Constructed Awareness as a Path to Secure Attachment

It can be illuminating in some ways to discover what attachment style you have. Is your attachment style Anxious (do you have low self-esteem, and a strong fear of abandonment)? Avoidant (does emotional and/or physical intimacy threaten you)? Disorganized (do you have a hard time trusting others)? But once the intellectual novelty of identifying our attachment style has worn off, is there anything you can do about it? After all, we can’t change the dynamics of the family we had; we can’t change the way our caregiver(s) responded to our needs or not. So isn’t it just a sad narrative that we’re stuck with?

I want to suggest that we do have the power to shift this narrative; that we can learn to give ourselves a corrective experience using techniques from Constructed Awareness. Through processing our emotions and experiences CA-style, we can develop the secure attachment many of us are missing but long for—with ourselves. Constructed Awareness offers a model of how to more fully acknowledge, validate, and respond to our emotional needs consistently.

In my early days as a counselor, well before I learned about CA, my go-to strategy regarding emotions was the cliché that you can “name it to tame it.” I’d encourage clients to identify their emotions, handing them the Emotion Wheel and asking them to choose the words that matched their feelings. Once identified, I might suggest that clients ‘sit’ with those emotions, though I couldn’t really explain what that might look like. We’d talk about the emotion, maybe identify thoughts related to it, perhaps exploring the reasons why the emotions were coming up. 

Using a CA lens, the limitation with processing emotions in that way is that by doing so, you’re only engaging one of the building blocks of awareness: the mental building block. CA posits that all human experience is made up of three building blocks of awareness: mental, internal sensations, and external experience. While putting a name to what you’re feeling is a great start, stopping there leaves you with a purely mental experience. CA introduced me to a way of deeply connecting to and processing emotions using all three building blocks.  

A CA exercise that opened up the way I understand and experience emotions is called The Emotion Tracker. To begin, you name the emotion you’re experiencing. Next, you identify the thoughts that are coming up as you’re feeling that emotion – memories, images, ideas. Then you bring your awareness to your internal sensations and notice what you feel inside your body. Finally, if there’s anything in the environment contributing to the emotion or sensations, you bring awareness to it. By doing this, you provide witness to the full experience of the emotion, thereby processing it more thoroughly.

So while we can’t change the way our emotional needs were handled by our caregivers as we were growing up, what we can do is consistently meet our own emotional needs now. Think about it: if you were upset because you were being bullied at school and you cried about it to your father, what did you likely need from him? To be ignored? To be told that’s nothing to cry about? To be punished? Of course not. Most likely you needed to be witnessed, your feelings validated; you needed to be seen. This is exactly what CA invites you to enact for yourself. When you ask yourself, What thoughts are contributing to this emotion? What do I notice in my body as I feel this emotion? you’re showing yourself curiosity about the full experience of your emotions. You’re providing witness for yourself, validating and seeing your emotional experience. Through this practice, you can provide for yourself the secure attachment that’s been lacking. How powerful is that?

The Emotion Tracker is not just an exercise I do with clients; it’s the way I now engage with my own emotions. Here’s an example, using something that’s just happened in my life. I’m writing this in real time, as I’m processing the experience. 

Today, I’m grieving the loss of my 16 and a half year old beagle, Maisie. She had a stroke this morning and I ended up having to put her down. 

Grief, I name my feelings to myself. Relief. Loneliness.

I bring awareness to my thoughts. I’m remembering the way she tumbled down the little set of stairs this morning as she tried to get off the couch, and how, when she stood up, her head tilted oddly to the left and as she walked, her whole body leaned left until she fell again. In my mind, I hear the way she’s been breathing the past few days – the coughing due to a mass in her chest. I picture the far away look in her eyes.

Shifting my awareness to the environment, I notice that the couch is empty where she should be stretched across it, her legs twitching now and then as she dreams of chasing prey. The room is terribly quiet. My home feels utterly empty without her. I’m sitting on the couch now where her white fur that was always shedding is still layered and clinging to my pants.

Now I’m noticing my internal sensations. There’s a feeling in the center of my chest, about the size of my open hand, that’s cool and sharp. It has movement, vibration that seems to start at the center and move outward. It doesn’t quite hurt, but it’s intense. The base of my throat feels heavy and around my eyes is growing warm as I cry. I’m aware of my arms feeling really empty, like they want to grasp something but they can’t.

 Back to my thoughts: I remember sitting on the floor of the vet’s office, and how Maisie’s head relaxed into my arms as she drifted into sedation. The sharpness in my chest grows stronger. It has a color now: orange and red. I open to it – welcome it. I actually speak to the sharpness, saying in my head: welcome. I do what I used to never be able to do: I sit with the feelings and make space for them. Fully acknowledging how I’m experiencing the emotion will allow the feelings to process, perhaps even to shift. Soon, the sharpness dulls and grows smaller, to a golf ball size circle. It’s fainter even now. 

This process shifts my experience profoundly. What’s important to me is not even how the feelings (both emotional and internal) have shifted, but the fact that I feel witnessed, seen, and validated. And I’m the only one in the room.  

Author: Stephanie Levin, LCMHC, NCC

Site Supervisor & Outpatient Psychotherapist