Transcript: Episode 100
100. Hope for Attachment
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[Short piano piece is played, lasting about 20 seconds]
Good morning. I recently heard a fantastic podcast with Dr. Crittenden, who is a researcher on attachment, who studied under Ainsworth, who studied under Bowlby. And she had talked with Bowlby and worked with him a great deal. That’s my understanding. But I’ll let her tell that story herself when she’s on the podcast coming up soon.
In the meantime, to prepare for that conversation with her, I want to share some of the things I’ve recently learned. I was shocked that I had no idea about this, although it explained in words, things I had already felt intuitively clinically, as well as noticing with our own children and our own therapy. For that reason, I was really grateful to be able to have words to fit what I had already understood, but didn’t know how to explain, and shocked that this isn’t being taught better in American schools. There’s really a difference between the American approach to attachment and what Dr. Crittenden describes.
But before we get into all of that, let me backup and let me just explain what I mean when I say attachment theory. So Bowlby was the first one back in the 70’s, who really described and explained, not just child development, but specifically the attachment process for the development of attachment specifically. So this is important because this is part of what gets mistranslated later in American history, if you can imagine that happening.
So, the development of attachment is different than just a theory of attachment, or theory of attachment capacity. This is how attachment develops and what happens in that process. Basically, what he said is the attachment figure is sufficiently near, attentive, and responsive. So meaning, for a child, specifically an infant, is the primary caregiver the mother or father or both or whoever the primary caregiver is -- are they attentive? Are they responsive to the needs of the child? Are they close and remain in contact with the child? All of these things are in reference to attunement -- which we’ve talked about on the podcast before -- and being present with what the child’s needs are, and present in responding to those needs.
This is what Bowlby said develops attachment itself. If the child’s caregiver is present and attentive and responsive, then the child feels security, love, and self-confidence, which means that through the child’s development, they are playful, less inhibited, smiling, and able to explore the world around them in socially appropriate ways. That is the development of attachment. The problem is that in America, this got misapplied to development itself, so that model healthy child, being able to smile and explore socially appropriately, and to be less inhibited and more playful, that got applied as if it were the conclusion that the child is appropriately attached, as if the child has the skill of attachment. Does that make sense?
And this is what’s taught in schools and what is being passed down in grad schools and for licensure and it is not the case, but we will get there. Let’s go back to the development of attachment by Bowlby. If the caregiver is not present, attentive, or responseive, then what you get is misattunement. Right, so this is where shame theory comes in and Patricia DeYoung’s work about there being an incongruence between what the child is feeling and what is reflected back from the caregiver. Because if the caregiver is in tune with the child, if there is attunement between the child and the caregiver, then the caregiver’s response is congruent to what the child needs. When it’s not… when there’s an incongruence and it doesn’t match, either their needs are ignored or pushed away or denied altogether or in the cases of abuse and neglect, the child is actually punished for needing -- then that’s where shame develops, instead of attachment developing.
Okay so -- and that goes back to shame theory, which is what Patricia DeYoung writes about and Brené Brown is all about in pop culture. But this is where that comes from in the attachment theory. Okay but, what Bowlby said originally was that if the caregiver is not sufficiently present, attentive, and responsive, then what develops in the child instead of attachment, are increasing behaviors that are basically a cry out for the developing of attachment. So there is -- instead of being secure and feeling loved and feeling confident, the child has fears; has increasing anxiety, even hypervigilance; checking the environment; having to read the room; have to read caregivers to predict their response, even for the child’s own safety; efforts to reestablish connection, even efforts to bed for or earn connection in some way.
And again, that’s what happens with a child whose caregiver is not present, attentive, or responsive. But the same thing plays out with adults who never had a caregiver who was present, attentive, and responsive. And that sometimes looks like personality disorders or other things that get stereotyped and misdiagnosed, because of the misunderstanding of attachment. So what Bowlby said -- “if the child consistently does not receive a responsive, attentive, or present caregiver, then the child becomes defensively avoidant of contact and appears indifferent about separation and reunion.
So what they’re talking about is the stranger experiment, right, where the child is playing near the parent, and then the parent leaves the room, and then a stranger comes in, and then the stranger leaves, and then the parent comes back in. You could google this or search it on YouTube and watch a video about it if you want to see the actual experiments. But they could predict -- based on attachment style -- how the child was going to respond, both to the stranger and to the mother reentering the room.
If the child inconsistently has a parent or caregiver who is not present, attentive, or responsive, then what they saw was the child becoming preoccupied with the attachment figure - clinging or being anxious about separation and not wanting to explore the room. So does that make sense?
Because here’s where it went wrong in being taught in America. That was the experiment with preschoolers, younger than preschoolers. There were toddlers and preschoolers, and this is the behavior at that age that was demonstrated through this experiment. And so they were able to classify different responses into groups and categories of -- these groups of children responded this way and these group of children responded this way and these group of children responded this way. And that was all good. I do not at all mean that was a bad experiment. It was fantastic. It gave a lot of information. It provided insight into children’s behavior and parenting behavior, and the impact of the way that those influenced each other.
And then Ainsworth did these experiments and wrote these narratives to describe these behaviors and started to classify them into these groups. And she named the groups, “A”, “B”, and “C”, because Bowlby told her not to use the groups to predict what they would grow up to be like, because that was taking the experiment too far, too soon. He told her to simply classify them, based on the narrative responses, to keep the experiment pure. So that’s where we got attachment style A, attachment style B, and attachment style C. Does that make sense?
So that is fabulous research and sort of the history of -- in a very brief, brief way -- the history of attachment theory or the development of attachment specifically. However, the experiment had two specific issues that limited it. And what happened was the information from these experiments got misapplied and now it’s being taught wrong and this has been a huge moment for me to learn this this morning and learn about it and research more into it. And I’ll be sharing more about what I learn, as I study it, and Dr. Crittendon herself has agreed to be on the podcast. So we’ll share that interview when it’s ready.
But here’s what happened. Two things -- number one, the experiment and the information of the way the groups were classified were specific to age. And what happened was, that got misapplied across the lifespan, but actually the behaviors and interactions and attachments look different across the lifespan, than they do at that age And so it’s not entirely accurate to assess an attachment style for an adult, based on the criteria for a preschooler. So that’s the first thing that’s wrong.
The other thing that’s wrong that I had no idea about and no one told me until I heard this from Dr. Crittenden, is that all of the subjects in the research were from Berkeley - in privileged families, stable families, where the parents were married, and there were jobs, and they had homes, and it was a secure setting. This blew me away. Because what Dr. Crittenden pointed out -- because she worked with foster children -- is that none of these criteria applied to children whose parents were not married, to children who did not always have stable housing, and to children who had been abused or neglected. Those children -- and their behaviors and interactions at the same age -- responded differently to the stranger situation, than they did in the experiment with the kids from Berkeley.
So this is huge. There are two things wrong. One - everything that is taught about attachment theory is based on kids from Burkley, at a young, specific age, and those classifications actually do not apply to anyone outside of that environment. So these were children who were in safe and stable homes, with safe and stable families, who had enough and were not hungry or in need of anything -- those were the children this experiment focused on. And yet the results of that experiment are then taken and applied to all children and then across the lifespan. So these are the two errors that are the problem with developmental attachment theory in America, that they took something that was about one aspect of development and tried to apply it across the lifespan, with children who were in unsafe situations, and unsafe families. And it doesn’t work. The results are different.
This is so huge, guys, I cannot tell you how big this is, or how important it is to understand these pieces, especially from a trauma background.
So I know I went through that really fast, very quickly, and very briefly, totally skimming over it with no offense to the attachment people out there. But very briefly, this is what I discovered this morning about the development of attachment being an actually different thing than attachment theory, and that it doesn’t actually apply to everybody else. I had no idea of this piece and it really changes everything.
Specifically what Dr. Crittenden says is that attachment is about protection from danger, not security. So this is like the opposite of what is taught in America. Because in America, it is taught that attachment means a child feels safe, and attachment means a child feels secure, and attachment means that bond is strong and so the child will develop healthy and well and behave and have positive interactions and all of these things. And that’s actually not at all what attachment is about. It totally flipped everything I understand about attachment and I almost don’t even know how to process. So I’m just going to share some of the things I learned.
She said, again, this is what is different with Dr. Crittenden’s model, that is different than what is taught as the American model of attachment. She said attachment is not about security or stability or safety. It’s actually the opposite of that. Attachment is about protection from and comfort during and after danger. So she says -- and this is why it matters with trauma and I’m going to connect it with DID and dissociation in a minute, but what she says -- is that in America, because we live so safely theoretically, right, not talking about danger in our homes or school shooters or things like that. But because we’re comfortable, we have medical care, and we have air conditioning, and we have food, and all of these things that many of us still struggle to meet with us. But if you’re talking about Berkeley kids [chuckles], then they have these things. Right? And so she’s saying that because we became, as a nation, sort of obsessed with security and stability and having it all and sort of the American dream perspective, that we lumped attachment into that and have now made the assumption that attachment means those things and that that’s what defines a healthy child. And everything is based on that, even the DSM is based on that assumption.
And it’s false! It’s false. She says -- oh my goodness - I can’t even -- I am really at a loss for words, even clinically, and I can’t tell you how this has uprooted my entire perspective of attachment. So attachment is about protection from danger and comfort during and after danger. It’s not about security. She said that attachment is about how we deal with danger and how we stay safe in situations with the family that we have, in the community that we have, in the culture in which we live, and the history that it has. What?! This is huge. This is talking about intergenerational trauma. It is talking about community trauma. It is talking about historical trauma. It is talking about family trauma. It is talking about everything that we as a person have experienced in the context of which we live, and how we deal with that, how we respond to that, and whether we get help dealing with it or not, or what kind of help we do or do not get dealing with it -- that that is what attachment is.
Do you see how different this is, how huge this is, what a shift it is? An entire paradigm shift. She says that attachment is not something the child does, but that attachment is a process within the context of a relationship. And this is huge and also comes back to DID later, because the attachment that is in the context of the relationship, in the context of your circumstances, that process is going to be different when you’re a child than when you are an adult. That process is going to be different when you’re back in memory time and things are hard and awful, and when you’re in now time where it is safe.
That attachment process is different when we have the husband and the therapist and new friends, who are safe and good and kind, than how we experience detachment when we were actually still in danger and had no one to help us and our caregivers were a part of the problem. Do you see how huge this is? It also gives hope for actually helping with attachment, because too often in the past -- what clinicians in America will say, is that once attachment’s developed and once there’s a specific attachment style, then that’s kind of how you are for life. So you guys with personality disorders will always have personality disorders. You guys with this will always be like that. You guys with this style, because of what you’ve been through -- really sorry that that was hard, but this is what you're stuck with.
And she says that’s not true - that it changes not only because we can get help with therapy and we can get help through safety and through relationships -- remember that healing always comes through connections. Right? So anytime we change our circumstances so that now time is more safe and anytime we change our relationships so that they are healthier and more stable, then our attachment process within that context, can also change. It’s a mic drop. It’s so huge. It’s so huge. I can’t tell you how big of news this is.
Attachment is about protection and comfort, not about security. This also means it’s something we can even work on healing within ourselves. As we learn -- so for example, after Africa, we were able to protect ourselves in a hard situation and get ourselves home and be safe. We are able to comfort our daughter, comfort ourselves, comfort the interpreter that was with us, through the situation. And because of that, since we have come home, something is different inside. At first we thought it was just because we went through a hard thing and were able to get ourselves out. And then we thought it was because we had someone with us who also witnessed what happened, who could, in an attunement kind of way, say, “Yes, this was what happened and this was that hard and it was that awful and I’m so sorry, but we did it together and we got through it.”
And then there was also the layer that we could see clearly the difference between now time is safe, except right now is danger and we’re able to get ourselves out. So now time is still safe, which is different than memory time feeling like it’s right now, and thinking right now we can’t get out, and thinking right now that things will never be different, and thinking right now that things will never be better. All of that is false and we can change it. There is hope and there are ways to change it through protection and provision and comfort in the context in which we live, in the relationships that we choose and build, and in the circumstances in which we make for ourselves - not just find for ourselves but make for ourselves, because we always have a choice.
So going back to what Dr. Crittenden said -- she explained how when infants are born, starting immediately -- and many research would even say before you were born, right -- that you learn to behave in a way that elicits protection and comfort from your caregiver - that this is what attachment is. You behaving and interacting in a way -- because it is all through relationships -- our trauma is actually not just what is done to our bodies, but what is done to our relationships. Okay? And so as infants even, much less as young children or as adolescents, but even as infants and some would say even in utero, we learn to behave and interact in ways to elicit protection and comfort from our caregiver.
So there are three systems in our body, in our being, from the very beginning, that give us the information about whether or not we are getting protection and comfort from our caregiver.
The first system is somatic. So the things that our body is telling us. When we are hungry, do we get fed? When we want comfort, are we hurt instead? These are the things that we learn from our body. And this goes all the way back to polyvagal stuff, about our body knowing when we’re in danger. So even as an adult, whether you want to call it your gut or your intuition or actually even your body itself, paying attention to your breathing, paying attention to your heart rate, paying attention to what messages your body is sending physically - like when we talked about somatic therapy in that podcast episode. Listening to the system that is your body, the somatic system that is a physical expression of what is happening internally - that is one way to get information.
The second way to get information is the competent system, like the choices and consequences. So if I do this, this is what happens. And I don’t just mean “are you a moral person or not”, “do you make good choices or not”, but this is in the context of relationship. So in the context of the caregiver and a child, when I do this, my parent does this. Does that make sense? And so you learn how to behave so you don’t get in trouble. You learn how to take note of what mood your parent is in so that you don’t set them off. And there’s a whole continuum of that, whether it’s just the normal “I did my chores and I’m behaving so that my family can be happy and we can have fun” to all the way to abusive of “I can’t set them off because they will beat me” kind of response. Right?
So you learn competence through strength-based learning of I can keep myself safe by doing this or by not doing this or by interacting this way, in the context of the relationship. Does that make sense?
And then the third system is the affective system, which is like your emotions, but it’s all through the limbic system. So it’s about how am I feeling, is what I’m feeling congruent with what my caregiver is feeling, and am I allowed to express those feelings, do I not express those feelings? Does that make sense? So a baby learns from the caregiver's response what is important or not. So if the baby cries and their needs are met, they learned that crying works, that they can use their words, that they can ask for help and receive it. But if the caregiver is being too careful and too sensitive and overly focused on whether they’re eating or sleeping or all of these things, then the baby turns up too and pays attention to the body more than they were paying attention before. Or in the opposite way, with neglect or abuse, right, if those needs are ignored, then the baby says this is not effective. I’m going to turn my body off, because it’s getting hurt when it needs something. And so instead I will focus on the consequences of when the parent does respond.
So what happens with a lot of survivors is not just dissociation mentally, but also a dissociation that’s physical, where we are numb to pain, or it takes a lot to feel something physically in the bodies, or we don’t notice when we’re sick or something is wrong. Sometimes even cutting becomes an issue because it takes that degree of a physical response to get your own attention. These things are things that actually can heal, whereas in the past they were thought to just be this is their style and how things are going to be, in almost a terminal way. It’s just this is how it is and there’s nothing we can do about it. And now we know that’s false. It’s entirely false because attachment is not a thing in the child.
Somehow, systemically, that got placed on the child, as if the child were to blame for the attachment process, but it’s not even like the parents are to blame. It’s about the relationship process. And so as long as we continue to repeat relationships that are like our parents or relationships that are not healthy for us, or ignoring our own needs so that our circumstances are not safe or that we’re not provided for well enough to meet our own needs, then we will continue to have attachment issues, because we’re still acting out the same process that we’ve endured all along.
So attachment doesn’t lie on the child. It’s not something the child does. It’s something that happens in the relationship itself. It exists between two people. It’s a pattern of relationship, a style of relationship, not a trait of the child. Does that make sense? Because -- and here’s the kicker for trauma -- security is not the issue of attachment. It’s not about how stable the child is, because the child could be in a very stable context that is stably unhealthy. It could be stably, consistently unsafe.
So the issue with attachment is not security, but adaption. And that’s what actually got my attention in the first place, because of the other episode where the whole drama was about what is maladaptive and what is adaptive. Right? Adaption is a strategy that allows or maintains function. So it’s only maladaptive when it’s interfering with function. So Dr. Crittenden pointed out what happened with these attachment styles is they were all based on these Berkeley kids. But then she was working with DHHS kids or foster children, who had trauma, and were in unsafe situations, and their responses did not fit that theory. They did not fit the Berkeley kids. And so she realized there was more to the process.
And what she said that blew me away is that children in traumatic situations -- what other people are saying is maladaptive, is actually by definition, adaptive, because they are strategically adapting to parents who needed extra help from the infant to get it right. And that line is a direct quote from the therapist on Censored Podcast, which I can totally link to in the notes. But what she said is powerful, that those adaptions, even dissociation, is a self protective strategy. And if it protects you, that is the right strategy.
I have no words for how powerful that is. That is attunement to the adaptive process of how children respond to trauma. This is not about you are wrong because you dissociate. Dissociation is not about you are bad because you dissociate. This is not about you are unwell because you dissociate. She said, “If it protects you, then that was the right strategy.” And it matters because everyone, even abused kids, all have different context in which they live. My abuse does not look like what your abuse was like. And even in my own family, the things I went through were different than the things the brother went through.
So it’s adaptive specific to me in the context in which I lived, with the family that I had, with the things that I was going through, and who was there or not there, to help me get through that…who did help or who didn’t help me get through that. Do you see how powerful this is? And then she goes on to say that you can’t apply it across the lifespan, because developmentally, there are changes where these processes, the somatic and the competent and the affective, are integrated -- I know that’s a big word, but we mean brought together, being able to work together -- not Alters, but these information processes in the brain -- the limbic system and everything else.
So developmentally, as the child grows up, those processes can use integrated information -- meaning work together instead of one of them -- to adapt further and develop more complex strategies. So in some ways, that looks like us being able to continue to deal with hard things. So for example -- and we talked about this in therapy today -- she mentioned it -- that when there was a new thing that was hard, but it was good, we still used the same old coping strategies to deal with it, even though it was good, even though we were safe.
So specifically, what she was referencing was when we met The Husband and agreed we were going to marry him, even though he was good and we were safe with him, it was such a transition and such a stressor, even though it was a good thing, that we still split off someone new -- and those are my words, not hers. I know not everyone uses that word anymore, but we still created someone new to deal with just getting married, because that was the adaptive process that we knew how to use in response to difficult things.
And yet this week, after this year and a half of therapy, for the first time, we have met a new friend and made a new friend, and have worked together in becoming friends with her, without creating someone new just for her, which is huge. This is a big deal. It’s kind of a breakthrough for us. It’s progress. Not that different Ones of us won’t be involved, but working together on a new friendship, rather than having to create a new person for a new situation. So we have been able to adapt in a positive way, using the same strategies we’ve always had, but applying them in different ways, to still have everyone’s input and still protect the system as a whole to keep us out of danger.
So adaption means fitting into a context that varies in complexity and type of danger. So when we’re talking about the American model of attachment, they’re assuming these are safe children who are already in good homes. It doesn’t at all take into consideration ACEs scores or traumatic experiences or underprivileged children or children from other cultures, beside white Berkeley intelligent, married parents. The DSM also assumes a normative safe environment, which is why you get diagnoses for coping with things, which is different than there being a clinical issue, which maybe is sometimes also the case, but it’s definitely the weak point of the DSM as it is. It’s why the DSM doesn’t always work, because it assumes the world is a safe place. So you acting like it is not safe is maladaptive, except that the assumption is wrong, because the world is not always a safe place and constantly requires us to adapt to that, even in good examples like getting married to the husband. Does that make sense? It’s huge.
So to adapt in difficult or dangerous circumstances is adaptive, not maladaptive. And Dr. Crittenden explained this really well. It was just powerful and amazing and I’m so excited for when she comes on the podcast in a few weeks. I can’t wait to share that with you.
But to sum things up, the way she’s developed her model is that attachment style A -- which was previously called dismissive avoidant -- doesn’t actually work across the lifespan, because developmentally those behaviors look different as the child ages. So she divides that up into one and two things. One is impulsive caregiving, meaning that the adaption is that we ourselves care for our parent, because we need the parent to feel calm and attended to so that they have the capacity to keep us safe. So it’s things like comforting your parent - meaning the child. The child comforts the parent. The child bringing them things. The child being super cheerful, even when things are hard. The child -- we even at times helped the mother get dressed or cooked for her and did our chores in ways that were more than just doing chores - really caretaking of the house and anything to keep her happy and comfortable so that she would not be upset and hurt us. Does that make sense?
The other thing this can look like is being compulsively compliant. We know the caregiver - we as the child. We know the caregiver is angry and will discipline us and so we’ll be obedient and do what she wants, even before she says, to avoid the abuse, because we know the consequences of not doing what she says. So here, in this situation, what gets dismissed, as far as being dismissive avoidant -- what gets dismissed is not the caregiver, but ourselves. We shut out our own needs for safety. Does that make sense? This is how attachment theory fits trauma, or how trauma fits into attachment theory. It’s really pretty profound.
And then style C -- which was really their own disarming -- becomes either aggressive - like saying mean things or hurting other people, but maybe even persecutor alters, but really is about hiding fearfulness, because they’re avoiding, right, the avoidance is avoiding vulnerability. And then the other thing it can look like is a feigned helplessness. So a high squeaky voice pretended to be incompetent, doing anything to avoid conflict or anger. Again, being protective of the system as a whole, or as the person.
What she said this means clinically is that you cannot treat the aggression. So whether you’re the therapist helping with persecutory Alters, or you have Alters like that, or you work with personality disorders, or any kind of aggressive or feigned helplessness client or person or Alter or yourself, you cannot treat the aggression or you will not find the problem. You have to treat the underlying fear and they will stop being aggressive, because it’s a defense mechanism. And if you treat what they’re afraid of and help them with what they’re afraid of, there will be no need to be aggressive. That’s huge! There’s so much powerful explanation in that.
So then when we talk about what used to be called preoccupied attachment, it’s talking about splitting off your own self, like category A, splitting their own self off from the other -- meaning the parent -- and focusing on the parent instead of focusing on themselves. But in category C, those kids split their negative affect - being either vulnerable or invulnerable and not addressing the other Part. But all the Parts matter. And so even if you’re working with singletons, even if you have patients who have trauma or even without trauma, who don’t have DID -- but the same thing applies. They still have these parts of themselves that they’re either avoiding or hiding to keep themselves safe.
So this was huge and it was powerful to me and I needed to share it right away. I know that it was super clinical, and I am excited that we’ll hear from Dr. Crittenden herself, and we can talk about it and explain more further. But I had to share right now, because for me -- besides the information itself -- it was so liberating to hear first of all, that what happened to me in the past does not have to define my attachments and relationships now and in the future. That piece alone blew my mind and has changed everything, which is fascinating timing, right, because we’re making new friends. There’s hope in that. And two, that the standard everyone’s being held against for normal were white rich kids without trauma in California. And so it makes sense that so many of us, for so long, feel like outliers, because we were not even included in that research, so to speak. Which means also, that it’s okay to not fit into that group, which is huge. And it’s liberating to recognize there’s room for compassion for ourselves in a new way, for doing what we had to do to survive - for using the coping skills we use to stay alive, for having defense mechanisms like dissociating or acting out in different ways or crying out for help in different ways, and all these examples of things that everyone in the past has said maladaptive.
For us to be able to say, “Wait a minute. This actually was adaptive, because that’s what we were going through and really turns out to be a signal about not how bad we were, but about how difficult our circumstances -- specifically our relationships -- were.” So that brings ourselves back into attunement with ourselves. That’s what’s so powerful. It’s not just that someone understands and that there’s attunement, because we found a good husband, and we found a good therapist, and we are making good friends. But because I can be those things to myself. I can care for myself. I can provide safety and protection for myself. I can provide comfort to myself and everyone inside - all of Myselves, all of who I am and embrace this in a brand new way.
I don’t know what that looks like. I just heard this this morning and it blew me away and it actually got me stuck so that I had to talk in therapy - to the therapist. I don’t usually go myself, and I was able to share this piece and then skip out. But that’s how powerful it is and what it means. So I don’t know what it looks like yet, and we’ll have to continue practicing these things and sort of sharing it inside -- what that means to different ones. But I had to share it right away, because it was so powerful and so liberating, and because it brought compassion and hope and truth, not just in the present for who we are or what we’re dealing with now, but for who we once were and who we have been and where we’ve come through and what we have already survived.
[Break]
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