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I believe we are only at the beginning of understanding what we commonly call attachment.
For decades, attachment theory has given us an important language for understanding human relationships.
It has helped us recognize patterns of closeness, distance, pursuit, withdrawal, fear, and longing.
It has offered explanations for why relationships can feel so beautiful one moment and so threatening the next.
But I believe attachment theory is only the first chapter of a much larger story that we are just beginning to uncover.
At the core of this uncovering is the possibility that our attachment system has never been trying to spare us from heartbreak. It has been faithfully leading us toward it. To initiate us into the experience of more life. For generations, we have inherited nervous systems designed to protect us from the immense grief, longing, and sorrow that love inevitably awakens. We have become experts at naming these patterns, yet beginners at allowing ourselves to fully feel them. And perhaps that is where the next evolution of attachment begins.
Today, much of the conversation around attachment revolves around one goal: becoming securely attached.
The attachment styles are viewed as something to overcome as secure attachment is positioned as the prize—the gold standard everyone hopes to achieve.
Parents desperately hope they have raised securely attached children. Adults often present themselves in dating as though they are securely attached, while hiding and deeply questioning the moments their nervous system is interpreting a far different story.
Without realizing it, we have begun treating attachment styles almost like personality scores—as identities to improve or conceal or mask.
But what if attachment was never meant to become another self-improvement project?
What if the very symptoms we are trying to silence are carrying profound intelligence?
This is the basis for my exploration around attachment. Most of my work can be found in my other Elephant Journal articles on attachment as well as in my most recent mini course, The Eros Trilogy.
Attachment theory is presented as something to be learned, to be understood and navigated by our thoughts and mind.
However, I have found the core component of attachment lives and breathes inside the nervous system.
Attachment is something you feel first. It is an energetic far before it is something that runs in the mind.
All attachment systems lead back to our core wound—that we carry as individuals and humanity—The Abandonment Wound.
The abandonment wound carries generations of adaptation, survival, protection, and inherited ways of responding to relationships. Before we had language, our nervous systems were learning one essential question: Am I safe in connection?
Is this a safe world to be me?
And the truth is…most people do not feel safe with other humans. (And I am not speaking to overt harm, but the silent unconscious tremors that arise when we are relating with intimacy).
Carrying the imprint of the abandonment wound is not a moral failure. It is a collective survival strategy we are all encoded with for a specific purpose.
Many have been shaped not only by our own childhood experiences, but by generations that came before us. We inherit nervous systems that have learned how to survive particular environments. We inherit bodies that carry unfinished stories.
And survival cannot simply be talked out of existence. The symptoms of anxious attachment cannot be gaslit into acting “secure.” The nervous system simply won’t allow for it. Safety cannot be “forced.” It must be slowly learned through embodiment.
Someone who relates from a securely attached place is not simply thinking differently. And to be clear, in my work with clients, even those who have been “securely” attached for many years in a long term relationship—can have their abandonment wound triggered when they begin to date again. There are so many factors that lead to the activation of the wound.
Every stage of relationship asks something different of the nervous system.
Distance.
Sexuality.
Emotional vulnerability.
Uncertainty.
Repair.
Disappointment.
Deep intimacy.
The intoxicating chemistry of new relationship energy.
The seasons of long-term partnership.
Even decades into a relationship, attachment continues to evolve because life continually presents new invitations into deeper intimacy.
Which means attachment is not something we graduate from. Nor actually should we graduate from.
It is something we continually meet.
We are continually invited to meet our abandonment wound.
This is where my work begins to depart from conventional understandings of attachment.
I do not believe the attachment system is simply something we heal or “fix.”
I believe it is one of the primary places where the soul is attempting to enter the body.
The nervous system is not merely regulating emotion.
It is becoming the vessel through which a pure frequency of love itself can move.
Every moment our attachment system becomes activated, something far greater than psychological discomfort may be happening.
The soul is asking:
Can you stay?
Can you remain open?
Can you allow more life to move through you than your survival strategies have ever permitted?
The activation is not evidence that something is wrong.
It is evidence that something is trying to awaken.
We often believe we are searching for romantic love.
For intimacy.
For partnership.
For belonging.
But I wonder if our soul is searching for something even deeper.
Not simply one person or a person to place our love onto.
But the capacity to embody Love itself.
To allow the current of Love to move through a human nervous system that has spent generations learning how to protect itself.
What I am saying is that perhaps attachment is not asking us to become less emotional.
Or less vulnerable.
Or even “more secure.”
It is inviting us to become more available, embodied, and capable of holding the immense force of Love moving through a human life.
And perhaps that is why relationships become one of our greatest spiritual initiations.
Because they reveal precisely where Love still cannot fully enter the body.
That, I believe, is the next frontier in understanding attachment.
Not simply asking how we become securely attached.
But asking how our nervous system becomes spacious enough for the soul to live through it to expand to feel the true frequency of love.
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