Have you ever felt confused and embarrassed by the ways you show up in relationship when you fear loss, rejection or abandonment? You know, that feeling when your emotions feel out of control and you need your partner to show up in a certain way to rescue you from your suffering?

Sometimes we judge ourselves for acting like a child in adult relationships. Yes, it’s vulnerable and humbling in these moments — and, it’s normal. There is actually a reason why as an adult we often feel like an infant in our closet relationships. It’s called our attachment template.

What is an attachment template? It’s the hardware in our brain that drives our beliefs and behavioral patterns related to connection and protection in relationship. This includes how we automatically respond when we feel threatened as well as our ability to receive and give love.

What makes this human experience of attaching so confusing? Why do we panic, turn numb, or feel fuzzy when we feel threatened in relationship?

Often what we learn about love, connection, safety and security in relationship occurs long before we have the ability to think conceptually or self-reflect. We learn through our body, senses, and feelings — not our mind. This means that recalling memory through our conceptual mind, or intellectualizing about our behaviors as an adult, can feel confusing and fuzzy when we’re operating from early attachment imprints.

Our need to belong, feel safe, seen, attuned to and celebrated reside at the core of our human experience. In my article, Which Attachment Template Do You Draw From?, we covered the foundations of attachment theory, and how to map our attachment template, including whether it’s secure-based and fear-based.

Our attachment template, our internal map related to safety, connection, and bonding, is constructed during our early life experiences.

In today’s article, we’ll explore how our attachment template is formed, and how it becomes our relational operating system as an adult.

Four phases: The growing architecture of our attachment template

There are four windows of development that carve and curate our attachment template, ranging from in utero to eighteen years of age.

As adults, we continue to draw from this template in our relationship to ourselves, others, and all of life.

PHASE 1: IN UTERO THROUGH SIX MONTHS

In the womb and as a newborn, our primary need in relationship is to be provided safety and security.

As humans, we’re born before we are neurologically ready. At this point in our species’ evolution, due to the narrow size of women’s hips in comparison to the baby’s growing brain and head, babies need to be birthed before being fully complete with their neurological development.

Newly born, out of the container of our mother’s womb, we’re met with a sudden increase in stimulus and sensory input. We’ve yet to develop our neurological filters. We exist as a soft sponge, absorbing everything and filtering nothing. That includes sounds, sensations, facial expressions, and surrounding energy and emotions. This is raw, unfiltered state of existence. We have no shield. We have no sense of being a separate self.

This phase is the most crucial time in which we develop our attachment template, our internal map related to safety, connection, bonding, and survival.

During this phase, we depend entirely on others to survive, and we need our caregivers to attune to our every need, with as much accuracy as possible. We rely on others for our food, soothing touch, a calm place to sleep, regulating our temperature, and emotional connection. We lean into eye contact, touch, and voice tones to determine how safe and connected we are.

“We’re born into the world completely dependent and vulnerable.”

Implicit memory

This non-conceptual learning window is one of the most critical times of our development. All memory from this period is called implicit.

Implicit memory includes sensation, energy, and emotion stored as somatic experiences. This is why recalling memories from that time of our lives can feel elusive since our cognitive functions aren’t fully online yet. Memories from this early stage of development can only be accessed through the body and somatic memory.

From a baby’s perspective, communication doesn’t occur through mental concepts or words. Instead, communication occurs through non-verbal language such as facial expressions, sensation, emotion and energy. Before we can think or speak, we’re already assessing and mapping our experience of safety through our sensory perceptions. Our limbic brain stores this material as a framework that will become our belief system about relationship and connection as adults.

If a newborn had the ability to think and speak, it might express thoughts such as:

Please soothe me when I get activated so I feel safe, tracked, and known.
Please notice I need gentle and reassuring touch.
Please make eye contact with me and touch me to keep hormones of connection and love flowing through us.
I need low stimulation because I feel everything. Please protect me from big noise and intensity.
Please notice when I’m hungry, need to sleep, or need to be held.

the importance of nervous system regulation

The baby is assessing, “If I express my needs, will someone respond? If I’m hungry, will I be fed? If I’m cold, will I be warmed? If my breath is laboring, will someone notice and help me?”

Even if we are attentively cared for, certain experiences can rock the foundation of our world. Medical situations can plunge a sensitive nervous system into bright lights, loud noises, chaos, and stress. Even with skillful care, the fragility of a baby’s system can be impacted by stimulus that will thrust it into an existential fear of annihilation.

We can assist a baby’s sense of safety by supporting and building a resilient nervous system. Ideally, any rupture of stability for the baby will be attuned to and soothed as quickly as possible. Secure attachment grows when a baby experiences stress, followed by loving connection and soothing that regulates their nervous system. In other words, the baby learns, “I have a need, someone notices, they responds and now I can settle. I’m safe here.”

This kind of consistency fosters an inherent safeness in being alive, a somatic and inner knowing that the baby has a 'right to exist.'

Misses will happen. During this phase of development, a baby seeks attunement every 15 seconds. For a caregiver, this is a lot to keep up with! The process won’t be perfect. Caregivers, medical teams, and early influencers don’t need to be perfect and catch every need, but it’s helpful to establish consistency as much as possible in those first six months of life.

This is the template that the infant will build their entire life upon. Ruptures or ‘misses’ can occur and repair quickly when there is a growing consistency of attunement and responding to needs as they occur. If a newborn experiences inconsistent attunement or neglect, then inner safety is compromised and nervous system dis-regulation becomes a threat to the baby.

This is the same for our adult relationships. Ruptures will happen and it’s how we navigate the repair process that either builds connection and trust or dismantles it.

“Secure attachment grows when a baby experiences stress, followed by loving connection and soothing that regulate their nervous system.”

2. PHASE 2: 6 TO 24 MONTHS

In this phase, the baby continues to exist as a soft sponge absorbing everything, without a filter. The neo-cortex is still not online, which means the baby is not yet able to self-reflect or recognize itself as separate. The baby continues to swim in a soup of undifferentiated experience.

Attunement to the baby’s needs remains essential and now, in addition, the baby has an increasing need to receive an accurate response to their communication of needs. Responding with accuracy deepens the baby’s sense of safety and trust in the world.

A primal sense of safety begins to establish when a baby’s hunger cry is followed by the offering of food. Conversely, if the baby’s hunger cry is missed, and food not delivered, it will panic because its very existence feels at stake.

The baby is tracking, non-verbally and somatically, how much work is required to get needs noticed and accurately met.

Over time, if basic needs like food and diaper changes are accurately responded to, safety grows which translates into neurological development that translates into relaxation and trust. The baby’s needs for touch, loving eye contact and facial expressions, as well as nurturing coos and sounds are growing in nuance and subtlety.

When nurtured consistently the baby feels love. Since the baby still has no filter or sense of separate self, the experience of love, just as everything else in this phase, registers as ‘me,’ which, in a nurturing and attuned environment, translates into an early perception (somatic not cognitive) of I am loved and lovable.

If there are inconsistencies of loving presence, attunement, and response time, the baby may sense frustration or other emotions and interpret them as feelings of unworthiness and lovability. All of these nonverbal and subtle experiences lay roots in the infant’s psyche about who they are, how the world works, and what they need to do to survive.

“A baby needs to know that its existence and needs matter, and are attended to, in order to feel safe and secure in connection.”

3. PHASE 3: TWO TO SEVEN YEARS

Around the age of two, we continue our journey through the four developmental phases, which is a hero/heroine’s journey in and of itself!

Our pre-frontal cortex begins to come online. The neo-cortex is the aspect of the brain that allows us to self-reflect and make meaning. This supports us to further refine our beliefs as we compartmentalize our experiences into who we are and who we need to be in order to get our needs met.

With access to the cortical structures of the brain, we begin to sense that we are a separate self to the sounds, voices, smells, and people outside of us. This is the birth of our conditioned sense of self, and ego-based adaptive strategies established to get our needs met.

OUR UNIVERSAL NEED FOR BELONGING

At this stage, being seen, loved and celebrated as a unique and special creature is a primary need. It’s common that during this time we will be met with the projections of our caregivers, peers, and society, which will influence the development of our personality.

For example, if we’re praised and rewarded for specific behaviors, we start to amplify the traits we know will be admired and approved of, as an attempt to please and create more connection. We may do this even when the prized behavior goes against another part of us that wants autonomy and authentic self-expression. We disregard our inner need and choose compliance because we need to belong.

If we’re shamed for certain behaviors, we will try to shut this part of us down. For example, if as a child we’re expressive and ‘bubbly’ but it’s not welcomed in our environment, we will most likely learn to button up our emotions and become contained to avoid judgment and rejection.

“Belonging and feeling seen is a basic survival need all humans share.”

4. PHASE 4: SEVEN TO EIGHTEEN YEARS OLD

As we enter phase four, we’re continue the process of refining our belief systems through our life experiences, which will serve to prove or disprove various aspects of our attachment template, which by now has become the scaffolding of our reality.

This is a complex developmental window during which our belief systems and self-images become increasingly solidified into our personality. We will be in relationship to this conditioned self for our entire incarnation.

With the pre-frontal cortex fully online, we now have the capacity to self-reflect, critique, and assess our value as a unique person. In this stage of development, we respond to our environment and develop the strategies we need to sustain our sense of worth, lovability, belonging and need for connection. Oddly enough, sometimes at the expense of embracing our most sacred and authentic desires.

To learn more about the social-emotional needs that occur during each of the phases, check out the article Your Relationship Patterns Are a Pathway to Heal & Integrate You can also download my free ebook: Unraveling Your Adult Relationship Patterns.

Applying attachment theory to relationships, sex, and intimacy

Many relationship challenges are a result of attachment dynamics not being consciously seen, understood, and discussed openly.

Most of us don’t realize that intimate relationships (lovers, partners, friends, and even colleagues) will reveal aspects of our attachment template.

Learn more in the next article, How Does Attachment Theory Relate to Sex and Intimacy?

If we want to integrate and embody more of ourselves, then it’s a worthy endeavor to study the behaviors that arise when we feel threatened, vulnerable, and fear abandonment or rejection in all types of relationships.

If revealing and embracing our attachment patterns is left in the shadows, then we will operate subconsciously through protective behaviors that create disconnection, criticism, blame, and shame (whether towards ourselves or others).

The good news is that when we see and take responsibility for how we operate, we create conscious choice and invite our intimate relationships to a whole other level of freedom and acceptance.

“Studying your relationship to attachment and intimacy opens a field of possibility to integrate and escort exiled parts of yourself back home, into the wholeness of your being.”