All the university staff meetings I have been at where we "orientalize" breathing with yoga stuff but don't deal with things like the suppression of dissent over genocide
*You’ve* named it. I am nowhere near as articulate or knowledgeable as you…I sense BS in my gut and struggle mightily to express it — ironic, since I work at a university. My writing is often messy (not an apology) because institutions shape discourse and I function inside one. Worked hard as daughter of immigrants to gain entry and I can’t always “see out.” But I know that now. I am happy to have found your page.
I'm not saying somatic work is "white" or that the body holding stress is a colonial invention. (remember, white is not a biological category). Bodies are bodies. Communities have been moving grief and terror through song, ritual, touch, breath, and dance since the dawn of time.
What I'm calling "white" is the current packaging. When somatics gets stripped of history and power, turned into a consumer product, and used as a way to metabolise structural violence privately, in a way that nothing outside the body has to change. That version recentres the neoliberal innocence, a moralised version of self where only when "I'm regulated, therefore I am good, while leaving the conditions of domination intact.
What you describe, like communal, lineage-based, not moralised, not commodified, is what I call uncaptured somatics. It's the opposite of what I'm critiquing.
So yes, the transformations and healings you experience are totally reasonable and natural responses to stress. My gripe is when that process becomes a substitute for naming what made this whole thing necessary in the first place.
Random thought 4: Your analysis also applies to DBT, dialectical behavioral therapy, which was “invented” by a white woman “diagnosed” with a personality disorder who then went on to sell this to others. DBT asks the disordered “patient’ to monitor, interfere with, and catalog all his/her/their emotions in real time and often, throughout the day. More parsing, labeling of defective thinking, the self as a specimen. Often court ordered, a money-maker. And of course, those assigned it are the most vulnerable and terrified that they won’t get off probation/get kids back/stop self-harm/finish college, etc. I have had so many young women come to office hours and confess, “I have a personality disorder,” then cry. Just this week a student wrote in a journal exercise: “As a sufferer of BPD, I know there are no happy horizons for me.” She is bright, affable, lovely. Grandfather lived through Armenian genocide. Tangential perhaps, or right on point, mental “illness" is continuing intergenerational wounding.
As a social worker in my previous work, I find the diagnosis of BPD absolutely abhorrent. You can get a “diagnosis” for that, but not trauma with results in CPTSD. It’s what’s wrong with you, but not what the abuser did to you.
That's such an interesting point. I've been reflecting lately on some culture-bound behaviors from my own experience and came to the conclusion that... Western psychological frameworks are provincial. They really can't apply cross-culturally. In my extended family (we're Iranian) every woman matches the diagnostic criteria for contamination OCD. By western standards our hygienic and cleaning practices are pathological and compulsive. But there is a whole layer of cultural subconscious, religious substrate and interpersonal/poverty trauma beneath that. And the "condition" is seen as anything but pathological in the native sphere.
Oh for sure, that’s what Mary Ainsworth's “Strange Situation” was, a child’s caretaker abusing / abandoning them, and the child’s distress not being interpreted as a rational response to systemic disruption.
Yall, why do we have “Presidents of the U.S.” and it’s in the 21st century of knowledge, virtuality, and digital world (with its consequences) that we have not had a President or mainstream news outlets magnify into the subject of mental health, let alone spread awareness, conversations, or invitations to discuss mental health & illnesses? We’d advance so much faster as a society that might just better understand itself (i vs. other/other vs. i), the more that I ponder and mentally investigate the possibility of such a world.
You’re hitting on something Joshua. It’s absurd that in the 21st century, with everything we know about mental health, not a single U.S. president has made it a real priority. But let’s be honest—if they did, would it actually be about helping people, or just keeping them functional enough to keep the machine running?
At a press conference on August 12th, 1986, Ronald Reagan said, “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are ‘I’m from the government and I’m here to help.’” Reagan was using that to gut social services, but there’s a deeper point: when the state decides to "care," it’s never just about care. It’s about control. If a U.S. president suddenly championed mental health, what would that actually look like? More funding for therapy, or just another way to medicalize discontent, slap a diagnosis on suffering, and keep people docile?
Because real mental health reform would mean asking why so many people are sick in the first place? Why capitalism grinds people down, why burnout is the norm, why entire generations feel like they’re drowning. But that’s not a conversation they want to have. It’s easier to push "awareness," to sell mindfulness apps and resilience training, than to admit the system itself is the crisis.
If something feels impossible, that’s exactly why it needs to be insisted on. If a world where mental health is actually taken seriously sounds utopian, that’s not an argument against it. It’s a sign of how deep the problem runs. So the goal isn’t just to get mental health on the agenda—it’s to make sure it’s not just another state-sanctioned coping mechanism that lets everything else stay the same.
Not being sarcastic at all. BPD is caused by a child’s caretaker(s) abusing / abandoning them, and that’s exactly what Mary Ainsworth did. I thought that’s what your question / comment was, but i looks i didn’t fully understand what your comment’s point.
I don’t doubt that she had “it." I question the construction of personality disorders…and if you listen to the podcast, there is reference to the inventors of attachment “disorders" constructing attachment theory referented by their own childhoods, which were white and upper class, at least for Bowlby. Many people have been harmed by this label. BPD fails to contextualize emotional distress as a response to relational trauma, attributing it to personal failings, most often in women. It is a sexist diagnosis that has little basis in evidence. Put differently, *something that can arise only in relationship is nonetheless characterized as an organic individual defect.* Also see Psychiatric Hegemony: A Marxist Theory of Mental Illness by Bruce M. Z. Cohen.
I have always heard these theories framed as response to relational / generational trauma? Not personal failings. Where or what are you referencing? Bowlby does not place blame neither does Gabor Mate or Van der kolk? Curious…relational trauma suggests the impact of relating? So how does this get translated as individual blame / shame or responsibility?
I do agree with the social conditioning and the regulation of status quo..
Social and historical context:
Cohen places mental health in its social context, arguing that it is often treated as an individual, internal problem rather than a response to socioeconomic conditions.
I'm in bed recovering from shoulder surgery so I can't answer this fully. My point is quite simple – that the way we define disorders is not neutral – it's a construction. Think about all the discussions around the construction of race and sexuality – more and more, scientist and thinkers are coming to terms with the fact that science is not neutral. It is embedded in a biased context and therefore what it creates is biased. I read all your comments and I can give you an example – you did not touch on the issue of gender. Women are suffers of mental disorders and far greater numbers than men and are more likely to be slapped with the label of personality disorder. Yet women are also the suffers of gender based violence and often from a very young age are socialised via that same violence. What is labelled personality disorder is more likely a trauma response to structural inequality and also an absence of a way to talk about it. Even our language is embedded in systems and critical discourse analysis tells us that language reflects the realities of those in power. I do not say that every therapist is a hack – my life is incredibly rich because of a good therapist. But she understood that I was not personality disordered as I had been labelled, but instead the product of intragenerational trauma – which you do reference and which I think is an emergent field that holds great promise in helping sufferers. I don't think we can disentangle the mental health and wellness industrial complexes from our capitalist system which grinds people into submission and is part of what I came to understand as the landscape for my own ill health. Parents and grandparents were worked to the bone and angry because we never had enough money nor did they have time and energy to think about the trade they were making. Or choose another path.The externalities of that kind of human capital depletion include physical and mental ill health. (I dictated this so I apologise if you find any mistakes).
Right - thanks for the response this is really fascinating. Its the old paradox of the fish not seeing the water analogy?
I think this essay is a solid examination or more a decolonial philosophical provocation, not a refutation of attachment science? Anyway - I am always fascinated by PRE Industrial life - and current?
Humans everywhere — across every culture, across all of evolutionary history — have always faced:
loss
inconsistent caregiving
environmental stress
parental illness
famine
war
community disruption
death
And when those things happen, attachment injuries happen, because attachment is a species-wide mammalian system, not a European invention.
Western psychology didn’t create attachment wounds. It simply named them using its own lenses.
Attachment existed long before humans — it’s MILLIONS of years old.
This is KEY.
Attachment is not a cultural theory.
It’s a biological survival system.
You see attachment behaviors in:
chimpanzees
bonobos
gorillas
orangutans
wolves
elephants
dolphins
even some birds
Infants cry, cling, seek proximity, or withdraw BECAUSE that’s how they stay alive.
This predates:
Europe
colonialism
modern psychology
even Homo sapiens
So YES — uncolonized populations absolutely had attachment dynamics.
The gender bias is definitely messy and deserves attention, but I wouldn’t dismiss the disorder entirely. Pete Davidson has the same diagnosis, and so does my cousin and my sister. I’m not sure where you heard about personal failings, because Cluster B disorders are often, if not always, connected with trauma. The trauma aspect isn’t completely ignored in the science. By the way, your bio says you teach at college. Do you specialize in psychology?
Judith Herman, MD. Trauma and Recovery is a limited but good starting point. I’m arguing that the diagnosis is a construct. I don’t know anything about your family members nor would I profess to assess them. BPD has long been a point of contention in the psychiatric community. It is a label that is slapped on persons (most of whom are women) who have difficulty in therapy and treated as a constitutional disorder. Many persons who have been identified as BPD have instead complex drama, a diagnosis that is only now getting traction (and while trauma is not a construct, the treatment of complex trauma is one that focuses on individuals – and that’s another whole discussion). The history of the DSM is very fraught. I won’t treat these diagnoses as if they are scientific truths because they aren’t. If they were, would the DSM change them yearly? I’m an academic with a science background - human subject protection in research/epidemiology – and teach about how science is not “neutral.” Or objective. The scientific “method” is not value-free. That is my point. PS I could write a whole thing on the idea of a human being as a “subject” — this wording comes from the Nuremberg Code, post Nazi “doctors” trials — and the history of epidemiology, which began in Britain as a way not to measure disease incidence but to measure the wealth of the state — this is in the early 1800s. I’m not judging anyone, just sharing what I know/think.
Curious about assessment that is not pathological? In your view how do we determine disorder from order - or is this the argument? The problem is we are labeling and damaging psyches via these labels? Makes sense to me!
Have you read The Myth of Normal - Gabor Mate - I wonder where his perspective would fit in. My take away is much of what has been normalized as actually been pathologically coerced and enforced and sadly destructive
I experienced an early separation from my caregivers that left an imprint on my system and I have been haunted by a sense of ’inadequacy’ in relation to this ‘secure attachment/ideal citizen’ metric. As a student of psychology at A-level (17 years old) we covered attachment theory and a teacher said “if your parents weren’t around during this stage, forget it”, I went to the bathroom and it was the first panic attack I ever had. My body held an inner knowing about what I had been through and society had just determined what that was going to mean for me and who I was. My brain and nervous system deviate from the “norm” to a massive extent. I have been doing my best to unlearn the negative view of self I’ve been conditioned to internalise but your article has now helped play a massive part in that unlearning. There are so many ways to live there are so many ways to bond there are so many ways to relate and who gets to decide which is more valid. These hash rigid surface level rules strip us of our own capability, self knowing and lead us into shame instead of action. If the discovery of secure attachment was so groundbreaking why has its use not gone into building spaces, ensuring resources and hubs of community and connection for people without it to be able to find it today amongst each other? Perhaps because it’s not truly about health and helping people but imposing a pathologising view on the masses. “Only one way is right = their way”. I do believe there is a biological basis of bonding required for the development of a healthy psyche but Neuroplasticity shows the ability of humans to grow and flourish. There have been some interesting studies about the helpfulness of communal theatre and performing arts in traumatised people, I personally have benefited from being able to attend a grassroots inclusive women’s football club. As a massively dysregulated person who has and could collapse under the weight of the labels determining my worth and who I am, I am finding my way. These labels are heavy. I read once that 80% of our ocean remains unmapped and unobserved. When we try to label everything and impose rules and laws mindlessly we remove the ability for nuance and the mystery, power and magic of organic life.
This is a powerful reflection, and I want to honor both the pain you’ve carried and the insight you’ve cultivated in response to it. What you’re describing—the early separation, the panic attack upon realizing what attachment theory seemed to declare about your fate, the slow unlearning of internalized inadequacy—these aren’t just intellectual realizations; they are felt truths, lived and embedded in the nervous system. The way you describe your body’s inner knowing in that moment is profound. It shows that even before the mind could fully articulate what was happening, your system already understood it as a verdict being passed on your existence.
And yet, what I hear in your words is not just a rejection of that verdict, but a deep reclamation of something beyond it. You’re not simply resisting the rigidity of the “secure attachment/ideal citizen” model—you are actively discovering alternative pathways to connection, healing, and self-knowing that exist outside of those imposed frameworks. That’s what’s so powerful about your response. Instead of remaining trapped in the binary of “I either fit or I don’t”, you are mapping the vast uncharted space where life actually happens.
Your question—if secure attachment is so groundbreaking, why hasn’t it been used to build the structures that could create it for those without it?—is sharp, and it exposes the limits of individualist psychology. A model that only tells people what they lacked, without providing the conditions to build what they need, is not a model of care—it is a model of classification, of sorting people into categories that often do more harm than good. Your intuition here is correct: if the goal were truly to support human thriving, we would see more structures designed to nurture attachment beyond the nuclear family model, more communal spaces for belonging, more ways for people to find regulation and connection outside of the early-life window that psychology often insists is final.
But what you’re doing—through football, through grassroots community, through rejecting the weight of labels and finding ways to move beyond them—that is the real work of neuroplasticity in action. Not just as a biological process, but as a lived practice of reshaping the meaning of your own experiences. You are not simply saying, “I refuse to be defined by this.” You are saying, “I am discovering new ways of being in the world, and in doing so, I am proof that these models are incomplete.”
I love the ocean metaphor you bring in at the end. 80% unmapped, unknown, unexplored. That’s exactly it. When we fixate on rigid models of human development, we risk mistaking the map for the territory, forgetting that there is so much more to the human experience than what has been charted, studied, or defined. What you are doing is not just resisting labels—it is embracing the vastness of what hasn’t yet been named. The mystery, the nuance, the unfolding potential of life itself.
I hope you continue exploring, questioning, and reclaiming your own space in ways that feel meaningful to you. And I hope you keep mapping the unknown—because in doing so, you’re not just finding your way, you’re proving that there are so many more ways to exist than the ones we’ve been told are valid.
I loved reading this conversation. I started writing a reply but it got so long that I think I will write my own substack piece to express it more generally. Stay tuned. I just want to say thank you both so much for your insights shared that resonated with something deep in me.
I would understand that you deemed it more important that you acknowledge this comment with a thorough reply than to get caught up in the ethics of AI use. As a writer, how do you decide that?
Random thought three: I was in a psych ward for depression. Most of the ppl in it with were trauma survivors, including veterans, rape survivors, and persons alleged to have “personality disorders.” One day we had mandatory yoga (to calm our vagus nerves) with a guy whose name I thought was Dave until I realized it was Dev (he changed his name from Bob or Joe or Bill to Dev) and put his hands all over the women in the circle as they were breathing in one nostril and out the other. I had the fantasy of kicking him in the head if he came anywhere near me and also had the thought that my fantasy was evidence of my mental ill health. The machinery of Otherness.
Your fantasy was likely a natural response to not wanting to be touched by a total stranger which is completely normal and acceptable. Some clinicians would call this an “intrusive thought” but it doesn’t need to be pathologised. An important question is how did you relate to and integrate that fantasy? Did you take the message from your body/mind that you were desiring and requiring a boundary and bodily autonomy? Just because someone is a yoga teacher does not mean they have a right to touch you if you don’t want them to. Were you able to communicate your need for that boundary clearly or did you wait to see if he would touch you first and then do your best not to kick him?
Appropriation of yoga, an ancient religious practice commodified in the West, in a psychiatric facility, in this case by a white guy with a stolen name. No, I didn’t name the boundary because there aren’t any in public funded psych wards. When I was released, I wrote a story about it. If you’ve ever been in a psych facility, you know it is an enterprise of othering. No person worth their salt would touch persons who have survived trauma unless they believe they have the right to do so. Three Generations, No Imbeciles. War Against the Week. Nice histories of institutions and the eugenics movement to eradicate “defectives” by corralling them.
I’ve listened to this three times. The more that I see your perspective, the more I can’t unsee it 😭
It’s refreshing, rather freeing to see the ways western colonized society creates attachment ideals and mental health standards. So thank you for making this 🐉
Glad to hear it resonated with you. It's this strange sensation of putting words that we didn't know that we already knew. The challenge then is figuring out what comes after—how to navigate relationships and selfhood without being bound by those imposed ideals. I appreciate you taking the time to listen, reflecting and writing in.
i’ve always felt disconnected to attachment theories—being a child of immigrants in the U.S. with a father who “abandoned” us to move back home to Liberia / Ivory Coast. everything about my presumed avoidant/anxious attachment style felt drawn up by that experience but also felt colonized. but i never had the words to properly discuss or describe it until now…
there’s so much more to say here, but for now i’ll leave it with THANK YOU!
I'm so happy you found connection with my writing. Migration within colonization is such a difficult circumstance. Like you have revealed, there are so many other layers that we must take into consideration, into context. I hope to hear your story one day about your story, and your father's story.
I’m so grateful for this article. I legitimately just had a therapy session an hour before happening upon this article in which I expressed dissatisfaction with talk therapy for someone like me, who has multiple (maligned) intersecting identities. I told her that fighting for my right to exist and feel happy and whole feels like a Sisyphean task in a world that structurally and systemically seeks to psychologically annihilate people like me. Thank you for giving words to the vague discontent I’ve been feeling with modern psychology.
Anika, I really appreciate you sharing this. Your frustration with talk therapy resonates deeply—especially for those of us whose identities and experiences exist outside of the frameworks psychology was built to serve. When the world itself is structured to invalidate certain existences, therapy often risks becoming an exercise in ‘adjustment’ rather than genuine liberation. The focus shifts to managing distress rather than questioning the structures that create it.
Your insight about ‘psychological annihilation’ is crucial. So much of what gets pathologized as individual struggle is actually a rational response to systemic conditions. And yet, psychology—particularly in its most institutionalized, clinical forms—tends to locate suffering within the individual rather than seeing it as relational, historical, and political.
What would it look like if therapy didn’t just teach us to ‘cope,’ but instead gave us tools to map, resist, and strategically navigate power? If instead of centering resilience, it centered refusal—refusal to internalize the world’s distortions, refusal to let frameworks of pathology define our struggles?
I’m curious—has there ever been a moment, inside or outside therapy, where you felt truly seen? And what was different about that space?
Kia ora/Greetings Ayoto, I was born in the 50’s and my primary employment on leaving school was to train as psychiatrist nurse on land taken from my tribal people by the colonial government in the late 1920’s in my homeland of Aotearoa otherwise known as New Zealand. Maori as indigenous have since 1975 as a date where law defines a new timeline of living in colonial space and we as indigenous have had five decades of a court or commission inquiry on such things as the confiscation of land either by war or my law. Moving from land theft back to working in a white constructed mental health facility where mental was weaponized as a young Maori and a woman I left after five years refusing to take the last exam because I saw then the worst as I said in 1977 of the white man’s medicine. I was I thought but as you write it was replaced or added to by psychology. Great article and trust you don’t mind but after subscribing on my free Substack subscription I have emailed the article to my address and lawyer assigned to the Waitangi Tribunal Inquiry on Maori women and the “Crown’s” relationship since 1840 and its effects. Need I say there has been little comfort assigned our way. Thank you for your submission to the discussion worldwide we have as indigenous deconstructing and reapplying the impact of colonialism. Na Mihirawhiti
Kia ora Mihirawhiti, and thank you for sharing this powerful reflection. The weight of what you describe—the forced removal from ancestral land, the imposition of colonial legal frameworks, and the violence embedded in so-called ‘mental health’ institutions—speaks to the depth of systemic harm that psychology has often served to reinforce rather than heal. Your refusal to take that final exam in 1977, seeing the full extent of “the white man’s medicine,” is a profound act of resistance. It’s a testament to how insight is not just something found within these institutions, but often in the act of rejecting them.
The continued inquiries of the Waitangi Tribunal highlight exactly what you describe: that so-called “reparations” within a colonial system rarely provide real comfort, because the underlying structure remains unchanged. That you are bringing this conversation into those legal and historical spaces is deeply significant—because as you know, these struggles do not exist in theory alone, but in the ongoing reality of land, body, and history.
I’m honored that you found resonance in my piece, and I deeply respect the work you’re doing to deconstruct and reapply the impact of colonialism. If psychology, as you say, has replaced psychiatry as a new colonial tool, then what do you see as its decolonial counterpoint? What models of care—whether rooted in whakapapa, whenua, or wairua—offer the restoration that these imposed structures never could?
Thank you again for sharing your story and for bringing this into a larger indigenous dialogue. Ngā mihi nui.
This is incredible, thank you. Someone commented on DBT and how it is so violent and exhausting all day to ruler smack yourself into acting different. (My paraphrasing). Ive actually done DBT and it was! and I had the thought— in Buddhist practice, we also incline the mind… so what’s the difference? Is this still a cousin to what you’re discussing about AT?
Then I realized, inclining my mind toward kindness has a natural outcome of evicting hatred from my mind. As opposed to AT that is instant result (act different) oriented. In practice, I’m not saying my mind is wrong when I do this. I just incline my mind toward kindness. With Buddhist practice, for me, there is no pathology to fix. There is only knowing what’s happening when it’s happening. There’s a gentleness. And also! One could create the quality of violence even in this small inclination—by simply adhering to the “I’m broken fix this mind” AT quality you’re discussing.
It’s not just the AT itself, it’s the quality of the mind this theory can create. Once it is created i can use this quality even on gentle things and still feel broken. Wow. Thank you so much for this eye opening discussion.
The quality of mind that cultivates is a really sharp comparison. Once a framework trains us as broken, even the gentlest practice can become another site of self-punishment. The legacy of pathology-driven models haunts us. Maybe the real movement out of this is precisely what you describe, an awareness that doesn't impose change, that doesn't intervene but allows. From there, the mind inclines towards compassion not as a command but as an inevitability.
I've developed an aversion to self-help/personal development books that center privileged experiences and perspectives. I felt what you mention about white repackaging of issues when I first read Grit. When books like Grit talk about resilience, they often treat it like a personal virtue anyone can build with enough mindset and discipline.
But Black people, and especially Black women, have been forced to develop resilience as a requirement for safety and survival.
It is not the same.
And while the author isn't white, her experiences at Harvard, Oxford and University of Penn create a structural insulation. Her model is built from a vantage point that flattens oppression into personal attitude.
That means a lot—thank you. There’s something powerful about realizing that what feels like an individual struggle is actually shared, structural, part of a larger pattern. If these words helped articulate something that’s been hard to name, then I’m grateful they reached you at the right time. Wishing you clarity, solidarity, and all the language you need for what comes next.
Random thoughts on listening to this a second time. “Glissant” great word. This is the chapter of El Kurd’s Perfect Victims where he talks about laughing at “Gotcha” questions like “Do you want to throw Israelis into the sea?”- using humor to “exile the prestige of the podium." Second random thought: The family court system in the US is built on its self-defined work serving the “best interests of the child.” An echo of same language as the eugenics movement and its expression in the US’s highest court: In 1927 Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr decreed it was “better for all the world” to sterilize “defective” people than to pay the costs of "executing their degenerate offspring." Ironically, the survivors who have come forward to share their stories of being sterilized as Black, brown, immigrant, and poor children received checks for nomimal amounts…just as the men of the Tuskegee “study” of untreated syphilis received $25 certificates for “participating” in a project to show the unique impact of this STI on Black bodies. The survivors of the Guatemalan “study” were less fortunate, as they were infected in prison and their suffering was photo-documented. The “other” is always a specimen and trauma is always a constitutional defect in tolerating that “otherness” — the ourborus of which you speak. It is built into the mortar of the educational institutions with podiums for DEI “talks” and the courts that administer “justice."
incredible musical labor of love. thank you for creating this. your style makes it feel so easy to follow through the connections and so powerfully calls out to what exists so we can see it in ways necessary. i also had never heard of the consideration of relationship between self through language and the unknowable, how there will be aspects, realities and truths that will always remain out of our grasp. that to demand translation and defining is antithetical to how life exists. this is a realization ive carried within me though i never was able to articulate it. it destroys my spirit knowing how the way white supremacy has numbed, and traumatized countless into believing, accepting this is all life can be - unimaginative, deadly cold machinerary for twisted pleasures of control.
i hope beings continue to remain and more turn to where our hearts truly reside. because they are not home in our bodies, but outside of them.
This was an excellent read with many screenshottable paragraphs! And I found attachment theory incredibly helpful when I first began unpacking my childhood trauma as a college student. I didn’t receive it as any kind of moral judgment, only as a window to understanding myself better. It helped me understand a lot of my (by then unhelpful) reactions to certain feelings and make different choices that didn’t create more chaos for myself, and it made me kinder to myself and others.
As you mentioned so brilliantly, multiple things can be true at once. Thanks for writing!
I see why attachment theory resonated with you, Samantha—it’s often one of the first tools people encounter when trying to make sense of old wounds, at least within Anglo-colonial spheres. And I get the appeal: it offers a narrative of self-understanding, a way to name patterns, to impose order on emotional chaos. But I also question what it leaves unquestioned—what it naturalizes, what it obscures, and what it conditions us to accept as normal or necessary.
It’s a framework shaped by a specific cultural and ideological context—one that assumes a universal model of human development while being deeply embedded in Western, often white, middle-class norms. But what is ‘secure attachment’ if not an adaptation to those norms? To what extent does it train us to internalize a specific emotional order—one that privileges stability as defined by whiteness? And at what cost do we find comfort in that adaptation?
Because the cost is consequential. Not just personally, but historically. The same ideological structures that teach us to seek ‘security’ and ‘stability’ in ways that align with white middle-class norms are the same ones that have rendered entire peoples disposable, ungrievable. What does it mean that we can so easily apply psychological frameworks to ourselves but struggle to recognize the suffering of those whose destruction was required to maintain this very sense of stability?
Eichmann, during his trial, was deemed perfectly "normal." Under psychological examination, he showed no pathology, no malice—only a fixation on efficiency, on improving the tools and frameworks of his work. He did not need to be a monster. He only needed to follow a logic, a system that normalized destruction as a byproduct of progress. This is what Arendt called the banality of evil—the way ideological conditioning allows horrors to unfold not through overt hatred but through the dull, administrative pursuit of ‘better’ ways of doing things.
And isn’t that the logic of attachment theory, too? To refine the self, to improve adaptation, to become more functional within a system without questioning the system itself? The same cold rationality that made Eichmann strive for technical efficiency in genocide is what makes modern subjects strive for psychological efficiency in a world built on dispossession. What does it mean to heal only insofar as it makes us more compliant? More legible to institutions? More functional within frameworks that have long justified the suffering of Indigenous peoples, Palestinians, colonized subjects under the guise of ‘saving’ them?
I think theories can be useful without being gospel, but as we mature—and expand beyond the self-help fixation on individual wounds—we have to ask: are we repairing ourselves, or are we being disciplined into ideological compliance? And more importantly—who pays the price for our comfort? That’s the space I like to sit in.
Yes! It’s just one of ten thousand fingers pointing at tiny sections of the moon, not the moon itself, and its utility is only as good as the way a person learns to follow those fingers and synthesize them with others. (It’s also not some necessary theory one has to know about, just one potential flavor of conceptualization someone might be drawn to.)
For some, understanding their trauma-informed reactivity can make them a lot less inclined to hurt others. This was the case for me, someone raised in a violent home who had violent tendencies and unkindness I didn’t understand was related to how fundamentally unsafe I felt in all relationships.
There will always be people who overidentify with specific fingers in ways that are unhelpful. I think believing any “theory” like that to be some universally applicable truth without problems (when it’s really just one of endless concepts that may or may not be helpful and shouldn’t be held too tightly) is almost always a problem. I don’t think attachment theory is inherently antithetical to someone being able to question the system itself, though I can see the potential? (It’s been over a decade since I read the book so maybe I’m forgetting certain aspects of it!)
I can only speak to my own experience, which is that “attachment theory” was one early, useful step on a 12 year+ journey of questioning everything, internally and systemically. Some of the self-understanding it helped me gain was a necessary foundation in having a psyche that felt “stable” enough to question larger things.
You’re touching brilliantly on a lot of conversations I see happening around “self-help” recently and I can see the usefulness of drawing on issues with attachment theory to do that.
Again, I really appreciate getting to read your take and saved it for future reference. Also excited to read more of your work! :)
I see what you’re saying—attachment theory was useful for you, a step toward stability before questioning bigger structures. But that’s precisely the point. Why is ‘stability’ always the precondition for critique? Stability for whom, by whose definition?
Theories don’t just describe—they prescribe. Attachment theory doesn’t just offer a tool for self-understanding; it conditions us to seek security in ways that align with a particular social order. It privileges self-regulation, non-reactivity, legibility—qualities that fit neatly within capitalist, white middle-class norms. That’s not incidental. Stability, as framed by these systems, isn’t neutral—it’s ideological. It dictates whose emotions are valid, whose distress is pathologized, whose grief is legible.
We see this playing out now in real time. Western psychological frameworks teach us to prioritize personal regulation, to see distress as something to ‘process,’ while entire populations are denied even the right to react to their own destruction. In the case of Palestine, genocide is rationalized as a necessary condition for ‘stability’—stability for the settler, for the empire, for the logic of order. What does it mean to be trained into emotional legibility within a system that defines some people’s existence as inherently destabilizing?
So yes, people can take what serves them and leave the rest. But some frameworks have more power than others. Some shape institutions, dictate policy, define what is rational or irrational. Attachment theory isn’t just one of many fingers pointing at the moon—it’s also a map of what kind of subject is desirable, functional, acceptable. That’s the part worth questioning.
A stronger sense of self (feeling a healthy sense of being “at the wheel” of your own life and not at the mercy of your own reactivity, as illusory as that perspective may be) is generally useful for creating the kind of psychological safety necessary for people to challenge their beliefs. Emotional disregulation typically makes us much more vulnerable to powerful people manipulating us, and disconnection from the self is one of the biggest predictors for whether people fall in line with heartless regimes and justify horrific violence in the name of “efficiency”. All of this is speaking very broadly, just trying to communicate that it might not be so black and white.
I’m not sure that privileged people remaining more disregulated would have a positive impact on more oppressed people, which you seem to believe? I think there’s a big difference between being passive/indifferent to injustice and being concerned with self-regulation in the absence of healthier conditions that regulate us more naturally. Plenty of non-white ideologies encourage forms of emotional “self-mastery” in order to expand our capacity to face suffering.
I don’t remember attachment theory demonizing anger or encouraging people to pursue their own stability at the expense of others but I could be off. If anything I see Israel’s treatment of Palestinians as a clear sign of its delusional insecurity and reactivity rather than having a healthy sense of self? When we have a healthy sense of self we don’t want to dominate others. (I might be spinning out on themes at this point lol I can stop. If I’m missing your point I apologize!)
Samantha, have you ever considered that the most dangerous people in history were not the disregulated, chaotic masses but the ones who were perfectly self-regulated, disciplined, and entirely at ease with themselves as they executed atrocity? There’s a lot to unpack here, and I’ll be sharing more in my next post.
All the university staff meetings I have been at where we "orientalize" breathing with yoga stuff but don't deal with things like the suppression of dissent over genocide
Yes, it’s time we begin to name the elephant in the room
*You’ve* named it. I am nowhere near as articulate or knowledgeable as you…I sense BS in my gut and struggle mightily to express it — ironic, since I work at a university. My writing is often messy (not an apology) because institutions shape discourse and I function inside one. Worked hard as daughter of immigrants to gain entry and I can’t always “see out.” But I know that now. I am happy to have found your page.
The power is removed once we start naming the constraints. It starts somewhere, somehow. Glad to be in conversation with you.
As am I
Are you having some sort of breakdown?
Hi Jordan, I appreciate your questions on this.
I'm not saying somatic work is "white" or that the body holding stress is a colonial invention. (remember, white is not a biological category). Bodies are bodies. Communities have been moving grief and terror through song, ritual, touch, breath, and dance since the dawn of time.
What I'm calling "white" is the current packaging. When somatics gets stripped of history and power, turned into a consumer product, and used as a way to metabolise structural violence privately, in a way that nothing outside the body has to change. That version recentres the neoliberal innocence, a moralised version of self where only when "I'm regulated, therefore I am good, while leaving the conditions of domination intact.
What you describe, like communal, lineage-based, not moralised, not commodified, is what I call uncaptured somatics. It's the opposite of what I'm critiquing.
So yes, the transformations and healings you experience are totally reasonable and natural responses to stress. My gripe is when that process becomes a substitute for naming what made this whole thing necessary in the first place.
This is what I was thinking while listening, thank you for explaining more. This makes so much sense!
Random thought 4: Your analysis also applies to DBT, dialectical behavioral therapy, which was “invented” by a white woman “diagnosed” with a personality disorder who then went on to sell this to others. DBT asks the disordered “patient’ to monitor, interfere with, and catalog all his/her/their emotions in real time and often, throughout the day. More parsing, labeling of defective thinking, the self as a specimen. Often court ordered, a money-maker. And of course, those assigned it are the most vulnerable and terrified that they won’t get off probation/get kids back/stop self-harm/finish college, etc. I have had so many young women come to office hours and confess, “I have a personality disorder,” then cry. Just this week a student wrote in a journal exercise: “As a sufferer of BPD, I know there are no happy horizons for me.” She is bright, affable, lovely. Grandfather lived through Armenian genocide. Tangential perhaps, or right on point, mental “illness" is continuing intergenerational wounding.
you point out many interesting connections. thank you for writing in.
As a social worker in my previous work, I find the diagnosis of BPD absolutely abhorrent. You can get a “diagnosis” for that, but not trauma with results in CPTSD. It’s what’s wrong with you, but not what the abuser did to you.
That's such an interesting point. I've been reflecting lately on some culture-bound behaviors from my own experience and came to the conclusion that... Western psychological frameworks are provincial. They really can't apply cross-culturally. In my extended family (we're Iranian) every woman matches the diagnostic criteria for contamination OCD. By western standards our hygienic and cleaning practices are pathological and compulsive. But there is a whole layer of cultural subconscious, religious substrate and interpersonal/poverty trauma beneath that. And the "condition" is seen as anything but pathological in the native sphere.
“Mental illness is continuing intergenerational wounding”
Thank you for that sentence and thought.
Oh for sure, that’s what Mary Ainsworth's “Strange Situation” was, a child’s caretaker abusing / abandoning them, and the child’s distress not being interpreted as a rational response to systemic disruption.
I can’t tell if this is a sarcastic comment or not, but the point that I’m making is that science is not neutral or objective.
Yall, why do we have “Presidents of the U.S.” and it’s in the 21st century of knowledge, virtuality, and digital world (with its consequences) that we have not had a President or mainstream news outlets magnify into the subject of mental health, let alone spread awareness, conversations, or invitations to discuss mental health & illnesses? We’d advance so much faster as a society that might just better understand itself (i vs. other/other vs. i), the more that I ponder and mentally investigate the possibility of such a world.
You’re hitting on something Joshua. It’s absurd that in the 21st century, with everything we know about mental health, not a single U.S. president has made it a real priority. But let’s be honest—if they did, would it actually be about helping people, or just keeping them functional enough to keep the machine running?
At a press conference on August 12th, 1986, Ronald Reagan said, “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are ‘I’m from the government and I’m here to help.’” Reagan was using that to gut social services, but there’s a deeper point: when the state decides to "care," it’s never just about care. It’s about control. If a U.S. president suddenly championed mental health, what would that actually look like? More funding for therapy, or just another way to medicalize discontent, slap a diagnosis on suffering, and keep people docile?
Because real mental health reform would mean asking why so many people are sick in the first place? Why capitalism grinds people down, why burnout is the norm, why entire generations feel like they’re drowning. But that’s not a conversation they want to have. It’s easier to push "awareness," to sell mindfulness apps and resilience training, than to admit the system itself is the crisis.
If something feels impossible, that’s exactly why it needs to be insisted on. If a world where mental health is actually taken seriously sounds utopian, that’s not an argument against it. It’s a sign of how deep the problem runs. So the goal isn’t just to get mental health on the agenda—it’s to make sure it’s not just another state-sanctioned coping mechanism that lets everything else stay the same.
Yeah the idea of the neutrality and objectivity is so full of hubris isn't it?
Not being sarcastic at all. BPD is caused by a child’s caretaker(s) abusing / abandoning them, and that’s exactly what Mary Ainsworth did. I thought that’s what your question / comment was, but i looks i didn’t fully understand what your comment’s point.
Thanks for clarifying.
Keep writing or processing all you’re seeing, somewhere. You’re seeing something. You’ve brought in some significant threads.
You seem to doubt that she had it, why?
I don’t doubt that she had “it." I question the construction of personality disorders…and if you listen to the podcast, there is reference to the inventors of attachment “disorders" constructing attachment theory referented by their own childhoods, which were white and upper class, at least for Bowlby. Many people have been harmed by this label. BPD fails to contextualize emotional distress as a response to relational trauma, attributing it to personal failings, most often in women. It is a sexist diagnosis that has little basis in evidence. Put differently, *something that can arise only in relationship is nonetheless characterized as an organic individual defect.* Also see Psychiatric Hegemony: A Marxist Theory of Mental Illness by Bruce M. Z. Cohen.
I have always heard these theories framed as response to relational / generational trauma? Not personal failings. Where or what are you referencing? Bowlby does not place blame neither does Gabor Mate or Van der kolk? Curious…relational trauma suggests the impact of relating? So how does this get translated as individual blame / shame or responsibility?
I do agree with the social conditioning and the regulation of status quo..
Social and historical context:
Cohen places mental health in its social context, arguing that it is often treated as an individual, internal problem rather than a response to socioeconomic conditions.
I'm in bed recovering from shoulder surgery so I can't answer this fully. My point is quite simple – that the way we define disorders is not neutral – it's a construction. Think about all the discussions around the construction of race and sexuality – more and more, scientist and thinkers are coming to terms with the fact that science is not neutral. It is embedded in a biased context and therefore what it creates is biased. I read all your comments and I can give you an example – you did not touch on the issue of gender. Women are suffers of mental disorders and far greater numbers than men and are more likely to be slapped with the label of personality disorder. Yet women are also the suffers of gender based violence and often from a very young age are socialised via that same violence. What is labelled personality disorder is more likely a trauma response to structural inequality and also an absence of a way to talk about it. Even our language is embedded in systems and critical discourse analysis tells us that language reflects the realities of those in power. I do not say that every therapist is a hack – my life is incredibly rich because of a good therapist. But she understood that I was not personality disordered as I had been labelled, but instead the product of intragenerational trauma – which you do reference and which I think is an emergent field that holds great promise in helping sufferers. I don't think we can disentangle the mental health and wellness industrial complexes from our capitalist system which grinds people into submission and is part of what I came to understand as the landscape for my own ill health. Parents and grandparents were worked to the bone and angry because we never had enough money nor did they have time and energy to think about the trade they were making. Or choose another path.The externalities of that kind of human capital depletion include physical and mental ill health. (I dictated this so I apologise if you find any mistakes).
I wish you a speedy recovery Melanie.
Right - thanks for the response this is really fascinating. Its the old paradox of the fish not seeing the water analogy?
I think this essay is a solid examination or more a decolonial philosophical provocation, not a refutation of attachment science? Anyway - I am always fascinated by PRE Industrial life - and current?
Humans everywhere — across every culture, across all of evolutionary history — have always faced:
loss
inconsistent caregiving
environmental stress
parental illness
famine
war
community disruption
death
And when those things happen, attachment injuries happen, because attachment is a species-wide mammalian system, not a European invention.
Western psychology didn’t create attachment wounds. It simply named them using its own lenses.
Attachment existed long before humans — it’s MILLIONS of years old.
This is KEY.
Attachment is not a cultural theory.
It’s a biological survival system.
You see attachment behaviors in:
chimpanzees
bonobos
gorillas
orangutans
wolves
elephants
dolphins
even some birds
Infants cry, cling, seek proximity, or withdraw BECAUSE that’s how they stay alive.
This predates:
Europe
colonialism
modern psychology
even Homo sapiens
So YES — uncolonized populations absolutely had attachment dynamics.
also...
Attachment existed long before humans — it’s MILLIONS of years old.
Attachment is not a cultural theory.
It’s a biological survival system.
You see attachment behaviors in:
chimpanzees
bonobos
gorillas
orangutans
wolves
elephants
dolphins
even some birds
Infants cry, cling, seek proximity, or withdraw BECAUSE that’s how they stay alive.
This predates:
Europe
colonialism
modern psychology
even Homo sapiens
So YES — uncolonized populations absolutely had attachment dynamics.
right but the theory is not.
The gender bias is definitely messy and deserves attention, but I wouldn’t dismiss the disorder entirely. Pete Davidson has the same diagnosis, and so does my cousin and my sister. I’m not sure where you heard about personal failings, because Cluster B disorders are often, if not always, connected with trauma. The trauma aspect isn’t completely ignored in the science. By the way, your bio says you teach at college. Do you specialize in psychology?
Judith Herman, MD. Trauma and Recovery is a limited but good starting point. I’m arguing that the diagnosis is a construct. I don’t know anything about your family members nor would I profess to assess them. BPD has long been a point of contention in the psychiatric community. It is a label that is slapped on persons (most of whom are women) who have difficulty in therapy and treated as a constitutional disorder. Many persons who have been identified as BPD have instead complex drama, a diagnosis that is only now getting traction (and while trauma is not a construct, the treatment of complex trauma is one that focuses on individuals – and that’s another whole discussion). The history of the DSM is very fraught. I won’t treat these diagnoses as if they are scientific truths because they aren’t. If they were, would the DSM change them yearly? I’m an academic with a science background - human subject protection in research/epidemiology – and teach about how science is not “neutral.” Or objective. The scientific “method” is not value-free. That is my point. PS I could write a whole thing on the idea of a human being as a “subject” — this wording comes from the Nuremberg Code, post Nazi “doctors” trials — and the history of epidemiology, which began in Britain as a way not to measure disease incidence but to measure the wealth of the state — this is in the early 1800s. I’m not judging anyone, just sharing what I know/think.
This book is an excellent recommendation.
Curious about assessment that is not pathological? In your view how do we determine disorder from order - or is this the argument? The problem is we are labeling and damaging psyches via these labels? Makes sense to me!
Have you read The Myth of Normal - Gabor Mate - I wonder where his perspective would fit in. My take away is much of what has been normalized as actually been pathologically coerced and enforced and sadly destructive
I experienced an early separation from my caregivers that left an imprint on my system and I have been haunted by a sense of ’inadequacy’ in relation to this ‘secure attachment/ideal citizen’ metric. As a student of psychology at A-level (17 years old) we covered attachment theory and a teacher said “if your parents weren’t around during this stage, forget it”, I went to the bathroom and it was the first panic attack I ever had. My body held an inner knowing about what I had been through and society had just determined what that was going to mean for me and who I was. My brain and nervous system deviate from the “norm” to a massive extent. I have been doing my best to unlearn the negative view of self I’ve been conditioned to internalise but your article has now helped play a massive part in that unlearning. There are so many ways to live there are so many ways to bond there are so many ways to relate and who gets to decide which is more valid. These hash rigid surface level rules strip us of our own capability, self knowing and lead us into shame instead of action. If the discovery of secure attachment was so groundbreaking why has its use not gone into building spaces, ensuring resources and hubs of community and connection for people without it to be able to find it today amongst each other? Perhaps because it’s not truly about health and helping people but imposing a pathologising view on the masses. “Only one way is right = their way”. I do believe there is a biological basis of bonding required for the development of a healthy psyche but Neuroplasticity shows the ability of humans to grow and flourish. There have been some interesting studies about the helpfulness of communal theatre and performing arts in traumatised people, I personally have benefited from being able to attend a grassroots inclusive women’s football club. As a massively dysregulated person who has and could collapse under the weight of the labels determining my worth and who I am, I am finding my way. These labels are heavy. I read once that 80% of our ocean remains unmapped and unobserved. When we try to label everything and impose rules and laws mindlessly we remove the ability for nuance and the mystery, power and magic of organic life.
This is a powerful reflection, and I want to honor both the pain you’ve carried and the insight you’ve cultivated in response to it. What you’re describing—the early separation, the panic attack upon realizing what attachment theory seemed to declare about your fate, the slow unlearning of internalized inadequacy—these aren’t just intellectual realizations; they are felt truths, lived and embedded in the nervous system. The way you describe your body’s inner knowing in that moment is profound. It shows that even before the mind could fully articulate what was happening, your system already understood it as a verdict being passed on your existence.
And yet, what I hear in your words is not just a rejection of that verdict, but a deep reclamation of something beyond it. You’re not simply resisting the rigidity of the “secure attachment/ideal citizen” model—you are actively discovering alternative pathways to connection, healing, and self-knowing that exist outside of those imposed frameworks. That’s what’s so powerful about your response. Instead of remaining trapped in the binary of “I either fit or I don’t”, you are mapping the vast uncharted space where life actually happens.
Your question—if secure attachment is so groundbreaking, why hasn’t it been used to build the structures that could create it for those without it?—is sharp, and it exposes the limits of individualist psychology. A model that only tells people what they lacked, without providing the conditions to build what they need, is not a model of care—it is a model of classification, of sorting people into categories that often do more harm than good. Your intuition here is correct: if the goal were truly to support human thriving, we would see more structures designed to nurture attachment beyond the nuclear family model, more communal spaces for belonging, more ways for people to find regulation and connection outside of the early-life window that psychology often insists is final.
But what you’re doing—through football, through grassroots community, through rejecting the weight of labels and finding ways to move beyond them—that is the real work of neuroplasticity in action. Not just as a biological process, but as a lived practice of reshaping the meaning of your own experiences. You are not simply saying, “I refuse to be defined by this.” You are saying, “I am discovering new ways of being in the world, and in doing so, I am proof that these models are incomplete.”
I love the ocean metaphor you bring in at the end. 80% unmapped, unknown, unexplored. That’s exactly it. When we fixate on rigid models of human development, we risk mistaking the map for the territory, forgetting that there is so much more to the human experience than what has been charted, studied, or defined. What you are doing is not just resisting labels—it is embracing the vastness of what hasn’t yet been named. The mystery, the nuance, the unfolding potential of life itself.
I hope you continue exploring, questioning, and reclaiming your own space in ways that feel meaningful to you. And I hope you keep mapping the unknown—because in doing so, you’re not just finding your way, you’re proving that there are so many more ways to exist than the ones we’ve been told are valid.
I loved reading this conversation. I started writing a reply but it got so long that I think I will write my own substack piece to express it more generally. Stay tuned. I just want to say thank you both so much for your insights shared that resonated with something deep in me.
Was this reply written with AI?
I would understand that you deemed it more important that you acknowledge this comment with a thorough reply than to get caught up in the ethics of AI use. As a writer, how do you decide that?
Whoop whoop, here comes the ethics police.
Truth does not acquire its legitimacy from your discomfort.
Your post spoke to me, also a person with early caregiver loss. Thanks for writing.
I'm sorry for your loss too. I'm glad to hear that we can connect with this moment of solace.
Random thought three: I was in a psych ward for depression. Most of the ppl in it with were trauma survivors, including veterans, rape survivors, and persons alleged to have “personality disorders.” One day we had mandatory yoga (to calm our vagus nerves) with a guy whose name I thought was Dave until I realized it was Dev (he changed his name from Bob or Joe or Bill to Dev) and put his hands all over the women in the circle as they were breathing in one nostril and out the other. I had the fantasy of kicking him in the head if he came anywhere near me and also had the thought that my fantasy was evidence of my mental ill health. The machinery of Otherness.
Your fantasy was likely a natural response to not wanting to be touched by a total stranger which is completely normal and acceptable. Some clinicians would call this an “intrusive thought” but it doesn’t need to be pathologised. An important question is how did you relate to and integrate that fantasy? Did you take the message from your body/mind that you were desiring and requiring a boundary and bodily autonomy? Just because someone is a yoga teacher does not mean they have a right to touch you if you don’t want them to. Were you able to communicate your need for that boundary clearly or did you wait to see if he would touch you first and then do your best not to kick him?
Appropriation of yoga, an ancient religious practice commodified in the West, in a psychiatric facility, in this case by a white guy with a stolen name. No, I didn’t name the boundary because there aren’t any in public funded psych wards. When I was released, I wrote a story about it. If you’ve ever been in a psych facility, you know it is an enterprise of othering. No person worth their salt would touch persons who have survived trauma unless they believe they have the right to do so. Three Generations, No Imbeciles. War Against the Week. Nice histories of institutions and the eugenics movement to eradicate “defectives” by corralling them.
I’ve listened to this three times. The more that I see your perspective, the more I can’t unsee it 😭
It’s refreshing, rather freeing to see the ways western colonized society creates attachment ideals and mental health standards. So thank you for making this 🐉
Glad to hear it resonated with you. It's this strange sensation of putting words that we didn't know that we already knew. The challenge then is figuring out what comes after—how to navigate relationships and selfhood without being bound by those imposed ideals. I appreciate you taking the time to listen, reflecting and writing in.
wowwwwww. this truly needs to be read worldwide!
i’ve always felt disconnected to attachment theories—being a child of immigrants in the U.S. with a father who “abandoned” us to move back home to Liberia / Ivory Coast. everything about my presumed avoidant/anxious attachment style felt drawn up by that experience but also felt colonized. but i never had the words to properly discuss or describe it until now…
there’s so much more to say here, but for now i’ll leave it with THANK YOU!
I'm so happy you found connection with my writing. Migration within colonization is such a difficult circumstance. Like you have revealed, there are so many other layers that we must take into consideration, into context. I hope to hear your story one day about your story, and your father's story.
I’m so grateful for this article. I legitimately just had a therapy session an hour before happening upon this article in which I expressed dissatisfaction with talk therapy for someone like me, who has multiple (maligned) intersecting identities. I told her that fighting for my right to exist and feel happy and whole feels like a Sisyphean task in a world that structurally and systemically seeks to psychologically annihilate people like me. Thank you for giving words to the vague discontent I’ve been feeling with modern psychology.
Anika, I really appreciate you sharing this. Your frustration with talk therapy resonates deeply—especially for those of us whose identities and experiences exist outside of the frameworks psychology was built to serve. When the world itself is structured to invalidate certain existences, therapy often risks becoming an exercise in ‘adjustment’ rather than genuine liberation. The focus shifts to managing distress rather than questioning the structures that create it.
Your insight about ‘psychological annihilation’ is crucial. So much of what gets pathologized as individual struggle is actually a rational response to systemic conditions. And yet, psychology—particularly in its most institutionalized, clinical forms—tends to locate suffering within the individual rather than seeing it as relational, historical, and political.
What would it look like if therapy didn’t just teach us to ‘cope,’ but instead gave us tools to map, resist, and strategically navigate power? If instead of centering resilience, it centered refusal—refusal to internalize the world’s distortions, refusal to let frameworks of pathology define our struggles?
I’m curious—has there ever been a moment, inside or outside therapy, where you felt truly seen? And what was different about that space?
Kia ora/Greetings Ayoto, I was born in the 50’s and my primary employment on leaving school was to train as psychiatrist nurse on land taken from my tribal people by the colonial government in the late 1920’s in my homeland of Aotearoa otherwise known as New Zealand. Maori as indigenous have since 1975 as a date where law defines a new timeline of living in colonial space and we as indigenous have had five decades of a court or commission inquiry on such things as the confiscation of land either by war or my law. Moving from land theft back to working in a white constructed mental health facility where mental was weaponized as a young Maori and a woman I left after five years refusing to take the last exam because I saw then the worst as I said in 1977 of the white man’s medicine. I was I thought but as you write it was replaced or added to by psychology. Great article and trust you don’t mind but after subscribing on my free Substack subscription I have emailed the article to my address and lawyer assigned to the Waitangi Tribunal Inquiry on Maori women and the “Crown’s” relationship since 1840 and its effects. Need I say there has been little comfort assigned our way. Thank you for your submission to the discussion worldwide we have as indigenous deconstructing and reapplying the impact of colonialism. Na Mihirawhiti
Kia ora Mihirawhiti, and thank you for sharing this powerful reflection. The weight of what you describe—the forced removal from ancestral land, the imposition of colonial legal frameworks, and the violence embedded in so-called ‘mental health’ institutions—speaks to the depth of systemic harm that psychology has often served to reinforce rather than heal. Your refusal to take that final exam in 1977, seeing the full extent of “the white man’s medicine,” is a profound act of resistance. It’s a testament to how insight is not just something found within these institutions, but often in the act of rejecting them.
The continued inquiries of the Waitangi Tribunal highlight exactly what you describe: that so-called “reparations” within a colonial system rarely provide real comfort, because the underlying structure remains unchanged. That you are bringing this conversation into those legal and historical spaces is deeply significant—because as you know, these struggles do not exist in theory alone, but in the ongoing reality of land, body, and history.
I’m honored that you found resonance in my piece, and I deeply respect the work you’re doing to deconstruct and reapply the impact of colonialism. If psychology, as you say, has replaced psychiatry as a new colonial tool, then what do you see as its decolonial counterpoint? What models of care—whether rooted in whakapapa, whenua, or wairua—offer the restoration that these imposed structures never could?
Thank you again for sharing your story and for bringing this into a larger indigenous dialogue. Ngā mihi nui.
This is incredible, thank you. Someone commented on DBT and how it is so violent and exhausting all day to ruler smack yourself into acting different. (My paraphrasing). Ive actually done DBT and it was! and I had the thought— in Buddhist practice, we also incline the mind… so what’s the difference? Is this still a cousin to what you’re discussing about AT?
Then I realized, inclining my mind toward kindness has a natural outcome of evicting hatred from my mind. As opposed to AT that is instant result (act different) oriented. In practice, I’m not saying my mind is wrong when I do this. I just incline my mind toward kindness. With Buddhist practice, for me, there is no pathology to fix. There is only knowing what’s happening when it’s happening. There’s a gentleness. And also! One could create the quality of violence even in this small inclination—by simply adhering to the “I’m broken fix this mind” AT quality you’re discussing.
It’s not just the AT itself, it’s the quality of the mind this theory can create. Once it is created i can use this quality even on gentle things and still feel broken. Wow. Thank you so much for this eye opening discussion.
The quality of mind that cultivates is a really sharp comparison. Once a framework trains us as broken, even the gentlest practice can become another site of self-punishment. The legacy of pathology-driven models haunts us. Maybe the real movement out of this is precisely what you describe, an awareness that doesn't impose change, that doesn't intervene but allows. From there, the mind inclines towards compassion not as a command but as an inevitability.
I've developed an aversion to self-help/personal development books that center privileged experiences and perspectives. I felt what you mention about white repackaging of issues when I first read Grit. When books like Grit talk about resilience, they often treat it like a personal virtue anyone can build with enough mindset and discipline.
But Black people, and especially Black women, have been forced to develop resilience as a requirement for safety and survival.
It is not the same.
And while the author isn't white, her experiences at Harvard, Oxford and University of Penn create a structural insulation. Her model is built from a vantage point that flattens oppression into personal attitude.
Truly one of the best pieces I have read for a long time. Thank you for putting words to what many of us have been struggling with.
That means a lot—thank you. There’s something powerful about realizing that what feels like an individual struggle is actually shared, structural, part of a larger pattern. If these words helped articulate something that’s been hard to name, then I’m grateful they reached you at the right time. Wishing you clarity, solidarity, and all the language you need for what comes next.
Random thoughts on listening to this a second time. “Glissant” great word. This is the chapter of El Kurd’s Perfect Victims where he talks about laughing at “Gotcha” questions like “Do you want to throw Israelis into the sea?”- using humor to “exile the prestige of the podium." Second random thought: The family court system in the US is built on its self-defined work serving the “best interests of the child.” An echo of same language as the eugenics movement and its expression in the US’s highest court: In 1927 Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr decreed it was “better for all the world” to sterilize “defective” people than to pay the costs of "executing their degenerate offspring." Ironically, the survivors who have come forward to share their stories of being sterilized as Black, brown, immigrant, and poor children received checks for nomimal amounts…just as the men of the Tuskegee “study” of untreated syphilis received $25 certificates for “participating” in a project to show the unique impact of this STI on Black bodies. The survivors of the Guatemalan “study” were less fortunate, as they were infected in prison and their suffering was photo-documented. The “other” is always a specimen and trauma is always a constitutional defect in tolerating that “otherness” — the ourborus of which you speak. It is built into the mortar of the educational institutions with podiums for DEI “talks” and the courts that administer “justice."
incredible musical labor of love. thank you for creating this. your style makes it feel so easy to follow through the connections and so powerfully calls out to what exists so we can see it in ways necessary. i also had never heard of the consideration of relationship between self through language and the unknowable, how there will be aspects, realities and truths that will always remain out of our grasp. that to demand translation and defining is antithetical to how life exists. this is a realization ive carried within me though i never was able to articulate it. it destroys my spirit knowing how the way white supremacy has numbed, and traumatized countless into believing, accepting this is all life can be - unimaginative, deadly cold machinerary for twisted pleasures of control.
i hope beings continue to remain and more turn to where our hearts truly reside. because they are not home in our bodies, but outside of them.
“[Our hearts] are not home in our bodies, but outside of them.” — thank you for your poignant reflection, mercury
Ho-ly shit. This is blowing my mind as a "ptsd/neurodivergent" human. Have to send this to my therapist.
I'm glad to be of service. Though maybe not everything needs to be run past the therapist-warden. Sometimes, our own recognition is enough.
This was an excellent read with many screenshottable paragraphs! And I found attachment theory incredibly helpful when I first began unpacking my childhood trauma as a college student. I didn’t receive it as any kind of moral judgment, only as a window to understanding myself better. It helped me understand a lot of my (by then unhelpful) reactions to certain feelings and make different choices that didn’t create more chaos for myself, and it made me kinder to myself and others.
As you mentioned so brilliantly, multiple things can be true at once. Thanks for writing!
I see why attachment theory resonated with you, Samantha—it’s often one of the first tools people encounter when trying to make sense of old wounds, at least within Anglo-colonial spheres. And I get the appeal: it offers a narrative of self-understanding, a way to name patterns, to impose order on emotional chaos. But I also question what it leaves unquestioned—what it naturalizes, what it obscures, and what it conditions us to accept as normal or necessary.
It’s a framework shaped by a specific cultural and ideological context—one that assumes a universal model of human development while being deeply embedded in Western, often white, middle-class norms. But what is ‘secure attachment’ if not an adaptation to those norms? To what extent does it train us to internalize a specific emotional order—one that privileges stability as defined by whiteness? And at what cost do we find comfort in that adaptation?
Because the cost is consequential. Not just personally, but historically. The same ideological structures that teach us to seek ‘security’ and ‘stability’ in ways that align with white middle-class norms are the same ones that have rendered entire peoples disposable, ungrievable. What does it mean that we can so easily apply psychological frameworks to ourselves but struggle to recognize the suffering of those whose destruction was required to maintain this very sense of stability?
Eichmann, during his trial, was deemed perfectly "normal." Under psychological examination, he showed no pathology, no malice—only a fixation on efficiency, on improving the tools and frameworks of his work. He did not need to be a monster. He only needed to follow a logic, a system that normalized destruction as a byproduct of progress. This is what Arendt called the banality of evil—the way ideological conditioning allows horrors to unfold not through overt hatred but through the dull, administrative pursuit of ‘better’ ways of doing things.
And isn’t that the logic of attachment theory, too? To refine the self, to improve adaptation, to become more functional within a system without questioning the system itself? The same cold rationality that made Eichmann strive for technical efficiency in genocide is what makes modern subjects strive for psychological efficiency in a world built on dispossession. What does it mean to heal only insofar as it makes us more compliant? More legible to institutions? More functional within frameworks that have long justified the suffering of Indigenous peoples, Palestinians, colonized subjects under the guise of ‘saving’ them?
I think theories can be useful without being gospel, but as we mature—and expand beyond the self-help fixation on individual wounds—we have to ask: are we repairing ourselves, or are we being disciplined into ideological compliance? And more importantly—who pays the price for our comfort? That’s the space I like to sit in.
Yes! It’s just one of ten thousand fingers pointing at tiny sections of the moon, not the moon itself, and its utility is only as good as the way a person learns to follow those fingers and synthesize them with others. (It’s also not some necessary theory one has to know about, just one potential flavor of conceptualization someone might be drawn to.)
For some, understanding their trauma-informed reactivity can make them a lot less inclined to hurt others. This was the case for me, someone raised in a violent home who had violent tendencies and unkindness I didn’t understand was related to how fundamentally unsafe I felt in all relationships.
There will always be people who overidentify with specific fingers in ways that are unhelpful. I think believing any “theory” like that to be some universally applicable truth without problems (when it’s really just one of endless concepts that may or may not be helpful and shouldn’t be held too tightly) is almost always a problem. I don’t think attachment theory is inherently antithetical to someone being able to question the system itself, though I can see the potential? (It’s been over a decade since I read the book so maybe I’m forgetting certain aspects of it!)
I can only speak to my own experience, which is that “attachment theory” was one early, useful step on a 12 year+ journey of questioning everything, internally and systemically. Some of the self-understanding it helped me gain was a necessary foundation in having a psyche that felt “stable” enough to question larger things.
You’re touching brilliantly on a lot of conversations I see happening around “self-help” recently and I can see the usefulness of drawing on issues with attachment theory to do that.
Again, I really appreciate getting to read your take and saved it for future reference. Also excited to read more of your work! :)
I see what you’re saying—attachment theory was useful for you, a step toward stability before questioning bigger structures. But that’s precisely the point. Why is ‘stability’ always the precondition for critique? Stability for whom, by whose definition?
Theories don’t just describe—they prescribe. Attachment theory doesn’t just offer a tool for self-understanding; it conditions us to seek security in ways that align with a particular social order. It privileges self-regulation, non-reactivity, legibility—qualities that fit neatly within capitalist, white middle-class norms. That’s not incidental. Stability, as framed by these systems, isn’t neutral—it’s ideological. It dictates whose emotions are valid, whose distress is pathologized, whose grief is legible.
We see this playing out now in real time. Western psychological frameworks teach us to prioritize personal regulation, to see distress as something to ‘process,’ while entire populations are denied even the right to react to their own destruction. In the case of Palestine, genocide is rationalized as a necessary condition for ‘stability’—stability for the settler, for the empire, for the logic of order. What does it mean to be trained into emotional legibility within a system that defines some people’s existence as inherently destabilizing?
So yes, people can take what serves them and leave the rest. But some frameworks have more power than others. Some shape institutions, dictate policy, define what is rational or irrational. Attachment theory isn’t just one of many fingers pointing at the moon—it’s also a map of what kind of subject is desirable, functional, acceptable. That’s the part worth questioning.
A stronger sense of self (feeling a healthy sense of being “at the wheel” of your own life and not at the mercy of your own reactivity, as illusory as that perspective may be) is generally useful for creating the kind of psychological safety necessary for people to challenge their beliefs. Emotional disregulation typically makes us much more vulnerable to powerful people manipulating us, and disconnection from the self is one of the biggest predictors for whether people fall in line with heartless regimes and justify horrific violence in the name of “efficiency”. All of this is speaking very broadly, just trying to communicate that it might not be so black and white.
I’m not sure that privileged people remaining more disregulated would have a positive impact on more oppressed people, which you seem to believe? I think there’s a big difference between being passive/indifferent to injustice and being concerned with self-regulation in the absence of healthier conditions that regulate us more naturally. Plenty of non-white ideologies encourage forms of emotional “self-mastery” in order to expand our capacity to face suffering.
I don’t remember attachment theory demonizing anger or encouraging people to pursue their own stability at the expense of others but I could be off. If anything I see Israel’s treatment of Palestinians as a clear sign of its delusional insecurity and reactivity rather than having a healthy sense of self? When we have a healthy sense of self we don’t want to dominate others. (I might be spinning out on themes at this point lol I can stop. If I’m missing your point I apologize!)
Samantha, have you ever considered that the most dangerous people in history were not the disregulated, chaotic masses but the ones who were perfectly self-regulated, disciplined, and entirely at ease with themselves as they executed atrocity? There’s a lot to unpack here, and I’ll be sharing more in my next post.
Totally. I look forward to reading!