For most adults, the “someone else” is no longer mother; you may have broken from that feeling of “oneness” with her long ago. But when faced with the prospect of losing or breaking away from whomever you found to replace that vacancy, a terrible desperation and panic ensues. This, Halpern (1982) refers to as “attachment hunger,” which he believes is akin to an addict’s need for a fix. It is composed of “powerful primitive feelings that are lodged deeply in your musculature and the reactions of your body’s chemistry” (p.31). In his book Love and Addiction, Stanton Peele concludes that “the addicting element is not so much in the substance, but in the person who is addicted” (Peele and Brodsky, 1975 as cited by Halpern 1982, p.7). Indeed, according to the recent brain research mentioned above, attachment experiences are felt in the reward centers of the brain associated with addiction—but also, potentially, with pain. Why might that be?
If attachment theory has taught us anything, it is that children are naturally predisposed to love and affection; it is an innate, bio–psycho–social–spiritual capacity. However, as John Bradshaw asserts, “A child’s healthy growth depends on someone loving and accepting him unconditionally. When this need is met, the child’s energy of love is released so he can love others” (1990, p.39). If a child is not loved for his essential self, his egocentricity sets in, and his true self never emerges. The child may become arrested emotionally at any number of phases of development, and grow up to harbor what Bradshaw calls a “wounded inner child.”
These arrestments may be the result of the three insecure parenting styles we discussed in Chapter 2: dismissive, preoccupied, and unresolved. These parenting styles in their extreme forms manifest in abusive and traumatic experiences, such as sexual abuse, physical abuse, emotional abuse, and the proliferation of toxic shame, reinforced by educational, social, and cultural institutions. The wounded inner child contaminates the adult’s life in a variety of ways, including co-dependency, offender behaviors, narcissistic disorders, trust issues, acting out or acting in behaviors, magical thinking, intimacy dysfunctions, “nondisciplined” behaviors, addictive and/or compulsive behaviors, thought distortions, and feelings of emptiness, apathy, and depression. Treating the inner child involves addressing the “original pain,” and allowing yourself to feel the repressed feelings in the present. Bradshaw states that:
Grief involves the whole range of human emotions. The original pain is an accumulation of unresolved conflicts whose energy has snowballed over time. The wounded inner child is frozen because there was no way he could do his grief work. (1990, p.76)
According to Bradshaw, the work of grief involves reclaiming your inner child at every phase of development, and includes such interventions as letter writing, and guided meditations.
With respect to the addictive and/or compulsive contaminates, Bradshaw concludes that all addicts (including those addictively attached to unhealthy relationships) have been emotionally abandoned, and to a child “abandonment is death.” Basic survival needs associated with attachment are “my parents are okay” and “I matter.” If the messages and behaviors the parents deliver to the child do not reflect this sentiment, there is a pathological turning inwards and distorting of the self, to somehow make this true: “Dad is in a rage and beat me again. I must have done something wrong to provoke it. I must be bad. I must be worthless.” In this scenario, the father is preserved as a “good” figure, and to receive punishment is evidence that one matters enough to be punished.
For the purposes of this discussion, let’s consider attachment hunger a “feeling addiction” (including all of the aforementioned dimensions: rage, “awfulizing,” sadness, grief, and love) that has the added potency of an ingestive addiction, because it directly and quickly activates the most primal parts of our brains associated with pleasure, pain, and survival. To put it more succinctly, it is my belief that all addictions are secondary to attachment hunger. And attachment hunger is a precursor to complicated grief.
Art therapy and addiction
In Chapter 2, we discussed how faulty internal working models built upon internalized projected introjects interact with our attachment styles to replicate unhealthy patterns of relating (notably, anxious–ambivalent individuals and avoidant individuals are usually drawn to each other for this reason). When this happens, feelings of grief and loss could potentially be perpetual, if the underlying mechanisms of basic security and attachment issues are left unacknowledged and unaddressed. In other words, anxious–ambivalent individuals have to learn the benefit of setting boundaries and being alone, and avoidant individuals have to learn the benefit of giving and being in relationships. These lessons, once learned, may be the only things capable of buffering the unavoidable losses and grief feelings we all must endure.
Art therapy is particularly useful in this endeavor because it works towards healing self-splits, and can substitute for the rituals that are involved in the addictions that distract us from them. The art is the object, so whatever the addict projects onto the drug can instead be projected onto the art. Let’s say a man’s mood and affect state have been stimulated by a loss and/or grief feelings that are unconscious and/or preverbal, causing diffuse feelings of anxiety and depression seemingly “out of nowhere.” He turns to his drug of choice to feel something different or to be distracted, which is truly an attempt to feel nothing in the face of his powerlessness. When an addict starts to make art he or she is being trained to make choices for themselves: “Why did you choose that color? What draws you to this material? Where would you like to place this collage piece on the page?” The art therapist is teaching the addict to have a sense of self-awareness. And when one is more conscious, one’s reality testing improves and the individual starts realizing the choices available. Imagine a client who smooshes pastels all over the paper and art space, says “That’s fun,” and walks out of the room without washing his hands. Then imagine the same patient, months later, returns, does same thing, but then before leaving the room realizes, “Oh, I have to wash my hands.” It’s an expansion of conscientiousness.
The impact of trauma and abuse
To understand the impact of trauma and abuse on attachment and grief, we must take into consideration the severity of the abuse and/or trauma, and at what phase of development it occurred, especially with respect to neurological development. The innate capacities for a child to grow and thrive in all dimensions are dependent upon the availability of an average expectable environment, when the timing is right (Tyson and Tyson, 1990). If stress and hypervigilance are prolonged and unrelenting, leading to such conditions as C-PTSD, it may affect neurological changes that could have a lasting and debilitating impact on learning (King-West and Hass-Cohen, 2008). This may lead to failures in achieving certain developmental goals, resulting in low self-esteem, loss of efficacy, and poor affect regulation—all of which have the potential to manifest in adulthood as the contaminants identified by Bradshaw, above.
From the art therapist’s perspective, we may see evidence of developmental progress and arrestments in children’s art-making process and products. Victor Lowenfeld (1957) used the term “art education therapy” to describe the therapeutic and educational use of art with children, and provided us with a normal trajectory of children’s drawings, what we can expect to see at certain ages, based on bio–psycho–social–spiritual development. These stages move from scribbling (18 months to 3 years), to basic forms (3–4 years), to human forms (4–6 years), to the development of a visual schema in which scenes of the environment are depicted (9–12 years), followed by increasing levels of realism (adolescence and beyond). Elizabeth Koppitz (1968) offers in-depth methods of interpreting the significance of children’s human figure drawings, Burns and Kaufman (1970) help us understand children’s Kinetic Family Drawings (KFD), and DiLeo (1983) offers interpretive suggestions for drawing directives such as “draw a man in a boat” (examining cognition), “draw a house” (examining affect) and “draw a tree” (examining self image). It was Williams and Woods (1977) who coined the term “developmental art therapy” and gave name to the many other clinicians examining how art expression can be used to recognize and understand how cognitive and developmental