Disorganized Attachment Identity and Coming of Aging
- Carolyn Lee Downes
- Feb 11
- 9 min read
Aging- a potential Tailspin if you've got Attachment Issues
If you're a Millennial like me, you're probably becoming much more aware of signs of aging.
Now, if you grew up to feel like a cycling byproduct of people pleasing and rebellion, listen up and read on.
Conceptual Transitions can be more, less, or not all Traumatic
Aging inevitably triggers an awareness of natural changes, seemingly out of our control, that impact how we perceive ourselves: physical appearance, social status, future goals, esteemed abilities, and running achievement lists.
Our western culture has a hyperawareness towards the ‘losses’ associated with aging appearances, bodies, and abilities. Internalized beliefs suggest aging comes with more and more red tape to how we’ll continue experiencing our external realities, whilst on journeys to pause, stop, or turn back and preserve the internal realities we want to experience them with.
This is a problem in general, but a particularly hard one to navigate for those with untreated or treated disorganized attachment (DA) patterns.
Transitions are Change, aka. the Fuel for Disorganized Attachment Issues
When you've experienced DA, it's like your brain's algorithm formed associative learning patterns in the form of cling-or-run responses. It's likely that early experiences in inconsistent and/or chaotic environments reinforced this style of coping.
The interesting part is that many of these circumstances aren't what you'd expect right off the bat.
Sure, some might include family dynamics with DV or drug use, but still others include situations like
Having had many caregivers with different parenting styles
Dismissive adult responses to coping with change in form of questions
Caregivers who were supportive and loving, but inconsistently accessible
Starkly different surroundings and expectations at home vs school
Having no role models for certain aspects of one's healthy identity integration
Moving multiple times across the country or between places with different lifestyle norms
Shifts in familial values based on parents' perceived satisfaction within their relationships, income, political views, self-perception, healthy or less healthy means for coping
I could go on....
But regardless of how disorganized learning patterns were originally introduced, they can be traumatic, and honestly lead to increases in the probability that one will respond to new circumstances that feel similar to past ones, with more complex traumatic responses than the original.
This is where we often see individuals suffocating for reprieve in the form of countless types of addictions, over identification with traits and achievements more in one's control, or even straight up declaration that one's gravitation towards chaos is because it's familiar-- as if to justify the patterns nonexistent end.
Imagine this:
You have a road bike as a form of mental and emotional transportation throughout life. But, because of the majority of trails you've experienced in childhood, it get's tweaked for you to use as more of a mountain bike. Then in adulthood, imagine trying to go back to riding it as road bike, without the mechanics to remove it's hypersensitive shock-absorbing system.
The going back and forth between the two+ environments over the course of a lifetime- without making any mediating adjustments like you probably would with environmental ones- is what experiencing unaddressed disorganized attachment can feel like.
Each environmental transition is representative of ANY big life change that requires an invisible mental & emotional transition to occur in parallel.
All of these exhausting sounding, but stereotypically non-traumatic seeming experiences result in subconscious learning messages (see below), reinforcing a disorganized attachment styled response system.
Disorganized Attachment beliefs/ rules to abide for mental & emotional survival
Sources of comfort are never the same, so life generally feels unsafe
To feel as safe as possible, I can mentally & emotional try to prepare for unpredictable disasters with slight clues like one weird look or gut feeling
Hyperawareness to the slightest signs of change provides a head start in processing any threatening emotional consequences, to quickly decide what I might need to do to best handle them, maintain what is most valuable to me, and/or totally avoid their loss
Feelings of loneliness dissipate when I prioritize⏤ above all else⏤ the comfort I feel in whatever relationship, hobby, or work project I've got going on at the time
When & if my over-sacrifice starts making me feel stiffled, trapped, and/or limited in the big picture, just dropping it and running away is always an option, until I'm ready to try again... and again
Over time, identity can seem to become just as transient as one's styles of damage control responding,
making a person with disorganized attachment inherently confused about whom they are, what aspects about themselves they value the most, and what they should consider investing in more because of their subjugated social capital.
But let's recap for a minute- So far when considering the DA experience, we've got one response system highly sensitive to responding to chaos with more chaos, and a guiding self-belief system founded in confused, but compliant shape-shifting to keep up with it.
Now, consider 2 more variables:
1). The smoke and mirrors nature of covetable Social norms/ ideals
2). The visible and functional affect of aging (consider it like puberty)
When lived experience prepares you for chaos, it doesn't necessarily mean you want it. Ultimately, I think all of us crave the stability and safety in knowing some things that are predictable- just to different degrees.
In cases of disorganized attachment, this is felt to an extreme, because mental & emotional, reality-shifting consequences are the ultimate detriment from which one's trauma response of a lifestyle formed.
Disorganized attachment brains are wired for preparation, to control what one can, before outcomes ensue. It's not about controlling the actual outcomes, rather maneuvering one's mental & emotional suspension system to best accommodate them.
Enters 'aging'.......
The Onset of Aging when you have a Brain Wired for Disorganized Attachment
What do you know, another major transition. Namely, one that's naturally occurring for all of us whether we like it, approve of it, and have come to terms with it or not.
And let me remind you, aging, or rather our self-perception of aging impacts the meaning of our physical appearance, social status, future goals, esteemed abilities, and running achievement lists.
Literally the idea of aging is probably a trigger to shut down, avoid, or ignore for everyone whose experienced patterns of disorganized attachment learning.
And the worry isn't in stopping or controlling ones aging, but rather the anticipation of and wishing one had more of a heads up of when and how the natural, yet unpredictable onset of changes with aging is going to impact one's self-concept.
So, if we imagine the road bike with mountain bike like changes analogy again,
it's like all of one's future paths (all terrains), which one already anticipates to continue struggling to move between, appear to be getting narrower and narrower.
Honestly, as Professional with previously treated, and now functional disorganized attachment issues, just writing this kinda makes me feel uneasy...
If the Fear with Aging is of being helpless, the goal after noticing signs of it⏤ with Disorganized Attachment or not⏤ should be to think about avenues for self-fulfillment beyond shifting to extremes and relying too heavily on specific abilities and appearances.
The struggle with this for those with disorganized attachment (at least in the US) can make it feel like an uphill battle to even begin considering the above goal. Experience has taught:
Society praises extremes & values independence more than connect culture (ie. "work hard, play hard," perfectionism, workaholics, etc...)
Memory networks have literally been conditioned to respond in extremes
If you have high-functioning disorganized attachment patterns, you probably learned that success can only be experienced in one area of life at a time
So in reality, aging more adaptively, which may or may not be considered graceful, will really require one to identify, unpack, face, and reprocess the various layers of messages learned, like the above, that conditioned one's development of disorganized response patterns FIRST.
Other wise, attempts to brainstorm sustainable paths of self fulfillment while aging will only seem more and more futile as life progresses.
Reprocessing Disorganized Attachment's Past Learning to integrate a more secure sense of Self-Concept, to then more adaptively age with
Healing requires another look at the following DA learning tenets from earlier:
Disorganized Attachment beliefs/ rules to abide for mental & emotional survival
Sources of comfort are never the same, so life generally feels unsafe
To feel as safe as possible, I mentally & emotional try to prepare for unpredictable disasters with tiny clues like one weird look or gut feeling
Hyperawareness to the slightest signs of change provides a head start in processing any threatening emotional consequences, to quickly decide what I might need to do to best handle them, maintain what is most valuable to me, and/or totally avoid a loss
Feelings of loneliness dissipate when I prioritize⏤ above all else⏤ the comfort I feel in whatever relationship, hobby, or work project I've got going on at the time
When & if my over-sacrifice starts making me feel stifled, trapped, and/or limited in the big picture, just dropping it and running away is always an option, until I'm ready to try again... and maybe again.
Each tenet ultimately represents a piece of internalized learning that needs to be reprocessed for someone with disorganized attachment to feel more comfortably functional as a version of themselves, where chaotic response patterns truly feel as unnecessary as they're already, logically understood to be.
Let's look at them based on themes of safety, belonging, power (ie. esteem), and control (ie. freedom)
Baseline of Feeling emotionally unstable because Comfort Sources weren't Consistent or consistently Available
Hyper-flexibility in responding (ie. code-switching) was required for Emotional Survival and building a sense of Belonging to support it
Control through Predictability & Choice (Freedom) became THE tool for accessing Safe-feeling moments of peace within supportive relationships, and later on- in sources of Esteem & Self-fulfillment
Situational changes trigger threat to one or both senses of Esteem & Belonging and activate Freedom's role in responding with extremes again, like it originally did to secure early Social & Emotional Survival
It's important to note that reprocessing these learning themes will require a mind body approach, because all traumatic learning is not stored in any one particular way.
Sometimes the traumatic learning is clean simple and in effectively stored in mind and body, without trickling in later on to negatively impact life experiences after.
Other times it's it's in pieces where logic is healthfully up to date with what is past, but the body and nervous system still hold on to details experienced in the past.
And still other times, different perspectives within the same memories or periods of life are linked to various unrelated or intertwined traumatic learning themes that each need to be reprocessed separately before being reprocessed as a whole.
I'm not going to lie, this process [reprocessing disorganized attachment patterns] is complicated. It's not necessarily as time consuming as you might think, but way less intuitive than I've even tried to explain here.
So, here's what I might think about if I were you... or me in the past, before I knew about anything I was going through, other than I was all over the place, exhausted, probably exhausted my parents, and knew something was off, but not too off to keep pressing the issue with providers like me today, for fear of being labeled 'crazy,' Bipolar, having a split personality (aka DID), or a personality disorder.
Minimization is Self-Gaslighting
Pay more attention to complex emotions, even in mundane situations. Ignoring will reinforce chronic self-invalidation, keeping us all trapped in trauma-bonded cycles of what we might presume to be with just control and freedom, but occurs within an over-protective foundation of expired, but deeply internalized search, rescue, and maintain missions for our peace, comfort, and belonging.
Now, if simply being aware of these patterns and trying to retrain yourself into believing that they are no longer necessary isn’t enough to break free from them, I strongly encourage you to speak up and out with any questions you might have and trauma professional with attachment experience may have answers to (I wish I had sooner).
Better yet, straight up explore the idea of investing in Complex Trauma Therapy.
Complex Trauma Therapy (not to be considered interchangeable with event-based trauma therapies) has the potential to enhance your quality of life just as it did for me and continues to do for my clients.
Contrary to popular belief, complex trauma and trauma therapies aren’t just for the most horrific events. They may have been created for those situations, but can also effectively treat any kind of mind-body learning experience details that are expired, but still clinging to you and causing you problems in the present.
Personally, EMDR Therapy is what worked for me to achieve what I would professionally consider today to be a healthfully functioning sense of memory network pathways built upon disorganized attachment learning.
Final Thoughts for you to Consider
We can choose to stop and take breaks when we feel they might be beneficial.
Taking a break or needing a pause is not the same thing as avoiding things due to cowardice, quitting because you already see yourself as a failure, refusing to quit because you're not that kind of person, or worse becoming a burdedning risk for self-harm and/or suicide.
I know I'm being blunt, but someone's gotta be....
But perceptions aside, reprocessing all the maladaptive meaning you've collected over the years from internalizing your experiences from a disorganized attachment frame of reference will clear this all up.
For now though, take a break to consider the type of person you want to become moving forward and how you might've learned to deter from it's becoming in the past.
Those are honestly gems for therapist like me to hear clients are thinking about in the very begging of their healing journeys.
Also, there 100% is a more integrative and adaptive path for YOU, that’ll guide all parts of YOU towards becoming the version of YOU that functions most comfortably with disorganized attachment.
Maybe you'll find you path is through EMDR Therapy, maybe not. Just keep an open mind and take a break to think before you commit to any one.
With professional & more personal understanding than you can imagine,
Carolyn L. Downes, LMHC
📍a Passionate Complex Trauma Therapist with Disorganized Attachment
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