Attachment, coping mechanisms and why doing all the right things isn't always enough
If you read my last post, you’ll know our rescue pup Poppy was abandoned at just five weeks old. What I didn’t share is that in those first few weeks she was sometimes reactive around food. On one occasion she and our older dog, Hamish, went for the same treat and she looked as though she was about to rip his face off.
A friend who has adopted many rescue dogs gave me a simple piece of advice: provide constant reassurance that food and love are always coming, so she no longer needs to guard or protect herself. Within a week of giving lots of treats, praise, love and physical contact to both dogs at the same time, the guarding stopped.
Resource guarding in dogs is a form of future-proofing: a way of protecting against further abandonment or scarcity. It is learned from experience, and it softens with consistent safety. Humans have very similar programming, and most of us are following the pattern without realising it.
Why your story matters for your health
In clinic, I often see clients who are doing all the right things yet still face chronic symptoms or a diagnosis. Others feel stuck in a rut of self-sabotage. Both cause a great deal of confusion, guilt and self-blame. Understanding how lived experience shapes the body can be one of the most helpful pieces of the puzzle.
The research here is substantial. In the landmark Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) Study, researchers at Kaiser Permanente and the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention surveyed more than 9,500 adults about their childhoods and compared this with their adult health. Those who had experienced several types of adversity were more likely to carry multiple health risk factors later in life. Importantly, the researchers suggested that behaviours often viewed simply as poor choices, such as smoking, overeating and heavy drinking, may in fact be coping mechanisms.
Since then, a 2017 systematic review and meta-analysis in The Lancet Public Health has linked multiple adverse childhood experiences with a wide range of health outcomes, from health-harming behaviours to heart disease, respiratory disease and poorer mental health. A follow-up of the original ACE cohort found that the likelihood of being hospitalised with an autoimmune disease rose with the number of adverse childhood experiences a person had.
The ACE research focused on significant adversity such as abuse, neglect and household dysfunction. In practice, I also see the influence of quieter experiences: a caregiver who was physically present but emotionally overwhelmed, or a childhood where love felt conditional on behaving, achieving or looking a certain way.
Where it begins: attachment and attunement
When we are born, we are completely vulnerable. We rely on our caregivers for survival, and so our early attachments begin to shape both mind and body.
At this stage we need one or more present caregivers who offer eye contact, supportive physical touch and facial expressions that help us find a place of safety. They encourage us to express ourselves, whether that is crying, anger or facing our fears, and they support us all the way back to calm. Over time, this is how we learn to regulate ourselves, find our place in the world and navigate relationships and everyday life with some confidence.
The importance of this attunement was shown vividly in developmental psychologist Edward Tronick's Still Face Experiment, first presented in 1975. When mothers were asked to stop responding and hold a blank expression, their babies quickly tried everything to re-engage them, then became distressed and withdrew. Encouragingly, Tronick's later work emphasised repair: no caregiver is perfectly attuned, and it is the return to connection that matters most.
The trouble is, caregivers may be facing incredible struggles of their own: emotionally, financially, or simply under the pressure of their own life load. When repair does not happen often enough, a child adapts.
How we learn to stay safe
Without secure attachment in the vulnerable early years, or during traumatic experiences, we develop coping mechanisms and survival strategies. We look for cues on how to earn love, and form dependencies on habits that flood us with dopamine or other feel-good chemicals.
Even a small comment about appearance or achievements in these early years can tip us into unhealthy territory with work, exercise or weight loss, either conforming to or rebelling against the terms and conditions we believe are required to be loved or liked. These strategies are often consolidated in adolescence, all as a means of keeping us safe.
Some common patterns include:
Hypervigilance. Constantly reading other people's nervous systems and facial expressions, looking for evidence of judgement and seeking to put it right. This carries into friendships, relationships, the workplace and family dynamics.
Hyper-independence. Without someone holding space for you, it feels easier to jump into doing: rescue someone, distract yourself, keep moving. Asking for help feels like weakness, and vulnerability feels frightening.
Withdrawal under stress. When things get hard, you may push people away and avoid social and physical contact as the body shifts into a kind of freeze.
Anxiety and future-proofing. The mind is rarely in the present moment. It is always one step ahead, because at some point it had to be. You ruminate on the past, use it as evidence, and leap to the future trying to predict, with a negative bias, what might go wrong next. And so you keep doing, to protect yourself.
Many people also find a sense of safety in certain habits and behaviours. To some degree these can be healthy sources of motivation and achievement. But when they start to affect your health and you still feel unable to stop, they have become a dependency, a coping mechanism. These might include:
Academic and career achievements, often tipping into workaholism and no boundaries
Qualificationitis: constantly upskilling to secure your self-worth and your future, even to the point of burnout
Exercise or sport, and being prone to overtraining and under-recovery
Never sitting still, always on the go
Being compulsive about cleaning
Micromanaging and controlling others
Obsessing over your appearance and looking perfect
Body image struggles and dysmorphia
Losing weight and conforming to slimness ideals
Orthorexia: an unhealthy fixation on eating only "pure" or "healthy" foods
Comfort eating
Alcohol or recreational drugs
Relying on painkillers or other prescription medication
Gambling
Caring excessively about what people think
Always being the kind one, the sounding board, the people pleaser
Volunteering and rescuing in every situation
Where it can lead
By midlife, many of my clients report feeling lost, lonely, worried sick about the future and on the verge of burnout. They feel that nobody listens, nobody sees them or knows what is going on for them beneath the surface.
With so much emotion suppressed along the way, they often feel a mix of exhaustion, anxiety and low mood, or find themselves constantly irritated and snappy.
Finding a place of safety
Just as Poppy let go of her food guarding once she knew more was always coming, we can gently let go of our coping mechanisms when we find a place of true safety with everything: our emotions, physical symptoms, life challenges, and loved ones facing their own struggles.
Safety comes, whatever is happening, when we practise self-connection, acceptance and awareness.
This is why I encourage clients to bookend their day with a quiet practice: a meditation, a yoga nidra, or simply lying down, dropping into the body and doing a somatic exploration. The invitation is to feel safe with whatever arises physically and emotionally, and to meet it with curiosity rather than fear.
The more often you do this, the more you come to acceptance and a clearer sense of what will truly help you. And because you are actually feeling your emotions and trusting yourself, your nervous system and immune system can begin to come off high alert.
Your place of peace
I encourage clients not to approach this with "I must do my mind-body practice to fix myself." Instead, see it as a place of peace, relief and the space you need.
I am a fan of simply lying on the bed with pillows under your knees, neck and shoulders, so you can feel supported and physically let go, knowing you will be okay. In these moments you watch the mind and feel the body, yet remain the observer. Here you are always safe and have all the answers you need.
If exploring your early experiences brings up difficult feelings, please be gentle with yourself and consider working with a qualified, trauma-informed therapist alongside any nutrition or lifestyle support.
Want to work with me? Book a free discovery call.
Recommended reading
Mindsight: Transform Your Brain with the New Science of Kindness by Daniel J. Siegel. One of my favourite books on this topic. Siegel, a clinical professor of psychiatry at UCLA, offers an accessible introduction to attachment and how it shapes the brain, alongside practical tools such as body scanning and learning to connect with your emotions.
References
Felitti VJ, Anda RF, Nordenberg D, et al. Relationship of childhood abuse and household dysfunction to many of the leading causes of death in adults: the Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) Study. American Journal of Preventive Medicine. 1998;14(4):245-258. doi:10.1016/S0749-3797(98)00017-8
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Adult health problems linked to traumatic childhood experiences. Press release, 14 May 1998. Link
Hughes K, Bellis MA, Hardcastle KA, et al. The effect of multiple adverse childhood experiences on health: a systematic review and meta-analysis. The Lancet Public Health. 2017;2(8):e356-e366. doi:10.1016/S2468-2667(17)30118-4
Dube SR, Fairweather D, Pearson WS, et al. Cumulative childhood stress and autoimmune diseases in adults. Psychosomatic Medicine. 2009;71(2):243-250. PubMed
Tronick E, Als H, Adamson L, Wise S, Brazelton TB. The infant's response to entrapment between contradictory messages in face-to-face interaction. Journal of the American Academy of Child Psychiatry. 1978;17(1):1-13.
Siegel DJ. Mindsight: Transform Your Brain with the New Science of Kindness. Oneworld Publications; 2010.
