#alan robarge

i don’t know how helpful it will be but - i think you should take a look at alan robarge on youtube and his videos about attachment. i’ve found them very enlightening and very helpful

Dysfunctional relating begins by picking an emotionally unavailable partner. You need to learn some new skills – boundaries, walking away, letting go, grieving your losses, and loving yourself more fully.

No more abandoning yourself waiting around for someone who’s not coming around. Wake up to the reality distortion and fantasy projections, and commit to a real plan of action. Today is a new day! Time for clarity, standards, and a new outlook.”

Over time I hate myself. There must be something wrong with me... because if there wasn’t something wrong with me, I would be able to shine so brightly and be so loving and be such a good kid that (there wouldn’t be tension in the home)... A kid is able to enter fantasy realm... I CAN SAVE THE FAMILY, and one way that I can do this is work on myself. Then I also have to believe there’s something wrong with me, and if there’s something wrong with me, then I have to keep shaming myself and be critical, try harder, do better, achieve more, all in the attempt to try to get some positive reinforcement from a family, family members, parents who are distracted in their own dysfunction and living in a collective system where we’re all marinating in a kind of shame, helplessness, anger, and frustration. The child absorbs this. The child takes this on. The child incorporates this into his/her personality and outlook on life. So then I’m a shame-based person. I don’t really like myself that much. I experience toxic shame. To expose myself, to assert my sense of self, to actually have my own point of view, my own opinion, to reveal my vulnerabilities is excruciatingly painful because I don’t have a lot of history in my family of that being welcomed or seen or handled with care because everyone else is distracted in the daily drama/dysfunction/tension/distress of not getting along in more healthy ways of relating.

So one reason why people continue to hate themselves is because they have not confronted the profound grief that if we look at how this shame got set up in our life and be aware that we were a precious innocent child, and were also with precious innocent adult parents as well. In many ways they’re clueless to what’s going on because they are products of their family and their history, and this is a family legacy of unconscious people hurting each other and perpetuating the dysfunction.

If I want to stop hating myself, if I want to stop being a shame-based person, I have to go to the origin of how this got set up in my life. In order to do that I need to open and access the incredible deep grief of what it was like to live in a family where I was taught to not like myself. So for many people, that’s daunting, that’s overwhelming, that’s scary. So many people would say (unconsciously), “Well, I’m not going to go there. I don’t have the strength, wherewithal, healing tools, support system to open to that level of grief - both what happened and also the missed opportunities of connecting with a parent.”

Healing work is profoundly courageous, and the people who embark on this healing work are actually the strongest people I know. It’s a paradoxical strength that comes from softening. It requires strength to enter my... tenderness, to be in relationship with my wound.”

“For many people who have an insecure attachment that comes from attachment injuries that are unintegrated... If we have trauma energy, we have emotional, developmental relational trauma that is encoded in your brain and in your nervous system, and it’s looping... and it triggers a flood of hormones and brain activity that is just activated the hyperaroused state which is showing up as hyperthinking... Your mind, you cannot turn it off. Your mind has a life of its own. This hyperaroused state of obsessing is going to be so painful and so distracting because it’s going to link you repeatedly to the loss, grief, disconnect from your partner. Sometimes it’s going to be the feeling state... and other times it’s going to be this very hyper detail oriented... mind mulling over all of this information. You’re not going crazy. Your mind is on overdrive, and it’s really really hard to interrupt this right now when you are fully activated in this unintegrated, unhealed trauma. You’re having a body response, a nervous system response. Your attachment system is perceiving a great threat. This relationship ending is perceived as a life-or-death situation.”