2.Dismissive parenting typically leads to an insecure/avoidant attachment style, in the child. The dismissive parent minimizes the importance of love relationships, has a lack of recall of childhood experiences, and idealizes problematic relationships. This parent is typically emotionally constricted and dismissing of feeling states and bids for emotional and/or physical contact.
In infancy, this parent’s child engages in exploration to the exclusion of attachment behaviors, avoids mother to prevent feeling rejected or overwhelmed by intrusive behaviors, emotional expression is limited to investment in play objects, and the child is seemingly oblivious to mother’s return in a “strange situation.” When Main observed a child like this at six years of age, the child appeared emotionally restricted and sullen, and could not find solutions to scenarios of separation. Family drawings had dissociated figures that were far apart with no arms, and/or floating in the air with stereotypical happy faces. The child also refused to look at or engage with a family Polaroid.
3.Preoccupied parenting typically leads to an insecure/ambivalent (sometimes called “insecure-anxious”) attachment style, in the child. Preoccupied parents are deeply concerned about their own attachment relationships, discouraging of independent strivings in the child (to the point of enmeshment), are deeply anxious and fearful of abandonment, and swamped by the effects of their childhood. They are inhibited in their capacity for recall, reflection, and to be fully present. For the child, avoidance is over-regulation of affect, ambivalence is under-regulation, resulting in hyper-reactivity.
In infancy, Main observed the child focuses only on the mother, clinging and angrily resistant one minute, then passively helpless the next. The child is anxiously preoccupied with mother’s whereabouts and inconsolable upon her return, unable to explore. At six years of age, Main observed these children to have intense expressions of need and anger. Solutions to separation scenarios were both rewarding and punishing (e.g. buy the parents flowers, then hide their clothes). Figures in family drawings were very large and very small, very close together, and featuring vulnerable, intimate parts of the body. Reactions to a family Polaroid were deeply absorbed and disturbed, setting off tics, and anxieties about being abandoned.
4.Unresolved parenting typically leads to a disorganized (sometimes called “anxious–avoidant”) attachment style in the child. Unresolved parents have experienced trauma and/or losses that were unresolved. Most important was not the experience they endured, but the way they’d integrated it into their understanding. Notably, the degree to which the experience lay unresolved impacted the degree to which their child became disorganized. In infancy, children of unresolved parents displayed bizarre, overtly conflicted, dissociated, or inexplicable behaviors. This was the result of a breakdown in the attachment system: the child has an inherent push to attach to someone that is simultaneously a threat and frightening.
At six years of age, Main observed these children to be inexplicably afraid and unable to do anything about it. When presented with separation scenarios, they fell silent, were too disturbed to respond, predicted catastrophic outcomes, or became disorganized in language and behavior. Upon reunion with their parents, children displayed parentified behaviors—either caretaking or punitive and controlling—in order to maintain proximity, while dealing with the threat the parents posed. Family drawings included skeletons, dismembered body parts, or figures scratched out. When presented with a Polaroid, they became wordless, irrational, or distressed.
THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN PARENTING STYLES AND ATTACHMENT STYLES
In laymen’s terms, as adults, we set ourselves up by finding relationships that confirm our early models, even when these patterns are not in our own self-interest. For example, in a romantic relationship, the person with an ambivalent attachment may need to be with his or her partner all the time to gain reassurance. To support this perception of reality, they choose someone who is isolated and hard to connect with: “See? If I didn’t hound him all the time, he’d never express his feelings or show me affection.” The person with a model of avoidant attachment has the tendency to choose someone who is possessive or overly demanding of attention, from whom he or she constantly needs to escape: “See? I have to be distant, otherwise her constant hounding would suck me dry.” These cyclical patterns leave one in a constant state of grief over lost and/or failed relationships. They also render us susceptible to complicated grief, particularly in the event of death and/or severe trauma.
Implicit versus explicit learning and attachment
These theories would seem to suggest that we spend our whole adult lives reliving our childhood dramas, like a song stuck on repeat. But this supposition is flawed for two reasons. First, memory is not a thing. Your heart is an object but the pulse it generates is a physiological event; it occupies no space and has no mass. Second, memory is not only mutable, but the nature of the brain’s storage mechanisms dictates that memories must change over time (Lewis et al., 2000). Our love maps are determined at the crossroads of implicit versus explicit learning. Lewis et al. (2000, p.103) state:
The physiology of memory determines the heart of who we are and who we can become…the plasticity of the mind, its capacity to adapt and learn, is possible only because neuronal connections can change… The stability of an individual mind—what we know as identity—exists only because some neural pathways endure.
Explicit learning encodes memories of events including autobiographical recollections and discrete facts. This is commonly described as our conscious perceptions. However, there is a wealth of learning human beings absorb without being consciously aware of it; this is implicit learning. We tend to give greater credence to explicit knowledge of facts, but this is misplaced, as evidenced by distorted eye-witness accounts, and those small moments of, “Huh, I remember it differently.”
For example, Mr. Underwood suffered catastrophic damage to his hippocampus, destroying his explicit memory and leaving him perpetually living in the present. Researchers taught Mr. Underwood to braid, a skill he did not have prior to suffering brain damage. After he had mastered it, researchers asked him if he knew how to braid. He replied, “No,” a truthful statement from his perspective. But when three strips of cloth were placed in front of him, he wove them together without hesitation.
When it comes to engaging in relationships, overwhelmingly, it is this mysterious, implicit learning mechanism—our unconscious knowledge—that tends to take charge. If your parents have a dysfunctional relationship, this will produce implicit schema, planting an erroneous generality in a child’s brain. Your unconscious knowledge “distills but does not evaluate” how applicable the early lessons of family life are to the larger adult world. Recall, Hendrix pointed out that a person’s composite imago image only etches certain data “onto a template,” without interpretation. This appears detrimental, because a child, in the absence of understanding his love map in the context of its conception, might grow up to make poor decisions in love. However, it also creates an opportunity for the adult to recontextualize his love map with the help of mature experiences.
In other words, as an adult, you might act childish at times, but you are no longer a child. Parts of you have grown and matured in spite of those wounds you still carry, and those mature parts provide you with the tools required to achieve personal insight. Insight allows for change. And change allows for the revision and integration of maladaptive patterns. And that will guide you through the quicksand of grief.
The essential artist
Where talk therapy alone falls short
I’ve described the grieving process as an opportunity for the “revision” of attachment disturbances several times, but what exactly does that mean? A reasonable person might assume analyzing pivotal moments in childhood will resolve his troubles,