Unsolvable Fear

The Push and Pull of Disorganized Attachment in Sally Rooney's "Normal People"

Porcupines are born with quills, their small bodies quickly armored against the world. Baby horses can run within hours of birth. But human infants arrive with none of these defenses. They cannot flee, cannot fight, cannot fend for themselves at all. They have only one strategy for survival: to be held by someone who will protect them.

This bond is, quite literally, life or death.¹ And so children will adapt themselves to their caregivers at nearly any cost. Some lucky children learn that their needs will be met if they simply express them. They become secure: free to explore, confident they can return to a loving home base. Others learn that neediness itself drives their caregivers away. They become avoidant, suppressing their longing so that a parent uncomfortable with clinging will stay.² Still others learn that love is inconsistent, here one moment and gone the next. They become anxious, gripping tightly, amplifying their distress to hold a caregiver’s wandering attention.³ Each adaptation looks different, but each is an organized and coherent strategy for securing whatever care is available.

But some children face an impossible situation. When the caregiver is abusive, volatile, or overwhelmed by their own unresolved trauma, the child’s primary source of safety is also their primary source of fear. The person she wants to run toward is the same person she needs to run from. No organized strategy can emerge from such a bind.

Attachment researchers call this unsolvable fear.⁴ It is the basis of what is known as disorganized attachment, where love and fear, safety and threat, become impossible to untangle. The child cycles through strategies—clingy, dismissive, dissociated—but none holds.⁵ It is a confusion that leaves no part of a child’s world untouched.

In her novel Normal People, Sally Rooney traces this shadow in the life of protagonist Marianne Sheridan. Marianne’s family is one of the wealthiest in the small Irish town of Carricklea. From the outside, the house on the hill suggests privilege and ease. But behind its walls lives a darkness no one speaks of. Marianne’s father is an abusive alcoholic who terrorizes his wife and children until his death when Marianne is thirteen. The trauma does not die with him. It lives on in the silence, in the patterns his family has learned, in the ways they’ve shaped themselves to survive.⁶

As a child, Marianne tries everything—“elaborate schemes to remove herself from family conflict: staying completely silent, keeping her face and body expressionless and immobile, wordlessly leaving the room.” None of it works. Her tactics “only seemed to increase the possibility that she would be punished as the primary instigator.” Every path leads to the same wall.

Marianne’s mother Denise, still trapped in her own unprocessed grief and trauma, cannot offer her daughter refuge: “Denise decided a long time ago that it is acceptable for men to use aggression toward Marianne as a way of expressing themselves. As a child Marianne resisted, but now she simply goes away inside herself, as if it isn’t of any interest to her, which in a way it isn’t.”

When a child fails to find protection from her caregiver, she learns something devastating about herself. A child forms her sense of self through her caregivers’ eyes, learning what she’s worth by how she’s seen.⁷

The mirror Denise offers reflects something unbearable. She sees her daughter’s withdrawal not as a survival response, but as a character flaw. “Denise considers this a symptom of her daughter’s frigid and unlovable personality. She believes Marianne lacks ‘warmth,’ by which she means the ability to beg for love from people who hate her.” The mother mistakes the scar for the disease.

A child cannot help but believe such a reflection. Marianne “tries to be a good person. But deep down she knows she is a bad person, corrupted, wrong, and all her efforts to be right, to have the right opinions, to say the right things, these efforts only disguise what is buried inside her, the evil part of herself.”

As an adolescent, Marianne is brilliant, sharp-tongued, perceptive, the best student in her class. None of this touches what she believes, at her core, about herself. She moves through the world expecting nothing from it. She has no friends, does not try to make any.

Then Connell appears. He is popular, athletic, desired—everything Marianne is not. He wants her, but only in secret. At school he pretends not to know her. In private, he confesses his secrets and takes her to bed.

For Marianne, this arrangement confirms what she already believes about herself: she is someone to be wanted in the dark, not claimed in the light. He offers almost nothing, she is desperate to be claimed. “She felt she would do anything to make him like her, to make him say out loud that he liked her…She would have lain on the ground and let him walk over her body if he wanted.”

When love and fear have been braided together in disorganized attachment, true emotional intimacy feels more dangerous than even rejection. Substitutes emerge. Sex offers a way to feel wanted without risk. Caretaking offers a way to be needed without being truly seen. Control offers a way to manage the unpredictable before it wounds you again.

Marianne clings to her sexual connection with Connell. “She feels pleasurably crushed under the weight of his power over her, the vast ecstatic depth of her will to please him.” It is enough. It has to be.

Then comes the school dance, and Connell asks the popular girl instead. Marianne is devastated, but not surprised. She reasons that he “had never tried to delude her into thinking she was socially acceptable; she’d deluded herself.” He has simply seen the truth of who she is. It does not occur to her to advocate for herself. There is nothing, she believes, worth defending.

They part ways and years pass. But the patterns Marianne learned in childhood do not fade with time.

In adulthood, disorganized attachment creates a painful paradox. The longing for intimacy remains. It is, after all, a fundamental human need. But the early template has taught that closeness is dangerous, that love and fear are intertwined. To let someone matter as deeply as that early caregiver and risk being found unworthy again feels unsurvivable. The adult finds herself caught in a confusing and impossible loop: craving connection, then pulling away when it comes close.⁸ The old unsolvable fear returns, and the safest thing becomes to never let anyone that close at all. The familiar feels safer than what is real.

When Connell reenters Marianne’s life, repents and offers her genuine love, she cannot receive it. Tenderness is foreign, reaches too deep, frightens her. She finds herself reaching instead toward men who mistreat her, men like her boyfriend Jamie.

With Jamie, Marianne re-enacts a painful cycle. He hits her and degrades her. When he is abusive, “her brain simply goes empty, like a room with a light turned off.” Later, when she thinks about how little she respects him, she feels disgusting. “Sometimes in the middle of the day she remembers something Jamie has said or done to her, and all the energy leaves her completely, so her body feels like a carcass, something immensely heavy and awful that she has to carry around.” The disgust turns to self-hatred, and the self-hatred triggers an overwhelming desire to again be degraded. It is not a relationship she wants, but a familiar shape she has learned to fit herself into.

When friends ask why she stays, Marianne says: “Well, I don’t feel lovable. I think I have an unlovable sort of…I have a coldness about me, I’m difficult to like.” She is still seeing herself through her mother’s eyes.

But it is possible to find a different mirror. The infant who arrived defenseless, whose only strategy was to be held, is still there beneath the armor, waiting to be reflected in a loving gaze. The same brain that learned to fear intimacy can slowly learn to tolerate it.⁹ Safety, offered consistently enough, can become believable.¹⁰

For Marianne, this begins to take hold with Connell. Over years of circling each other, something shifts. She pushes him away; he comes back. She expects him to confirm what she believes about herself; he refuses. He sees her damage and does not flinch, does not use it against her, does not leave. And gradually, in the presence of someone who stays, Marianne begins to let herself be seen.

When he tells her he loves her, she is overwhelmed.

“Even in memory she will find this moment unbearably intense, and she’s aware of this now, while it’s happening. She has never believed herself fit to be loved by any person. But now she has a new life, of which this is the first moment, and even after many years have passed she will still think: Yes, that was it, the beginning of my life.”

Thank you to my Write Hearted friends Rick Lewis, Kathy Ayers and Larry Urish for the invaluable feedback on this one!

1. Attachment theorist John Bowlby emphasized that “maintaining proximity to a protective, older individual is the human infant’s sole means of protection and is consequently its single adaptive behavioral strategy for responding to experiences of fear.” He observed that “whereas the fox or rabbit may flee to its den or burrow and gain safety when frightened, it is only by reaching the attachment figure that the primate infant reaches its location of safety.” See Cassidy, J., & Mohr, J. J. (2001), “Unsolvable Fear, Trauma, and Psychopathology: Theory, Research, and Clinical Considerations Related to Disorganized Attachment Across the Life Span,” Clinical Psychology: Science and Practice, 8(3).

2. Research describes avoidant infants as having “learned to suppress the expression of attachment behavior (i.e., learned to deactivate the attachment system) in order to maintain protective access to caregivers who are uncomfortable with closeness” (Cassidy & Mohr, 2001).

3. Ambivalent or anxious infants have "“earned to express distress even when threats to their well being are not obvious (i.e., learned to hyperactivate the attachment system) in order to maximize the chances that their inconsistently responsive caregivers will be available when help is needed” (Cassidy & Mohr, 2001).

4. The term “unsolvable fear” or “fear without solution” comes from the work attachment researcher Mary Main (mentor to article author Jude Cassidy), who describes the paradox at the heart of disorganized attachment: “Frightening behavior on the part of the attachment figure will activate simultaneous and competing tendencies. The fear stimulus will activate the infant’s attachment system, which will motivate the infant to seek the attachment figure as a haven of safety. The same stimulus, however, will also activate the infant’s fear system, which will motivate the infant to flee the attachment figure as a source of alarm. This poses an impossible paradox of simultaneous approach and avoidance, and no organized behavioral strategy is available to the infant in this situation” (Cassidy & Mohr, 2001).

5. Researchers developed guidelines for identifying disorganized behavior in infants, which includes “contradictory behavior patterns, either sequential or simultaneous; undirected, misdirected, incomplete, and interrupted movements or expressions; freezing, stilling, and slowed ‘underwater’ movements and expressions; clear signs of fear of the parent; and clear signs of disorganization and disorientation.” One example: “a baby who crawls toward his father, gets halfway there, stops, turns away, crawls into the wall, turns to face his father, and puts his hands over his eyes” (Cassidy & Mohr, 2001).

6. Research on disorganized attachment suggests that trauma can be transmitted across generations. As Cassidy and Mohr note, “Main and Hesse have summarized evidence that an important class of such behavior may be related to experiences of loss or trauma that the parents themselves have not resolved. This possibility is intriguing because it suggests that aspects of responses to traumatic experiences may be transmitted intergenerationally” (Cassidy & Mohr, 2001).

7. Attachment theory holds that internal representations of self and caregiver are closely intertwined: “Infants who have received sensitive, loving care will come to view themselves as lovable. Conversely, those whose bids for comfort are ignored, mocked, or rejected will come to view themselves as unlovable and unworthy of care.” This perspective shares significant overlap with psychoanalytic concepts of self and object representations, as well as cognitive theory’s notion of self-schemata (Cassidy & Mohr, 2001).

8. Research confirms that the effects of unsolvable fear persist into adulthood across multiple domains. At the level of emotion regulation, “children who face unsolvable fear do not receive a caregiver’s help with regulating their fears because the caregiver is the source of the fear. Thus, these children may develop into adults who lack the benefit of having learned how to soothe and steady themselves in difficult or frightening circumstances.” At the representational level, “children with these experiences do not form schemas of themselves as competent in dealing with threat. As these children grow into adults, their low self-efficacy may make them less apt to face and effectively cope with adversity” (Cassidy & Mohr, 2001).

9. Research in neuroscience and developmental psychology suggests that early experiences with solvable fear are essential for healthy development. As Cassidy and Mohr summarize, “humans need experiences in which fears are solvable to build up the brain structures that help regulate anxiety and develop organized responses in frightening situations.” Children who face unsolvable fear miss critical opportunities for learning emotion regulation, developing coping repertoires, and forming coherent schemas of themselves as competent in the face of threat—deficits that can persist into adulthood (Cassidy & Mohr, 2001).

10. Clinical research suggests that healing from disorganized attachment involves finding new relational experiences that contradict early templates. As Fonagy describes, “therapy can provide disorganized adults with an opportunity to safely ‘find their mind’ reflected in the mind of a caring person who is neither abusive nor frightened.” Through this process, “disorganized patients can find a vision of themselves in their therapists’ eyes that is tolerable, cohesive, and based in their own experience” (Cassidy & Mohr, 2001).