Healing the Hungry Heart: Attachment, Psychedelics, and the Dissociative Child

By Steve Elfrink for Webdelics

I used to believe love was a concept. Something you earned, something you kept people from taking away. I’ve sat across from hundreds of clients who felt the same. Their relationships were a minefield—of longing, avoidance, craving, fear. What I now know is this: our ability to give and receive love is wired into our nervous system from the beginning. It’s not a belief. It’s a body state.

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Attachment isn’t about romance. It’s about survival. As infants, we’re utterly helpless. We need co-regulation to feel safe, seen, and soothed. When that doesn’t come—or comes unpredictably—we adapt. Anxiously attached children learn to overfunction, to please, to protest, to cling. Avoidantly attached children shut down. They suppress needs to stay safe. Disorganized children, often raised in environments of terror or neglect, split. They love the caregiver and fear them at the same time. These patterns aren’t mental flaws. They’re brilliant survival strategies encoded in fascia, breath, muscle tone, and orientation to space.

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But here’s the trap: what once kept us safe now keeps us stuck.

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Psychedelics can offer a profound opportunity to revisit these early imprints—not with words, but with sensation, memory, emotion, and body truth. But they don’t heal attachment on their own. In fact, if not skillfully supported, they can re-expose us to the unbearable aloneness of the original wound. I’ve seen it again and again: adults in a ceremony who regress to infant states of terror, their systems screaming for a mother that never came.

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This is where the somatic approach matters. In my work with Psycholytic Somatic Integration Therapy (PSIT), I’ve found that what most people need is not “a breakthrough.” They need someone to stay. To witness. To help them feel the terror of abandonment with another nervous system present. Healing doesn’t come from a chemical. It comes from presence.

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That’s where the framework of the Dissociative Child emerged for me. I began to notice that underneath the adult client—the one managing life, careers, families—was a younger self, frozen in time. Dissociation, in this view, isn’t pathology. It’s protection. When the body couldn’t flee or fight, it left. Not entirely, but enough to survive. That child part never learned to fully arrive. So even today, as adults, people may be walking through life as if their emotional center is still waiting—still hoping—for someone to return.

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Psychedelics, used skillfully, can allow that Dissociative Child to speak. To rage. To weep. To reach out a trembling hand for connection. And when that happens in the presence of a grounded guide—someone who knows how to titrate, to track, to co-regulate—healing becomes possible. Not just insight. Not just “knowing what happened.” But a deep re-patterning of the nervous system’s story about love.

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In session, I’ve watched clients curl into fetal positions. I’ve heard their voices shift to that of a toddler calling for help. I’ve seen their breath stop, then shudder into life. These aren’t metaphors. They are somatic truths emerging from the body’s ancient memory. When we meet them with compassion, when we help these parts complete what was once cut off—movement, sound, protest, reaching—they don’t need to hijack our adult lives anymore.

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Healing attachment doesn’t mean becoming perfect. It means becoming whole. It means letting the Dissociative Child finally find a place in the arms of the Self.

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If you’ve been told you’re “too needy” or “too distant,” if you keep repeating relationship patterns that leave you lonely or overwhelmed, you’re not broken. You’re bonded to an old survival strategy. But there’s a path forward. It’s not always easy, and it’s certainly not linear. But I’ve walked it myself. And I’ve sat with others who have. The good news is: the heart can learn to trust again. Even after everything. Especially after everything.

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And that, to me, is the real medicine.

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—Steve Elfrink
www.omterra.org | @webdelics | #3DHealing #AttachmentRepair #DissociativeChild #PsychedelicTherapy #SomaticHealing

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