Why do I keep repeating the same mistakes? Reflecting from attachment theory.

It’s very common to hear people blaming their parents for their psychological problems.

It probably all started with Freud's theory of psychoanalysis, which gave an important responsibility  to parents to help develop our psique, controlling our desires and impulses and finding solutions between our inner selfish desires and our social duty to behave properly.

Anyway, that theory is almost 100 years old. Much has happened since then. In 1966, Bowlby[1] proposed the attachment theory to explain how humans build relationships with other humans and objects, giving an important relevance to children's guardians (usually parents) to develop attachment patterns that they repeat during their adult lives.

Today, different authors and researchers [2] defend the idea that human beings, just like other mammals, activate an “attachment” mechanism to call the attention of others in order to survive. That is why babies and little kitties are so cute. They attract people and trigger in adults the strong desire to protect them, especially when they are crying and showing sadness.

But what happens when a baby attachment mechanism doesn’t work? What happens when the adults guarding that baby are under stress or damaged and can’t satisfy the baby’s emotional needs in time?

When adults are going through stressful situations and are not capable of creating a safe bonding with the children that they are responsible for, children don’t learn to regulate their own emotions as society expects and they adapt to survive under stressful dynamics with their guardians. These maladaptive patterns are repeated with other people afterward because that is the way they learned to live. In some cases, the child learns to avoid their feelings and suppress them, because adults are more available or supportive when the baby doesn’t cry. In other cases, the child needs to cry very loud to get the adult's attention, learning that intense emotional responses are the way to trigger the attachment that they need.

In other words, attachment mechanisms help humans to learn to regulate their emotions, build relationships with others, understand and give meaning to the world and develop the ability to think about others thinking too (Mentalization and metacognition). To use this knowledge in psychotherapy, there are profiles of attachment styles that help us to understand an individual's behaviour.

To keep It simple, let's turn to Ainsworth’s work [3]. She conducted an experiment named “strange situation”, where she observed children between 12 and 18 months interacting in a situation in which a stranger came into the child’s room while the child was playing close to his/her mother. The plan was to stress the children and observe what kind of attachment responses they display to cope with the stress. This experiment led to different responses that Ainsworth described in 3 attachment styles: the safety attachment, in which the child goes back to the mother looking for safety: the ambivalent-insecure attachment, in which the baby goes back to the mother but doesn’t calm down even when the strangers have left the room; and the avoidant-insecure attachment, in which the child doesn’t react repressing his fearful emotions or avoid the mother and the stranger. Later on, other researchers suggested more attachment styles, but these 3 can resume the basics.

Ainsworth's findings mean that some individuals under stress may trust others to get help and feel safe; overreact to secure the attention of others and feel safe, or avoid total contact with others in order to feel safe.

If a child has been raised in a protected environment, with a successful guardian that regulates this child's emotions, this child would develop a Safe attachment style, which allows him to relate to new experiences with emotional stability, build trustful relationships with others, and cope with emotional stress successfully.

To understand this better, imagine a child feeling hungry and crying. This crying attracts a parent who connects with the child's needs, and through empathy, concludes that the child is hungry, so the parent decides to feed the child carefully, bringing satisfaction, joy and feel of safety to the child. There are many other examples in which a child is emotionally regulated by significant adults (parents or other family members), which helps them to believe that the world is safe and secure

On the other side, if a child has been raised with a guardian that has frequently failed to give protection in moments of danger, that scared the child through shouting, violence, inappropriate jokes, delivering confusing or contradicting messages between love or hate; or transmitting fear about the child environment or other people surrounding, this person may develop an unsafe attachment style, which is based in overthinking, anxiety, avoidance, paranoid thinking and other traits that help this person to “survive” in an unsafe environment.

To understand this in context, imagine a child crying because he is hungry and experiencing that no one comes, or that he is fed roughly, or that the guardian shouts at the child “shut up and stop crying!!” instead of providing food.

Another example could be a kid that is not allowed to play outside because something bad could happen, growing around scared parents that are overprotecting and transmitting to the kid that the world is dangerous and something terrible could happen if the kid is not close to the parents.

Now, going into more practical details, attachment styles are used to describe and understand people's behavior and relationships with others, but they are not “exact” predictions of people's personalities. A child can create a safe attachment with male friends and an anxiety-unsafe attachment with male authorities. So this is not a label that people should wear to describe themselves, instead, I suggest it as a guide to understanding our behavior in relationships with others.

The image above represents Bartholomew and Horowitz's [4] models of Adult Attachment styles, which explains our relationship with others based on two edges: the assessment of yourselves and the assessment of others.

Moments and life experience lived with significant others (parents, family members, friends, lovers) define the way that individuals perceive themselves and others. As an example, if a child grows up with an angry and strict father and no other available adults to deliver love and care, the child may learn to avoid an intimate connection with the father in order to get along better with him, trying to accomplish his father’s expectations and learning to trust himself to solve problems, instead of asking for help to his father or others. This context could lead an adult to develop a positive perception of himself and a negative perception of others.

As a second example, If a child grows up with an overprotective mother and father, that already lost a child before, it's possible that the child will learn that he can’t trust himself to get things done (because the parents do everything for him) and the world is very dangerous (overprotection). This context could lead to an emotionally dependent adult with a negative perception of himself and a positive perception of others.

The world of attachment theories is very complex to describe in one post. But now It is easy to see through some examples how life can be shaped by our early relationships and the important role they play in people's lives.

The patterns learned through life experiences can’t be completely changed. However, It is possible to develop special skills and methods to cope with these maladaptive patterns that were learned in order to survive in an insecure context and today have become an obstacle to accomplishingx a better quality of life.

References.

[1] Bowlby, J. (1969). Attachment and loss. (OKS Print.) New York: Basic Books.

[2] Check Peter Fonagy work on Mentalization and Attachment; Felipe Lecallenier studies on Attachment; Main and Solomon (1990)proposal of disorganized attachment; Baker and Biringen (2012) research about Emotional Availability.

[3] Ainsworth, M. D. S., Blehar, M., Waters, E., and Wall, S. (1978). Patterns of Attachment: A Psychological Study of the Strange Situation. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.

[4] Bartholomew K, Horowitz LM (August 1991). "Attachment styles among young adults: a test of a four-category model". J Pers Soc Psychol. 61 (2): 226–44.

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