Disorganized Attachment Style

Hello everyone, welcome to the Said in Therapy Podcast. Have you ever considered going to therapy and you ended up not going? My question is why? In my humble opinion, I believe everyone can benefit from therapy. In fact, I believe everybody should go at least once in their life.

My name is Iman Tohami, and I'm a psychologist. This podcast tells you all about everyday cases with everyday people who have everyday problems and difficulties, and sometimes they carry around really deep wounds. These are their stories.

So today we are going to discuss the disorganized attachment style. And I gotta be honest with you, I have been struggling with this um series in general just because I really didn't feel like talking about this attachment style for many reasons.

But first and foremost, I think I have worked with so many abused survivors in the past that I kind of find it hard to put this attachment style into context. Because the reality is, I explained this before, especially when it comes to the development of attachment styles, that this is something that you don't necessarily, or not necessarily, you don't choose this full stop.

It is always in relation to the people who are taking care of you, whether it's a parent, a caretaker, a guardian, whatever it may be, that attachment will always be a result of the relationship that you have with this person.

So when I started thinking of this series, I somehow put this one attachment style very much in the back of my head, and then somehow ignored it. And then I thought, okay, I will just ignore the series as a whole, but I really want to finish this series because I feel that this is something people can benefit from.

So the disorganized attachment style is, as I told you before, a little bit more complex and difficult and complicated. The most difficult type of insecure attachment is the disorganized attachment style. We also call it the fearful avoidant attachment style, which is maybe if you have a hint here, a combination of the two other insecure attachment styles.

But I think the disorganized attachment style as a definition or as a term is so much more accurate, if you will. So as I said, attachment styles develop in relation to the child's caregiver. And in many cases, or in all cases, this caretaker or the or the caregivers, the parents, are the only source of safety in the beginning of a person's life or a baby's life.

So when this person becomes the source of fear, the results or the impact it has on your life later on becomes so much more significant. In adulthood, people with this attachment style are extremely inconsistent in their behavior and have a hard time trusting other people.

So individuals who are affected by this could also suffer from other mental health issues, which is in many cases predominantly the reason why they seek therapy. You can see people with substance abuse, depression, borderline personality disorder. When you look a little closer, this attachment style can actually always be found.

I don't want to say always, but it's a good indicator that this might be one of the reasons. This attachment style can be changed with proper treatment, although the process is very challenging and it can take years. I want to cover what is the most common question around the disorganized attachment style and what specifically causes disorganized attachment in children.

So let's start. We see that, you know, it's coherent to the attachment styles that I have discussed before in terms of how it develops. What makes a disorganized or fearful avoidant attachment style different is that it implies a lack of coherence in the individual social behavior.

Most attachment specialists believe that disorganized attachment style is the most difficult in the three insecure attachment styles that I have, I mean, I have just discussed the other two already, but this is the most complicated of the three.

Because it implies that you have both anxious and avoidant behaviors and styles in how you deal with people. So, what causes the disorganized attachment style in children? You hear me pausing because um obviously this is not always the case, but in most cases, I would go as far as saying it's 95% of the people who suffer from a disorganized attachment style have suffered some sort of abuse in their childhood.

And trauma can be one specific or many specific incidents that you cannot get out of your head, or it can be a phase that you cannot really grasp. Perceived fear is a central aspect in the development of people who suffer from this attachment stuff.

I'm sure you know the survival of a baby depends on the parent, the caregivers. The child knows that subconsciously she has to seek safety in that person. The problem arises when the source of safety becomes a source of fear.

So if the caregiver, parent, whatever, for the sake of the spot, I want to say caregiver because I don't want to imply that only parents take care of their children or children in general, because circumstances are obviously not always ideal.

If the caregiver shows highly contrasting behavior, which is inconsistent and unpredictable, the child can start fearing for her life or safety. The child does not know what to expect, nor does the child know when the caregiver will meet their needs, if at all.

Another reason for fear is having or witnessing a traumatizing experience that involves attachment figure. For instance, the caregiver abuses the child, it could be verbally, physically, sexually, or the child witnesses the caregiver abuse someone else. So you get the idea.

It could also be just for the sake of an example, I will take a very traditional example in the sense of roles. If the father is beating up the mother, those could be a source of trauma that the child will never forget and will affect them for the rest of their life.

Either way, the child no longer trusts the caregiver. The child realizes that they cannot rely on the caregiver and they stop asking for physical and emotional needs, whether it's implicit or explicit, the child simply decides at some point on a subconscious level that this person is no longer trusted.

The caregiver who should be acting as a source of safety, they are often not reliable. And on top of that, they are causing a lot of fear. And I really want to put the emphasis on fear because it's not simply this, oh, I'm a little bit nervous or afraid.

No, the caregiver who is causing this type of relationship with yourself and with other people is causing deep-rooted fear. Children with a disorganized attachment style are not able to truly adapt to caregivers' behaviors. And as a result, they will never know what comes next.

They cannot predict behavior, they don't know if a person is going to be nice or if they are going to leach out or if they are going to be hit. So, this is what I mean by children like a coherent idea in their own behavior towards the caregiver.

They might seek closeness because, especially when they're still young, they don't know where else to get it. But in other times, they might reject the caregiver's proximity and look for physical distance because they are afraid. So, what do relationships with disorganized adults look like?

Well, in adults with disorganized attachment, it's a very complicated approach towards relationships. On one hand, they want to belong, they want to be loved, they want to love, but on the other hand, they are afraid to let anyone in.

They have a strong fear that people who are closest to them will hurt them because they already had a very close example, which is supposed to be the most important relationship in your life when you're a child. So adults with disorganized attachment style fear intimacy and avoid proximity, similar to individuals with the avoidant attachment style.

But the main difference is for the disorganized adult, they want to have relationships. So you might see these people enter relationships that are very toxic because they're almost expecting and waiting for rejection, disappointment, and more pain. So on a subconscious level, they basically choose those people to give them exactly the emotions that they are already expecting from them.

They do not necessarily reject emotional intimacy, but they are very afraid of it. Adults with disorganized attachment style continue to view the attachment figure, parent, caregiver as very unpredictable. And on a very subconscious level, they will seek the same type of person as a partner.

But they will have troubles to believe that their partner will love and support them, and they will wait for the rejection and disappointment and pain. In their minds, it is something that it has to happen. The mindset can also turn into self-sabotaging relationships that are possibly good for them, or maybe they end a relationship too early, or maybe they stay in a relationship because they think there's nothing out there that could possibly be better than this.

And this is the complicated complicated part because this type also tends to be in a relationship that is self-fulfilling, or tends to be leaning towards self-fulfilling prophecy. So, for those who don't know, self-fulfilling prophecy is basically you believing in something being so bad that you actually start attracting it, not because you're a magnet or something like that.

I am not talking about this new age idea of law of attraction. The meaning is basically that you are surrounding yourself with the same type of people who will actually help you to repeat history. And in that sense, this is called self-fulfilling prophecy.

And I want to give you an example that is quite famous in psychology. And if I can tell you anything, it's this that most people have heard this maybe in the first or second lecture they were in when they started studying psychology.

So there is a man who needs a hammer, and he knows his neighbor has a hammer, but he tells himself, even before he goes out the door to knock at his neighbor's door, that oh my God, he is never helpful, he is never trying to help me.

Last time I asked him for something, he didn't say yes, and so on and so forth, and so on and so forth. And then by the time he reached the door and knocked, the neighbor opened the door and he told him, You can keep your damn hammer.

So he didn't even ask. He just assumed that his neighbor is not going to give him the hammer. And this is a type of self-of-frame prophecy on a very basic level. So for you to understand what I mean.

Disorganized adults tend to have negative views about themselves, but also on other people. They are at a very high risk of developing mental health issues, such as substance abuse, as I said before. They tend to be aggressive, and sometimes they also tend to abuse their own children because they don't know any better.

I want to be very careful about this because everybody should know better. I am not by any means excusing this, but this could be the end result of a disorganized adult. Many researches um suggest it also demonstrates a link between the disorganized attachment style in adults and the borderline personality disorder.

I think the most important question is now can you change a disorganized attachment style if you think you suffer from it? Living with a disorganized attachment style is anything but easy. Imagine playing a game that you never really understood, and yet you're playing it.

You want to play with others, but no one even taught you how to play. And when it's your turn, you make your one move, and then you expect you're gonna lose anyway because you don't know any better. This is how you need to look at it again on a very basic level.

Fortunately, there are ways to heal, but it is very important for you to seek the help, to talk to loved ones, and eventually, if you have children, to heal in relation to them. Because in many cases, if disorganized adults have children, they will start reliving their own trauma that they had as children.

A disorganized attachment style can also cause a lot of distress and confusion when it comes to social interaction and intimacy. It can actually harm you to the point that you force people out of your life that you actually love and know that they are good for you.

Being around or being with someone who has this attachment style is very challenging. It's very unpredictable. There's a lot of suspicion, there is a lot of trust issues. And when they are hurt and sad and afraid, they tend to be very hurtful.

As a caregiver with a disorganized attachment style, so if you're a parent of a child, the key thing is here for the child's emotional development is to understand that oftentimes your reactions are not in relation to the behavior of the child, but in relation to what happened to you in your own childhood.

So if you as a parent have unresolved trauma or loss, you're very likely to raise a child with a disorganized attachment style. And this could be a good motivation to actually seek therapy, to work through your own issues in order to avoid the same thing to happen to your child.

How to heal a disorganized attachment style in adults. One of the key issues in people with attachment style, in this attachment style is fear, especially in the one person that they were supposed to trust, but no longer could because they were so for them.

Everybody will hurt me. However, this is not very productive later on in life. To simply avoid the proximity to anyone you could possibly trust and love will not help you heal from the trauma or the painful childhood experiences.

In order to learn to build secure relationships, you need to learn to trust other people first. I know this sounds very easy because it's really not, but for adults with disorganized attachment style, it can be so, so challenging.

It might be the best reason for them to start seeking help from a professional. And I don't say this lightly. If you have trauma in your life, if you think you have been traumatized by a caretaker, seek the help of a psychotherapist.

It needs to be a clinically trained person and try establishing that trust with them. And from there on, you can actually expand and start establishing trust with other people as well. Normally in therapy, you will not have judgment, you will not have minimal space to express yourself.

In fact, you will have so much space that you sometimes will not know how to fill it. In learning how to express yourself, you will also make sense of your own experiences and emotions, and you will also acknowledge all the needs that were never fulfilled.

If therapy is not necessarily an option, and if you want to try healing on your own, the most promising approach is to actually start journaling. I know I repeat myself all the time, but when you start writing about what happened to you, and when you see it flowing, and it's actually very important for me to tell you to try journaling the old school way.

So take a notebook and take a pen and start writing and see what comes up. Whatever you write doesn't need to make sense, whatever you write doesn't need to be a short story or even you know a text that makes something uh logical for an outside reader.

Just start writing and see what comes out. And it will help you to sort your feelings and thoughts so that maybe later on, if you don't feel comfortable going to a therapist right now, you can decide that you actually need a therapist and you will start looking for one.

Yes, I try to make this as short and as sweet as I can. Unfortunately, it's a very um complicated, as I said before, attachment style. It comes along with a lot of sadness and anxiety and fear. And I you might hear it in my voice.

I have dealt with this type of attachment style for the better part of my career. It's a very complicated one, and it takes a long time to actually untie all the knots that were built throughout childhood and to make sense of them.

I want to say that you can heal, but you actually need to take the step forward and seek the help you need. So I hope that helped and see you next week. Next week, I will try to make maybe a short overview of the attachment styles if that is what you need or what you want.

But other than that, latest the week after we go back to interviewing other people and talking about their therapy experiences.

All right. Take care, everyone. Hey, thank you so much for tuning in. And hopefully, you will tune in again next week. It will be another episode talking to or about clients of mine, and you can find us on social media on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram.

The handle is always @saidintherapy. Thank you so much.