In Undoing Aloneness, Diana Fosha describes how, from the perspective of attachment theory, emotional safety is not being alone with frightening experiences. Emotional disturbance has its roots in being alone with overwhelming experiences in the earliest years of life.
Fosha describes how each emotion contains the ‘pulse’ towards completion. Emotions evoke bodily changes to support specific action programmes or action tendencies that are adaptive. The release of such adaptive action tendencies creates an experience of positive affect. Trauma interferes with this process.
The adaptive capacity embedded in each emotion is thwarted when a person is left alone with difficult emotions that overwhelm one’s resources and the emotion is not processed to completion. When emotions are not regulated, they overwhelm, disorganise and feel unbearable, threatening the self or the attachment relationship, or both. Defence mechanisms and anxiety are created to cope that are survival strategies that seek to protect the self or the attachment relationship. When experiences that were previously excluded can be let in and explored, anxiety begins to dissolve.