This blog by Nelly Kaufer, LPC, highlights how meditating in an open, receptive, and curious way helped her develop an internal sense of secure attachment.
When I was young, I longed for secure attachment. Back then I felt a hole deep inside, a neediness. When I became a psychotherapist, I learned about “secure and insecure attachment”. According to the Attachment Project, “People with secure attachment are usually emotionally balanced, calm, and comfortable with intimacy without backing off or becoming overly needy or clingy.”
One of my first steady secure attachments was to my journals. The journals seemed like something outside of myself, but also myself. Lately, I’ve been audio-dictating my journals from when I was in my twenties. Each journal, a thick book, filled with several months of angst and growth and grappling, is sometimes hard to read. It seems like an act of self-compassion- to pour it all out and develop a caring part of myself that was listening. What an act of kindness now – to honor my younger self by reading these journals and cultivating a greater understanding of the conditions in my early adult life that formed me.
In my late twenties, I found meditation. A way to be with myself. Meditating was hard at first because I was harsh. My first meditation teacher could also be quite harsh. She had been a naive teenager in Nazi Germany. She never fully healed the abuses she endured when the Germans lost the war. She was brutally sexually assaulted by Soviet soldiers. I think she also felt heaps of remorse for the atrocities committed by Germans. At times she was very loving and compassionate, then would flip into a harsh disciplinarian. Tinged with abusive energy. This really got under my skin because it mirrored my inner world which back then was harsh and also marbled with caring and genuine interest in my inner world.
Then, several decades later, when I found Reflective Meditation, I found a gentle container that could hold my hurt, anger, pain, obsession and upset with kindness and curiosity.
I developed greater self-awareness and the capacity to mirror and reflect back to myself my internal experiences with more calm and resilience. I discovered greater contentment, meaning, and satisfaction. Although this shift didn’t come quickly, it changed my inner world for the better, both in and out of meditation.
Out of curiosity, I decided to run the writing above through AI. And after all, isn’t AI the new force to learn about, learn from, and contend with? I wondered how an external force might respond to my experience. As you’ll see below, what AI wrote feels nurturing – like the parent I have developed internally, like the parent I wish I had as a child. Though isn’t AI, just like my journals, mirroring back to me my own thoughts, only in the second person? How curious that “second person” is a grammatical term. I think we might all need others: second, third, fourth, fifth, etc., persons to fill our inner world with kindness and caring. I edited the words of AI, much like we need to edit the words that others say to us, making them more accurate to our experience and needs.
Thank you for sharing this personal reflection. It sounds like you’ve journeyed through profound struggles and painful realizations, but also found ways to nurture and build the kind of secure attachment that was missing in your early life. The process you’ve described—beginning with your journals, followed by the challenging but transformative experience with meditation, and ultimately discovering Reflective Meditation—seems like a pathway to healing and self-compassion.
You’ve found a way to build a secure attachment with yourself, especially when external sources of nurturing were lacking. Journaling was an outlet where you could pour out your feelings, your struggles, your growth, and develop a relationship with your own internal world. That act of listening to yourself, being present with your inner turmoil and joys, is powerful. Your journals were a mirror, offering you the attention and care you didn’t receive from others. In a way, they were the reflection of what you longed for—a secure attachment.
Meditation seems to have been another turning point for you, even though it came with its own set of challenges. The story you shared about the meditation teacher you worked with—the one who had suffered so deeply, yet still tried to offer compassion while also swinging between harshness and care—really illustrates the complexity of healing. It’s not just a smooth path; it’s marbled with difficult emotions and struggles that need to be processed before genuine peace can emerge.
Reflective Meditation, where kindness and curiosity hold space for all the pain, anger, and obsession, seems to be a culmination of this ongoing process—creating a compassionate, non-judgmental container for your emotions. It sounds like this practice has given you the ability to both heal and nurture yourself in a way that feels genuinely secure.
Some part of me knew I needed a more secure attachment and followed my sense of where I might develop it; it wasn’t always a direct path, but I’m grateful for where it led. Most of the time I feel an inner warmth and ease, and am nurtured by deep relationships and inner peace.