attachment and safety in relationships
As psychiatrist and trauma expert Bessel van der Kolk states in his acclaimed book, The Body Keeps the Score: brain, mind, and body in the healing of trauma (2015), “children have a biological instinct to attach. They have no choice. Whether their parents or caregivers are loving and caring or distant, insensitive, rejecting, or abusive, children will develop a coping style based on their attempt to get at least some of their needs met.” He furthers that a person’s need to attach never diminishes throughout life. Human beings are wired for connection and cannot handle separation from others for too long. Those who struggle to make positive connections with others will still find a way to connect through feuding with others or experiencing illnesses. As we are a relationally dependent species, any connection - even negative - is better than isolation and disengagement.
John Bowlby was one of the first psychiatrists to study the attachment between a child and their primary caregiver. He observed that children are sensitive and responsive to changes in facial expression, tone of voice, physiological changes, posture, and movement. He attributed this phenomenon to evolution, as children are naturally helpless and vulnerable to threats and their attunement to their caregivers is necessary for their survival. Furthermore, mirror neurons - the links in our brain that bolster our ability to empathize - begin engaging as soon as babies are born. Newborn babies are able to mimic the actions of those close in their view automatically. Human beings are wired to absorb and reflect the behavior of those around us.
Children become attached to one primary caregiver and this relationship defines their communication and relationship schema. Children with responsive caregivers secure healthy attachment styles, and this is reflected in the success of a child’s continuing relationships. Bowlby found that this strong attachment offered children a secure base from which they could safely explore and unfold into the world. From such a secure base, children are able to find self-reliance and trust themselves and others appropriately. They are able to flow “in sync” with the environments around them, which helps them to self-regulate, feel empathy for others, and find deeper awareness within themselves. This creates a feedback loop that fosters self-esteem and affords them to have success, as they are able to have the positive relationships necessary to work with others to meet their needs and reach goals. Unfortunately, children with early childhood trauma are not set up to experience the world this way.
Psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott, the father of the idea of attunement, found that if a caregiver is unable to attune to their child and meet their needs, the child needs to adapt to the caregiver. “The baby learns to become the mother’s idea of what the baby is.” The child learns to deny their own feelings, impulses, desires, needs in order to meet their caregiver’s needs. The disorienting result of this dynamic is that the child begins to believe there is something wrong with them, decreasing their self-esteem and worth. Lacking their own internal locus of control, they are unable to assess what makes them feel good and bad, how their behavior impacts others, and establish a sense of agency. Lacking this internal awareness, they struggle to appropriately read clues and screen for dangerous or disingenuous people appropriately. Additionally, traumatized children are hypervigilant in response to stimuli around them. Many are highly sensitive and respond to changes in faces and voices as threats when no threat is there, instead of using these cues as helpful information to sync and adjust to their environment.
The Strange Situation was a research tool developed by Mary Ainsworth and Mary Main to assess how infants respond to a temporary separation from their mother. The researchers found that children with secure attachments were upset and stressed when their mothers went away but relieved and happy when she returned. The mother was able to soothe the child and the child was able to begin playing again. However, they noticed two other groups of children who were not as easily soothed. They found that children whose caregivers are unresponsive or dismissive learn to handle their anxiety by either 1) becoming more upset and demanding or 2) becoming more apathetic and withdrawn.
In the “avoidant attachment” style, infants appear unbothered by their mother coming and going, and in fact they will ignore the mother at times. Although they appear unaffected emotionally on the surface, their physiology indicates a state of hyperarousal with an elevated heart rate. The researchers found that the mothers did not enjoy holding their children and did not engage in expressive back and forth interactions with the child.
In the “anxious/ambivalent attachment” style, the infants were in a state of high distress, crying, clinging, and screaming when the mother went away. However, the infants did not feel comforted when the mother returned and did not enjoy being with her. Despite this, they kept their focus on her even when other children were playing. Although these infants experienced a lack of emotional closeness and attunement with their mothers, both of these groups were able to adapt to maintain the relationship.
Another group, the “disorganized attachment” style, is less able to function within the attachment with their caregiver. Their caregiver is a means of survival for them but also a source of serious fear. When their mothers return from the brief separation, the children look away in fear, but also feel the need to reestablish connection. The resulting disorganized energy may manifest in a child rocking on her hands and knees or going into a trance. These children constantly feel unsafe and consequently have trouble self regulating their impulses and moods. As they grow, many disorganized infants become aggressive, dissociated, have more psychiatric issues, as well as experience physiological issues such as heart rate variability, elevated stress hormone levels, and a lower immune system.
Knowing how the body responds to perceptions of fear is important when interacting with any person, but particularly with a trauma survivor. When the limbic system hijacks the functioning of the prefrontal cortex, a person is less able to think with full capacity. A person likely will not be able to communicate appropriately to another in critical moments. The most important tactic with a trauma survivor is to establish safety and trust, yet knowing this biology is key for any relationship. With regard to culture, it is helpful to be aware of how trauma interacts within a larger system of poverty. In communities where there is more violence, less resources, familial instability, and a general environment of insecurity and lack of safety, there are higher rates of trauma and insecure/disorganized attachment styles. Safety and attunement between people is everything in a relationship, and being aware of these considerations will enable more relationship success.
References
Van der Kolk, B. (2015). Getting on the Same Wavelength: Attachment and Attunement. The Body Keeps the Score: brain, mind and body in the healing of trauma (pp. 107-124). Penguin Books.