The unlikely connection between childhood trauma and interior design

Why your home may hold clues to your attachment style

When my parents finalized their divorce in 1989, Dad signed a lease on an apartment that needed new carpeting. He was emphatic with the landlord about the carpet being red.

That lease ended up falling through. Instead, he moved into a one-bedroom duplex with beige carpet and bought a red metal bunk bed. He slept on the bottom; I slept on the top.

For Christmas each year he asked only that I get him a red bar of soap. His towels were red. His sheets were red. His sweaters.

Red does nice things with my dark hair and pale complexion. But until recently, I rarely wore it. It’s the color of power, the stuff of job interviews and hot dates, lipstick and attention.

It’s also the color of my father’s blind rage and my childhood trauma.

Until I was 15, I stayed with him every other weekend. Every atom of the place smelled of cigarettes. There was nowhere to turn for relief. I slept with my head under the blanket anyway.

Those first years, I fantasized about converting his attic into a room of my own. Accessed by a fold-out ladder on a pull rope, it opened directly in front of the bathroom door.

I was too young to understand that fathers who have leases and landlords and cocaine addictions and blue-collar jobs and traumatic childhoods of their own do not renovate attics for their daughters.

Still, I imagined a twin-sized bed, daylight streaking through a window, books on a shelf. I wouldn’t need air conditioning; I only wanted to be able to close a door, seal myself against what I reeked of when he dropped me at school on Monday. I wanted an escape hatch.

My interest in interior design began in high school. One of my diary entries luxuriates in a description of the inky blue I’d painted my bedroom and how much it pleased me.

Color, especially, has fascinated me. On the spot, I can rattle off the names of many brands’ paint colors. I may even be able to tell you the name of the particular shade of white on your walls, but no promises.

I ended up being a writer, not an interior designer. I make up the difference by writing about design as often as I can.

For one recent assignment, I interviewed design psychologist Amber Dunford over Zoom. She described color with the relish of a chef describing a flavor. Her favorite greens to decorate with, she said, are those that are either “watery” or “deep and vegetal.”

Amber unknowingly gave me a gift during that interview by connecting the dots between those long dreary weekends at my dad’s and my longtime preoccupation with making everything around me pretty.

Besides designing the sets you see on Overstock.com, Amber teaches a college course of her own creation that probes the relationship between our feelings and our spaces.

She explained, “Past attachments to spaces from your childhood can be positive or negative. From zero to five are your formative years for attaching to another person. That’s your blueprint for how you operate. Based on how that went for you, it colors how you attach to people in your adult life.”

Attachment theory has been another, more recent, preoccupation of mine. The theory holds that a behavioral system has evolved to keep infants close to their caregivers, safe from harm. Infants either relate to their caregivers in a way that’s anxious, avoidant, or secure (the latter is ideal AF). Later in life, these attachment types reveal themselves like Polaroids in our relationships with people we love or whom we wish to be loved by.

Many of us heard about attachment theory in Psych 101 and then promptly forgot about it. Maybe we didn’t yet care why our childhoods had fucked us up because we hadn’t yet realized how profoundly they had.

Plus, the story isn’t a particularly compelling one to most college students. It involves scientists and a lab in Baltimore in the 1960s, caregivers, toys, introducing toddlers to strangers and evaluating their reactions. And a pioneering woman named Mary Ainsworth.

What I wasn’t familiar with was that it’s not just how we grew up, or with whom, but where that shapes the way we relate. Houses, spaces and places — both those we drift through and those we inhabit — have a way of getting into our nervous system.

“When we walk into a space,” said Amber, “we immediately have a feeling, whether you recognize the feeling or not. Spaces have power over our psyche and our emotional wellbeing. They can make us feel at ease; they can make us feel anxious. I teach people how to tap into that — whether it’s their own attachments to space or their history with spaces in their childhood. Some people recreate chaotic spaces because they’re familiar with them, even though they know they’re not that healthy. The smell of something, or the way something felt, or the view, or the layout of a place can have nostalgic memories that, if you recreate them in your adult life, feel really calming.”

Blue and green have been staples for me. I’ve had dalliances with yellow, pink, and purple. I once spent many days painting gold foil roses on the landing of a stairwell. But I’ve never liked decorating with red.

Now I know that as I was growing up patterns were being hardwired into my subconscious that have affected the way my brain, heart and nervous system have operated ever since — in relation to people, but also to the color red. And to bunk beds.

The neglect and fury I experienced at my father’s house every other weekend can explain almost everything about the way I now perceive other people’s inattention and anger. It’s why my nervous system registers threats the way it does, so that running into an ex-boyfriend hits me the same as a car accident.

It’s why any time I’ve found myself on vacation in a cabin or beach house with a bunk bed, I recoil from that room.

I was nearly fifteen when my father woke me one morning and told me that Princess Diana had died. By then, he had lived in the duplex so long that the walls had turned as yellow as the linoleum in the kitchen. Paint peeled from them. Condensation beaded along the window air conditioner.

From the red bunk bed, I’d asked my dad many times over the years if he could please stop snoring. This would invariably infuriate him. I’d also asked him to please turn off the moaning sounds coming from the little TV set with the rabbit ear antenna.

“Go to sleep, Ellen,” he’d growl. But I never could.

The TV was on to tell us the news about Diana. Then again, the TV was always on.

I got up and made him breakfast. I always did.

I didn’t care about Diana. But he did.

A few months after she died, he got furious at me for the last time. His car radio was broken. He was trying to play a Frank Sinatra cassette from a boombox in his car. But the boombox batteries were dead, so he hurled it into the backseat with a ferocity that spiked terror in me.

When I protested about his outburst, he told me to get the fuck out of his car.

I walked the couple miles back to his duplex, and arrived full of rage. When he emerged from the front door, remorseful, I told him he could go fuck himself.

I never stayed there another night.

In one of my longest reoccurring dreams, I’ve purchased an old house. Only afterward have I discovered a secret door that opens to a wing much larger than the house itself. I’m elated to find it. There are grand staircases festooned in dust, bedroom after bedroom preserved as shrines, tomb-like bathrooms I’m already planning to renovate.

I want to make it all so much better. In my dream, I can. It will be my greatest mission yet.

These days, I’m more at peace with the color red. I’m propping my feet up now on a chest the color of an old red barn. I carry a red purse. I wear a red dress.

I’ve come to understand why Diana’s death was a global tragedy, why her sensitivity was so exquisite, so extraordinary.

I know now why bunk beds make me uncomfortable, even as he still sleeps in ours. I haven’t stepped foot in his place in several years.

The last time I did, the sun had bleached the bed into an entirely different color.