Moon and Ceres — Archetypes of Attachment and Nurture
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by Rebecca M. Farrar
Every Full Moon phase we have an opportunity to invite more self-awareness and emotional wisdom through balancing our inner world of emotions with our outer world of identity — aka our Moon and Sun. When the Moon has its own space in the sky it can be an ideal time to focus on feeling what needs to be felt and attuning to our unique lunar state and attachment patterning.
In psychology, nurture relates to our attachment and ability to attune and connect with others. Unfortunately, many of us didn’t grow up with parents who were responsive and attuned to our needs or emotions and therefore causing a rift in our relationship with our inner individual nurturer and the collective Great Mother. These differing responses to nurturing during our early development culminate in various attachment styles that become the basis of how we build relationships, and cultivate intimacy with ourselves and others.
The word “attachment” gets thrown around a lot, often in reference to attachment styles. However, its roots are much deeper than categorizing ourselves or others through perceived availability. John Bowlby first coined “attachment theory” as “lasting psychological connectedness between human beings.” His theory evolved through the work of many including Mary Ainsworth during the 1960s and 1970s. Research in the field identified attachment patterns that are created early on between caregivers and children and centered around food as well as behavioral motivations such as fear and wanting comfort. It was Ainsworth whose famous “Strange Situation” study that developed the three major styles of attachment we discuss today as secure, anxious-insecure (or anxious), and avoidance-insecure. Though it wasn’t until later in the 1980s that Main and Solomon’s research also added a disorganized-insecure attachment.
Core aspects of attachment theory center around emotional attunement and nourishment — archetypes I associate with the Moon and Ceres, respectively. This is where the chart comes in as giving us clues to our soul’s patterning that feel most natural to us and how we can evolve and heal through these archetypes. For the purposes of exploring complexity, I’m not going to focus on the main attachment styles as I see them intertwined with…
