Understanding Trauma: Linda Thai on Attachment, Identity, and Healing

Описание: In this session from our Trauma Wisdom Circle monthly membership, Linda Thai, LMSW, shares her reflections on trauma, attachment, and identity formation. She recounts a transformative experience at the 2020 Boston Trauma Conference, where Karlen Lyons-Ruth’s research on early maternal withdrawal and adolescent psychopathology deeply resonated with her own personal and professional journey. Join us: https://therapywisdom.com/the-trauma-...

Linda opens up about her childhood as a Vietnamese refugee in rural Australia, navigating attachment disruptions and cultural identity amidst inconsistent caregiving and societal messages. With vulnerability and insight, she weaves together attachment theory, identity coherence, and the impact of early relational dynamics on mental health and self-understanding.

This session is an intimate blend of science, lived experience, and an invitation to embrace and decolonize emotional expression—a hallmark of the Trauma Wisdom Circle community.

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#AttachmentTheory
#MentalHealthAwareness
#RefugeeExperience
#IdentityFormation
#TraumaWisdomCircle
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#BorderlinePersonalityDisorder
#MaternalWithdrawal
#TraumaRecovery
#CulturalIdentity
#EmotionalHealing
#BostonTraumaConference
#DecolonizingHealing
#PsychologyInsights

Transcritp-
Linda Thai, LMSW
I think it was 2020, I attended his...
trauma conference in Boston and I attended it online because you see this thread that I was following, it was a thread of hoping to find something that would help me to make sense of myself and my life.

And at his 2020 Boston Trauma Conference, Karlen Lyons-Ruth presented about the etiology of adolescent psychopathology. And in her presentation, she talked about individuals that she had studied from very early on in life, longitudinally over time. And by the time certain individuals got to their late teens,

There was suicidality, there was hospitalizations, there was dissociation, there was substance abuse. There were the hallmarks of attachment disruptions and a distortion to the attachment template that presented as symptoms in alignment with borderline personality disorder. And knowing that I also had some of those similar features, I was actually really fascinated to see her presentation.

And in her presentation, she showed video footage that indicated that early maternal withdrawal was actually the causal factor that contributed to later life adolescent psychopathology. And in the video footage that she showed, she showed the therapist with the infant and then the parent leaving the room.

And then the parent would come back into the room and the infant would start crawling towards the caregiver. And when the infant got into a certain proximity to the caregiver, the caregiver would take a half a step back and the infant would collapse to the ground. And it happened so fast that Lyons-Ruth had to slow down the video footage so that we could actually see the parent coming, the crawling, the proximity half a step back collapse.

And then the parent would pick up the infant, put the infant down and then give the infant objects with which to self soothe instead of offering the nervous system and the body of the caregiver.

And I paused and I paused and I paused and I thought to myself,

I wonder if that happened to me on a regular enough basis that this then formed my attachment map of the world. And what I actually remembered instead were other memories.

These are photos of, sorry, I'm having feelings come up. And I'm gonna retract my apologizing for my feelings in decolonizing our space. I'm gonna let my feelings be okay and safe with you all and safe with myself. So as I started to recall these early memories of time in Australia, it was September, 1979 when my family,

was sponsored out to Australia under a pilot rural resettlement scheme. And Tumut had 7,000 people, rural New South Wales. And the Anglican church got together with the Catholic church to sponsor out four Vietnamese families. And I had these outside of my conscious awareness memories of people coming over to the convent and then, that's where we stayed for a while. And then people coming over to our apartment where people would...

we'd be sitting there and people would come in, they'd get to a certain proximity and they'd take a half a step back and then they'd go put the food or the clothes or whatever they brought, you know, over to one area or between us and then they'd take that half a step back again. And this is what got me absolutely fascinated because at the time I was two and a half years old and my identity was still very much enmeshed with my parents.

And so I'm actually making a map of what it means to be Vietnamese in a world that is now not Vietnamese...