At Asheville Family Counseling, we focus on the relationship as the vehicle we’re driving on the path to healing.
Attachment Theory provides a map for our journey.
John Bowlby developed Attachment Theory. He created a framework for understanding the emotional attachments between parents and their children.
This new framework, known as attachment theory, is now one of the most prominent and influential theories of human development. Bowlby also described how early attachments impact a child’s sense of self and ability to form healthy relationships.
Further research related to attachment theory provides evidence that parent-child relationships are a key to personality development. It sheds valuable insight into the genesis of conflicts within the family system as well as outside of it.
Using the lens of attachment theory, we understand how a child’s early experiences with attachment shape her experiences. It will also impact her behavior in the future.
Securely attached children regulate their distress on their own in a healthy way. They self-soothe easily because they learned how to self-soothe from their attentive and caring parents.
Further, they are able to transmit clear messages about their needs. They learn to accept and rely upon care and soothing. They can explore their environment and other relationships with confidence. People who are insecurely attached, however, present a very different picture. They present along two dimensions: anxiety and avoidance.
Attachment theory is particularly useful in the event that a family has experienced any kind of trauma. This trauma can look like persistent conflict. It can look like depression. It can look like grief.
If a child repeatedly experiences parents as unavailable, whether from a chronic or life-threatening illness, or even unavailability because of work commitments, it follows that she will not expect her parents, or others, to be available for emotional support.
People have an innate need to seek out a loved one for care and soothing in times of distress. But this need is incapacitated by fears of abandonment and betrayal. We call this phenomenon, “One foot on the gas and one foot on the brake.” One part longs for connection. But the other part is scared of it and withdraws from it.
Children and adolescents with insecure attachments are simply less able to express their feelings. They struggle to understand them. This generally results in the inability to regulate emotions in a healthy way. It also leads to overall difficulty with coping in the face of distressing circumstances.
Children and adolescents with insecure attachments who are not able to regulate their emotional states without resorting to maladaptive coping mechanisms become adults who resort to behaviors that are also maladaptive. I’ll just mention here briefly that addiction is a complex psychophysiological process, but it has a few key components.
Our definition of addiction is any behavior that a person finds temporary pleasure or relief in and therefore craves, suffers negative consequences from, and has trouble giving up.
We see this in our clients every day – adults who haven’t learned to self-soothe. They’ve learned that it’s unsafe, or unreliable, to look to others for soothing. Therefore they seek and find soothing in behaviors like drinking, shopping, sex, exercise, or overwork.
Getting back to children and adolescents – we see that they’re often likely to manifest very unpredictable and labile emotional states. These look like angry outbursts, anxiety, and/or intense fears when their emotional needs aren’t met.
These children and adolescents don’t feel safe expressing their needs. They don’t trust that they’ll be met. They’ll resort to these challenging behaviors. We call these “bids for connection.”
It’s understandable that most parents focus their energy on controlling their child’s behavior. They focus on behavior rather than investigating the meaning behind it. It’s understandable that it feels too hard to deal with these big emotions. Challenging behaviors are also very…challenging. Again, though, we can see them as bids for attention and connection.
Remember, when we’re children the experience of aloneness is almost intolerable. It makes sense that we did everything in our power to not feel that pain.
When we can allow “the awfulness of emptiness” (to coin a phrase from Winnicott) to be, without needing to fill it up with compulsive behaviors like drinking, eating, shopping, sex, overwork, and/or grasping for connection with others, we can then consciously, mindfully, compassionately, fill it up with people and activities that are genuinely soothing.
So, as challenging as it is, the priority is to create a safe space for yourself and the important people in your life, because emotional safety is the key to creating secure attachment.
If you’d like to find out more, call/text Asheville Family Counseling at 828-761-3149 and set up a completely free, 15-minute exploratory session. You can also click the button below and schedule online.