Attachment is how we learn the meaning of “special.”
Attachment is the defining mechanism that organizes the brain – for the totally helpless and dependent infant, attachment to the powerful capable other means survival, and failure to attach, to be left to his own devices or abandoned, means death. At the core of every human being is this one evolutionary imperative insistent by virtue of its own existence: to live. So for the infant, who knows nothing yet of how to be, his most critical, crucial learning concerns what behaviors do and don’t allow him to stay close to the person that ensures his survival. What is learned in these earliest days of life become rooted in the deepest core of who the individual is. When we think of the strategies we use to attach to others and keep them in our lives for whatever role and function we need them to serve, we will act in accordance with what follows the wiring of this most archaic path; to go against what was wired as attachment is to try to resist every single cell that your body is organized around. Attachment is survival. Failure to attach is death.
Research into orphaned and abandoned children in the 20th century challenged and contradicted previously existing assumptions about the way attachment works. Nurses were not allowed to hold infants due to concerns of infections; parents were not allowed to visit. Since it was thought to be cruel to allow children to attach to temporary caregivers, children were rotated out of foster homes every six months. Observers began to notice that the children’s ability to form consistent bonds with particular people seemed compromised. They failed to develop lasting attachments, appeared to lack feeling for others, and seemed aimless and distractible in their play.
Inconstant attachment figures result in repeated losses.
Infants with extended stays at hospital pediatric units often failed to thrive: more than a third died despite adequate nutrition and medical care. They ate poorly and failed to gain weight, did not sleep well, and showed arrested sucking and smiling responses. They often sustained lasting infections that would not properly heal. They were largely unresponsive and seemed unhappy, exhibiting arrested physical, cognitive, and emotional development. They showed developmental delays in speech and behavior, having very little interaction with others and lacking in stimulation or play.
Researchers began to study this under the effects of institutionalization on infants, describing “hospitalism” as the patterns and effects from institutional deprivation of nurturing and social contacts. This failure to thrive and develop appropriately resulted in a form of depression that represented a global pattern of physical, social, emotional, and cognitive impairment and progressively more unresponsiveness, which seemed related to the development of psychopathology. As the children grew, the way they related superficially to others without genuine affection was identified as a “primary affect hunger:” not only a hunger for affection but the full spectrum of human feelings, including hostility, that arise from daily interaction with a mother. And so thinking shifted from the idea of attachment as a generalized, nonspecific concept to the idea of maternal deprivation specifically – the absence of a true and deeply bonded attachment to a specific figure with a root that grows over time. We grow and develop with cumulative continuity, and hospitalism set about patterns of detachment in relationships.
Relationships are a long and enduring road that must have depth to be meaningful.
Research into attachment reconceptualized around themes of separation, deprivation, and the depth of emotions and of continuous relationships. Deprivation was not caused by disruption of the home per se; it was disruption of the parent-child bond that emerged as the essential cause of mental health problems. While frequent or prolonged separations present a clear example, maternal deprivation can also occur when a child lives with a mother who is unable to provide sufficient care in ways that are evident in the parent/child dynamic: having a conscious or unconsciously rejecting attitude toward the child, excessively demanding displays of love and reassurance by the child to the parent, and a myriad of ways of exploiting the child for vicarious gratification.
Maternal deprivation and separation disrupts attachment in a very specific way: it prevents the formation of a long-term relationship with a figure who has been discriminated from others as reliably safe. Tracking the behavior of children hospitalized and separated for contagious conditions like tuberculosis, a consistent pattern emerged of initial protest and clinging at the parent’s departure followed by the emergence of despair once the child realized the parent would not be returning. Finally, as separations became extended, the child appeared to emotionally detach and respond with indifference to both caregivers and parents, becoming withdrawn and unresponsive in subsequent visits. The persistent disappointment and deprivation of the child’s needs for love and connection and the inability to depend on consistent availability of the parent result in repeated experiences of psychic and emotional abandonment, triggering the death instinct and confirming an inner experience of complete isolation over and over. Faced with enduring such damaging frustration of core emotional needs of the self repeatedly, detachment is an adaptive response to circumstances of maternal separation and deprivation with disastrous consequences. Survival shifts to wire in the brain as self-reliance, not dependency on others which may even come to be recognized as a threat.
Imprinting is how ducks maintain proximity.
Similar to the imprinting process with ducks, activation of the attachment system triggers innate and fixed behavioral patterns that are instinctual, ingrained, and species-specific, designed to attract and maintain proximity to a clearly identified individual. For humans, this behavioral activation is seen in caregiver-signaling actions such as rooting, sucking, grasping, looking, reaching, following, calling, crying, babbling, smiling, and protesting when left alone, all of which attract and keep the mother nearby. These behaviors serve to form, maintain, react to the disruption of, and reestablish attachment bonds. The young stays close to the mother, with the immediate goal of protection but the larger goal of survival of the species. The drive for this behavioral activation is separate and independent of the need for feeding and care-seeking; activated by emotional projections, parental response models representations of the purpose and function of the felt experience of emotions. The limbic system, the seat of emotions in the brain, is directly connected to the brain stem which moderates physiological and somatic sensations in the body. The developing brain must also learn effective processing of this output separate from usually recognized forms of cognitive or social learning. Attachment is also how we discriminate meaningful emotions as we learn what attachment behaviors are effective and which are not and the resultant internal experience.
The chronic disappointments of separation and maternal deprivation taught a specific lesson about the productive application of emotions: they are not safe in the hands of others. This robs the individual of the relational component necessary to experience emotional depths that only result from connection and interpersonal interactions, confining emotional experience to entirely self-directed and self-contained operations. The full spectrum of emotional experience (causing primary affect hunger) is truncated, along with it the use of emotions for goal-directed purposes like appraisal, curiosity, understanding, exploration, and deductive determinations about other people. The discriminating factor is lost. Without the experience of one specific caregiver identified and discriminated against all others as safe and reliable, the expectation of need gratification and the normal function of social relationships cannot be learned; nothing differentiates the meaning or function of one individual in relation to the self from any other. We do not learn what people are “special.” Everyone is the same with the same odds of gratifying or disappointing.
One child singled out for her own special day.
Without the ability to discriminate the special function of a primary caregiver, the internal working model that helps to identify individuals more likely to nurture and gratify does not get built. There results a general indifference to the prospect of bonding overall. Attachment tends to bias by being either hypervigilant to dangers posed by all or indiscriminately trusting of all. The relationship models that get built instead identify the self and others in terms of all good or all bad with no way of discriminating acceptance or rejection or why. The other remains an object whose relevance is dependent on whether they gratify or frustrate one’s needs. The perspective of relationships as a vehicle for gratification solely through connection and emotional fulfillment does not develop. Whether or not to engage in a relationship is judged by whether there is any benefit or harm to forming a bond that may not endure.
This was bore out in the research. The children were seen to be superficially affectionate, often pleasant and indiscriminately affectionate toward anyone, but without the presence of any genuine feeling for others, their true feelings appearing to be indifferent and uninvested. They appeared to lack pride and displayed problematic behaviors including sexual aggressiveness, fantastical lying, stealing, temper tantrums, immature or infantile demands, and failed to make meaningful friendships. The absence of a mother figure and no alternative replacement results in essentially a series of short term mother figures and thus repeated losses. Bitterness and mistrust develop instead of a view of relationships as positive and beneficial, shutting down the natural tendency to reach out to others for love and connection. The impact of loss, particularly early in life, severely damages the development and stability of the self.
The four identified stages of attachment therefore correspond to the infant’s initially indiscriminate activation of care and proximity seeking behaviors; subsequent orientation toward a specific caregiver; the progression and solidification of proximity maintaining behaviors and responses, and, having established dependency to a specific other; a goal-corrected partnership of mutual and dynamic interchange of need fulfillment. If the discriminant function is lost from the start, indifference to others is guaranteed and mutuality in relationships as a concept is impaired. Many assume the attachment itself is the goal, but the fourth stage is key; attachment only solidifies with trust and safety after the relationship endures mutual goal-correction after a rupture. Then both parties know what is required to stay in sync and learn to trust the relationship as one with reliably mutual gratification, justifying its existence. Without completing the process, the individual does not learn to resolve conflict in relationships as attachment did not progress as far as an enduring long-term bond with all its ups and downs. Without the conflict resolution necessary for the phase of goal correction, attachment is severed prematurely and avoidance of conflict overall becomes a dominant coping mechanism, further sabotaging attachment attempts.
What we learn about life begins with what mother thinks of us and what we think of her. The root of the self forms from whether we learned we were worthy enough of care, or whether repeated physical and psychological losses taught us to expect abandonment from the people we need the most. The road to correct attachment patterns is not easy, but with time and effort, trust and security can be earned.
