© 2021 Robert W McBride, LCSW
When attachment grows up—
for better or for worse
Investigations in attachment theory have taught us that destructive and self-defeating adults are the result of their childhood environment, which dictated to the child how to survive.
Most of the people with insecure attachment strategies disclosed experiencing trauma in childhood.
Here trauma is limited to the family of origin experience of the child unless otherwise described.
Trauma here refers to the physical, sexual, and psychological abuse or neglect, abandonment, or loss experienced by the child of their caregivers.
Most of these families did not come to the attention of any public agency.
There was no intervention that may have made a positive difference.
The childhood environment was a distortion of the larger environment.
The resulting behavior was often unusual or maladaptive.
Survival becomes a struggle.
We continue here with our brief description of the comparative categories of child attachment strategy and resulting adult attachment strategy.
3. How an ambivalent strategy grows into a preoccupied strategy-—
Children with ambivalent strategies—
Researchers describe the ambivalent child as almost constantly requesting contact with the caregiver, although resisting contact when offered and fail to be comforted.
They are distrustful yet needy and angry.
These children tend to develop inflexible behavior strategies for dealing with moderately stressful situations.
“They develop maximizing attachment behaviors, because they are fearful of the caregiver's potential inaccessibility” reports Main (1986, 1990).
Caregivers tend to be inconsistently available so that the care giving is unreliable and ineffective.
Caregivers may be unpredictable and insensitive causing the child to find it difficult to attain closeness in any dependable manner.
Adult with preoccupied strategies—
Preoccupied adults maximize attachment strategy and appear preoccupied and entangled by attachment relationships.
They tend to be confused, angry, and non-collaborative about attachment figures and lack the objectivity to move beyond their preoccupation (Main, 1996).
These people often describe an unloving family of origin that lack nurturing, understanding, reasonableness.
They are often stuck in their distress and dissatisfaction over the way they were treat by early caregivers.
Persons with a preoccupied attachment strategy tend to spend a great deal of time actively controlling others so they are available for them.
They seem needy and clingy toward the relationship but also emotionally unavailable.
They also tend to distrust all relationships, especially intimate ones and blame their partners for the problems and dissatisfaction in their life.
They often take little responsibility for their lives and they are frequently vocal about their troubles being caused by others—co-workers, bosses, polices, or parents.
They tend to be angry and punishing toward others but try to hold on to relationships even when dissatisfied with them.
George is representative of the preoccupied attachment strategy
George had limited memory his family of origin or childhood.
His only sibling was a brother twelve years older.
George felt his mother was unfair, punishing and was seldom loving toward him.
He praised his mother for making a home for him and doing her best to raise him until she died he was twelve. He never remembered his mother being sober.
The night she died, she had drunk a substantial amount of whiskey.
He described his recurring memory of how she died.
He reported having tremendous guilt over her death.
He claimed being responsibility for her death and blamed himself because he knew no life saving techniques and he was unable to get rescue help fast enough.
He spoke little of his father who he hated.
His father lived in another state and never showed any interest nor any love toward him.
He claimed to have often been abused as a child.
He felt both his parents were unavailable to him.
No one looked at schoolwork, attended school meetings or activities and seldom spoke to him.
No matter what he did, he could not gain favorable attention from either parent.
He remembered in his eleventh year, his mother and her sister used him for sex and continued the practice until she died.
Because his father lived in another state, custody was given to his older brother who treated him badly and physically abused him.
He went to school sporadically for awhile; earned money playing pool and stealing; stole all his clothing and most of his food; slept on pool tables, at friend's homes, and in parks; and began using alcohol and drugs before he was fourteen.
He used and abused girls his age and much older women who had taken him in.
He began a trade in his late teens and married in his mid-twenties because she was pregnant.
George had multiple arrests for his abuse of alcohol and violence.
He talked about how well he was doing in his trade and how good his relationship was with his wife and five children.
He was again arrested and convicted for drunkenness, assaulting his wife and a police officer.
Sentenced to two years in jail, he was released after serving sixty days on the condition he enter a high-risk offender treatment program for two years.
George began to realized how angry he was toward his mother for not only sexually abusing him but for dying of alcoholism and leaving him afraid and alone to fend for himself.
While trying to resolve the issue of his mother's death, he contacted his father.
During discussions with his father he discovered his mother had committed suicide by taking large amounts of barbiturates and whiskey.
Neither George nor anyone else could have saved her.
At age thirty-eight, he realized that for twenty-six years, he had guilt, anguish, and anger about an event for which he had never before known the truth.
He had lived his life angry with self doubt and was always unclear and confused about events.
4. How disorganized-disoriented strategy grows into unresolved-disorganized strategy.
Children with disorganized-disoriented strategies—
Disorganized-disoriented children lack a coherent attachment strategy toward caregiver.
Disorganized children develop a controlling, role reversing response patterns by being either punitive or care giving with the parents.
Disorganized children are most at risk for mental disorders.
School children with disruptive, aggressive, and dissociative behaviors have been associated with disorganized attachment status earlier in their lives.
A large “majority of maltreated children have been found to be disorganized” states Mary Main (1996).
The caregiver of a disorganized-disoriented child tend to be unpredictable, rejecting, frightening and out of control.
The caregiver's behavior creates fear and anxiety for the child when requesting attention, protection and nurturing.
Adult with unresolved-disorganized strategies—
Unresolved-disorganized adults manifest irrational thoughts about trauma and loss, unfounded fear, unfounded guilt, continuing disbelief and disorganization.
Those who exhibit a unresolved-disorganized strategy of attachment tend to be more socially isolated than other people.
If they discuss their family of origin, the description of people and events, usually, are vague.
Commonly, their families of origin were unpredictable, abusive or violent, and/or alcohol and drug dependent. They may have no intimate relationship and are without much idea about how to go about beginning a new relationship if they wanted to.
They also tend to distrust all relationships.
Many seem depressed and with a suicidal ideation.
Mary is representative of the unresolved-disorganized strategy
She never revealed much about her family of origin other than her parent used drugs and there was a lot of fighting going on in the family.
Mary was apparently an only child, was raised by her mother.
She never knew her father or any other relatives.
Her mother was drug addicted and an alcoholic.
Mary's mother had a series of drug addicted, alcoholic boyfriends some who occasionally lived with her.
A couple of the mother's boyfriends beat her “just for the fun of it.”
One of the boyfriends sexually molested her until he left after Mary cut and stabbed him with a knife.
Mary remembered little else of her childhood.
What she did report of her childhood was general information—having a loving mother, life was boring, and she could do what every she wanted because no one cared what she did.
She watched television a lot and roamed the streets with other young people.
She was using alcohol and drugs with the other children before she was a teen.
At seventeen, she came home one night after being gone for several days and found her mother's bloated body on the floor. She had finally drunk herself to death.
By eighteen, Mary had a child.
The relationship failed shortly after the child's birth.
She started another relationship and had another child.
This relationship ended in less than four years.
In both relationships, she continued to drink and drug, obtained low paying temporary jobs when she worked. On the job, she often fought with co-workers.
She saw herself as incompetent and without much value.
She denied and minimized her behaviors and problems.
She refused see herself as a person with abusive, violent, and criminal behavior.
She was emotionally closed down and volatile when she lost her composure.
Attachment behavior does not disappear with childhood.
It persists throughout a lifetime.
A child’s early experiences lend to his or her adult character or personality traits.
For the most part, that character remains stable and persistent.
Events throughout life can alter a person’s attachment pattern in subsequent years—for better or for worse. Therapy and other interventions can make a difference for the better.
The earlier and more effective the intervention, the better chances children have to lead healthy and happy lives.
Over time, existing attachment becomes progressively more difficult to change.
Important adults in the lives of children have a responsibility to educate themselves on the subject and they can subtly and effectively intervene.
The real hope, however, lies in community education rather than in remediation.
Early in life, a child’s attachment process is flexible.
That process, however, becomes less flexible as the child grows.
The attachment process is a vital part of a person’s life—how he or she thinks, feels, and behaves.
It is important to comprehend the attachment process so healthy adults can intervene while there is still opportunity.
The more we learn, the better we can assist children in developing more secure attachment processes—a gift that spans their lifetimes.
References:
Bowlby, J. (1982). Attachment and Loss, Vol. I, Attachment (2nd ed.). New York: Basic Book, Inc.
Main, Mary. (1996). Introduction to the Special Section on Attachment and Psychopathology: 2. Overview of the Field of Attachment. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology. Vol. 64. No 2, 237-343.
McBride, R. (2001). Breaking the Cycle. Colorado: Gylantic Publishing.
Our next article concerns Developing Pesonality Characteristics that are rigid and tend to be inflexable.