What Is Attachment Trauma and How Do We Move Towards Healing?

How we respond to “threat” is often shaped long before we have language for it. Our reactions aren’t always conscious or logical—they are frequently dictated by our earliest experiences of safety, connection, and care. You’ve probably heard about attachment styles by now, usually in the context of romantic relationships. But attachment can go beyond who we date or how we argue with a partner.

Our attachment patterns can influence how we relate to the world around us, how we experience stress, how we seek support, and how we respond internally when things feel overwhelming or uncertain. Attachment speaks to how we find safety—both externally with others and internally within ourselves. Our earliest attachment experiences with parents or caretakers create a template for how our nervous systems learn to regulate, how we expect our needs to be met, and whether the world feels like a place we can soften into or one we must brace against.

What Are the Different Attachment “Styles”?

Attachment styles are often described as categories, but it’s more accurate to think of them as patterns—tendencies that emerge under stress or threat. They are the folders your brain and nervous system access from the filing cabinet. They are adaptive responses, not character flaws.

Anxious attachment
If you’re anxiously attached, your system may feel perpetually “revved up.” There’s often a sense of urgency—like something needs to be fixed right now in order to feel okay. You might seek reassurance outside of yourself, grasping for what feels steady or predictable. When stress hits, your nervous system leans toward hyperactivation: racing thoughts, tightness in the chest, restlessness, difficulty sleeping, or feeling overwhelmed.

Your adrenals may work overtime, constantly scanning for what’s next: the next conversation, the next potential catastrophe. You are vigilant. You are ready. At some point, closeness or safety felt inconsistent, and your system learned that staying alert was necessary for survival.

Avoidant attachment
If you’re avoidantly attached, your system may move in the opposite direction. When faced with threat or emotional intensity, you might turn away, shut down, or withdraw. Distance becomes the way you regain a sense of control and safety. You may not seek support during distress, not because you don’t need it, but because relying on others hasn’t felt safe or reliable in the past.

Emotions may feel overwhelming or intrusive, so your body helps you cope through numbness, detachment, or intellectualizing. You might feel disconnected from your needs, unsure of what you’re feeling, or uncomfortable when others express vulnerability. Again—this is adaptive. Withdrawal once protected you.

Disorganized attachment
With disorganized attachment, the nervous system hasn’t found a consistent strategy that reliably leads to safety. You may oscillate between anxious activation and avoidant shutdown, sometimes feeling desperate for closeness and other times pushing it away. Threat can create a sense of internal chaos, confusion, or fragmentation.

This pattern often develops when the source of safety was also a source of fear, or when care was unpredictable. Your system learned that connection itself could be dangerous, leaving you without a clear roadmap for regulation.

A Note on Attachment

These descriptions are offered as examples, not boxes to climb into. As humans, we contain immense nuance. We may each trend toward one attachment style more than others, depending on our relational histories, trauma experiences, and current environments. But attachment is contextual. Different parts of us may carry different attachment needs, and different situations can activate different responses.

From an Internal Family Systems (IFS) lens, it’s likely that you have multiple “parts” with distinct attachment strategies. One part of you may become anxiously activated in romantic relationships, while another becomes avoidant at work or with family. Or you may have a part that feels anxious at the start of a new relationship, only to find you have another part that is more avoidant as things get more serious, or conflict develops. Context matters.

How Are Attachment Trauma and Developmental Trauma Different?

Attachment trauma forms through repeated early relational experiences that shape our nervous systems. These experiences don’t have to be overt or extreme to have a lasting impact. Trauma isn’t defined solely by what happened—it’s defined by what was overwhelming (too much, too fast, too soon) and how supported (or unsupported) we felt in those moments. The same event can affect different individuals in very different ways.

Small moments accumulate over time. Being left to cry without comfort. Caregivers who were emotionally unavailable, unpredictable, critical, or overwhelmed themselves. Parents who relied on us for emotional support. Chronic stress in the household. Even well-meaning parents can unintentionally disrupt a child’s sense of safety—so this isn’t meant to shame parents who are doing their best in a complex and demanding world.

You might hear the terms attachment trauma and developmental trauma used interchangeably. While they are closely related, they aren’t exactly the same. Developmental trauma refers to experiences that occur during key periods of development and interfere with typical neurological, emotional, or relational growth. This term is most often used to describe trauma occurring in early childhood—from pre-conception and in utero through the pre-teen years. That said, because brain development continues into the early to mid-20s, trauma occurring during adolescence and early adulthood can also have developmental implications.

So, are attachment trauma and developmental trauma different? I would put it this way: if you have attachment trauma, you also have developmental trauma. However, it’s possible to have developmental trauma without attachment trauma. For example, something traumatic may occur during early development that isn’t primarily relational in nature—such as medical procedures, difficult or premature births, serious illness, or accidents. Events like these can interrupt how our bodies, brains, and reflexes develop, or prevent our basic needs from being met, even in the presence of caring relationships.

We also live within social, cultural, and systemic contexts that regularly signal danger, instability, or unworthiness. Oppression, marginalization, economic insecurity, and collective trauma all layer onto our individual experiences. Our nervous systems don’t develop in a vacuum.

The Filing Cabinet Metaphor

Somatic therapist and author Kathy Kain uses a helpful metaphor for understanding how our nervous systems adapt to trauma: the filing cabinet.

Our limbic system and amygdala—the core of our threat-response architecture—begin collecting data early in life. Each overwhelming or distressing experience gets stored as a “file.” These files contain rich sensory information:

• Interoception: how the body felt internally (tightness, heat, collapse, panic)
• Exteroception: what was happening around us (tone of voice, facial expressions, absence or presence of care)

Our nervous systems are predictive. They use this stored data to assess whether new experiences are safe or threatening. The amygdala is constantly quick-sorting: Is that a stick or a snake? Is this sensation helpful or dangerous?

If your early experiences involved neglect, emotional misattunement, or repeated stress, your filing cabinet may be full of files coded for danger. Over time, your system learns that it’s safer to assume threat than risk being wrong. Relaxation simply isn’t a safe option.

And yes, it can be exhausting.

Attachment styles are not life sentences. They are learned patterns, and learned patterns can change. With “safe enough” relationships, consistent experiences of attunement, and intentional internal work, it is absolutely possible to develop more secure attachment, both with others and within yourself.

How Does Somatic Therapy Help Heal Attachment Trauma?

When our nervous systems are chronically activated or shut down, much of our energy is diverted toward survival. Healing attachment trauma isn’t about “thinking differently” or forcing positive beliefs—it’s about providing the nervous system with new, lived experiences of safety.

Let’s go back to that idea of the filing cabinet. For every traumatic file in the filing cabinet, we want to slowly create new files coded for rest, regulation, and having our needs met. This doesn’t happen all at once. Attachment patterns formed over years, and healing unfolds gradually, through repetition.

It happens in small moments:

• A pause where you notice you’re safe right now
• A relationship where repair actually occurs
• A therapy session where you feel seen without being rushed
• A sensation in your body that feels just a little more settled than usual

Somatic therapy helps us slow down enough to notice these moments. It invites us to track sensation, to gently stay with the places in our bodies that have learned to brace, collapse, or disappear. Rather than pushing for catharsis or insight, somatic work prioritizes capacity: how much safety and presence your system can tolerate.

Sometimes the work looks quiet. It may involve sitting together, noticing your breath, orienting to the room, or placing a hand on a part of your body that feels guarded. It can feel deceptively simple. But for parts of us that have been yearning for care without overwhelm, these moments are profound.

Over time, your nervous system learns something new: I can feel this and survive. I can be connected without losing myself. I can rest. We start to build new experiences, not by erasing the past, but by expanding the present.