John Bowlby (1907-1990), British psychologist, physician and psychoanalyst, was the initiator of the psychological perspective that later It has been called “attachment theory” or “attachment psychology.” considers those initial links crucial.
Bowlby thought that attachment or bonding appears when there is a “warm, intimate, and continuing relationship with the mother, in which mother and child find satisfaction and pleasure.”
Unlike the psychiatrists and psychoanalysts of his day, Bowlby argued that having an attachment figure in childhood, and at any age, is as important as meeting basic needs. to suck, sleep, know…
For Bowlby, intimate emotional ties are primary, they tend to develop without having to be taught to do so.
And because? Because They fulfill an important biological function: the survival of the individual and the species. Without an attachment figure, we are all in danger of dying due to lack of care, food, predators, fire, drowning… Or, simply, due to the chaotic impact of our primitive emotions, when they are not contained by the mother and the child. father. Therefore, we all look for an attachment or bonding figure (at least one) from birth.
But these figures not only provide care, security and defense, but also are at the base of all mental mechanisms that guide our expectations and behavior planning: we generate them from the internalization of our relationships with the fundamental attachment figure or figures, generally the mother (and, increasingly important, the father).
What is attachment?
Attachment or attachment behavior is that which leads to a person reaches or maintains proximity with respect to another differentiated and preferred individual, from which he receives security and support.
Throughout our development, we tend to be or feel close to that figure, normally embodied by the mother (or the main caregiver), a role that can be played by other people later in life.
The result is the establishment of fundamental affective bonds, at first between the child and the parent and, later, between adults. It is a crucial issue for the development of the child and, in general, of the individual and of the species.
How attachment affects the psyche
Attachment is resistant to change: “There is only one mother” and “I love you more than my mother” are popular sayings that testify to the tendency for this first relationship to remain as the most important in life, the pattern and the point of comparison with the others.
However, in the human species and, above all, in children and adolescents, hthere is a continuous potential for change, so that a person’s life is permeable to both adversity and favorable influences.
In that sense, we “learn” to become attached in various ways, giving rise to different types of attachment, from secure to insecure (and with different axes, as we will see later). throughout life, we tend to search over and over again for the attachment figure or its representatives, real or symbolic (mother figures and father figures).
Even in adult life, each new upset or disappointment tends to bring us closer to the family, that is, to our attachment figures: we want to cry or console ourselves with our mother, our father, older brother, tutor, coach…
We look for other attachment figures, but almost always according to patterns we have established during childhood, modified by later experiences.
That explains the tTendency of some people to establish ‘bad partners’ or ‘bad relationships’ repeated: it has a lot to do with how we live the relationship with our initial attachment figure.
Was he a warm, close, accessible person? Without realizing it, we may be looking for such figures in the future. Now: Was the mother or main caregiver fearful, skittish, full of fears? She will probably generate in us similar tendencies…
In any case, there will be a relationship between the bonds established with that attachment figure and many of the personality traits deeper feelings of that girl or boy and that adult.
Attachment shapes our emotional world
Attachment not only affects our psyche: it is also decisive in the development of our nervous, hormonal, and immune systems; among other things because many of the most intense human emotions, based on these biological components, they are structured and developed as attachment relationships form in early childhood.
It is then when we first feel and manifest the patterns of pleasure, surprise, suffering, fear, disgust… In that sense, emotions are the basis of attachment, and the attachment, the shaper of our emotional world.
For example, there are parents who value “brave” children, “without fear”, who face dangers alone, who tend to separate, to move away… However, other parents approve of their children requesting help in a situation of danger or difficulty, in the face of any fear…
As long as the attachment bond lasts, the various forms of behavior that contribute to it are active only when necessary: the baby and the child are not always complaining, but rather when they feel the bond of attachment is in danger, they fear that the mother will leave…
Hence, early, untimely or too long separations destabilize the attachment figure.
It is something that sensitive mothers or fathers notice every time they leave the child of months or a few years for more than one or two days: around, the child rejects them or he manifests himself sad, angry, rebellious, vulnerable, complacent…
They are ways of expressing the pain of loss. and to notify so that it does not happen again. Because maintaining the bond of attachment is the main source of security in childhood and one of the fundamental ones in adult life.
The attachment relationship is established in the first weeks and months of the baby’s life, when many of the most intense human emotions are structured, and it is the crucible where the most primitive emotions are developed, for which we come genetically preprogrammed: pleasure, suffering, disgust and discomfort, interest and surprise reactions… And then, joy, anger, sadness, envy, jealousy and the other human emotions more complex, but also more secondary.
Consequently, the psychology and psychopathology of emotions coincides, to a large extent, with the Psychology and psychopathology of attachment bonds: some bonds that can be altered when the parents are there and not there, are emotionally unstable, one suffers from depression or does not control their anger…
The breaking of the attachment bond alters the development of primitive emotions, which facilitates the development of psychopathologies in the child.
Hence The best way to raise a baby and a child is through happiness and security, and that the best thing that parents with a child with problems can do is to seek help for themselves and for the relationships they establish between themselves and the child.
What happens if the attachment is broken in childhood
A classification of attachment ties divides them into secure attachment, anxious attachment, avoidant attachment, and dissociated-disorganized attachment. Another, between secure, worried, unstructured and fearful attachment.
As we can see, there is no classification accepted by all, although in general it is thought that there are bonds or secure attachments, anxious attachments and unstructured attachments: this means that, when the child or adult loses or fears losing the attachment figure, becomes excessively anxious, what prevents development, relationship, conservation of balance.
Some children avoid situations in which such a loss may occur and are unable to separate and progress.
Others, faced with separation or the threat of separation, They manifest excessively disorganized behaviors, emotions or thoughts.
Today we know that what determines attachment behavior throughout life are experiences during the primitive dyad (mother or main caregiver-child) and with the original triangulation (mother-father-child with their differentiated identity) and their substitutes.
The connatal endowment of the baby, the ways of reacting with which it is endowed by nature, they also play a role on which containment capacities act in an amplifying or reducing way of the attachment figure and the family.
Consequences of an insecure attachment in adulthood
Much of the patterns of adult affective bonds depend on the way in which attachment behaviors are organized in the brain and in the internal world (mind) of the person. Disturbed patterns of attachment behavior may exist at any age, due to the fact that the development of this behavior has been diverted for reasons that may lie in the individual, in the caregivers, that in the context.
AND ways of bonding can be altered because the individual already carried this tendency from childhood, but also due to later influences of sufficient emotional weight that reactivate other relational models that until then had remained secondary in the person’s mind.
This basic idea, of a dominant form of attachment and some dominated or secondary forms of attachment, is what explains why certain events of adult life can change us Therefore, they can make appear other ways of relating and linking us that were previously secondary.
For example, as I usually say, heostracization breeds violence and anxious or disorganized attachments. Childhood attachment, like genetics, are important, but a deep loving relationship, a good tutor, teacher or teacher, a shocking experience or series of experiences, even apparently negative ones, can bring to the fore other attachment tendencies that until then were secondaries in us. That is the hope we have left for change through psychotherapy and, in general, for human change.