Talking About Attachment

Talking about my attachment in therapy today opened something up in me.

A lot of grief. Fear. Crying. Just… a flood of emotion.

What’s weird is that the fear isn’t really centered around her suddenly leaving me. That fear was really intense with past therapy relationships, especially my first one, but it feels quieter now. I don’t know if that’s because I trust her more or because I understand now that there’s ultimately nothing I can do to prevent endings if they happen.

What scares me now is the pain itself.

I told her that becoming attached scares me because of the longing it wakes up in me and how painful that longing is for me to hold. I’ve already experienced one therapy relationship where the attachment became so overwhelming that I genuinely couldn’t cope with it well. I’m scared of ending up back in that kind of pain again.

What confuses me is that this relationship is very boundaried. I don’t really know anything about her personal life. There’s no blurred lines here. So what is it that wakes this up in me? What creates that ache? What makes me want to run and stay at the same time?

I think part of it is probably my attachment style.

People always say that talking about feelings makes them easier to hold, but honestly that hasn’t really been true for me. Talking about the attachment intensified it. Maybe because I’ve spent so much time trying not to feel it that actually naming it pulled everything to the surface at once.

I don’t know.

What I do know is that attachment can feel healing and painful at the exact same time. And sometimes the scary part isn’t the other person. Sometimes it’s realizing how much feeling was sitting underneath the surface waiting to be touched and knowing that I could be heading toward having to relive that pain again.

I’m also scared to allow myself to feel an ounce of safety with someone again.

And I can feel grief from former therapy relationships that ended suddenly starting to come back up, and I don’t really know what to do with the overwhelming sadness that comes with it.