trauma, attachment

Social attachment and the trauma response (bolds, emphases mine):

Human beings are strongly dependent on social support for a sense of safety, meaning, power, and control.

Even our biologic maturation is strongly influenced by the nature of early attachment bonds.

Traumatization occurs when both internal and external resources are inadequate to cope with external threat.

Physical and emotional maturation, as well as innate variations in physiologic reactivity to perceived danger, play important roles in the capacity to deal with external threat. The presence of familiar caregivers also plays an important role in helping children modulate their physiologic arousal. In the absence of a caregiver, children experience extremes of under-and over arousal that are physiologically aversive and disorganizing. The availability of a caregiver who can be blindly trusted when their own resources are inadequate is very important in coping with threats. If the caregiver is rejecting and abusive, children are likely to become hyper-aroused.

When the persons who are supposed to be the sources of safety and nurturance become simultaneously the sources of danger against which protection is needed, children maneuver to re-establish some sense of safety. Instead of turning on their caregivers and thereby losing hope for protection, they blame themselves.

They become fearfully and hungrily attached and anxiously obedient. Bowlby calls this "a pattern of behavior in which avoidance of them competes with his desire for proximity and care and in which angry behavior is apt to become prominent."
[...]
The separation response

Primates have evolved highly complex ways to maintain attachment bonds; they are intensely dependent on their caregivers at the start. In lower primates, his dependency is principally expressed in physical contact, in humans this is supplemented by verbal communication. [One researcher] suggests that language is an evolutionary development from the mammalian separation cry that induces caregivers to provide safety, nurturance, and social stimulation.

Primates react to separation from attachment figures as if they were directly threatened.

Thus, small children, unable to anticipate the future, experience separation anxiety as soon as they lose sight of their mothers. Bowlby has described the protest and dispair phases of this response in great detail. As people mature, hey develop an ever-enlarging repertoire of coping responses, but adults are still intensely dependent upon social support to prevent and overcome traumatization, and under threat they still may cry out for their mothers.

Sudden, uncontrollable loss of attachment bonds is an essential element in the development of post-traumatic stress syndromes.

On exposure to extreme terror, even mature people have protest and despair responses (anger and grief, intrusion and numbing) that make them turn toward the nearest available source of comfort to return to a state of both psychological and physiologic calm. Thus, severe external threat may result in renewed clinging and neophobia in both children and adults. Because the attachment system is so important, mobilization of social supports is an important element in the treatment of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).