Attachment and the Fragility of This American Moment

I became an American in 2016 — stepping into an inheritance at once awe-inspiring and deeply fractured. To claim this identity was to embrace not only the brilliance of democratic ideals, the creativity and resilience of its people, and the audacity of its imagination, but also the legacies of violence, exclusion, and exploitation. That dual inheritance is now mine as well: the wonder and the wound, the promise and the fracture.

This is what it means to live with attachment at scale.

From the moment we come into this world, our bodies are listening. Before words, before memory, we are registering: Can the world be trusted to meet me? The first gaze, the first touch, the rhythm of being held or missed — all of it becomes the ground on which we build our lives. Those same threads echo at the scale of nations. This is attachment — one of the most studied and enduring theories in psychology, a cornerstone of how we understand human development and the architecture of our daily existence.

Every nervous system carries a map drawn in these earliest encounters. Where is it safe? Where is it dangerous? Who will meet me, and who will turn away? That map guides how we move through the world — whether we open toward connection or brace against it. The map is provisional, shaped by family, community, and nation. We can redraw it, but the earliest lines remain.

What happens when the secure base you thought you had turns out to be fragile? For a child, that question shapes a lifetime. For a nation, it shapes generations.

Attachment as Lived in the Body

Our childhoods never fully leave us. The presence or absence of steady and attuned care lives on in how we trust, withdraw, or seek safety. Attachment is not just a stage we grow out of; it is carried in our muscles and breath, in our silences and startle responses, in how our bodies brace or soften when someone comes close.

When early care is steady, we carry a template of security: a body that expects to be met, a nervous system that can rest in connection. When care is absent, inconsistent, or harmful, the body adapts. Some become hypervigilant and anxious, scanning constantly for whether love will stay. Others retreat into avoidance, equating need with danger. Still others live in disorganized patterns, pulled toward the very source of harm they must also fear.

These patterns are not character flaws. They are embodied survival strategies- the nervous system’s best attempt to keep us alive with the caregivers we had. And attachment doesn’t stop at the individual; what is patterned in families repeats in institutions, in communities, in nations.

America as an Attachment Figure

America, too, functions as an attachment figure — not a parent, but an idea we are asked to orient toward for safety and belonging. “The land of the free.” “The shining city on a hill.” There have been moments when we lived these promises — movements that widened freedom’s doors, moments when America stood as a beacon of liberty.

But as with any attachment figure, the bond has never been equal. For some — often those born into privilege — the nation has provided a secure-enough base: consistent enough, safe enough to allow exploration. For others, attachment has been anxious: recognition extended one day, withdrawn the next. For still others, avoidant: a refusal to trust promises that failed too many times. And for many — Black, Indigenous, working-class, immigrant, queer, disabled — attachment has been disorganized: the place that declares itself protector has also been a source of profound danger.

What keeps those scars alive is not only force, but the imprinting that conditions the marginalized to accept inequality as natural — and the privileged to see their advantage as normal, even deserved. Over generations, people are taught to see exclusion as order, to mistake compliance for freedom, to confuse control with stability. That, too, is an attachment pattern at scale — communities adapting to less care, normalizing betrayal, bracing against hope.

We are now living in a moment when the illusion of permanence has shattered — and with a speed and force that stunned even those who thought they were prepared. The rupture of the last year didn’t create this reality; it revealed it. What seemed like permanence — institutions, norms, the basic guardrails of democracy — has shown itself to be fragile. The ground many assumed was steady was never steady for all. What is new is not the fragility, but that more people now feel it in their own lives. It is part of the inheritance we carry forward, whether chosen or not.

And there is no going back. Not just because politics has changed, but because our bodies have registered the truth. Once you have felt how easily the ground can be pulled away, that knowledge lives in you. Attachment, once ruptured, is never restored by wish or nostalgia.

How Healing Happens

If attachment wounds are carried in the body, they must also be healed in the body. Trust is not thought into existence; it is built through repeated experiences of safety, attunement, repair, and presence.

In my work as a therapist, I’ve learned this through approaches like Dyadic Developmental Psychotherapy, Polyvagal Theory, and Somatic Experiencing. Each offers a different lens, but they share the same truth: healing happens in relationship— in the space in between. A nervous system shaped by rupture can redraw its map when it encounters steadiness, curiosity, and care.

This healing lives in small gestures: a gaze that lingers, a voice that softens, a nervous system that stays steady through another’s storm. Our earliest bonds wire our bodies for fight, flight, freeze, or connection. Those imprints echo forward, but they are not final. Through co-regulation — nervous systems settling in the presence of another — new maps can be drawn. Safety must be felt before it can be believed.

Trauma, after all, is not that our feelings are too much, but that our bodies lacked the space to complete their protective responses. When that space is opened, what was frozen can finally move, finish, resolve. The body learns what once felt impossible: that connection can be lived again without danger.

Systems as Living Organisms

What is true in the therapy room is also true at scale: systems, like bodies, carry histories of attachment. They, too, shape whether communities feel held with care or left to fend for themselves.

In my work — from refugee camps in Africa to child welfare agencies in New York to communities displaced by war in the Middle East — I have seen how systems echo the dynamics of attachment. At their best, they function like a secure-enough base: reliable, humane, responsive to those they are meant to serve. At their worst, they turn cold, distant, or punitive, forcing families and communities to adapt alone.

What we’re witnessing now is something more destructive than neglect. It is the deliberate dismantling of supports that once offered stability, the hollowing-out of institutions designed to protect. When supports are stripped away, it is like tearing connective tissue from a body — the whole becomes brittle, prone to collapse. And just as a child learns whether a caregiver can be counted on, communities learn — sometimes painfully quickly — whether institutions will show up with steadiness or betrayal.

Our American Moment

We stand at a threshold. There is no going back. Nostalgia is not repair. The fractures in our national attachment — long visible to some, newly felt by many — can no longer be denied. The choice is stark: normalize dismantling, or forge a future of care.

Some live with daily reasons to fear, as vulnerable families know all too well. Others of us must resist passivity, name what is happening, and carry forward the work of citizenship, decency, and humanity. Our greatest danger is not invasion from outside, but collapse from within. The fractures are not distributed equally, but the responsibility to respond belongs to us all.

In families, secure attachment is never about perfection. It is the steady rhythm of presence, attunement that is good enough, repair that is possible enough.

A “secure-enough” America would carry the same spirit already practiced in countless families and communities — drawing on our best inheritances of ingenuity and pluralism, and weaving them into habits of care. It would begin with truth, naming harm without erasure, so that compassion carries backbone. It would grow through accountability shared, communities standing together rather than alone. It would take shape in a daily fabric of belonging — care practiced across difference, steadiness that quiets panic. It would ask those with privilege to step forward with responsibility, and leaders to embody a protective love that shelters rather than strips away.

Such a vision is not flawless, but like any secure base, it can hold, it can bend, it can endure rupture — and still invite us back into connection.

This is the work before us: to resist dismantling, to demand accountability, and to build institutions that embody steadiness, responsiveness, and care.

Closing Reflection

Attachment names our paradox: what is broken travels with us, yet so does the longing to mend. We cannot return to a secure base that never was, but we can choose to build one now — sturdy enough to hold difference, alive enough to invite us back into connection.

When I became an American in 2016, I stepped into that paradox — fracture and hope braided together. That inheritance shapes me still, as it shapes us all. What comes next will depend on whether we risk connection again and weave a fabric of care strong enough to carry us forward.

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Note on Influences

This essay is shaped by stories and thinkers that have stayed with me — from clinical practice to popular culture to political philosophy. Each, in its own way, speaks to the tension between inheritance and possibility at the heart of attachment.

Therapeutic Lenses: Dyadic Developmental Psychotherapy, Polyvagal Theory, Somatic Experiencing

My therapy work is grounded in approaches that remind me healing is always embodied and relational. Dyadic Developmental Psychotherapy reminds us that growth happens in relationship, through playfulness, acceptance, curiosity, and empathy that say: you are welcome here, just as you are. Polyvagal Theory shows how our earliest bonds wire the nervous system, teaching our bodies when to brace and when to rest — maps that can be redrawn through co-regulation. Somatic Experiencing brings this to the ground: trauma is not that feelings are too much, but that they had nowhere safe to go.

Together, these lenses echo the same truth: repair is not about erasing rupture, but creating new conditions of safety and trust. What heals between parent and child is also what can heal between people and the systems that shape their lives.

The Last of Us and Our Inherited Attachments

The HBO series The Last of Us is often framed as a dystopian drama, but what lingers is not the collapse of civilization — it is how attachment shapes survival. Underneath the violence, it is a story of parents and children, of wounds that travel across generations, and of the fragile hope that love might one day arrive more steadily.

When Joel recalls his father’s confession that he tried to be a better father than the one he had, and his wish that Joel would do the same, we see the paradox of attachment: trauma and longing traveling together. Later, with Ellie, Joel echoes that generational hope through tears: “Because I love you… in a way you can’t understand. Maybe you never will. But if that day should come… if you should ever have one of your own… well, then… I hope you do a little better than me.” The wound is passed down, but so is the wish that it might be otherwise. In protecting Ellie — however imperfectly — Joel reaches for the possibility his father once imagined. Even amid collapse, the chance of being better than what came before lives on in his care for her.

Gramsci, Spinoza, and the Limits That Open

Antonio Gramsci, writing from Mussolini’s prison, gave language to this paradox. For him, as for Joel, inheritance was undeniable. He saw that power endures not only through force but through the conditioning of expectation that teaches people to accept inequality as order and mere survival as freedom.

But contingency is not destiny. We are bound by families we did not choose, histories we did not write, political worlds we did not build — yet within those constraints, we can act differently. Spinoza called this freedom: not escape from limits, but the ability to move within them in ways that expand possibility. Attachment carries the same truth: none of us chose the ruptures that shaped us, but with presence and co-regulation, new relational patterns can be created.