(Secure)Attachment to Self

There’s a viral video that was going around, “a fun fact about me is that I’ve never been relaxed, ever”, which is me. Ever since I was little, I was a ball of energy and nerves cartwheeling down hallways, convening stuffed animals in my bedroom for language class, or pounding the piano keys with exasperated tears because I couldn’t get the song right on the first try. I was a NERVOUS system and often felt highly insecure, always sensory-seeking, and in a general flight response– I just didn’t really know from what or to where I was fleeing.

Through studying Buddhism, trauma, and attachment theory, I’ve come to see this as being in an insecurely attached relationship to myself— to being hooked (even addicted) to scarcity mode because it sustains a level of intensity, arousal, and/or stimulation in my nervous system to where I’m always mobilized and always wanting/ reaching for more. There is never enough (achievement, recognition, love, time, etc) because I am never enough. 

Little me didn’t have the language to describe some of what was happening internally, besides just that I was hyperactive and “too sensitive”, and therefore needed to do something to not be that way, that there must have been something inherently wrong with me. So I learned to achieve, perform, and perfect in order to earn approval and love. 

Through my teenage years, I resorted to various internalizing coping strategies, including anorexia, which I’ve come to understand as a spiritual and emotional hunger, a deep-seated belief of unworthiness manifesting as physical deprivation and restriction. Beneath the eating disorder behaviors lived anxiety and depression, neurodivergence, and a highly sensitive nervous system. My system was physiologically in scarcity, making explicit what I was feeling internally: not enough, hungry to matter, for my life to matter, and to belong. 

Naturally, I became a therapist; it is said that most research is “ME”search, and I had a whole lot of me-search to do. Through my lived and learned experience over the past decade in the field of community-based mental health, I’ve deepened my understanding of trauma, chronic stress, the nervous system, mental/ emotional well-being and illness/ dis-ease, and I’ve traversed relational dynamics across vast differences in social location and identities. I’ve also come to understand my own nervous system’s operating system and why it’s been wired for flight based on my Jewish ancestry and inherited trauma, my family’s mental health history, my upbringing (albeit comfortable upper middle class, there was a perceived scarcity), and the environments within which I’ve chosen to work: all have reinforced the scarcity mindset. 

Here’s the TL:DR from the decade of study and work in the field, from Buddhist practice, and from ME-search:

When we are not feeling balanced or internally resourced, we can tend toward default patterns and modes of operating from stress and survival responses. When I run/ flee, chase, grasp or desperately cling to an experience, a project, an identity, or a person, I am in an anxiously attached relationship with life. We can think of a clenched fist holding on tightly to life and/or the Self. This maps with the Buddhist concept of greed/ grasping.

When I hide/ avoid, crawl into my bed or numb out into doom scrolling or weed smoking/ gummy eating ;)  (sometimes necessary coping strategies), I am in an avoidantly attached relationship to life. We can think of this avoidant approach as holding up the back of the palm to life and to the Self, which maps with the Buddhist concept of aversion/ hatred, and sometimes delusion/ confusion as well. 

When I allow life to come to me and then meet it with openness and connection as much as I’m able to at any given moment, I am cultivating a secure and trusting relationship with life and the Self; consider an open palm. When I choose to be here, I choose myself and the life that is right here living through me. I choose to securely attach to this life that I am in relationship with and to the self that is experiencing it. This is a space of clear-seeing, wisdom and understanding (Prajna). 

And listen, there are copious reasons not to trust: we’ve been hurt, jerked around, let down, shamed, overwhelmed, dejected, in existential crises, and beyond. And, I’m learning that to trust life is to trust myself and vice versa. To become a secure home base for myself is to allow life’s ups and downs, joys and sorrows, griefs and celebrations to come and to leave. This is not to tolerate an unsafe or violent situation, it is to allow what is skillful and serving of life carrying on living, and of a human being living in an insecure and groundless world.

To shift into sufficiency, abundance even, is a seed change: it is to radically alter my relationship to seeing myself as unworthy and in the past, not worthy of life, toward trusting myself and seeing my life as unfolding toward my highest/ most essential self. This is not to claim some manifest your truth, attract your destiny spiritual bypass garbage while disavowing oppressive systems within which we are embedded. Rather, it is to see life clearly and to see my own role in life clearly. 

To be in an intimate relationship with the Self, with life, is to securely attach, and to know that experiences, people, identities will come and they will leave, and we don’t know how long we will have with them. I do know that while I’m here, I want to be as present for each of the experiences and people who visit as humanly possible. And I want to be present with myself: securely attached and at rest within the seat of the Self. 

And from an embodied stance, feeling secure and trusting in the Self brings a whole lot more ease and settling into this tense AF nervous system. And perhaps, one day, I will even relax a little bit.