, teaching the baby’s nervous system that discomfort won’t last forever and that it can settle.
This happens by meeting the child’s physical needs and by offering nurturing touch and holding, through receptive eye contact, soothing voice, and mirroring. This process is called co-regulation, when two or more nervous systems find a shared sense of safety in each other’s presence.
Developmentally, co-regulation precedes self-regulation, and in our somatic therapy sessions, we dedicate a lot of time to creating opportunities for regulation in connection with us.
How somatic attachment therapy supports a more secure experience of relationship
In attachment-informed somatic therapy, a somatic practitioner offers a secure enough relational container by staying present and regulated enough, attuning, listening closely, noticing changes in the client’s state and responding to what is happening in the moment. This helps the client feel that they are perceived accurately, and are seen, heard and understood.
A practitioner also pays attention to the pace, volume, tone and rhythm of their voice and adjusts them in response to the client’s nervous-system state. When appropriate, they may mirror facial expressions or movement, for example, during an exercise, sending an implicit message: “I’m with you. We are doing it together”.
They take a non-judgmental stance and support choice, autonomy and agency by creating a relational environment in which the client has options to slow down, stop, change direction, decline an invitation, or choose what feels right.
A somatic practitioner may also use therapeutic touch to support a felt sense of safety and containment through physical contact. In online somatic therapy sessions, this is facilitated through self-directed touch, imagined forms of supportive holding or the use of props.
A lot of these relational cues of safety and connection are important in healing any kind of trauma, but they become even more crucial in attachment healing.
Learning to navigate relational ruptures
Ruptures are inevitable and are an important part of any relationship, including a therapeutic relationship. It is the consistent enough repair of those ruptures that restores a sense of safety, connection and trust, making a relationship deeper and stronger. A baby and their caregiver constantly move through cycles of connection and disconnection – a natural process that teaches the nervous system flexibility in a relational context.
If reconnection has been missing during the developmental stages, therapy can provide new experiences of attunement, repair and restored connection. A practitioner tracks and does their best to notice ruptures and misattunement in the moment and initiates a repair, which supports the development of an earned secure attachment.
But their role is also to help the client tolerate the occasional misattunement that is part of any healthy relationship. This means noticing the discomfort in the body, learning to stay with it in a way that is manageable while staying grounded in the present moment. With support, time and practice, this can make you less likely to feel overwhelmed or panicked when ruptures happen in relationships, and more capable of approaching them with presence and choice.
Repatterning attachment through the body
Somatic attachment therapy can be a ‘playground’ to safely explore bodily cues and the physiological signs of attachment patterns. It can help recognise what happens in you when attachment is activated.
For instance, you may get really anxious, angry or impatient when there’s a disagreement. If you pause and observe what happens in your body, you may notice your body leaning forward, hands clenching, while your gaze is becoming direct and sharp. In a somatic therapy session, a practitioner may ask you to experiment with leaning back just a bit, or alternate between clenching and unclenching your fists while paying attention to what is going on in the rest of the body.
Another example: if you observe your posture when you feel overwhelmed by shame or guilt when facing criticism, you may notice your back rounding, head dropping, and your eyes wanting to look away. In a session, you may be asked to stay with the posture and observe it a little longer, or exaggerate it, for example by rounding your back even more or leaning even further forward.
This can create an opportunity for completion of either a defence response or a developmental movement. It can also reveal deeper emotional layers or uncover beliefs or memories related to similar situations in the past, which can then be explored and worked with somatically.
When I guide my clients to pay close attention to the body, they are often surprised by how much information it holds, what gets uncovered and what becomes possible when we track or follow those bodily cues.
Secure attachment with oneself: cultivating ‘adult presence’
When you attend to your early relational wounding with the co-regulating support of a practitioner and begin to build greater nervous system capacity for regulation, you may notice overall reduced reactivity and more access to reflective thinking even in situations when attachment gets threatened.
This ability to stay present and observe your state when something relationally activating happens without being consumed by strong emotions and physiological responses is sometimes described as the ‘adult presence’, ‘adult consciousness’ or ‘adult Self’.
This wise presence anchored in the here and now, rather than in the past, allows you to see the bigger picture, make healthier choices and stay more connected to yourself and available for connection with others. It allows you to recognise your needs, respond to yourself with care, tolerate closeness and distance, set healthy boundaries and receive support.
In a way, you become your own secure attachment figure that you can rely on and trust in times of stress, while also enjoying more secure relationships with others.
I'm Elena Jacinta, a Somatic Experiencing Practitioner (SEP), online somatic therapist and the founder of Back To Your Body.
At Back To Your Body, we offer online somatic therapy for adults worldwide, grounded in Somatic Experiencing®, to support nervous system, trauma and attachment healing.
If you would like to explore somatic attachment healing with us, feel free to read about who we are as attachment-informed Somatic Experiencing Practitioners and how we work. And when you are ready, fill out the New Client Application form below to arrange your first session with one of us. If you have any questions, you are welcome to check our FAQ section or get in touch.
