Attachment and Trauma: How Early Wounds Shape the Way We Love as Adults
There is a question that comes up, directly or indirectly, in nearly every therapy I conduct: why do I keep repeating the same patterns in my closest relationships? Why do I find myself attracted to people who are unavailable, or why do I push away the people who actually show up for me? Why does intimacy feel like a threat rather than a relief? These are not questions with simple answers, but they are questions with real ones. Understanding attachment, and how early experiences of being cared for shape the nervous system’s expectations of closeness, is one of the most clarifying frameworks I bring to my work with clients across Hidden Hills, Calabasas, and the West Valley.
What Attachment Actually Means
Attachment theory, developed originally by John Bowlby and expanded significantly by subsequent researchers, describes the deep biological drive human beings have to form bonds with caregivers. From the very beginning of life, infants are monitoring whether their caregivers are available, responsive, and consistent. The patterns of caregiving they experience in those early years become encoded in the nervous system as working models: implicit expectations about whether closeness is safe, whether needs will be met, and whether they themselves are worthy of care.
When early caregiving is warm, responsive, and consistent, children develop secure attachment. They learn that relationships are generally safe, that closeness is possible without losing oneself, and that conflict does not have to mean catastrophe. When early caregiving is inconsistent, cold, frightening, or absent, children develop what researchers call insecure attachment strategies. These strategies are genuinely intelligent adaptations to the environment they were raised in. The problem is that those adaptations travel into adult life and relationships where they are often no longer adaptive at all.
Trauma and Its Imprint on Intimacy
Trauma, whether it is a single overwhelming event or the accumulated weight of chronic relational difficulty, leaves its mark on attachment. For many people, the most formative traumas were not dramatic in the way that word often implies. They were the ongoing experience of a parent who was emotionally unavailable. The household where love was conditional on performance. The relationship where affection alternated with criticism or rage, and safety was never quite reliable.
These experiences shape the nervous system’s baseline. A person who grew up in an unpredictable emotional environment does not simply decide, as an adult, to tolerate uncertainty in relationships. Their nervous system treats uncertainty as danger, because that is what it learned. They may experience a partner’s normal request for space as abandonment. They may interpret a moment of irritability as the beginning of rejection. They may pull away just as a relationship is becoming genuinely close, because closeness itself activates old terror.
The Possibility of Earned Security
One of the most important things that attachment research has established is this: attachment patterns are not destiny. The nervous system that learned insecurity can learn security. Researchers call this “earned security,” and it is available to anyone who is willing to do the work of examining their relational history with honesty and compassion.
Therapy is one of the most reliable paths to earned security, because the therapeutic relationship itself becomes a place to practice a different kind of closeness. The experience of bringing something vulnerable into the room and having it received without judgment, of being known by another person without being rejected or overwhelmed, is not just conversation. It is corrective experience. It begins to update the nervous system’s expectations about what closeness actually means.
What This Work Looks Like in Practice
In my work with clients on attachment and trauma, we begin by building a detailed and compassionate map of their relational history. We notice the patterns that appear across relationships: the types of people they are drawn to, the moments where things consistently break down, the specific situations that trigger the strongest reactions. We bring curiosity to those patterns rather than criticism. And we begin to trace them back to their origins, not to assign blame, but to understand the logic of the strategies that were learned and to consciously build new ones.
This work takes time and patience, but the changes it produces are durable. People who do this work describe it as a fundamental shift in their relationship to themselves and to the people they love. They still have difficult moments. But they no longer feel at the mercy of their own nervous system in quite the same way. That is the kind of change that matters.
Susie Cole Rome, MA, LMFT, is a licensed marriage and family therapist with over forty years of experience providing therapy for individuals, couples, and families in Hidden Hills, Calabasas, and across the Greater Los Angeles area, in person and via secure telehealth for California residents.
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Susie Cole Rome, MA, LMFT, offers compassionate therapy for individuals, couples, and families in Hidden Hills, Calabasas, Woodland Hills, Malibu, Agoura Hills, and throughout the Greater Los Angeles area, with secure telehealth available for all California residents.
📞 (818) 618-4762
✉️ Susie@susierome.com
📍 24933 Kit Carson Rd, Hidden Hills, CA 91302
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