Attachment - · PDF fileAttachment Tony White Transactional Analyst ... For example these men can complain of labour pains, ... This is known as Couvade

AttachmentTony White

Transactional AnalystMonday, 8 March 2010

The attachment diagramHave you ever noticed how sometimes someone who you know quite well seems different when they are with their partner. Its almost like they have a different personality. Well they do actually.

Couvade syndrome. Research shows that 11% of all expectant fathers exhibit symptoms during the wife’s pregnancy which are of a similar nature to the symptoms of pregnancy. These symptoms have no physical basis but are psychologically caused. For example these men can complain of labour pains, pressure sensation in the pelvis, nausea and vomiting, tightness in the abdomen, mood swings, variations in appetite and so forth. This is known as Couvade syndrome.

There are many explanations for the “sympathy pregnancy” and there may be different causes for different men but one group has been identified. These are men who come from backgrounds where they were overly attached to their mothers. They had a very strong psychological symbiosis with their mother. Consequently they became overly attached to their wives to such a degree that they would experience the same physical symptoms as her.

This is known as an attachment problem. In this case the man is overly attached and his identity or sense of self is excessively fused or confused with mother’s.

In any relationship there are actually 3 people and not 2, see the diagram below:

There are the two individuals who have a sense of self (individuality) and thus they will have their own personality. If these two people spend time together and begin to relate in an emotionally intimate way then they will begin to form an attachment or bond. When this happens their personal boundaries or sense of self starts to get confused with the other person. There is a merging of identities and then one has a sense of being psychologically attached to the other. This then forms the third personality in the relationship.

Usually this third self is not all that dissimilar to the individual selves. However sometimes they are. So if you know a person in the work place you will be seeing them in the individual self. If you then happen to see them with their partner you will see them in their relationship self. If that relationship self has a different personality then the person will seem quite different than when you knew them at work.

Attachment and introjectionWhen I first presented the attachment diagram in 1986 I thought I would have difficulty selling the topic.

As mentioned above I talk about attachment involving two people when:Their sense of self gets confused with the other personThey have a merging of identities

What do these statements actually mean? However I have been pleasantly surprised that I have never had trouble communicating the concepts. I can not recall anyone over the years saying that they don’t get it. People seem to grasp the concept easily and I imagine can relate to it personally and thus they understand the idea.

Fortunately over the years there has been much written about the psychological process of introjection and one can use this to understand what this ‘merging’ of identities means. When any two people spend time together they will tend to introject each other. The more emotionally laden and intimate the relationship is

the more introjection will occur.

Introjection is where you ‘swallow’ or take in the characteristics and attitudes of another person. They literally become part of you, your personality and your sense of identity. Hence we have an explanation for the merging identities that occurs in the attachment process. One could say that in the attachment process introjection can play a pivotal role.

Carl Jung was big on this idea when he discussed the anima and the animus. He suggests that when a husband and wife live together over time the husband will begin to evolve his anima or feminine side and the wife will develop an animus or masculine side of her personality. They do this by the same attachment and introjection process. Jung goes onto say that it is indeed by the husband’s development of his feminine side (anima) that he can now understand his wife at a more deeper level. He can understand her mind because he has incorporated part of it into himself. And so forth the other way as well.

Hence we have Freud’s explanation of suicide. If a son introjects his mother as they all do and then he feels great animosity to her, then he can kill her by killing the introjection of her in himself. Hence we have a murderous and suicidal act in one. Freud would however pose that it is more and act of murder than suicide.

Attachment and proximityThis comes from John Bowlby in his widely known book “Attachment”. He states:

During infancy and childhood the responsibility for maintaining proximity between mother and child shifts progressively from mother to the youngster. Initially the infant’s attachment behaviour is absent or very inefficient. He is not strong enough to grip and when he gets mobile he may stray recklessly far. At this stage the maintenance of proximity is achieved by mother. This stage usually lasts until the child is six months of age or maybe a bit older.

After this the infant may display a strong tendency to maintain proximity to mother but his competency to do so is consistently low. He will explore but with little discrimination or judgement so he may range unacceptably far or in a dangerous way. In this phase proximity is maintained by the mother as much as by the infant, or even more than by the infant. This phase continues until about the end of the third year.

It is up to mother to make sure the infant does not get lost.

The balance then shifts. The infant’s attachment behaviour is much more efficient and its assessment of danger much better. Proximity is maintained by him as much as by mother. Indeed at this stage mother may even encourage him to stray further. This phase can last a number of years and in modern society the child is usually not allowed by it self for extended periods of time until it is at the least 10 years of age.

After this in the final stage mother increasingly leaves the maintenance of proximity up to the juvenile, so she plays an increasingly minor role.

As you can see the concepts of human attachment and separation are intimately intertwined with the idea of proximity. Indeed that is how they are defined. In the original psychological definition proximity was the core part of an attachment. The more one feels the need to maintain geographical proximity to another the more attachment they have with the other.

It would seem that over time the word and concept of attachment have become widely used in the general population. As one would expect this has resulted in the definition being altered. Some now use the term attachment when the desire to maintain proximity has become much less important. People can have an attachment to another and not have a strong urge to seek them out and maintain proximity. This is a significant departure from the original definition of an attachment.

Internet attachmentOne way in which the concept has changed over time is with the idea of internet attachments. That is two people who have communicated extensively by email, web logs, Facebook , Skype and so on can report a significant level of closeness or attachment to each other. These people have never met face to face and thus there is no geographical proximity at all. According to the original definition of attachment there is none as there is no desire to maintain such proximity.

To say that one can ‘love’ another person whom they have never met and only emailed would seem not possible. That degree of emotion could not be engendered just by email contact. However people do report such emotions. I have mentioned before perhaps such love or attachment can happen if people make up a fantasy about the other person. Perhaps it is not so much of a fantasy, but the normal human trait of filling in the gaps.

I think it is safe to say that people will fill in the gaps unconsciously. They are not even aware they are doing it. I have a friend who had been emailing a female blogger for some time and finally he met her in person. He told me that one of the first things he noticed was that she had an British accent, he had expected an Australian one. He had filled in the gap about her accent. He felt he knew her more than he did. There would be many, many more gaps he filled in about her without even knowing it. Perhaps this is how internet friends can fall in love, they fill in the gaps so they feel they know the person much more than they actually do.

Why would regular face to face contact be necessary for deeper or stronger attachments?. We hear regularly about non-verbal (Body language) communication, and how this is far more important than any verbal communication. Any connection between two people that includes all the non-verbal cues is going to be far more complete and comprehensive than just written or verbal contact. Obviously internet friends get no non-verbal communication.

Then of course there is physical touch and I do not mean just in the sexual sense. If two people touch then a relationship is taken to a much more robust level than if there is no touching. A mother and son may hug as a means to show they love each other. If that mother and son only ever emailed it is safe to say that the relationship would be far more superficial. There would be less emotional attachment.

However an advantage of internet friends is you can fill in the gaps. If you only know the other person a little bit, you can make up all the other bits exactly how you want them. Perhaps this is the perfect relationship!

Bowlby - The father of attachment theoryIn the 1950s the World Health Realization commissioned a guy called John Bowlby to look into the area of human attachment. After WWII there were a lot of orphaned children and governments set about doing the right thing by housing and feeding them. Over time however it was noticed that in these children there was a ‘failure to thrive’ as it was called. They wanted to know why and hence Bowlby got the job.

He took on this research and produced many documents with the 2 most famous being a book titled “Attachment” and a subsequent one called “Separation” (surprisingly enough). He has since become one of the most influential thinkers in the psychological literature in the past 50 years. His works have had a tremendous influence in the area of human attachment and child rearing practices.

He and his compatriots did lots of experiments like putting a mother and a young child into a room full of toys and then simply observed the movements of the child. The mother would stay stationary in a chair to see what would the child do?. What the child did varied on how secure it was in its attachment with mother. For instance a child with an insecure attachment may never leave mother’s side even to go and look at some interesting toys. (This child is seen as having separation anxiety). Then there was others with insecure attachments who

would simply move away from mother to play with the toys and never return to her for long periods of time. (This is common in the development of the antisocial personality).

Those children with a secure attachment would at first stay near mother and then slowly move out to the toys. The child would regularly look back to see where mother was and ‘touch home base’ every now and then before once again leaving to investigate the toys. This child was developing what is known as object constancy. He is learning that mother (the object) is constant and does not disappear when he moves away from her. Thus he is secure in his attachments.

Baptism - another human attachment style?

However one of the key findings of Bowlby was that when a child develops an attachment then it will seek to maintain a geographical proximity to mother and this is one of the central features of human attachment. When two people attach they will have a very strong drive to be together and to maintain contact.

Of course this has a corollary. If two people have an attachment and they slowly drift apart spending less and less time together then the attachment will diminish. It slowly fades away. The husband and wife who progressively live more and more separate lives can finally separate without intense grief or bereavement because they have spent the last 10 years detaching anyway.

If you see one of your primary attachments disintegrating then you can do things quite out of character and extreme.

Grief monitor scaleIndeed I have used this finding of Bowlby about attachment and the desire for proximity in workshops over the years with an exercise called the Grief monitor scale .

Next to the line on the left one puts the names of people whom if they suddenly died you would have a grief reaction. Put the person one would most grieve for at the top. Then the next person down, and so on. The person at the bottom is going to be the man down the street who you hardly know at all. By doing this one is defining who they are attached to. The more attached, the more grief is experienced if they should die suddenly which is shown by the middle line.

The line on the right is the should scale. Who are the people that you should grieve for at their funeral. What are the societal rules for this. Then compare the line on the left with the one on the right. Are they similar or dissimilar? Thus we end up with a continuum of attachment figures.

Attachment problemsThere are a number of different kinds of attachment problems.

Not enough attachmentThose with not enough attachment resist the urge to enter into the relationship self. They will resist their natural urge to form an attachment or bond with another for what ever reason. They maybe a commitment phobe, they may have fear of emotional closeness, or they might just feel like they are getting trapped and loosing control.

The downside to this is stroke deprivation. A relationship that has a strong bond provides strokes that can touch deep into the psyche. People with only superficial attachments also have a sense of aloneness, obviously. With that can go a whole array of problem such as depression, anxiety and despair. Humans are basically relationship beings and if this ‘need’ is not met then sooner or later the person will suffer some form of emotional distress.

Too much attachmentSometimes at weddings one hears the statement, “this couple will now complete each other”. When you hear someone say, “I feel my husband completes me” that is not a good sign. It means their individual self feels incomplete and thus they seek a relationship to fill the need for completeness and that is not a good way to enter into a relationship. The man with Couvade syndrome is like this. His own sense of self is fragile or weak and then he overly attaches to the wife.

Ambivalent attachmentThese are the people who don’t know if they are coming or going, with the main example being the Borderline personality. In their individual self they feel lost, alone or fragile so they seek out a strong attachment. Once they get it, they don’t want it. It is found to be too claustrophobic or too painful for whatever reason. With the ambivalent attachment the person’s history is marked by a series of unstable relationships that are of the on again, off again variety.

Anxious attachmentThis type of attachment provides the link between anxiety, panic attacks and attachment.

We all have basic feeling systems deep down inside in our character. Some people have an angry character or a sad and melancholic character or a happy character. It is just there all the time in the background and sometimes it comes out into the fore ground.

Some people are of an anxious character. They have a sense of anxiety that pervades in the background. It can be quite mild or it can be quite intense. This varies from person to person. What causes it? Probably we are born with a propensity to a certain feeling state and then how we are raised determines the rest. One way a person can develop an anxious character is because in childhood they had an anxious attachment to a parent.

Consider the separation continuum. Well it is actually half of it. This looks at the various levels at which a child can be emotionally abandoned by mother. It goes from the normal range to complete abandonment. The other half of it, pointing in the other direction goes from the normal range to complete smothering or over protection by mother, but that is another story.

Children who fall on this side of the scale are the ones who have been under protected. Those children who have been forced to stand on their own two feet before they were psychologically ready. Often this child is the oldest child, who is given the responsibility of looking after the younger children before he is psychologically capable. In other cases, some parents have their own personal

problems which restrict them in how much support and nurturing they give to their children. Often these are the parents who are there, whilst not being there. That is the parents who provide physically but not emotionally. This leaves the child feeling emotionally abandoned.

Parents can be physically and psychologically unavailable in varying degrees. The more severe the unavailability, the more damaged is the resultant character feeling in the child. If the parenting is just outside the normal range then the child will develop an angry character. Statements such as, "It's not fair" are common for children in this group. The anger is not of a very severe nature, however the child who is consistently raised in this way, will have an angry character which is basically an attempt at paying back the parents for the perceived mistreatment. A young child had been left by mother who had to go to an appointment. On the mother’s return the child will say things like: “I don’t want you”, “Mummy is naughty” and may even hit out at mummy physically. The child feels angry that it was ‘abandoned’ at least in its eyes. This chastisement by the child of the parent is done so the parents will not do it again. The child is telling the parent off for their neglect.

Developing healthy attachments with children is a hard thing for parents to do

If the unavailability of the parents is more prolonged and pronounced, then the child will become anxious or scared. Some phobias or panic attacks can result from this basic scare which the child feels towards her 'abandonment'. The child begins to realise that this emotional abandonment is more serious than first thought. Initially it could be angry but it now sees that the parents are serious about not emotionally being there and thus it reacts more with scare than anger. It stops chastising the parents and goes more into survival mode. “I can’t make these people look after me by getting angry at them so I am going to have to survive by standing on my own two feet”. Hence we get the term, the “Hurried child” or the child who is required to be emotionally self sufficient before they are able to do so.

Thus we arrive at the term the “Anxious attachment”. The attachment between mother and child is structured such that it promotes anxiety in the child. The child attaches to a mother who is emotionally not there and the child has an anxious reaction to that. In the very structure of the attachment is anxiety.

What happens to a child who has grown up with such an attachment? This can sometimes lead to the ‘Good child’ syndrome. This child decides, “What I have to do is keep a low profile, do the right thing, behave and conform and that will keep them around. That will then make me safe”. Whilst it does not make the child safe it does make them feel a bit safer and a bit is better than nothing. The unfortunate thing for this child is they rarely get diagnosed. They don’t complain and they don’t make trouble so they are assumed to be happy. Underneath the goodness however is anxiety.

"If I study hard and get good grades, then they will be happy and want me to stay around"

As they grow into adolescence they can still remain unidentified or they can develop other difficulties like self mutilation or perhaps an eating disorder. Teenage girls with an eating disorder are often nice conforming people with some anxiety and can come from a background of anxious attachment. The other thing such a child can decide is: “There must be something wrong with me or they wouldn’t be treating me as such. There must be something bad about me or they would look after me properly” and thus there can be self mutilative acts, eating disorder, self loathing and low self image.

However if the ‘good child’ remains unidentified then when they are in their late 20s or early 30s the bubble finally bursts an they can end up in my counselling. They can no longer cope with the panic attacks or the anxiety that they endure day after day. So they will seek help of some kind or turn to drugs and alcohol to self medicate the anxiety away.

Other children from an anxious attachment wont be so conforming and they can act out with things like school refusal. The child refuses to go to school. (There are other causes of school refusal such as maternal over protection as well). Obviously this leads to some action being taken and often the child can be diagnosed with Separation Anxiety. Such a child decides, “Being away from mother is frightening so I will stay around her as much as possible and then I will feel safe”. Again it does not make the child feel safe but it makes them feel a bit safer and a bit is better than nothing. The child will not go to school, or on camps, or even do sleep overs with friends. Sometimes they will even try and sleep with the parents in their bed as many nights as they can get away with.

Sometimes bed wetting is a symptom of separation anxiety. If a child wets its bed then it is much more difficult for it to stay away from home over night. They seek to maintain as much geographical proximity to mother as they can, and this in turn makes the anxiety less, temporarily.

To complete the separation continuum. If the emotional abandonment is even more severe the child goes beyond scare and becomes despairing. This child is considering giving up, because life seems too bad. He tends to have poor emotional development, be apathetic, display rocking behaviour, have a weak cry, sleep excessively and show little spontaneous excitement. We saw examples of this when Romania was liberated with the TV images of orphanages showing young children with blank expressions in cots just standing there displaying very little movement or emotion. If these people survive then they can have significant psychological disturbance.

The blank expressionless face shows a despair and "I give up" attitude.

The final group is that of marasmus and death. Whereas in despair the child was considering giving up, in marasmus the child has given up, and so will not even give a weak cry of help. Such children have been abandoned psychologically and physically. With little physical or psychological attention, a child will develop mental and physical deterioration even to the point of death. This tends to occur to children in large institutions who are rarely picked up or touched.

Attachment hungerHumans have what is known as an attachment hunger . That is we all have a biological, psychological and social hunger for an attachment to a mother [father] figure. Without it in infancy there is a swift decline in our mental and physical health eventually leading to a state of marasmus or 'hospitalism'. This hunger persists throughout our entire lives.

However from adolescence on, peer attachments allow the childhood need for a parental attachment to decrease. Thus there is more variety in the type of attachments in adolescence and adulthood. However without at least one firm and secure attachment in adulthood there is also mental and physical decline. This is primarily exhibited by withdrawal behaviour and the various problems associated with that. Most notably the schizoid personality type demonstrates these difficulties. In addition, it is noted that the psychopathic personality is also typified by the lack of attachments.

Attachment hunger comes into play at about 5 to 7 months of age. Prior to that time there are indiscriminate attachments. The infant does not discriminate between who is feeding her, changing her or holding her. As a result some call

this phase the stage of primary narcissism. At about 6 to 8 months the child develops specific attachments - the object period. The child will develop an attachment to one primary person, most often mother. At this time the child shows a fear of strangers and of being left by the primary object.

If the specific attachment phase proceeds well, after a few more months the child will show a broadening of attachments. First to one other person and then to several others. By 18 months most children have an attachment to several people, with some research showing that only 13 percent of 18 month old children are still exclusively attached to one figure.

It should be noted that these two phases: of the attachment to one figure only, followed by the broadening of attachments to a variety of others may be culture specific. In monomatric families there is a tendency for the child to initially form a single all exclusive attachment to one figure. However in polymatric families, where the care of the child is shared around, this initial single all exclusive attachment is less observable. Whatever the specifics are the child will begin forming attachments around 5 to 8 months of age and there will be a broadening of them over time.

This is not meant to discard the notion of stimulation hunger or the craving for strokes, recognition and sensory stimulation. Research clearly highlights the human need for stimulation. Stimulation and attachment are in many respects necessary for each others existence. For example it seems impossible that two people could become attached without any psychological stimulation. That is physical and/or non-physical strokes, occurring between them.

Stimulation hunger in part allows the attachment hunger to be satisfied. For attachment to occur there must be stimulation or strokes occurring between the two parties. However that is not enough in itself for attachment to occur. There needs to be other conditions met. First there needs to be a consistency of the person providing the strokes. The few primary parent figures need to be there consistently and stimulating consistently. Second the person providing the strokes needs to be giving something of their own Child ego state to the relationship. A parent who mechanically and disinterestedly gave physical strokes to a child would of course hamper the attachment process. Attachment is a two way process.

The literature notes that one of the most important features for attachment to occur is the, "...readiness with which an individual is prepared to respond to the infant's signals and his general willingness to engage in playful interaction". In transactional analysis terms the parenting figure must be willing to invest his own Child ego state into the interactions with the infant. Both sides need to attach.