Attach: Needy. Desperate, craves rescue & connection, sweet, innocent, wants someone to depend on.
Here’s how she describes a child-like part connected to an “attach” system coming to existence:
… research has demonstrated the propensity of the brain to develop neural networks holding related neural pathways that consistently “fire” together, and these neural systems often encode complex systems of traits or systems (Schore, 2001) that represent aspects of our personalities or ways of being. For example, if neural pathways activating the proximity drive fire consistently in the presence of the attachment figure, along with neural pathway holding feelings of loneliness and yearning for comfort and a neural network holding the tendency to believe that “she loves me—she would never hurt me,” the result might be a neural system representing a young child part of the personality with a toddler’s yearning for comfort and closeness along with the magical thinking that the attachment figure will be safe and loving, yet also the uneasy feeling that something is not right. Such neural systems can be complex with a subjective sense of identity or can be a simpler collection of traits associated with different roles played by the individual.
Here are how she relates various trauma symptoms to these systems:
The paradoxical quality of these symptoms is rarely captured by traditional diagnostic models. Clients report symptoms of major depression (the submit part), anxiety disorders (freeze), substance abuse and eating disorders (flight), anger management or self-harm issues (fight), and they alternately cling to others or push them away (the characteristic symptoms of disorganized or traumatic attachment).
And here’s how she describes something that in traditional IFS terms would be described as polarized parts:
Aaron described the reasons for which he had come: “I start out by getting attached to women very quickly—I immediately think they’re the ‘one.’ I’m all over them, can’t see them enough … until they start to get serious or there’s a commitment. Then I suddenly start to see everything I didn’t see before, everything that’s wrong with them. I start feeling trapped with someone who’s not right for me—I want to leave, but I feel guilty—or afraid they’ll leave me. I’m stuck. I can’t relax and be happy, but I can’t get out of it either.”
Aaron was describing an internal struggle between parts: between an attachment-seeking part that quickly connected to any attractive woman who treated him warmly and a hypervigilant, hypercritical fight part that reacted to every less-than-optimal quality she possessed as a sign of trouble. His flight part, triggered by the alarms of the fight part, then would start to feel trapped with what felt like the “wrong person,” generating impulses to get out—an action that his submit and cry for help parts couldn’t allow. Guilt and shame for the commitment he’d promised (the submit part’s contribution) and fear of loss (the input from his traumatically attached part) kept him in relationships that his fight and flight parts resisted with equal intensity. Without a language to differentiate each part and bring it to his awareness, he ruminated constantly: should he leave? Or should he stay? Was she enough? Or should he get out now? Often, suicide seemed to him the most logical solution to this painful dilemma, yet at the same time “he” dreamed of having a family with children and a loving and lovely wife. “He” didn’t approve of his wandering eye, yet “he” couldn’t stop trolling for prospective partners. Who was “he”? The suicidal part’s threat to end it all was in direct conflict with his wish for a wife and family; the “trolling for women” part was at odds with the person he wanted to be and believed he should and could be.
Janina Fisher’s book “Healing the Fragmented Selves of Trauma Survivors” has an interesting take on Internal Family Systems. She conceptualizes trauma-related parts (subagents) as being primarily associated with the defensive systems of Fight/Flight/Freeze/Submit/Attach.
Here’s how she briefly characterizes the various systems and related behaviors:
Fight: Vigilance. Angry, judgmental, mistrustful, self-destructive, controlling, suicidal, needs to control.
Flight: Escape. Distancer, ambivalent, cannot commit, addictive behavior or being disorganized.
Freeze: Fear. Frozen, terrified, wary, phobic of being seen, agoraphobic, reports panic attacks.
Submit: Shame. Depressed, ashamed, filled with self-hatred, passive, “good girl,” caretaker, self-sacrificing.
Attach: Needy. Desperate, craves rescue & connection, sweet, innocent, wants someone to depend on.
Here’s how she describes a child-like part connected to an “attach” system coming to existence:
Here are how she relates various trauma symptoms to these systems:
And here’s how she describes something that in traditional IFS terms would be described as polarized parts: