The Haunted Self: Structural Dissociation and the Treatment of Chronic Traumatization (Norton Series on Interpersonal Neurobiology)

Phobia of attachment is often paradoxically accompanied by an equally intense phobia of attachment loss. It manifests in desperate feelings and behaviors that motivate the individual to connect to another person at all costs. Typically, different parts of the personality experience these opposite phobias. They evoke each other in a vicious cycle, with a perceived change in closeness or distance in a relationship resulting in the well-known “borderline” pattern of “I hate you— don’t leave me,” more recently described as disorganized/disoriented attachment (D-attachment, e.g., Liotti, 1999a)

When survivors associate an increasing number of stimuli with the traumatic experience and memory through stimulus generalization, they may start to fear and avoid more and more of inner and outer life. For example, when survivors as ANP have intrusive traumatic memories and associate this aversive intrusion with EP, they develop a phobia of this dissociative part. The survivor as EP can become phobic of ANP when that part is perceived as ignoring or harming (i.e., neglecting or abusing) EP in some way. In fact, survivors can become anxious and avoidant of any mental action, such as having particular feelings, sensations, and thoughts that are consciously or unconsciously associated with the original traumatic experience(s).

Behavioral and mental avoidance strategies which maintain structural dissociation, are needed to prevent what are perceived as unbearable realizations about one’s self, history, and meaning. Subsequently, additional phobias ensue from the fundamental phobia of traumatic memory.