Quote from Jessica Townsend

As I was reading the young adult series Nevermoor by Jessica Townsend I came across this quote that is a really good descriptor of secure attachment.

“It made sense to her now. Jupiter carried himself …like he was surrounded by an invisible bubble that protected him from all the bad things in life. He knew there were people in the world – somewhere out there – who loved him. Who would always love him. No matter what.”

It is a secure attachment to a parental figure that conveys this bubble of protection.  It protects us because we are safe and secure in our knowledge that someone out there loves us, no matter what and this translates into a secure sense of self and our place in the world.

And beyond the attachment relationship, each layer of your intersecting identity can strengthen that bubble of protection or thin it. For example, the more identities you have of dominant groups (white, male, cisgender, hetrosexual, etc) the more insulated you are, and the easier and safer life can feel.

Trauma can disrupt this, and trauma within the home can prevent the development of this bubble of protection. Without that secure attachment, we are left feeling like we have no one we can rely on outside of ourselves, which leads to a cascade of other issues as we develop.

But hope is not lost, you can repair what was damaged and can develop what we call an earned secure attachment, which simply means this attachment is earned through reparative relationships, sometimes with significant others and sometimes in therapy.