For me, attachment is concerned with human relationship and the nature of the relationship. And more specifically, whether, within the relationship, we feel safe!
Safety has particular significance for humanity in that safe relationships (and bonding) are necessary for our evolution. Obviously, early childhood experience is very important in influencing how we will relate to others, and our overall development (and patterns of behaviour) in life in general. This was recognised by John Bowlby.
Other researchers since then have posited that, because we have so many significant experiences as we grow from childhood to adulthood (and indeed into our mature years), attachment styles (which I will describe in this Chapter) have the potential to change at other developmental stages (for example, adolescence) and indeed throughout the life course.
Influences in our environment are, of course, very important, and the personality that we are born with is important too.
Research also indicates that how children perceive the quality of their relationships with their parents, and the quality of the parental relationship itself, is influential in predicting what kind of attachment style will prevail in adult life. That is, continual observation of, and exposure to different forms of relationships, affects the child.
Attachment theory gives an explanation as to why family love (mutual nurture, the root of emotional gravity, the identity that I already described) is so powerful.
Humans have a need for attachment and without it we are like empty vessels that yearn to be filled.
Attachment helps keep infants and children close to their caregivers so that they can receive protection in a loving context, and also experience what it is like to be protected.
I believe that this is very important because it is a sign of good emotional health when, as adults, we can ask for help, which is a way of protecting ourselves.
And, of course, another important aspect of attachment is that feeling secure in ourselves encourages curiosity so we can safely explore our environment, and learn about the world outside through all our senses.
Before I describe the styles it might be helpful to look at four aspects of attachment here:
1. When we are infants we need an attachment figure which we will call a secure base.
2. If we are afraid or threatened we return to our secure base for safety and comfort.
3. We experience anxiety when our attachment figure is not present.
4. We like to be near the people we are attached to.
John Bowlby identified three principles of attachment.
1. Children who are confident that their primary caregiver will be available to them are more likely to experience safety and security [1] than those who are raised with inconsistent, unavailable primary caregiver(s).
2. This confidence is forged during the years of infancy, childhood, and adolescence. These years are influential for the remainder of the person’s life – and, in general, the patterns laid down in younger years are hard to change.
3. If caregivers are responsive in infancy, children will develop expectations that caregivers in general will be responsive to their needs throughout their teenage and then adult lives.
Now this is important……
While 1 and 2 may be intuitively known to us, and are common sense, 3 may not – but it is particularly significant – and I believe it is one of Bowlby’s very important discoveries.
The reason that it is significant is that it sets us up for a self-fulfilling prophecy about life in general – that what we believe might happen in relationships more often than not will happen!
[1]. In some literature this sentence is written as ‘children are less likely to experience fear and anxiety’. Rather than use a double negative I put in a positive form.