When we are supporting families in the Focus Group with a view to ensuring that their children grow up emotionally healthy, we aim for the secure attachment described in previous Sub-Chapter, and the associated love, democracy and appropriate, healthy regulation of their emotional needs.
However, because of the importance of dissociation, we need to have some knowledge of the other styles, in particular the last one, disorganised attachment.
This is because, in disorganised attachment situations, harmful events (for example witnessing domestic violence, or experiencing sexual abuse, or even high levels of anxiety among significant adults) may trigger dissociation as a reaction to trauma. Dissociation may manifest in seeming to be detached from reality, (whether this is related to a current event or a memory), detached from a sense of real self, or even our own identity.
Remember that we mentioned in the Sub-Chapter on Attachment that the experience of secure attachment gives us permission to be critical of that to which we are attached?
However, in insecure (and very often disorganised) situations, sometimes care-givers (particularly if we are parents) have unresolved memories of trauma or significant loss and despite strong evidence to the contrary, have a kind of, idealised view of our parents and own childhood, dismissing the idea that relationships in our families or with our parents were problematic. This can be accompanied by substantial lapses in memory of the reality of childhood experiences and/or situations.
Without this being brought into conscious awareness, the possibility of it being propagated through the generations, with children also developing a disorganised attachment style, is increased.
This, in turn, may lead to a tendency for children to dissociate in response to trauma in their own lives as the pattern is repeated. (Patterns repeating will be discussed in the Chapter on fractals later).