Secure Attachments

Note: This article was first published in Life in the Delta in January 2007.

One of the best kept secrets, I believe, in the field of psycho-therapy, is “attachment theory.” Almost every conference I attend or professional magazine I receive talks about its importance. Yet few people in the general public are familiar with the term. I think if people understood it, they might understand much of their own behavior in their close relationships. So just what is “attachment theory”?

The theory had its early roots over half a century ago when Rene Spitz noted that babies who were well fed, clothed, and kept warm in an orphanage, but given no emotional attention, holding, or affection, had a syndrome he called “hospitalization.” The babies’ mental development slowed or stopped, and their appetite and weight gain decreased until they eventually lost any interest in interacting and often they died. Later the work of John Bowlby, Mary Ainsworth, and others described and verified by research the attachment process – that infants come into the world helpless and completely dependent on their parents. An “attachment figure” (usually one or both parents) thus needs to provide comfort and security from which the child will develop a secure attachment to them and a subsequent healthy sense of self in the world. Positive attachment creates a secure base from which children learn to explore their world and a safe haven to which they can retreat from the stress of the outside world. If there is an attentive, loving responsiveness of caregivers in the first few years of life, they become securely attached and develop a sense of basic trust. Without a secure attachment, they can become either anxious or avoidant. Anxious children are constantly seeking the safety of their attachment figures. Eventually if they cannot get the attention they need from their attachment figure, then they give up and stop seeking relationship altogether. People then carry these relationship styles with them into all future relationships.

A positive goal in life would be to transition to God as the ultimate attachment figure. This can come about naturally if people have experienced healthy attachments. However, if people have attachment wounds, these can follow them through life and affect their abilities to have satisfactory relationships and maybe even be passed on to their children. Or insecure people can eventually grapple with their attachment wounds and seek help and receive healing.

The good news is that attachment wounds can be healed. As stated previously, children come into the world needy and dependent on their parents. If their parents have their own problems and cannot adequately be tuned in and responsive to the child’s emotional needs as a result, then the child has to conclude “something must be wrong with me.” To think otherwise is life threatening – i.e., a child cannot just leave and find a new family. But in actuality, something is wrong with the parent, not the child. Healing can usually come after realizing and correcting these distorted beliefs and agreeing and accepting that each of us has innate value and worth on our own. Then we no longer have to struggle with insecurity. We can go out into the world and enjoy being the person we were created to be. We can enjoy close relationships without either being dependent on another person for our security or giving up totally and avoiding close relationships.

Because of the importance of secure attachments for setting children on the right emotional path for life, parenting can be a daunting task. Therefore, I plan to focus my articles throughout the coming year on how to help give children these secure attachments at each stage of their development, beginning with infants and extending to the teenage years.