Mind the Body Podcast

Loved, But Can't Feel It? Attachment Insecurity and Dissociation : Episode 24

• Yvette Vuaran • Season 1 • Episode 24

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🎧 Episode 24: Loved, But Can't Feel It? Attachment Insecurity and Dissociation

What happens when someone tells you they love you, and you know they mean it, but you simply can't feel it?

Or when someone leaves the room and, despite knowing they'll return, it feels as though they've disappeared completely?

In this episode of Mind the Body, I explore two often-overlooked patterns that emerge from attachment trauma and dissociation:

  • Why love can be present but fail to register emotionally.
  • Why absence can feel like abandonment, even in secure relationships.

Drawing on philosophy, attachment theory, psychoanalysis, and contemporary trauma research, we look at how the body learns to protect itself - and how those protective responses can continue long after the original danger has passed.

In this episode, you'll learn:

  • Why dissociation is often an intelligent survival response rather than a disorder.
  • The difference between not feeling love when it's present and not being able to hold onto love when someone is absent.
  • How early caregiving shapes our ability to experience safety and connection.
  • The concepts of psychic skin, the skin ego, and the protective shell.
  • What object constancy is, and why it matters in adult relationships.
  • Giovanni Liotti's theory linking trauma, dissociation, and disorganised attachment.
  • Why healing happens not just through insight, but through reconnecting with the body.

Takeaway:

If you've ever wondered why you understand that you're loved but struggle to feel it, or why separation feels far more overwhelming than it seems to others, this episode offers a compassionate framework for understanding why.

Resources - Free download:

The 7 Day Body Trust Reset – A free 7-day guide to help you reconnect with your body through small, practical daily practices.

References:

Anzieu, D. (2016). The Skin-Ego: A New Translation (N. Segal, Trans.). Routledge.

Bafna, A. R., Hurley, J., Nair, T. K., Moore, M. T., & Brumariu, L. E. (2026). Childhood adversity, perceived disorganised caregiving and dissociative symptoms in emerging adulthood. Journal of Infant, Child, and Adolescent Psychotherapy.

Bick, E. (1968). The experience of the skin in early object relations. International Journal of Psychoanalysis 49:484-486.

Claxton, G. (2015). Intelligence in the Flesh. Yale University Press.

Liotti, G. (2004). Trauma, dissociation, and disorganized attachment: Three strands of a single braid. Psychotherapy: Theory, Research, Practice, Training, 41(4), 472–486.

Mahler, M. S., Pine, F., & Bergman, A. (1975). The Psychological Birth of the Human Infant. Routledge.

Nietzsche, F. (1883/1961). Thus Spoke Zarathustra.

Tustin, F. (1990). The Protective Shell in Children and Adults. Routledge.

Winnicott, D. W. (1958). The Capacity to Be Alone. International Journal of Psychoanalysis ,39:416-420.

Take a breath, stay curious, and explore what it truly means to Mind The Body.

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Hello, and welcome back to Mind the Body. Nietzsche suggested that the sense of I emerges through what we do, our actions, habits, and bodily experiences, the self comes to life through what we do and how we live, rather than simply through what we say. In other words, being a self isn't something you declare with words. It's something your body enacts every time you move towards someone, soften at their touch, or reach out for connection. The I is happening before you can even put it into words. Contemporary cognitive science echoes this idea. Psychologist Guy Claxton, in his work on embodied intelligence, puts it simply. He said, We do not have bodies, we are bodies. If your body were different, you would be a different person, not because your body just carries you around, but because your body is where your whole experience happens." Claxton argues that thinking, feeling, and connecting are whole body experiences, unfolding moment to moment with the mind often being the last to catch on. Both philosophy and science then point to the same truth. Who we are is lived with and through the body, not just thought or spoken, and that's what makes dissociation so strange and so hard to spot Dissociation is often the body's response to overwhelming or traumatic experiences. It's a way to protect us when things feel too much to handle, and it isn't always dramatic or obvious. It can simply show up as numbness or distance inside. Someone can tell you that they love you, and you can say truthfully that you know, but the feeling doesn't land, no matter how much you want it to. You can explain the relationship clearly, but while the words are there, the feeling is missing. The body has stopped enacting what the words described The part of you that would normally feel loved has checked out, and words can't bridge that gap because words were never what was missing in the first place. There's a moment you may recognize. Someone you love tells you clearly that they care, or they hold you in the way they always have. You believe them. You know it's real, and still there's a space between knowing and feeling. In that space, nothing is happening at all. This experience can feel really confusing, which is why I think it's important to talk about it openly and bring some clarity to what's actually happening So today I'll be covering three things. First, why love can be present and still not felt in the body. Second, why absence can feel like disappearance even when you know someone is coming back. And third, how these might form and what actually helps So first, let's stay with that space because this isn't about how much love or trust exists between two people. It's something happening at a much earlier, more subtle level, at the level of the body itself, and specifically at the level of the body's boundary. Let me describe what this actually looks like because it rarely looks the way people expect, like fainting or the dramatic blankness you sometimes see in films. It's much more understated than that, and much easier to miss, including by the person living it. Sometimes it's like Someone who can't remember if they've eaten today. We usually think it's because they've been too busy, but sometimes it's because they couldn't feel their hunger, and it's hard to grasp a sense of how much time has passed. Sometimes it's like catching your reflection and not recognizing the body as belonging to you. I've noticed that some people describe their body in the third person without noticing that they're actually doing that. So instead of saying, "My shoulders are tense," they'll say something more like, "The body is holding a lot right now." These things can be clues, a small distancing in the grammar itself. So this in many ways can be harder to treat. There's a concept in psychoanalytic thinking that I find useful, the idea of the psychic skin. The psychoanalyst Esther Bick wrote about this in her work with infants. Her observation was that before a baby has any sense of a coherent self, Before there's an inside and an outside that makes sense, the infant needs to be held physically, emotionally, psychologically. Held in a way that helps the infant experience their own edges, where they stop and the world begins. When the conditions for that early containment weren't fully there, and there are many reasons why this can happen, so illness, disrupted care, even a parent's exhaustion or grief. You see, the body will always find another way to cope. Bick described this substitute as a kind of second skin, a muscular, effortful, holding together, a performance of containment rather than a felt sense of being safely held. And Didier Anzieu extended this into what he called the skin ego. The idea that our earliest sense of psychological boundary is modeled on the skin itself, a container, something that lets us know where we end and someone else begins. And this container has to be built relationally in infancy. And I also want to add to this, Frances Tustin, working with children in extreme states of withdrawal described something related, a protective shell, armor that forms when the boundary between self and world felt unsafe and if you're on the other side of this, loving someone who experiences the world this way, you may recognize something too. A stillness when you'd expect a response. Affection that seems to land somewhere just short of them. It can feel understandably like you're doing something wrong. But when someone has this kind of history, this lack of containment in early life, it very rarely is, And I want to be clear about something here. Too many people think that they are failing, but really this is how the body copes. Dissociation gets talked about as a symptom, but it starts as a response that made sense. When a child faces something too frightening, too confusing, or too much to process, the nervous system does what it can to survive it. Often, that means distance. The child stays present enough to function, but the part of them that would normally receive connection, comfort, love, begins to withdraw instead. At the time, the response is intelligent. It protects the child from feeling something they weren't equipped to feel. The difficulty comes later when the danger is long gone, and the body still hasn't learned that it's allowed to stop protecting against it. It's as if you stopped allowing yourself to feel loved because at some point you learned that receiving wasn't safe So let's move on to the second point. There's another version of this space. Instead of I'm held and I can't feel it, it's the opposite. You've left the room, and it's as if you were never here at all. This is a different mechanism, and it deserves its own name. In developmental psychology, it's called object constancy, a term from the psychoanalyst Margaret Mahler, Object constancy is the capacity to hold onto the emotional experience of being loved, even when the person who loves you isn't there, even when they're distracted, distant, or simply in another room. For most of us, that capacity is so automatic we never think about it. someone leaves for work, and some sense of them stays with us. We don't have to keep reproving they exist or that they love us every time they are out of sight. Here's what it can look like in adult life. In an otherwise healthy relationship, a partner goes away for a few days for work, and it isn't longing that shows up. It's something closer to a flatness where missing someone should be, or just as often, a rising panic that has nothing to do with any real doubt about the relationship The phone goes quiet for a few hours, and instead of assuming they're busy, some part of the system quietly concludes the connection is gone. A felt certainty that arrives before any reasoning does. Both versions, the flatness and the panic, are really two ways we learn to protect ourselves. Object constancy is supposed to let the relationship carry on existing internally, even when the person isn't in front of you. When it isn't secure, the relationship has to be, in some sense, reconstructed every time someone returns. But object constancy isn't something that we're born with. It's built slowly across early childhood Through thousands of small repeated experiences of someone leaving and consistently coming back. And when those experiences were inconsistent for whatever reason, and again, there are many reasons, that capacity doesn't form as securely. The nervous system doesn't learn a felt bodily trust that absence is temporary Winnicott wrote about something closely related, what he called the capacity to be alone. His insight was that being able to tolerate someone's absence is really about carrying an internal felt sense of the other person with you so that even in solitude, you're not alone. Paradoxically, paradoxically, He thought this capacity depends on having had someone reliably present enough early enough that their presence became internalized. Something you carry rather than something you constantly need in front of you to believe in. Without that, absence doesn't feel like I miss them. It feels like disappearance, and unconscious defenses then will kick in. The relationship doesn't just fade quietly in the background. It goes out like a light and has to be relit every time the person returns. So just to recap, the first pattern is difficulty in receiving love when it's present. The second pattern is a mind that has trouble holding onto love when someone's gone. And now to the third point, Let's look at how they emerge and how healing can begin. There's research that helps explain this. A recent study looked at what actually predicts dissociative symptoms in early adulthood, and the finding didn't just point at a difficult childhood equals more dissociation later. What mattered most was something more nuanced: how someone remembered their mother's caregiving in moments of real difficulty. Specifically, two things stood out. Times when their mother seemed helpless, unable to step into the role a child needed her in, and times when the relationship itself felt frightening. Of those two, it was fear within the relationship that mattered most. And I wanna pause on that for a moment, because a frightened or helpless parent is very often someone who is themselves overwhelmed, carrying their own unprocessed trauma, history, their own fear. It's difficult and complex. What happens inside a child when the person they rely on for safety isn't able to provide it? The whole child is affected. And this is where the second piece of research helps explain the mechanism. the psychiatrist Giovanni Liotti spent decades studying what he called disorganized attachment. His central idea is this: a frightened child's instinct is to run toward their attachment figure. But if that same person is at times also the source of the fear, the child is left with an impossible task: move towards safety, except safety and danger are standing in the same place Picture what this looks like for a child in the ordinary run of a difficult day. A parent who is overwhelmed, perhaps frightened themselves, raises their voice, or goes silent, or simply isn't available in the way the moment calls for. The child wants to move toward them. That's what children do. But moving closer in that moment doesn't bring safety. It brings more of whatever just happened. There's nowhere else to go, no second attachment figure standing by, no alternative source of safety in that moment. The only option left is internal. Stay in the room and leave anyway. That pattern, learned early, tends to stick. Years later in adult relationships, it can look exactly what we've been describing. Closeness that should feel safe, distance that should feel bearable. But it's such a painful position to be in, and there's no clear strategy that solves it. You can't approach and avoid the same person at the same time. Liotti's argument is that dissociation is what happens when a nervous system meets a problem that it has no solution for. It doesn't fight. It doesn't flee. The mind leaves while the body stays exactly where it is He has this phrase I'd like to repeat, "Trauma, dissociation, and disorganized attachment are three strands of a single braid." This is where my earlier point comes back around. When a child learns to shut down in this way, it happens because their mind and body are trying to protect them in the only way they know how. Instead of being a broken response, it's an adaptation, a way of coping when no better option was available. So where does that leave us? There isn't an easy answer. This isn't something that gets solved with a simple technique or a quick fix What I can tell you, both from the clinical work I do and from what the research increasingly supports, is that rebuilding this happens through the body somatically. Talking about the pattern helps, understanding it helps, but the actual repair tends to happen through the same channel the disconnection happened in the first place. Interoceptive work, noticing sensation again safely, slowly. Approaches like EMDR, Working with the nervous system directly rather than only with the story. For those of you listening who work clinically, this framework, the two directions of this pattern, presence and absence, may be a useful lens in your own consulting rooms. Healing doesn't happen quickly and it's not linear. But the body that learned to leave can, with the right conditions, learn that it's safe to stay So we have covered three things today. First, love can be right there, but still not felt. Sometimes dissociation happens because the body has learned, often for good reasons, to shut down and stop letting love in. Second, that someone can leave the room and feel as though they've disappeared entirely because object constancy, the ability to hold someone in mind when they're gone, isn't automatic. It has to be built through relationship And third, where both of these patterns begin, often they come from parents who themselves feel overwhelmed, frightened, or lack the resources to offer steady safety. A child caught between needing someone and sometimes feeling afraid of them faces an impossible situation. There's no clear way forward. In these moments, dissociation steps in to help the child cope. I started this episode with an old idea. The body doesn't just say I, it shows it through how we act and respond. Nietzsche suggested that being ourselves isn't just about what we say or think, but about what our whole body does, often without us realizing it. Love works like this too. It's more than just hearing "I care about you" or knowing it in your head. It's about whether your body is able to take in when love is offered, and whether you can hold onto that feeling even after the other person is gone. If it feels like something inside you has gone quiet, remember, this was your body's most intelligent response to what it faced. What was once a way to survive can become a way to heal, too. With time and gentleness, the capacity to receive and hold love can return. And if you'd like a way to return to your body this week, my free seven-day body trust reset is available to download. It's a gentle way to help you reconnect with your body one small step at a time. The link is in the show notes. Until next time, stay curious.