By Paul Renn
Attachment theory may be considered a theory of emotion regulation. The
mechanism of transmitting attachment organization and, thereby, a characteristic
style of regulating affect, lies in the particular quality of the person’s early
care-giving experience. Subtle fine-grain interactive micro-behaviours are
related to attachment and to the transmission of emotion from one generation to
the next. Such micro-behaviours operate at the level of implicit relational
knowing and include the co-ordination of gaze direction, vocal inflections, body
posture, touch, and facial expressions. The infant perceives and remembers the
caregiver’s repetitive subtle behaviours in the form of pre-symbolic
interactional expectancies. This pre-verbal intersubjective process ‘instructs’
the infant into the logic of being and relating and is experienced as a
phenomenological form of knowledge conceptualized as unformulated experience.
Thus, the cumulative impact of parent-child interactions that are consistently
matched or mismatched creates a structuring effect on the infant for good or
ill. In later life the person generalises these interactional expectancies to
other interpersonal contexts.
The Adult Attachment Interview (AAI) is of relevance to this debate. The AAI
assesses and classifies adult mental representations of childhood attachment
experiences and was designed to operationalize Bowlby’s construct of the
internal working model as a “state of mind with respect to attachment”. Such
mental states are expressed in different discourse patterns about early
relationships. These discrete narrative styles reveal differences in the
person’s access to attachment memories and his or her ability to coherently
discuss past attachment experiences. Four patterns of adult discourse in the AAI
have been observed: secure-autonomous, dismissing, preoccupied and unresolved.
As the following illustrates, the caregiver’s AAI classification has been linked
to the child’s predominant pattern of attachment.
Secure-Autonomous Caregivers: A meta-analysis of research findings show that
caregivers who have a secure-autonomous adult attachment style are capable of a
wide range of emotional experience and expression and thus are skilled emotion
regulators. This means that they are able to observe their child’s distress
without becoming overly aroused because of experiencing vicarious personal
distress associated with their own attachment histories. This leaves the secure
caregiver free to respond to the infant’s emotional distress in a flexible and
appropriate manner, thereby repairing normal interactive ruptures to the
attachment bond in a relatively consistent way. The child, in turn, develops a
matching secure pattern of attachment organization and a free and flexible style
of emotion regulation. The provision of secure base/safe haven functioning by
the parent facilitates the child’s exploration of his or her external
environment and inner world of emotional experience. Research has demonstrated
that secure attachment established in childhood perseveres and extends into
adulthood.
Dismissing Caregivers: In contrast to secure parents, caregivers with a
predominantly dismissing attachment style are restricted in the emotions they
are able to express to others, and of which they are conscious in themselves.
Their infant’s distress activates personal distress characterized by an aversive
emotional reaction and an attempt to assuage vicariously induced stress. In
consequence, dismissing caregivers ignore, or turn away from regulating, their
infant’s stress and, instead, focus on managing their own emotional conflicts.
To avoid rejection, the child minimizes expressions of need and vulnerability
and becomes disconnected from his or her emotional states. Thus, the child tends
to match the caregiver’s dismissing state of mind by developing a predominantly
avoidant pattern of attachment, together with a dismissing and restricted style
of regulating emotion. Children classified as avoidant have been found to show a
marked lack of empathy towards peers in distress and to behave in aggressive and
hostile ways.
Preoccupied Caregivers: Parents with preoccupied states of mind in respect of
attachment are considered to have an under-controlled emotion regulation system,
as manifested by an exaggerated style of emotion regulation and by attempts to
heighten or maximize their emotional experience. Because of the attachment need
to have their infant emotionally dependent on themselves, preoccupied caregivers
focus on the infant’s negative feelings to the exclusion of helping the child
regulate his or her emotions. Thus, although preoccupied-enmeshed caregivers may
appear to respond in a sensitive way, they do not act quickly or appropriately
to end the infant’s distress. As with dismissing parents, they are unable to
allow the needs of the distressed child to take precedence over their own needs.
The failure to provide appropriate and consistent soothing serves to keep the
infant intensely focused on the attachment relationship, thereby reducing the
chances of the child becoming emotionally independent of the caregiver. In such
infant-caregiver dyads, the child is likely to develop a matching
ambivalent-resistant pattern of attachment organization and a style of
regulating emotion that is preoccupied and under-regulated, particularly in
respect of anger.
Unresolved Caregivers: With respect to disorganized/disoriented attachment,
findings indicate that infants develop this pattern in reaction to caregivers
who display frightened and/or frightening behaviour associated with their own
unresolved early trauma. Such fear-inducing parental behaviour may consist
either of abuse or alternating forms of care-giving wherein emotional
availability is followed by an abrupt entrance into dissociative, trance-like
states that may be activated by the child’s distress and need of comfort. In
effect, the unresolved caregiver’s mental states take precedence over the
infant’s attachment communications and initiatives. Moreover, because of their
own unintegrated fear, unresolved caregivers may perceive the child as a source
of alarm. The child, in turn, comes to associate his or her own fearful arousal
as a danger signal for abuse or abandonment by the caregiver.
A relational context in which the attachment figure is, at one and the same
time, the source of alarm and the source of its solution presents the infant
with an irresolvable paradox: fear of the parent activates the attachment
behavioural system compelling the infant to seek proximity to the attachment
figure, but proximity-seeking has the effect of increasing the child’s state of
fear. This paradox of ‘fright without solution’ results in a collapse of
behavioural and attentional strategies which is manifested as odd, disoriented
approach-avoidance conflict behaviours. A distinct aspect of this behaviour
consists of simultaneous and contradictory tendencies to approach and flee from
the attachment figure.
In a caregiving-attachment system of this kind, the child’s attachment system
remains in a state of high activation and he or she fails to develop a coherent,
organized strategy for coping with the stress of separation. Since there is no
physical escape from this traumatizing situation the infant shifts from a state
of hyper-arousal and angry protest to a state of despair, followed by emotional
detachment and dissociation, thereby matching the caregiver’s dissociated state.
Findings show that a child may be classified as disorganized with one parent but
not with the other. This supports the view that attachment disorganization
emerges within a particular relationship and is transmitted at an interpersonal
level.
Attachment research, then, indicates that parents’ internal working models of
attachment are transmitted to the growing child and powerfully influence his or
her working models of attachment. These, in turn, mediate all subsequent
relationships, particularly those forged with intimate, sexual partners in
adulthood. Research also shows that older children and adults continue to
monitor the accessibility and emotional responsiveness of those with whom they
have formed a meaningful emotional attachment. The person seeks to maintain an
optimal degree of proximity to his or her attachment figure throughout the life
cycle in order to sustain feelings of security.
Choice of adult romantic partner is one of the most significant mechanisms by
which attachment patterns and early affectional ties are externalized and
maintained, particularly in instances of unmourned loss. This finding is
supported by clinical experience and observation, most directly in work with
couples. Here, a certain fit or match may be discerned in the respective
partners’ early insecure attachment histories, with implicitly encoded
maladaptive interpersonal patterns being externalized and destructively played
out in their current emotional and sexual relationships.
Indeed, preliminary findings provide compelling evidence that attachment
strategies formed in infancy influence the playing out of the sexual system in
adult romantic relationships. Hyperactive strategies include preoccupied,
intrusive and coercive attempts to persuade a partner to have sex. The
preoccupied person is hyper-vigilant of a partner’s signs of arousal, attraction
and rejection, coupled with heightened arousal about her or his own ability to
gratify and hold on to a partner. By contrast, deactivating strategies are
characterised by inhibition of sexual desire and avoidance of sexual contact, or
by a shallow cynical approach that divorces sex from kindness and intimacy and
disparages the partner. Thus, in broad terms secure attachment tilts sexuality
towards more successful, less conflictual solutions, while anxious ambivalent
attachment or avoidant/dismissing strategies tilt the patterns of sexuality
towards less successful, more conflictual solutions.
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