How Your Attachment Patterns Sabotage Your Happiness (and How to Break Free)
If you struggle with feelings of depression, flatness, anxiety, anger, or other unpleasant symptoms, you have your attachment system to blame. Attachment is an innate, unconscious system that tells you from infancy, that you must stay close to your your parents because you need them to protect you from physical danger, illness and overwhelming emotional distress (Bowlby 1988). This is what makes little kids cling to their moms in public places. They just know, “Mom keeps me alive.” This isn’t learned behavior; it’s more like an instinct. It gets “turned on” in response to real or perceived threats to your survival and well-being, such as when you’re tired, hungry, or frightened, or separated from your parents.
The most effective way to make sense of why you feel bad or stuck is through the lens of attachment theory. This means that your experience of being in the world now is largely a result of the way your parents responded to your needs as a child. Do you mean that what I struggle with as a 40-year old is the result of my childhood? I haven’t outgrown that stuff?
Yes, you are experiencing your childhood over and over again, all the time. You just don’t know it.
What does my mother have to do with it?
While your attachment system governed your behavior as an infant and child, your mother had her own biological system, called the care-giving system, that encouraged her to respond to your care-seeking/attachment cues with the comfort and care you needed. However, this doesn’t mean that she did that enough of the time. The care-giving system is easily overridden by the mother’s own emotional distress and preoccupations that overwhelm her because of her own negative attachment experiences from her upbringing. These haunt her in the same way yours haunt you today.
This is how attachment trauma gets passed down through generations.
For example, one mother might hold her three-year old daughter’s hand and patiently guide her across the street, while another one walks briskly, with her daughter behind her, struggling to keep up. Both mothers are responding to their daughter’s care-seeking behaviors, but in very different ways: The first mother behaves in a responsive and protective manner, while the second one is too preoccupied with her own internal experience to either notice her daughter’s attachment cues and respond protectively. Imagine how different each of these little girls feels, about her mother and herself.
Now consider this: In one study, infants whose mothers responded promptly to their cries cried much less at the end of one year than the infants who whose cries were ignored (Bowlby 1988, 49). How come? Because the infants whose mothers swiftly attended to them developed an internal voice that told them, “When I need my mother. She will come, and I’ll be OK.” As that sense became stronger with repetition, their experience of being alone in bed became less scary. These babies were less fearful of being alone, because they knew they weren’t really alone: Someone was available to give them the care they needed. As a result, with similar continued care, they would go on to develop a view of others as available when needed, and of themselves as lovable and worthy of care.
On the other hand, the infants whose cries were ignored had a totally different experience. They cried more. For them, being left in bed became increasingly terrifying. These infants were left alone and helpless, forced to manage a level of fear that is intolerable at that age. As a consequence, in the absence of a real shift in their caregiving environment, they would go on to develop a view of others as uninterested in caring for them, and themselves as unlovable and unworthy of care.
These are called attachment patterns.
The infant inside of you
There’s an infant inside of you that likely didn’t get what that baby needed enough of the time. So, now, when you’re in distress – from feeling alone, or upset, or vulnerable – that baby gets activated, and you need comfort that you don’t know how to get. You’ve found ways to manage it, but those adaptations eventually fail.
That’s when you go to therapy, and we have an opportunity to make sense of these experiences and the change your attachment patterns. Therapy is where you develop the internal strength to manage distress without resorting to behaviors and people that reinforce the view that you’re fundamentally not good enough.
Attachment is the key
This is what attachment is about: During the most formative years of your life, you’re completely dependent on others to keep you safe. When they fail in repeated, significant ways, it leaves you feeling unprotected – too vulnerable to feel safe in your own skin. This deeply affects your personality and experience of being alive. The result is some combination of anxiety, depression and unhealthy ways of managing overwhelming emotions. Without intervention, these symptoms persist throughout your entire life (Bowlby 1988, 124), and wreak havoc on every aspect of you and your relationships.
Understanding attachment is important, but individual therapy is the only way to change these problematic attachment patterns. Learn more about Dr. Agree’s focus on attachment in therapy. CONTACT US today to make an appointment with Dr. Agree or one of her excellent therapists.
References
Bowlby, J. 1988. A secure base: Parent-child attachment and healthy human development. London, England: Routledge