by Ellert R.S. Nijenhuis

Key words: attachment trauma, child maltreatment, dissociation, ecosystems, motivation

Farina and Schimmenti detail and define the potential consequences for their health when children meet and cannot escape from primary caretakers who neglect, maltreat, and abuse them. They define attachment trauma in this frame and thereby overcome some of the limitations of previous formulations. Inspired by their important work, I try to make a few points. Being ecosystems, we must long and strive to get the useful, to avoid and get rid of the harmful, and to leave alone what is useless. Part of the complexity of our being and becoming is that we include multiple longings and strivings, and that these can be contradictory. Per our very nature, and particularly as children, we long and strive to attach to our primary caretakers, defend against threat, and gain power to act. What to feel, think, and do when caretakers we depend on and must learn from are in fact harmful or useless to us, and the rest of our environment does not care or intervene? What is useful, harmful, and meaningless? Attachment trauma, then, is an ecological injury that evolves when harmful powers of caretakers and others far exceed our own power to act. Being ecosystems, the form the injury takes depends on this reciprocal causing. While it is an injury, it also is a creative effort to live and make sense of a most difficult life.