My Wake-Up Call, Attachment Wounds, & What You Really Need

What You Really Need “We have been raised to fear . . . our deepest cravings. And the fear of our deepest cravings keeps them suspect, keeps us docile and loyal and obedient, and leads us to settle for . . . many facets of our own oppression.”[1] —Audre Lorde, The Uses of the Erotic   I used to think it was indulgent and selfish to acknowledge my needs and desires, especially when so many people in the world suffer so much more than I do. I grew up with few models of self-love and care, and I was painfully aware of my white privilege from an early age. In my teens and early twenties, my reluctance to take good care of myself and my white guilt mixed together into a brew of savior mentality. I showed up in less-than-helpful ways and lived on the brink of burnout. Luckily, life sent me a wake up call at a relatively young age. My moment of truth came while lying on my bed in Oaxaca, Mexico, thirty-six weeks pregnant. I’d just returned from an appointment with my midwife. The hospitals in Oaxaca had extremely high rates of medical intervention in births, and I wanted a home birth. My midwife told me that my baby was breech and that my son would need to turn soon in order to have the birth I was hoping for. Lying on my bed, I placed my hands on my belly and asked my baby what he needed. I sensed his response immediately—Settle yourself. I’d been through a lot in the year leading up to that moment. My partner, who was undocumented at the time, was racially profiled while driving to work, and six months later, he was deported to Mexico. I had transferred with my job with the hotel workers’ union from New Haven, Connecticut to Phoenix, Arizona to be closer to him. A few months after that, I discovered I was pregnant, and I spent my pregnancy bouncing back and forth across borders, trying to figure out where we’d live next. Finally, at seven-months-pregnant, I moved to Oaxaca, Mexico. With my hands on my belly, I realized that to be the mother I wanted to be for my baby, I needed to feel settled in my body, which meant doing many things differently. I promised my son that I would learn to take better care of myself, and that started my journey to share this with you today. Now, it wasn’t an immediate jump from A to B—from neglecting my needs to honoring them at all times—and I am definitely still a work in progress, but I am so grateful to my son for the wake-up call and for starting me on this path toward aligning my life with my deepest needs and values. So, now that you know a bit of my story, let’s turn to you. How would you describe your relationship with your needs? When people ask you what you need or want, do you know exactly how to answer? Or do you struggle to respond? And, if you do know what you need, do you prioritize your needs? Would you like some acknowledgement of how hard it can be to meet your needs, with all of the demands that are on you and the lack of support we receive in our splintered society? Or would you like some acknowledgement that no one ever taught you to meet your needs well? One reason I see that many people struggle to understand and prioritize their needs is attachment wounds. So, before we go further, I want to take you on a brief detour to explore attachment theory and how babies learn to honor their needs—or not. Although most of us come into this world with the capacity to express whether or not our needs are met, we are not born with the ability to meet our needs. Instead, we rely on our caregivers to teach us to meet our needs. Here’s how we ideally develop the ability to identify our needs and feel safe, seen, soothed, and able to trust ourselves and others, an ability known as secure attachment:[2] Secure Attachment Let’s imagine that there’s a baby. The baby wakes up after a nap and starts crying. The caregiver comes into the room, coos lovingly to the baby, picks the baby up, and rocks the baby back and forth. The baby stops crying. The baby realizes, in perhaps not so many words: “Oh! That feels good! I felt lonely, and now I’m held. I needed attention.” After a moment, the baby starts to squirm with discomfort. The caregiver checks the baby’s diaper, realizes it’s wet, and changes the diaper. The baby realizes, consciously or unconsciously: “Oh! That feels good! I felt wet, and I needed to be dry!” After a few more moments, the baby begins to cry again. The baby hasn’t eaten for a couple of hours, so the caregiver offers the baby a breast or bottle. The baby eats, feels sated, and realizes: "Oh! I felt hungry, and now I feel full. I needed food!” In the ideal scenario, we humans develop the ability to honor our needs through being in relationship with people who attune to our needs and offer solutions that match. Babies develop secure attachment when caregivers consistently and effectively attune to their needs. However, if babies don’t receive attunement and repair consistently enough, they are less likely to learn to interpret, trust, or effectively respond to what they feel and need, and they are more likely to develop coping strategies including avoidant attachment and preoccupied attachment (also known as anxious or ambivalent attachment).[3] Let’s explore each of these now. Avoidant Attachment Let's now imagine that the same baby cries, but the caregiver consistently does not attune to or match the baby's needs. The caregiver may be hostile toward or critical of the baby or absent for reasons such as an illness or preoccupation with work or other responsibilities. The parent may also appear involved but only become excited about a shared interest with the child or the child’s high performance. This baby still experiences feelings of distress from their unmet needs, but it seems pointless to the baby to even pay attention when there’s nothing they can do to meet their needs. To make their needs manageable and turn down the pain of consistently unmet needs, they learn to ignore their body’s signals, turn away from their longings, act as if they’re getting what they need, or convince themselves that they don’t need anything at all. They may develop a tendency to flee the right hemisphere and the parts of the brain that signal unmet needs and to become highly cognitive and task-oriented instead. If you developed an avoidant attachment style, you may now have a harder time identifying your feelings, needs, and desires or even relating to the idea that you have needs in the first place. You may feel a sense of embarrassment or disgust when considering your longings, look down upon others for their messy emotions, feel irritated at the hassle of having to add your needs to your to-do list, or think you should need nothing at all.[4] Because avoidantly attached people had to rely on themselves to meet their own needs, they  tend to believe that other people won’t or can’t help them, that they shouldn’t trust other people, that they can only rely on themselves, or that their vulnerability might be used against them. In order to protect themselves from being hurt again, they often refuse help from others. Avoidantly attached people may show up as the most competent person in the room and become highly respected yet lonely leaders. Preoccupied Attachment Now, let’s imagine another baby. This time, the caregiver occasionally attunes to the baby and matches their response to the baby’s needs, but most of the time, the caregiver offers the wrong thing at the wrong time. For example, the baby cries out of loneliness, but the caregiver gives them a bottle or the baby feels overtired, but the caregiver sits them down in front of the tv. Preoccupied attachment often emerges when a primary caregiver relies on the child to meet the caregiver’s emotional or physical needs, and the child learns that their needs are more likely to be met if their caregiver's needs are met. As a result, the child learns to be preoccupied with others’ feelings and needs, prioritize other peoples' needs before their own, or hide their own feelings and needs in an attempt to please others. Preoccupied-attached people often do not trust themselves and can develop a pattern of seeking advice from others rather than following their own inner guidance. This lack of trust sometimes develops because the caregiver expected the child to handle adult responsibilities, so the child expects this of themself as well, but no matter how hard they try, the child doesn't have the power to meet all their needs effectively. As a result, the preoccupied child is likely to blame their inability to meet their needs on themselves and thus not trust themselves. Additionally, due to the fact that even when the child’s needs were met, the child came to expect that their needs soon enough would not be met, so preoccupied-attached people often learn to anticipate disappointment and feel a sense of foreboding, like something’s about to go wrong even when things are good. As adults, they may say “yeah, but” after sharing good things that are happening or explain why the good things aren't as good as they could be. They might be on high-alert to every little feeling and struggle to soothe themselves effectively. To avoid the pain of rejection or disappointment, preoccupied people sometimes appear to become avoidant. Although I had learned about attachment theory before, I didn’t really get it until taking Carmen Spagnola’s course, Secure, through her online membership site, the Numinous Network. For a deeper dive into healing attachment wounds, I highly recommend taking her course or reading her Medium article, Portrait of A Marriage (Yes, It’s Mine). To get a clearer picture of how these attachment strategies show up in your life, I recommend taking these free assessments: dianepooleheller.com/attachment-test/ and yourpersonality.net/attachment. You can also take these assessments repeatedly over time to track your healing.