Attachment Theory
You may have heard about attachment styles in popular media, such as secure, avoidant, ambivalent/ preoccupied and disorganised. The messaging often portrays secure attachment as best, avoidant and ambivalent/ preoccupied as problematic and disorganised as pathological and dangerous. Bowlby and Ainsworth, the founders of Attachment Theory, never intended such dichotomous labels be used as such, but categorised different observable child survival strategies as A (avoidant), B (secure) and C (Ambivalent/ preoccupied). Later children who presented a mix of strategies were identified as D (disorganised).

Children growing in mostly safe environments will likely develop a secure style but it may not be very protective as a strategy to cope with danger in school and potential abusive partners. Whereas the other strategies may be more protective, but in the long term can be problematic if new strategies haven’t been learnt and their early attachment style adapted. A secure attachment style would not be adaptive or safe for those living in dangerous communities and countries.

In this short essay I will present some contemporary perceptions of Attachment Theory.

Attachment danger and adaptation
Attachment Theory is one of the most researched developmental theories that helps us understand and predict personality, emotion, brain development and how we behave, particularly in close relationships.

“It is a theory about how we gain protection and comfort in the face of danger – in other words, how we stay alive as individuals. It is also a theory about how we form and sustain close, sexual relationships and reproduce the next generation – in other words, how we stay alive as a species” (Baim, 2011).

The attachment seeking instinct in babies predisposes them to seek closeness and comfort when they perceive danger and get anxious and distressed.

When they experience danger the infant seeks safety
When they experience distress the infant seeks comfort
When they experience isolation the infant seeks closeness to their main person
When they experience chaos the infant seeks predictability

The infant not only is born with powerful instincts to survive and communicates this through crying, clinging and reaching out to their attachment figure, but equally powerful instincts to organise and adapt their behaviour based on how their caregiver responds to them.

From the first weeks of life, we mould ourself to our primary caregiver and are laying down our primal templates of emotion regulation and how to interact with our attachment figure.

When caregivers respond to the infants signals in an attuned way that sooths the child’s anxiety, the child’s brain can develop in an organised way, where there is a balance between the cognitive and emotional faculties. There is coherence between the expression of a need, the emotional/ bodily experience and they can predict and rely on a consistent response.

When caregivers are unattuned to the infants’ signals this can lead to significant insecurity in the child and the development of survival strategies that often appear as confusing, frightening, self-defeating and unusual behaviour.

On one extreme these strategies include cutting off, freezing, becoming rigid and controlling, caregiving and compliance or dissociation, and at the other extreme become overwhelmed by emotions like anger, fear, helplessness, or sadness. While these strategies were developed in an early context for survival, they often continue throughout life and can lead to later mental health and relationship issues.

When we speak of danger, to an infant, their absolute dependence on their caregiver means insensitive caregiving can feel life threatening, especially when infants have no capacity to calm themselves down. Young children are particularly vulnerable to trauma symptoms and dissociation to manage intense feelings, fear and distress. Many years later clients may present for psychotherapy with overwhelming feelings that they cant identify where they came from or have any recollection of traumatic events. This is likely when there was excessive stress, disruption and trauma in the childs first 3 yrs of life, before the development of language and without episodic or autobiographical memory, that is, there is no story of events they recall being part of. All those trauma memories are stored in implicit, procedural memory, that is, the triggers and adaptive survival behaviours are all automatic, below conscious awareness.

Attachment strategies and adaptations

B strategy
An infant has a need and they can only communicate by crying and fussing. If they are responded to in a timely manner and learn to predict a caring response and their distress dissolves. They learn to rely on their emotional/ bodily signals AND cognition (predictions/ temporal order of events).

A strategy
An infant has a need and communicates with crying and fussing, they feel the urgency, discomfort, distress and fear increasing. If the caregivers response is unattuned, unresponsive, inappropriate or angry the child gives up. If the child experiences such a response consistently they begin to predict this and learn to value thinking over feeling. They down-regulate emotions. Their emotional expressions don’t seem to have survival value, in fact being a good little boy or girl pleases the parent, so these children learn to inhibit negative emotion and organise themselves more cognitively and around other’s needs.

C strategy
An infant has a need and communicates with crying and fussing, they feel the urgency, discomfort, distress and fear increasing. If the caregiver is experienced as consistently unpredictable and sometimes provides an attuned response and at other times unattuned, children learn to value feeling over thinking. They hyper-regulate emotions. These children cant predict how to consistently feel secure with their caregiver, but learn that increasing the volume of their screams, intensity of behaviour, excessively clingy and vulnerable behaviour will keep their caregiver engaged and attentive, sometimes negatively, and can evolve into intense, inconsistent, enmeshed and mis-communication relationship patterns. These kids learn that the only way to reliably get their needs met is through exaggerating emotions, as they weren’t able to predict what their parents would do, so thinking has less survival value.

Children can develop different strategies with different caregivers and may rely on different attachment strategies in different contexts. Historically, people presenting with mixed strategies were identified as having a disorganised attachment style. This category has been over/ misused and in 2017 was reviewed by 42 leading researchers of Attachment Theory clarifying false assumptions about the category. Read more about it here… 

Memory and neural networks
Repeated experiences trigger brain activity with neurons “firing and wiring together”, creating complex neural networks. The repeated neural activation of these networks strengthens connections and impressions of the world, this is how memory can be described, and helps us move into the future with predictability and safety. As we grow our brains develop sequentially and so do our different memory systems. If we grow in a safe environment our brains can develop in a balanced way and our memory systems and information processing also develops in a coherent balanced way.

In the first 2 years of life, before the development of language, procedural and sensory memory is developing. This is commonly referred to as implicit memory.

The baby is predisposed to seek comfort, protection and safety and to adapt to caregivers responses. If the baby’s cries are regularly responded to angrily or ignored they can quite quickly learn to inhibit negative emotions to maximise the experience of safety and comfort.  The baby learns from their sensory (sight and sound), somatic (bodily arousal) and temporal information (the order in which things happen). Learnt attachment strategies are automatic, implicit, pre-conscious and accessed at great speed, which is protective. Procedural memory is just knowing how to ride a bike, like how we hold our body and posture, mannerisms, nuances of speech and how we talk about distressing things.

These learnt behaviours often are as automatic 50yrs later as they were as a baby. How we automatically react or shut down to our partner when we perceive criticism, anger, distance, or even our partners’ non-verbal behaviours and facial expressions can trigger early memory networks that set off our inner danger alarm system and our automatic learnt protective behaviours. Often we are not in danger and have more inner resources available to us as adults, but something feels threatening. This may be described as a trauma trigger or an old learnt survival mechanism.  

After the second year of life explicit memory is becoming available, that is memories that come with the sense that “I am remembering”. Explicit memory systems include semantic (use of words and language), episodic (autobiographical) and integrative/ working memory.

Children first learn language from caregivers and are reliant on how parents explain difficult circumstances. This has many implications for the healthy development of semantic memory and how we make sense of experiences throughout life. If the child is caught up in her parents difficult separation and negative messages of the other parent are given to the child; if a child experiences abuse and they are told its nothing, normal, or a game; or if a child receives messages about certain emotions, gender, body shape etc. being good or bad, such early messages can have serious consequences on later mental health. The child’s bodily/ sensory experience and the semantic messages from caregivers may be incongruent but the child still needs to feel safe and comforted, forcing them to contort between a biological drive and a complex environment. In later life, this shows up in beliefs to live by, such as “I’m only acceptable when I weigh ….”, “Children should respect parents”,  “I have no right to feel this, others have it worse than me”, “Its bad to be needy, its good to be competent”, while disconnected from their feelings, the body and the context. 

Episodic memory involves more complex information processing. After 3 years episodic memory becomes available and is also heavily dependent on how caregivers talk with children about events. It helps the child develop a more complex image of themselves in terms of time, place, sequence of events and a sense of self across time. As the child gets older, they develop their own life stories and sense of themselves in the social world.

People using a more down-regulated attachment strategy may describe episodes in a more cognitive, less emotive and descriptive manner.

People using a more hyper-regulated attachment strategy may emphasise emotionally charged episodic memories full of feeling, blame and points of view, but may be more scattered and lacking sequential flow.

Integrative memory is not fully available until mid-20’s, some recently saying mid 30’s for full integrative capacity. It is the capacity to weigh up information discrepancies and possible contradictions from different memory systems while evaluating and drawing new conclusions about the task at hand.

Integrative memory can be extremely challenged when your baby is crying, you are tired, and trying to manage conflict with your partner at the same time!! It is the capacity to take a helicopter view of yourself, the other, the situation and context, your triggers and past experience and respond with perspective and coherence.

This kind of neural processing is often slower and requires flexibility of cognition and emotions. The downside to this is when we are under pressure or perceived/ real danger, our implicit survival strategies kick in fast and we may miss vital information in responding well. For people who have a down-regulating survival strategy they may miss emotional signals and information, down play their emotions or a risky situation and may not act in the most protective way for them self or children and may, for example, end up in abusive relationships. For people who have a hyper-regulating survival strategy, they may be led by strong emotion and not think things through sufficiently and end up in chaotic distressing relationships.

Developing coherence of mind, body and ones life story

Attachment research shows consistently that our learnt survival strategies can be upgraded with some dedicated personal development work and healthy corrective relationship experiences with a partner or a therapist etc.

A powerful tool that has been developed in attachment research is the Adult Attachment Interview. It has been compared as ‘the MRI for the mind’, identifying how the body, mind, emotions, memory and personality are organised. In the interview, a person is asked to describe their relationship with their childhood caregivers using 5 descriptive words (semantic). Then are asked to provide a memory of an event for each word (episodic). How the person relates to the therapist, holds themself and communication characteristics indicates implicit memory and procedural learning. The interview gets progressively more personal and challenges the person to access multiple memory systems, to find words, in the presence of another. 

A person who has significantly healed from a difficult childhood may be able to stay engaged with the interviewer and the process, be able to show emotion consistent with difficult memories, demonstrate insight and reflection on what happened, understanding the context, their caregivers challenges, the impact on themself, how they had to adapt and how they continue to work with their vulnerabilities. This requires balanced access to different brain regions

An incoherent response may have inconsistencies like smiling while describing a painful memory, positive descriptive words of the caregiver but an absence of associated memories, distancing language, absence of emotion (A strategy), or high emotion (as if event described is still happening), disjointed sequence of events, high blame of other or disparaging the self, speed and tone of the telling (C strategy).

Attachment focused psychotherapy can help you develop a coherent narrative of your life; integrate different brain regions, horizontally (between hemispheres) and vertically (between limbic and the pre-frontal cortex); integrate emotion and cognition; integrate body, ‘felt sense’, emotion and meaning; integrate opposing parts of ourselves; mindfully identify automatic reactions when under relationship stress with a partner or in parenting; process painful memories and traumas, and develop more resources, flexibility and more options in the moment rather than automatic reactions based on survival strategies learnt in childhood.   

To learn more about my work with Trauma
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To learn more about my work with EMDR
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To learn more about EMDR theory and the Adaptive Information Processing Model CLICK HERE

To learn more about my work with Attachment
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