This is an important post describing the disorganised attachment style and how it affects growth.
You may remember that I said elsewhere that I believe that adults have the wherewithal to protect and care for children naturally, but that we may need to unlearn a lot of prejudices, beliefs, core values etc. to allow us be natural in our caregiving.
This will be explored in this post – for example, in the description (below) we may need to unlearn the strong belief that lack of control means lack of safety.
We have an innate disposition to not only care for each other, but (I believe anyway) to care for the world in general. It is easy to spot this care-giving tendency in ourselves. It is revealed when we smile at a baby (who is a stranger) in a pram, or even pat a dog’s head as we pass by, or have a hobby like gardening which is a manifestation of our wanting to care for plants/flowers etc., or indeed, having pets. (Mutual nurture and emotional gravity again)!
Our care-giving tendency usually matches our care-seeking tendency and this probably ensures relative harmony in normal family, community or societal situations.
What I mean here is that in normal mature adult-adult relationship, I will sometimes need help. So I ask for it and receive it. At other times, I am asked for help, and I am able and willing to give it. The help that someone else gives me is acknowledged and appreciated by me, and the help that I give someone else is acknowledged and appreciated by him.
If I am giving all the time and my requests for help are never reciprocated (or vice-versa) then I (or the other) will ultimately feel taken for granted and this will usually lead to disharmony in the relationship. In the adult-child relationship, the child, because he is a child, will obviously need more care than he can give! (This will be revisited in the Chapter on Symmetry in Section Four).
The area of interest of this Sub-Chapter on Attachment is the parent-infant relationship where the care-giving is, because the child is an infant, (in a normal relationship) one way – that is, from the adult to the child.
Crying is a common and perfectly normal manifestation of infant care-seeking, i.e. asking for help.
If I, a parent, experienced disorganised attachment as a child, (and have not had the opportunity to heal) I know that I should (and probably will have a natural desire to) soothe my infant when he cries. However, the trauma (unresolved) that is triggered by the crying (particularly if the crying persists) gets in the way, and my disorganised attachment quickly kicks in.
My baby’s need induces my need!
This is partly related to feelings of powerlessness in me, the parent, i.e. not being able to control my baby. (After all, part of my own trauma will most probably have arisen from my inability to control my parent).
Any situation where I feel not in control can thus be, potentially, frightening. Parental disorganised attachment may now manifest as anxiety, fear, or very often anger.
Research shows that even very small babies (an hour old or even less) can respond to different emotional expression. When a parent is fearful or anxious etc. an infant will also be afraid. After all, the infant totally depends on the parent for safety.
And what do we do when we are afraid? We try to get away.
Because an infant cannot really get away, the need to get away may manifest in distraction, or avoidance of eye-contact. The avoidance of eye contact, in turn, causes the parent to avoid eye-contact, which for the child is also frightening – a baby can be very fearful of an unresponsive face! (All these behaviours are, of course, happening unconsciously).
Paradoxically (because of the over-riding need for protection) the infant’s fear actually increases his need for closeness to the attachment figure. Our need for closeness to a person who we might fear (or who might even be harming us) can be repeated in adult relationships and is sometimes called the trauma bond, also mentioned here.
The trauma bond can lead to the idealised, uncritical view of childhood, which, when allied to the repetition of the need for closeness when carried throughout the life stage may lead to denial both of historical and contemporary realities.
This is a very powerful wall that continually inhibits insight into what is good for me, what is not, what I deserve, what I don’t etc.
If we cast our minds back to the Sub-Chapter on Trauma, this, if we think about it, also makes sense. One way of protecting ourselves is to identify with the aggressor or the punisher. The old saying, keep your friends close but your enemies closer probably comes from this wisdom! Or perhaps the Mozambican author Mia Couto hit the nail on the head when he suggested that in times of terror, we choose monsters to protect us.
So the parent, (viewed from the infant’s perspective) is the source of his anxiety, but is also the only resolution to his distress. This, obviously, causes great confusion in the infant, the most harmful aspect being that there is no way out of the dilemma!
This uncertainty in respect of the source and the resolution of anxiety in an infant is very harmful.
Now I know that I have promoted the view in earlier chapters that it is helpful, as adults, to allow and indeed embrace chaos and uncertainty.
However, (and this is very important) at this early stage of development uncertainty does a lot of harm.
In fact, the infant needs the certainty of the secure base in very early years to firstly venture out and explore, then make sense of, and finally embrace the inevitable uncertainty (and in particular the emotional uncertainty) of the world as she grows to maturity – otherwise it will be feared greatly, and an impenetrable barrier (the thick armour I mentioned already) will be grown to avoid it!
Ongoing, repeated situations of the confusion and uncertainty described above, as the infant grows into and through childhood firstly lay down the foundations and then concretise, or sediment a disorganised style of attachment thereby repeating it through the generations.
Such experiences also determine what Internal Working Model (IWM, described in the next post) will prevail in her life.