Healing Maternal Attachment Trauma This Mother’s Day
On Mother’s Day, I usually take time to acknowledge my gorgeous kids and my mum, and also send a message of support to all those who are experiencing loss or pain in relation to motherhood (which is so many of us).
This year, I have been thinking a lot about maternal attachment trauma and the intergenerational aspect of it.
Trauma begets trauma. It travels down family lines until someone breaks the cycle with their own healing.
As young girls, when we experience attachment trauma and it goes unhealed, we are more likely to grow up and become mothers that pass our trauma on to the next generation. Either we repeat our childhood experience, or we try to run so far away from it, that our reaction becomes a redirected trauma response that is passed on to our children.
It is my belief and hope that this is changing with the current generation of new mothers. Many of us are aware of our trauma, we are doing ‘the work’ to heal, and we are consciously looking for ways to engage as responsive, loving mothers. It is not easy. We are not perfect. We are still triggered, messy fallible humans, but we are learning to love ourselves, acknowledge our mistakes, and with each rupture, find a way to lovingly repair the bonds with our children and show them what unconditional love looks like.
When we haven’t grown up with secure attachment and a healthy ‘map for love’, this can be an epic journey that requires patience, compassion, and commitment.
Most of our trauma goes unlabeled, masked in the nuances of our personality and coping mechanisms. It’s simply part of us. We are very clever at adapting, surviving, and prevailing. The thing is, we are not designed to survive forever, and at some point, our carefully hidden trauma will be triggered. Triggers can occur simply through the pressure of time, but they can also occur during high-intensity experiences and ‘turning points’.
For many women, becoming a mother can be the trigger that causes our attachment wounds to not only surface but to start screaming and demanding for the attention they have never received. Because that’s exactly what a trigger is – it is an unhealed part of us that is popping up to say ‘Is it my turn to tell my story yet? Please listen to me!’
In my clinic practice, I see many young mothers going through this experience and the crippling feelings of fear, shame, anger, grief, confusion, and helplessness that come along with it.
Some women describe overwhelming feelings of anxiety and immobilization, while others talk of an ‘angry monster’ taking over their being, and there are those that feel like they lose their sense of self and their ability to feel any sense of connection at all. While the manifestation may vary, the origin of attachment trauma is usually the same.
Most new mothers suffer silently and ashamed with these unlabeled experiences, and many who do reach out for mental health support are quickly labeled as post-natal depression or anxiety and put on medication. Certainly, medicine has its place in mental health care, and it is also important to acknowledge the enormous physiological changes that occur post-partum. However, when there is a history of developmental trauma, it is always important to consider the trauma story as part of the diagnosis and route to recovery.
In my experience working with young mothers experiencing mental health issues that are non-responsive to mainstream care, there is always an origin of maternal attachment trauma. And when we work with the root, healing becomes accessible. Mothers who delve into their trauma work often find that not only their mental health symptoms equalize, but they start to cultivate a sense of self-compassion that translates into deeper connection with their children, partners, and the world at large.
Being able to label and make sense of our childhood trauma and why it may trigger when we become mothers is really helpful for dissolving the shame that is often blocking access to our own healing. I find rather than get into the science of trauma, a conceptual explanation is better received:
‘When we have experienced childhood trauma, we often have to pack away many parts of ourselves that were not safe to express (our fear, our anger, our confusion, our grief, and our sheer helplessness). To do this, we create adaptive survival strategies that become part of our personality. Unconsciously, a huge amount of energy is going to protecting our inner child and keeping in all the responses that would not have been safe to emerge during the trauma (which usually occurs over many years). When we become a mother, it’s as if, in one instant, all our protective energy shifts over to our baby. But our inner child is left unattended and starting crying out. Because trauma is non-verbal and somatic in nature, it presents as sensations, feelings, emotions, and behaviors, rather than a cognitive linear narrative. This is why it is so incredibly confusing and scary. Once we can name our trauma and start to make sense of it, we are no longer powerless to some unexplainable force. We are no longer wondering if we are going crazy. And we are no longer trapped alone inside ourselves. We can start to piece together our trauma story; to make a space for those suppressed parts of us to express and integrate. We can heal’.
Some of the ways attachment trauma can show up include:
Emotional outbursts
Anxiety/bouts of fear
Apathy, listlessness,
Unexplained pain
Auto-immune conditions, particularly in relation to thyroid and hormone health
Feeling disconnected from your partner or child
Feeling frozen/paralyzed
Strange ticks or twitches
OCD type behaviors
Sabotaging close relationships
Body dysmorphia/shame/eating disorders
When attachment trauma is triggered and goes undiagnosed or untreated, we can often spiral into our symptoms and re-identify as sick, mentally ill, or just bad, wrong, or crazy.
The good news is, that it is never too late to start healing out trauma. Sharing our story is the first step. When we share our stories, we are finally acknowledging and freeing the traumatized child trapped inside us and creating a space for healing to begin. It’s a windy non-linear journey but in my onion a beautiful one.
As someone who has done (and continues to do) a lot of ‘the work’, the biggest reward is witnessing how it translates into my children who are clearly such content little beings who feel safe in their bodies, safe to express needs, boundaries and their cute little inner freaks! When I see this, gratefulness washes through me, and at the same time, I feel a little bit of grief for the childhood I didn’t have. I make sure my heart recognizes and acknowledges both, as I continue on my journey of healing – for me and for them.
Happy Mothers’ Day to all the mums out there!
If you resonated with this article and would like to take a step towards healing, you can email me here.