Secure Attachment as Adults
As adults, we can often be so busy with parenting, work, caring for our parents, that we neglect to nourish ourselves - physically, mentally, and emotionally.
Our childhood attachment experiences influence how we respond to our own needs as adults
How we treat ourselves can stem from our attachment experiences as infants and children.
This includes:
1) our ability to notice when we are not coping, and
2) our response to our own emotional needs i.e., are we insensitive to our needs or do we pay attention to what we are needing and respond appropriately?
Whether we ‘respond to self’ or ‘turn away from self’ is heavily influenced by what was or was not taught to us by our primary attachment figures.
Understanding our attachment experiences assist us to work towards healing our past attachment wounds.
Essentially, our ‘Attachment Style’ is formed in response to the emotional quality of the relationship provided to us by our primary caregivers. We know that early attachment experiences strongly influence human development in many key areas, including how our brains and immune systems develop, how we learn to self-regulate in response to both pleasant and unpleasant events, how we learn to experience and communicate our emotions (and needs). As adults our attachment experiences inform our perception and understanding of relationships and this heavily influences how we are likely to feel and behave in relationships, why we choose the partners we choose (and/or why we choose emotional distance from others). Our early attachment experiences also influence how well we treat ourselves as adults.
Although our early attachment experiences do not necessarily have to define us, they set us up with a ‘template for relating’ to Self and Others, which ultimately becomes either an asset or risk factor in terms of our ability to cope with stress. We now know from decades of research that early attachment experiences heavily influence an adult’s susceptibility to mental health difficulties.
As parents there are many reasons why we may struggle to be emotionally present in Secure Attachment ways with our children. For example, if we had a parent who was not responsive to our needs (was not Secure in their attachment style), or who may have punished us for having certain emotions, we may struggle with knowing how to be Secure in our own Attachment. As a parent, we may have difficulties with emotion regulation or lack insight to our own emotional state and way of interacting with others which can lead us to repeating behaviours similar to what we were exposed to, with our own children.
These emotional reactions and their resulting protective behaviours are an understandable adaptive response to feeling insecure (or unsafe) in an important relationship during a critical stage of our development. When Secure Attachment is not present, one or a combination of the following non-secure attachment styles were likely present for us growing up - anxious, avoidant, or disorganized attachment behaviours.
Fortunately, attachment styles are adaptive behaviours (and can therefore be changed). As adults we can learn to understand and heal from our childhood attachment conditioning to help ourselves recognise that the past is affecting us and to provide ourselves with options (and the permission) to change and replace patterns that are no longer serving us (and may be interfering with us benefitting from having healthy relationships with others).
Healing attachment wounds in therapy
A therapeutic relationship has the potential to be an emotionally corrective relationship because it is the therapist’s job to be ethical, consistent, and to build in security while being fully present for the client. The goal of therapy in offering a secure attachment is for the client to experience a secure relationship, and then take those healthy ways of relating and emotion regulation skills outside into relationships with partners, children, and friends. In therapy, you can uncover ways you may be defending yourself from getting close and being emotionally connected and can work toward forming an “earned Secure Attachment.” This work can also help you to be more kind and connected to yourself, increasing your ability to nurture yourself and meet your own needs in ways that may have been absent growing up. What I love about doing this work as a parent is that our children observe how we treat ourselves and in turn we are providing them with a template for how to be a securely attached and nourished adult.
If you would like to learn more about your attachment style, please contact The Kidd Clinic to enquire about engaging in psychological sessions and feel free to check out some of the resources below.
Attachment Resources
Books
Attached: The New Science of Adult Attachment and How It Can Help YounFind - and Keep - Love by Amir Levine and Rachel Heller.
Training for Parents
Circle of Security (COS) training
An international program designed for parents and carers of children aged 0-12 years who want to strengthen the bonds with their children and would like support to help their children to build secure relationships. There is evidence that parents can in fact positively change a child’s insecure attachment style to ‘secure’ with COS training.
Trish Kennedy will be facilitating COS groups for parents at our clinic soon! You can register your interest for these here
Collaborative and Proactive Solutions (CPS) training: https://www.cpsconnection.com/workshops-and-training
CPS is an evidenced-based model of psychosocial treatment developed by Dr Ross Greene, and described in his books Raising Human Beings, Lost at School, & The Explosive Child (another highly recommended ground-breaking approach to understanding and parenting children who frequently exhibit severe fits of temper and other significantly challenging behaviours).
Rather than focusing on kids’ challenging behaviours (and modifying them), CPS helps kids and caregivers solve the problems that are causing those behaviours. This problem solving is collaborative (vs unilateral) and proactive (vs reactive). Research continues to find that that the model is effective at not only solving problems and improving behaviour but also at enhancing adaptive communication and emotion regulation skills.
For tickets to attend Ross Greene’s Training click here
The Attachment Project: click here
The Attachment Project is a (for profit) organisation that has useful Self-Help information for parents & caregivers (such as the specific link above) to help better understand how the different attachment styles develop in response to specific parenting strategies and styles. Their content is written by psychologists.
However, they offer an Attachment Style ‘quiz’ that is not a reputable diagnostic tool, nor is it empirically validated (if you take this quiz, do so with ‘a grain of salt’). To their credit, the do state “The Attachment Project’s content and courses are for informational and educational purposes only.
