[āWhile yearning to ālikeā ourselves, the disowning of traumatic experiences or the vulnerable, ashamed, angry, or depressed parts holding implicit memories of those experiences results in a profound alienation from self: āI donāt know myself, but one thing is clear: I donāt like myself.ā The ability to be compassionate or comforting or curious with others, which comes so easily to many trauma survivors, is not matched by the ability to offer themselves the same kindness. What it took to survive has created a bind. It was adaptive āthenā to avoid comfort or self-compassion, to shame and self-judge before attachment figures could find them lacking, but now it has come to feel believable that others deserve or belong or are worth moreāwhile, at the same time, it also feels that these āothersā are not to be trusted; they are dangerous or uncaring.
It is a well-accepted premise that, to feel safe in any relationship, human beings need compassion both for themselves and for the other. Internal attachment bonds or āearned secure attachmentā (Siegel, 1999) give us emotional resilience. The internalization of secure attachment allows individuals to tolerate hurt, loneliness, anxiety, disappointment, frustration, and rejectionāall the risks inherent in any close relationship. But in order to unconditionally accept ourselves and āearnā that resilience, we need to develop a relationship to all of us: to our wounded and needy parts, to the parts hostile to vulnerability, to the parts that survived by distancing and denialāto the parts we love, the parts we hate, and even the parts that intimidate us.
Embedded in most methods of psychotherapy is the belief that āhealingā is the outcome of a relational process: that if we are wounded in an unsafe relationship, the wounds must heal in a context of relational safety. But what if the quality of our internal attachment bonds, rather than our interpersonal attachments, is a more powerful determinant of our ability to feel safe? What if attachment to ourselves is a bigger contributor to the sense of well-being than the attachment we feel to and from others? What if being witnessed as we recall painful events does not heal the injuries caused by those experiences? And what if compassion for the child who lived through these events is more important than knowing the details of what happened? If that is so, and I believe it is, then trauma treatment must focus less on painful and traumatic events and more on cultivating compassion for our disowned selves and their painful experiences. When all parts of us feel internally connected and held lovingly inside, each can experience feeling safe, welcome, and worthy, often for the first time. The first step is to become curious about this āotherā inside whom we do not really know.ā]
janina fisher, from healing the fragmented selves of trauma survivors: overcoming internal self-alienation, 2017
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