Your New Home: Attachment Theory Explained
The earliest months of your life determine the relationship patterns you will form and repeat throughout life. This is the basis of Attachment Theory. If you want to improve your relationships and avoid the fate of the couple above, keep reading.
It’s Evolutionary
Attachment theory was developed by psychoanalyst John Bowlby and developmental psychologist Mary Ainsworth in the mid-1900s. The theory begins with the evolutionary need of an infant to maintain close physical proximity to their primary caregiver to ensure survival, when staying close to a protective adult was literally a matter of life and death.
It Starts With Your Needs
As infants, we are completely reliant on others and we learn early on if and how our needs will be met. We adapt ourselves and become experts at the relational dynamic dictated by our caregivers and then we keep repeating this dynamic in our relationships throughout life. As the comic above illustrates so well, we are attracted to and take comfort in the familiarity those relationships offer, but we also continue to suffer from the ways in which our core needs were not met.
Attachment theory attempts to explain this dynamic and its importance in our mental health, relationships, and overall life outcomes. Understanding Attachment Theory can help us stop repeating relationship patterns that stand in the way of deeper connection, fulfillment, and success in life.
Attachment is about Availability
As humans developed into more social and emotional beings, the need for protection was extended from physical danger to include the need for availability, both physical and emotional.
Infants’ early needs are usually felt and communicated as discomfort. Attuned parents notice distress when infants are hungry, tired, scared, upset or in pain and intervene to help them deal with and alleviate the discomfort. Infants are wired to connect. In order to stay connected, infants adapt to the less attuned caregivers and will make great emotional and psychological sacrifices to maintain that connection. How infants first learn (or fail to learn) to manage difficult emotions shapes the child’s appraisal of the caregiver’s availability.
This appraisal, based on early attachment experiences, has important implications throughout your life and in all your relationships, personal and professional.
The Strange Situation
Attachment develops through stages in which the infant’s initial lack of differentiation of mother from others is replaced by a clear preference for her in the form of a powerful bond between 6 and 9 months. When the baby is distressed or alarmed they seek out the caregiver (usually their mother) and use her as a secure base from which to explore and return. However, Bowlby and Ainsworth noted that some babies could not be soothed by their mothers when they became distressed by her absence while other babies did not explore at all.
In 1963, Ainsworth recruited 26 pregnant mothers in Baltimore, MD to participate in a study documenting the interactions between them and their newborns during 18 four-hour visits to each family over a one-year period. Once the infants reached 12 months old, they participated in a 20-minute laboratory assessment that came to be known as the “Strange Situation”. After entering a pleasant, toy-filled room the infant was allowed to explore in the mother’s presence. There were two 3-minute separations where the mother left the room followed by two reunions with the mother, as well as an exposure to a stranger.
The patterns of interaction and communication that were observed between the infant and mother in these experiments led to the classification of attachment styles in infancy with implications into adulthood.
Types of Attachment
Secure Attachment
Secure infants, however distressed by separation from their mothers, were quickly reassured and soothed when their mother returned and were quickly ready to resume play and exploration. This flexibility and resilience stemmed from interactions with a mother who was responsive to her baby’s signals and communications. Mothers of secure infants were quick to pick them up when they cried and held them with care for as long as the infant wanted to be held. At the heart of it, the mother displayed attunement to the baby’s experience and emotional availability.
2. Avoidant Attachment
Avoidant attachment is characterized by infants who appear unphased by their mother’s departure or return but are actually experiencing high levels of anxiety (as indicated by elevated heart rates and cortisol levels). These babies concluded that their desire for comfort and care would go unheeded so they stopped communicating it. Inhibition of emotional expression, lack of physical contact and rejecting the child’s attempts for connection are hallmark traits of the mother of avoidant babies.
And a hallmark trait of infants with avoidant attachments is that they inhibit communicating their own needs to avoid the constant rebuffing of those needs and the accompanying sadness and anger.
3. Ambivalent Attachment
Mothers who are unpredictably or only occasionally available (emotionally and physically) most often have babies with an Ambivalent attachment style.They discourage the autonomy of the baby and their impulse to explore. These babies are too worried about their mothers to explore and they react to her departures with immense distress.
Given an unpredictable level of responsiveness on the part of the caregiver, ambivalently attached infants communicate their needs in a heightened way, always sounding the alarm, in desparate hope their needs will be responded to.
4. Disorganized Attachment
Disorganized Attachment results when the caregiver is simultaneously experienced as a safe haven but also as a source of danger. The child is caught between contradictory impulses to approach and avoid. Thus the disorganization and disorientation results. Disorganized attachment can be understood to emerge from the child’s interactions with parents who are frightening, frightened, or dissociated. Disorganized attachment was late to be classified as it evaded detection due to the distinguishing behaviors being so subtle and short-lived.
Attachment in Childhood, Adolescence, and Adulthood
Once classified and tracked, researchers found that attachment patterns in infancy could reliably predict outcomes in childhood, adolescence, and adulthood.
Children with a history of secure attachment show greater self-esteem, emotional health, resilience, social skills, and focus than their insecure peers. Children with secure attachment as infants tend to be treated more warmly by adults whereas children with avoidant histories are often seen as oppositional and tend to evoke anger and controlling responses from adults. Children with Ambivalent classifications are perceived by adults as clingy and immature. Avoidant children have been shown to be more likely to victimize other children while ambivalent children may often be victimized.
Because those who had less than secure attachment experiences did not have core needs met, clinicians note that as adults they can often experience a persistent sense of longing manifesting as general malaise, life dissatisfaction, or insatiable food cravings.
In this way Attachment needs are on-going throughout life rather than something we outgrow as we grow up.
Determining your Attachment style
Chances are you were not observed by infant researchers during the first year of your life. And we can’t remember what the interactions were like between our caregivers and us as infants. However, we can infer what our early Attachment experiences were like through the following methods.
Look at your parent’s relational dynamic with you growing up to glean a sense of how they were with you as an infant. Were they generally attuned, available and responsive to your needs? Or were they more physically or emotionally absent, unpredictable or at times scary?
Look at your romantic relationships in your adult life. Do you find yourself consistently attracted to partners with qualities described in one of the Attachment style classifications above?
Look at your work history. Is there an attachment style that accurately describes your behaviors in the workplace? Are you comfortable advocating for raises and promotions or not so much? Are you drawn to charismatic yet unpredictable and sometimes abusive bosses?
Now that we understand the theory and have some sense of our own Attachment classification and how it’s impacting us currently, are you starting to wonder if there’s anything you can do to change course? And are you worrying that you have already or inevitably will mess things up with your own children?
Have no fear, help is on the way. It involves moving out of your parents house (metaphorically) and into your very own new home (also a metaphor).
Changing Your Attachment Style and Raising Securely Attached Children
In his recent book Reset Your Romantic GPS, psychotherapist Marc Sholes uses the analogy of a GPS that is preset to take you home, leading you again and again into familiar relationship dynamics. As Sholes says, “your attachment style establishes your emotional ‘home’, the kind of emotional ‘place’ that feels familiar and safe to you.’ I like to think of this as “your parent’s house”.
So you need to set your relational GPS to a new destination, the new emotional home you wish to live in (i.e. your house). A home in which you are more fully able to identify and advocate for your needs and reasonably expect they will be responded to and supported. Once you get clear on that new home you will have to repeatedly reprogram your GPS until it learns to take you there by default.
And if you’re already a parent or soon to be one, don’t be alarmed. You don’t need perfect attunement, availability and responsiveness to raise securely attached children. That would be impossible. As pediatrician and psychoanalyst D.W. Winnicott's concept of the “good enough” parent states, as long as a majority of the time a child’s needs are understood and responded to, a secure attachment relationship will be formed. It’s more the quality of availability and attunement rather than the quantity.
Because we have spent our entire lives connected to our early relational dynamics, Sholes explains that “for many people, letting go of their attachment style brings up deep feelings of sadness.” So it’s important to be aware of these feelings, to understand them as progress and to stay focused on how much nicer your new home will ultimately be.
So maybe it’s time to move out of your “parent’s house” and into your own “new home”, and if you’ve already made that move to continuing with your home improvements.
If you found this article helpful please let me know and feel free to share it. And if you need help with your relationships at home or at work please be in touch.