Was ist Bindungstrauma? Zwei unbedingt lesenswerte Artikel (englisch)

Benedetto Farina and Adriano Schimmenti (2025) offer an important contribution to the understanding of attachment trauma (access article Farina & Schimmenti, 2025 in Clinical Neuropsychiatry) . They refine existing definitions, outline the forms of psychopathology linked to this trauma type, and show how widespread it is among psychiatric patients. The authors also propose a coherent set of therapeutic interventions and emphasize the central role of patient–therapist collaboration.

In my commentary published in the journal Clinical Neuropsychiatry, I elaborate on the definition of attachment trauma. My point is to provide a conceptual framework that clinicians can use in daily practice. 

Below you’ll find the abstract of my article. The full article you can find in my free online library. 

Kind regards,
Ellert

Farina and Schimmenti detail and define the potential consequences for their health when children meet and cannot escape from primary caretakers who neglect, maltreat, and abuse them. They define attachment trauma in this frame and thereby overcome some of the limitations of previous formulations. Inspired by their important work, I try to make a few points. Being ecosystems, we must long and strive to get the useful, to avoid and get rid of the harmful, and to leave alone what is useless. Part of the complexity of our being and becoming is that we include multiple longings and strivings, and that these can be contradictory. Per our very nature, and particularly as children, we long and strive to attach to our primary caretakers, defend against threat, and gain power to act. What to feel, think, and do when caretakers we depend on and must learn from are in fact harmful or useless to us, and the rest of our environment does not care or intervene? What is useful, harmful, and meaningless? Attachment trauma, then, is an ecological injury that evolves when harmful powers of caretakers and others far exceed our own power to act. Being ecosystems, the form the injury takes depends on this reciprocal causing. While it is an injury, it also is a creative effort to live and make sense of a most difficult life.