Real or Not Real? Living with Attachment-Based Trauma, CPTSD, or BPD
I recently re-watched The Hunger Games movies, and there’s a series of interactions between Katniss and Peeta where he inquires, “Real or not real?” after he has been tortured, his memories hijacked and distorted in such a way he believes her to be the enemy. As a woman who is forever Team Peeta, my heart cracked a little every time he asked her this—every time he attempted to reconcile the truth of his memories and his love for her.
This plotline strikes me as so very similar to the experience of folks living with attachment-based trauma and/or other offshoots of traumatic injuries such as CPTSD or Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD). When early childhood relationships—or even relationships in our adulthood—cause serious harm, it can be challenging to trust people, and more so, to trust our own decision-making.
The Role of Parts in Trauma Response
In Internal Family Systems, the explanation provided for this phenomenon is the formation of parts (emotions, thoughts, and/or images), which develop around the traumatic wound to prevent us from re-experiencing pain and to ensure our survival.
To highlight a few examples:
Folks struggling with avoidance have parts that feel threatened by too much closeness and fear loss of independence. These parts employ strategies such as fault-finding and sabotage to keep intimacy at bay.
Those who are more anxiously attached develop parts that fear abandonment; they become hypervigilant to any distancing behaviors.
With CPTSD and BPD, people can struggle with intense and overwhelming parts (e.g., anger, depression, self-destruction) in response to any kind of perceived threat or event that triggers shame, abandonment, or failure.
The outcome? On a dime, the people we love become the enemy—unsafe, or a combination of both. It’s a whirlwind of feeling, exhausting for those experiencing it, and an equally tumultuous roller-coaster for the people who love us.
The Pattern of Unsafe Attachment
To complicate things further, if our early childhood attachments (such as our parents or caregivers) were unsafe in any way—think parents with personality disorders, tempers, or simply absent or emotionally unavailable—this particular pattern of relationship becomes one we are drawn to in our adult lives. It is what actually feels safe, despite it being the opposite.
What. A. Cluster. F*ck.
We’re often told to trust our gut or listen to our intuition when making decisions, particularly where relationships are concerned. But what if you can’t?
The Path to Healing
We therapists tackle these issues in a variety of ways, very much dependent on our theory of practice. But generally, for therapy to be effective, you’re going to require an approach that includes:
Developing a felt sense of safety in the body.
Development of self-trust, including identifying your values, core wants, and needs.
With avoidance: allowing yourself to be uncomfortable; moving toward relationships rather than pulling away.
With anxiety: also experiencing discomfort, but doing the opposite—turning toward yourself, learning to self-soothe, and meeting your own needs.
Noticing and naming a part as a part; learning to communicate your parts (feelings, wants, and needs) to your partner. Within this, resisting blame/criticism of your partner for your emotional experience.
Identifying and setting boundaries in relationships when the ways they treat you—or basic compatibility—don’t align with your core values, wants, and needs.
Trauma-based approaches to healing core attachment wounds.
More than anything, I want to validate the torture of living with an insecure attachment style, CPTSD, or BPD. It’s a special kind of hell to be hijacked by parts—to long for rest and ease when your body is either (a) warning you of danger where there is very little, or (b) keeping you googly-eyed over partners from whom you should have ran-like-you-stole-something after date #1.
If this is you, I would encourage good therapy (i.e., one addressing the above elements, with a particular focus on safety in the body). Talk therapy alone isn’t going to get you where you want to be.
Because if Katniss and Peeta can live happily ever after, you deserve that too.
With love,
Christina
