MAY I HAVE A HUG?

“Attachment theory” is an often useful idea about why some people fall in love and never leave that faithfulness, why some are soon restless and break off, and why some never attach to anyone else at all.  As soon as someone has an idea like this theory, people pounce on it — whether they are professional counselors or not and whether they are using the idea in their own interest or not.  

I’m relying on the material in Wikipedia for this discussion, specifically the article called “attachment measures” which is about “instruments” to try to achieve some kind of objectivity about what is going on, though the phenomenon itself is quite observable and logical.  Infants, even birds, must attach to parents in order to survive.  The style they learn from the interaction of their personal physiology/temperament with the situation is one that will persist through life, not least because it becomes biologically wired into their brain domains at a primal level.  It becomes the style of romantic relationships, the style of relationship with institutions, and in religions with a focus on a god or on ancestors, their “faith.”  Normally, one’s attachment style is below consciousness.

One system organizes the types of attachment as secure, anxious-ambivalent, anxious-avoidant, and disorganized/controlling.  Each of these types has sub-categories with more detail or maybe as “fall-back” strategies.  There are other systems:  one uses only two dimensions: anxiety about the relationship and avoidance in the relationship.  A third uses four categories, but they are named as secure, preoccupied, dismissive-avoidant, and fearful avoidant.  The wiki entry doesn’t discuss how much the circumstances of the times (The Great Depression, World War) acting on the ability and way of the care-giver or schools can shape a whole generation of children into people who will have a different kind of care-giving that will shape the next subsequent generation.

Strategies and tests described in this entry are mostly meant for young children and amount to devising situations and then recording the reactions.  This is a common psych strategy but the range of cleverness and reliability of the results, let alone the sensitivity and empathy of the interpreter, make all the difference.  For adults, there is the dimension of acceptance and insight by the person being tested — which is a direct result of the person’s attachment style!  

One test, by Smyke and Zeanah, is given to the caregivers.  Called Disturbances of Attachment Interview, it became important when dealing with “warehoused” children who failed to form any attachment.  Such investigations are also vital in a time when many children have a sequence of caregivers, either because of fostering, adoption or simply because the parents are gone to work or are sociologically separated, as in the historical British system of delegating childcare to nannies.

The 12 items on this test include:

Having a discriminated, preferred adult

Seeking comfort when distressed

Responding to comfort when offered

Social and emotional reciprocity

Emotional regulation

Checking back after venturing away from the care giver

Reticence with unfamiliar adults

Willingness to go off with relative strangers

Self-endangering behavior

Excessive clinging

Vigilance/hypercompliance

Role Reversal

If a person were needing a kernel dynamic for a story, they might begin with one of the four categories devised by Bartholomew and Horowitz.  The categories are described in self-statements:

SECURE:  It is relatively easy for me to become emotionally close to others.  I am comfortable depending on others and having others depend on me.  I don’t worry about being alone or having others not accept me.

DISMISSIVE:  I am comfortable without close emotional relationships.  It is very important to me to feel independent and self-sufficient, and I prefer not to depend on others or have others depend on me.

PREOCCUPIED:  I want to be completely emotionally intimate with others, but I often find that others are reluctant to get close as I would like.  I am uncomfortable being without close relationships, but I sometimes worry that others don’t value me as much as I value them.

FEARFUL:  I am somewhat uncomfortable getting close to others.  I want emotionally close relationships, but I find it difficult to trust others completely, or to depend on them.  I sometimes worry that I will be hurt if I allow myself to become too close others.

One can imagine infinite plots generated by people with different styles trying to get attuned to each other, even enough to work closely.  Another consideration is that “conscientiousness”, the awareness of expectations and painful attempts to work against one’s own nature in order to do “the right thing,” can confuse life.  And for those aforementioned writers, they can become so immersed in imagined persons that they neglect the expectations of the real people in their lives, which makes them unpredictable to those around them.  Writers tend to be dismissive and that makes real people angry because of frustrated overtures.

The “Experiences in Close Relationships” questionnaire is online at  http://www.web-research-design.net/cgi-bin/crq/crq.pl  

As with everything in life, one’s time and place provide context for how things turn out, and one of the great human tragedies is being trapped in circumstances that don’t fit one’s nature without any idea how to change, to adapt, to find work-arounds.  We have been watching for decades now as gay men finally are released into relationships and work that fit their inner lives.  When women are economically dependent on men that is highly problematic as well.

This material and line of thought is from an approach called “Object Relations” which has mostly unfolded in England.  Some people know it as “teddy bear psychology” because of its recognition that little children can slide the care-giver’s qualities onto a toy they can carry with them as a source of reassurance.  The intensity of attachment to a teddy bear or a “blankie” is legendary.  Removal of that object is the same as removing the caregiver, so no wonder that the storms are major.  If the actual caregiver is undependable or remote, the consequences of separation from the substitute can approach psychosis and deform a person for life, particularly in terms of close partners, sexual or not.

We are in swirling, uncertain, poorly defined times of terrifying dissension.  Teddy bears are everywhere and people who “cosplay” even become teddy bears.  We love our mascots in sports.  I wonder whether anyone has researched violent outbursts of destruction as revenge against betraying caregivers.  These concepts help us figure it out.

ATTACHMENT, SELF-REGULATION AND COMPETENCY

This set of three ideas, which are arranged to justify the acronym ARC, are basically Attachment, Self-Regulation and Competency.  It is a “components-based framework which is designed to address vulnerabilities created by exposure to overwhelming life circumstance taking place within the early caregiving system.”  I’m working from the PDF you can download here:  http://www.traumacenter.org/clients/Intertwining_Nature_of_Attachment_and_Trauma.pdf  

It’s only five pages including a short bib.  It was meant to get at the reasons that many adoptions failed, so this is not a psychoanalytical one-on-one way of approaching the phenomenon, but a practical way of developing attachments to what they call a “family,” and also call a “container,” that is safe, regulates new challenges, and develops the whole idea of self-regulating skills, which is new to me.  I mean, most authorities want to tell kids what to do, not teach them how to decide for themselves.

Quoting:  “When attachment systems [note: “systems” rather than devotion to one person] are compromised or distressed, children develop adaptations that keep them safe.  However, a consequence of these adaptations is often a failure to adequately develop key competencies.”   For instance, one of my birth family’s solutions — two generations back when they were homesteaders — was intense family loyalties to the point of limiting contact with outsiders and foregoing the sort of explorations that would challenge the family’s style.  This created secrecy and limited skills in establishing friendships with “different” people.  Going off to college or developing career paths were scary propositions, but education was a high enough value to be one way out.  Up to a point.  Few of us would be defined as "failures" but we may have compromised.

My escape route

A friend had over-controlling and abusing parents.  As a pre-adolescent he developed a compensating “family” of peers, boys who witnessed his physical damage, joined him in emotional solidarity, and encouraged consoling physical embrace.  It kept him alive -- but not others -- and even supported a considerable intelligence in the face of erratic education.  But there was no way to access and redirect the control and abuse of the adults.

The ARC writer says, turning away from broken parents, “ARC is a strengths-based model, which emphasizes the importance of building or re-building safe relational systems.  In the context of that safe system, the model focuses on skill-building, stabilizing internal distress and enhancing regulatory capacity in order to provide children with generalizable skills which enhance resilience outcome.”  I take it that the idea lends itself to Al-Anon, which helps kids survive and maybe even manage adults in their lives who go out of control because of drug or alcohol use.  It helps to build self-talk in the kid, so he can say to himself, “It’s not my fault.  I’m entitled to protect myself.  I will think of ways to escape and alliances to make.”  This kind of self-reassurance will be useful throughout life.

Foster family

More detail about ARC.

1.  Attachment means the caregiver should know and manage their own emotions to keep from suffocating or deserting or punishing.  They must learn to work at a meta-level where they can ask, “What’s going on here?  What are the clues?  What would be the best way to react?  How am I feeling about this and how do I manage it?”

2.  Attunement is making empathetic bonds, one-on-one, with the child.  Solidarity.

3.  Predictability and consistency, routines in the face of normal disruption (company, travel, special events) are vital.

“Self-regulation” “building blocks”:

1.  Helping the child recognize his own feelings, esp. if he has been invested in concealing them for the sake of safety.

2.  Managing arousal so as not to freak out when bad things happen in spite of all efforts.  Skill in describing, using strategies, referring to role models even if they are fiction.

3.  Sharing emotion.  Learning how to communicate how one feels.

Three “competency” targets, though there are more.

1.  Since “executive functions” and “problem-solving” may have been suppressed and punished, they can be restored and expanded by building a sense of personal agency and seeing that their actions have appreciated value.

2.  Growing a sense of self in spite of the probably accurate scientific understanding of a “self” as a constantly changing and re-gathering of elements is no small task.  Normally it is supported by a family identity, a sense of community belonging, and close sympathetic attention from one special person, but it can be fragile, shattered, or armored by trauma.  One needs role models, friendships, experiences, and a steady stream of small successes.

3.  This particular item is for the clinician presented with a problem kid:  be sure to consider across a range of domains and developmental levels.  It would be easy to miss something.

The claim is that this approach to what the animal humanitarians call “finding one’s forever home” does work well enough to keep doing it and getting better at it.

A barnacle gosling leaps into the world from the cliff nest.

Now the swerve:  attachment theory is not romantic.  It's not about pity and cuddling.  It is biological, survival-based, often ending in death, blindly choosing who will live.  Those who live will build the future and then survive in it, or be the victims of it.

http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20141020-chicks-tumble-of-terror-filmed

This video is as vivid a metaphor for a human child entering the world as I can think of — and I can hardly stop thinking of it, both the danger and the courage, and then the incredible miracle of 3 out of 5 surviving it.  But this is a “best case” scenario in that both parents are there to meet that gosling, which is as literally resilient as any animal can possibly be.  

This is entirely opposite to the idea that a baby must be guarded in a soft pastel environment and played Mozart to develop his or her brain.  It is entirely against the idea that everyone can fight through life with universal success when we know it is full of desperate events and very hard bumps.  Just trying is no guarantee.  No one can dominate life events.  Only survive them: consider the Roosevelts, even Teddy. 

The gosling’s sib who ended crumpled on the stony cliffs is the little boy washed up on the beach after being dumped out of his previous niche.  Both the victim and the surviving little gosling were so attached by instinct to parents that they staggered off after them into the unknown, only three days after hatching and immediately after taking an epic leap/fall.  Lots of other creatures like to eat little goslings; for instance foxes, which have learned to listen for the loud encouragement of the parents as an invitation to eat at least crippled and dead goslings — maybe nab a live one, nicely warm and squeaking.

These geese are shoreline creatures who can eat shelly seawater dwellers, swallowing them whole and crushing them in their gizzards.  How a little chick manages to do anything of the sort is a mystery.  Maybe something like a child managing to survive in a drug household, swiping left-over munchies in the morning-after chaos of unconscious addicts.  Even a toddler can attach, forage, and learn to be engaging — or invisible.  But it’s tough to even know they exist, much less help them.  Once they are found, often dead but sometimes only badly traumatized, ARC has ideas about how to help.