Rebuilding Your Foundation: How to Cultivate Trust and Secure Attachment After Complex Trauma
If you are on the journey of recovering from complex trauma, you have likely encountered a frustrating paradox: you can learn dozens of coping skills and behavioural tools, yet still feel a profound barrier to genuine connection and inner peace. You are doing the "work," but a core part of you remains anxious, avoidant, or deeply distrusting.
Why?
According to Tim Fletcher, the answer often lies not in the present-day tools we lack, but in the very first foundation stones of our development that were cracked or never laid. In this first part of our series on the Recovery Stages of Development, we delve into the inaugural stage of life—infancy—and explore how the wounds formed here create ripples that touch every aspect of our adult lives. The healing of these early wounds is the essence of reparenting yourself.
The Blueprint for a Healthy Psyche: Erikson’s First Stage
Every human is born with a set of developmental tasks that must be successfully completed to build a healthy psyche. Drawing on the work of Erik Erikson, Tim Fletcher explains that the first year of life is dominated by one critical crisis: Trust vs. Mistrust.
The favorable outcome is simple yet monumental. A child whose needs are met consistently and compassionately develops a secure attachment to their caregivers. From this, three life-giving pillars are established:
- Faith in their environment: The world is a generally safe and predictable place.
- The ability to trust others: People can be relied upon.
- The capacity for healthy attachment: Connection is safe and rewarding.
Trust and secure attachment are not just nice-to-have traits; they are the absolute, non-negotiable prerequisites for a functional and fulfilling life. They are the foundational floor upon which the entire structure of your personality and relationships is built.
When the Foundation Cracks: The Unfavorable Outcome of Complex Trauma
But what happens when this stage is disrupted? What occurs when a caregiver is inconsistent, neglectful, abusive, or emotionally unavailable?
The unfavorable outcome is a rupture in trust and the formation of an insecure attachment style—a core wound at the heart of complex PTSD.
This initial break in trust sets off a devastating chain reaction of faulty conclusions and painful adaptations, which are classic complex trauma symptoms:
- "It must be me." The child, unable to comprehend a caregiver’s failure, internalizes the blame. This seeds the core shame beliefs: "I am unlovable. I am not good enough. I am a burden."
- "I must hide to be loved." If their authentic self was "rejected," they learn to wear masks, becoming a chameleon or people-pleaser (fawning) to earn the connection they crave.
- "I abandon myself." Eventually, they come to agree with the perceived rejection: "If others do not want me, I do not want me either." This leads to a profound disconnection from self—a hallmark of complex trauma in adults.
- A simmering anger: Anger at themselves, at the world, and at their unmet needs begins to seep into every area of life.
- Dysregulated emotions: Without a co-regulating caregiver, the child never learns how to manage powerful feelings. As adults, they may suppress emotions until they explode or fly off the handle at the slightest trigger.
- Anxiety and depression: A constant, low-grade hum of anxiety about being "found out" or rejected, coupled with depression over their perceived brokenness, becomes a daily reality.
As Tim Fletcher poignantly states, you can learn hundreds of tools but if you do not heal your attachment issues and learn secure attachment and to trust again your recovery from complex trauma is only going to go so far. Those are the core issues that were missed.
The Path of Repair: How Do We Rebuild Trust and Attachment?
The hopeful, empowering truth is that these developmental stages can be re-entered and healed later in life. Reparenting yourself is the process of going back to meet those unmet needs and learn the skills you missed. This is not a quick or clean process; it is a slow, often messy, and profoundly courageous journey of returning to your own foundation and beginning the repair work.
So, where do you start? The journey back to secure attachment must be taken in small, deliberate steps, focusing on practice, not perfection.
Step 1: The First Relationship – Learning to Connect with Yourself
Before you can healthily connect with another, you must return home to yourself. For many with complex trauma, their entire life has been organized around avoiding themselves. The first step in reparenting yourself is to end this self-abandonment.
How do you build a relationship with yourself?
- Schedule Daily Connection: Set aside 10 minutes, three times a day, to get quiet. Perform a body scan ("What am I feeling in my body?") and an emotional scan ("What emotions are present?"). Just listen. Journaling can be a powerful tool here to process what you discover.
- Practice Self-Compassion: This is not a drill sergeant's discipline. You must approach yourself with kindness, not judgment. As Tim Fletcher emphasizes, you must learn to stop seeing yourself as a loser or a failure and start offering yourself the warmth you missed.
- Develop Self-Regulation: Learn grounding techniques (focused breathing, sensory check-ins) to calm your triggered nervous system. The goal is to pause before reacting—before sending that angry text, isolating, or lashing out—and offer yourself compassionate reassurance: "I am safe right now. I am learning. This is a normal part of healing."
Step 2: Finding a Safe Harbor – Connecting with a Safe Person
This is not a romantic relationship. Jumping into romance too early will only trigger old wounds. Instead, you are looking for a "practice relationship"—a safe person with whom you can slowly and carefully learn new relational habits.
What does this process look like?
- Start with Common Interests: Begin with low-stakes interactions around shared activities or hobbies.
- Vet Gradually: As you spend time together, look for green flags: Are they trustworthy? Do they have integrity? Are they non-judgmental? Gradually ask deeper questions and share more vulnerably, moving from superficial connection to something more meaningful over months, not days.
- Build Trust in Baby Steps: Trust is earned in pennies, not given in dollar bills. Trust them with a small piece of information and see how they handle it. Trust them to show up on time. If they prove reliable, trust them with a little more. As researcher Brené Brown teaches, a single misstep does not empty a jar filled with hundreds of trustworthy acts.
- Practice Repair: Conflict or hurt is inevitable. The goal is not to avoid it, but to learn to repair it. A safe person will be willing to talk it out: "When you did that, I felt hurt. Can we understand what happened?" This repair process is the glue of secure attachment.
Step 3: The Guardrails of Connection – Embracing Healthy Boundaries
Many with complex trauma believe connection means having no boundaries (enmeshment) or building impenetrable walls (isolation). Secure attachment requires a middle path: two autonomous individuals choosing to connect.
Learning to set and respect boundaries is a massive part of this healing. It protects your autonomy and the autonomy of the other person, ensuring the connection is between two whole people, not one person trying to complete themselves with another.
A Final, Compassionate Note: You Were Wounded in Relationship, and You Will Heal in Relationship
The tragedy of complex trauma is the extent of the damage done so early. The hope of recovery is that it is repairable. This journey of reparenting yourself and rebuilding your trust and attachment abilities is the most important work you will do in your mental health and relationships.
Supporting Your Journey
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- ALIGN Courses: Practical, self-paced, trauma-informed tools to help you navigate recovery with clarity and confidence.
- Article: Read “Why Healing Your Relationship With Your Body Is the Key to Healing Everything Else | Complex Trauma” for actionable insights into overcoming trauma’s long-lasting effects.
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