The language of 'attachment wounds' quietly pathologises what are, in fact, structural adaptations. Bowlby did not describe damaged children but resourceful ones — each attachment style a pragmatic answer to the question: how close, or how independent, must I be to survive? Therapy is therefore less about repairing an injury than about loosening strategies that once protected the subject but have since become costly. Anxious and avoidant patterns are not marks of trauma so much as ways of negotiating the caregiver’s presence and absence — and, crucially, the enigma of the caregiver’s desire.

Contemporary somatic accounts of trauma often compound the problem by treating distress as something 'stored in the body,' borrowing the language of physical injury and blockage. The result is a subtle medicalisation of what is fundamentally a creative, adaptive function. It misrepresents Bowlby’s thinking and risks further stigmatising the very strategies that once enabled survival.