I love Suzanne Zeedyk's analogy of tigers and teddy bears to explain attachment.
Unique and highly personal neural pathways significantly influence our thinking, feeling, behaving, and relating - neural pathways that weren't in place when we were born but were formed by the time we were just a year old. Formed by our connections with the people around us. I mean - just wow!
In very crude terms - if, in the first year of life, we were surrounded by human teddy bears then we develop an internal teddy bear - we can self-soothe and the world feels safer.
But if, in the first year of life, we didn't have access to a teddy bear - we're left physiologically in a state of fear - regardless of what's going on around us. If we were surrounded by tigers it's obviously going to be worse but it's really all about whether or not we had access to a teddy bear when we needed connection, protection, comfort, or care.
(As an aside - this is why I reject the idea of 'post trauma' - because trauma is physiological in nature, because it's all about the internal experience - there's either trauma or there isn't.)
Attachment theory justifies why it's so unhelpful to focus on 'difficult' or 'challenging' or 'unacceptable' behaviour - our children's or our own. We need to also consider internal experiences of safety and threat - and the self-protective strategies they've developed, and we've developed, to cope.
Children struggle to manage their emotions and behaviour anyway - regardless of trauma - so we need to be gracious and consider where they are in their development. But where there's an internal experience of danger then we really need to be addressing that first. We need to become teddy bears to the children in our lives.
And if we grew up around tigers, without access to a teddy bear, we might need to become our own too. It's never too late to start.
More about tigers and teddy bears and attachment theory here - suzannezeedyk.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/Suzanne-Zeedyk-Attachment-v1.pdf