Attachment Trauma and Family Boundaries
Attachment trauma and family boundary struggles go hand in hand. What we go through in our family of origin carries into adulthood, both in our adult relationships with partners, friends and children and in how we interact with our family of origin. You may notice you struggle with healthy relationships, both present and past, but are unclear as to why or how to change things. To work on how to hold boundaries with family, we first have to understand where and why we struggle to do so. Therapy can be an invaluable tool to address the emotional and psychological impacts of our first relationships, those of our family, so we can rebuild healthy attachments, and establish appropriate boundaries in all of our relationships.
Attachment theory, developed by John Bowlby, emphasizes the importance of early relationships between children and their caregivers, as these relationships form the foundation for future emotional and social development. When a child experiences inconsistent, neglectful or abusive care-giving, it can lead to attachment trauma. This trauma can result in various attachment styles, and includes difficulties in forming healthy, secure relationships in adulthood. It can look like struggling to trust in relationships, being afraid of abandonment, hyper-independence, and/or an inability to regulate emotions when afraid of being hurt in a relationship, to name a few.
How Individual Counseling Addresses Attachment Trauma and Boundaries
People often come to counseling when current relationships are struggling significantly, or when pain gets activated with childhood family. I will help you to understand your attachment style from your childhood. I am commonly asked, "Can my attachment style change?" The good news is research shows YES, we can change our attachment style. Whether you struggle with an anxious, avoidant or disorganized attachment style, therapy can help you become securely attached. Alongside attachment style, we look at where emotion regulation and boundary setting are challenging, and sometimes engage in somatic work when the body gets activated in fight, flight or freeze. We will do work that includes concepts and tools from Emotion-Focused Individual Therapy (EFIT), Internal Family Systems (IFS), sometimes brainspotting, and a lot of psychoeducation on how attachment works and changes. Through this process, you grow to find compassion and boundaries for yourself, your family and all of your relationships in general.
Boundaries refer to the limits we set in relationships to protect our emotional, mental, and physical well-being. Healthy family boundaries are essential for ensuring that individuals can maintain their sense of identity, respect one another’s autonomy, and manage conflicts constructively. In many dysfunctional families, boundaries may be poorly defined, overly rigid, or excessively porous. This can look different for each of us:
Feeling enmeshed, unable to have any boundaries
Codependency, only feeling "okay" when everyone is "okay"
Hyper-independence, a removal of self from the family system, stemming from feeling no one can be trusted or counted on but one's self.
When family boundaries are not clear, it can create confusion, frustration, resentment, and unhealthy relational dynamics. You may feel emotionally drained, manipulated, or trapped in your family role, and it can make it difficult to form healthy relationships outside the family as a consequence.
On top of all of this, setting boundaries is a skill we have to learn. If your family of origin did not provide opportunities to set boundaries and have them respected, it can be scary or interpreted as being a bad or mean person. Learning how to be assertive, rather than passive or aggressive, or a mixture of both, is the middle path to healthy relationships. As you learn to develop healthy boundaries, you will begin to experience a shift in relationships with yourself and with others, writing positive experiences over the original unhealthy definitions in your mind about how relationships look and feel. Ultimately, it is my goal for you to heal from attachment trauma, begin to value your needs, emotionally regulate and determine your reactions, rather than feel at the whim of your emotions.