If you’ve ever taken a Psych 101 class, you are most likely familiar with the Strange Situation experiment, in which researchers separated babies from their mothers for brief periods of time and observed their reactions. The research associated with this experiment resulted in what we now call Attachment Theory.
Research on Attachment Theory indicates that the type of care that we receive from our caregivers during early infancy has a significant impact on how we relate and attach to people throughout our lives. If our caregivers are loving, reliable and responsive to our needs, we learn to be trusting of the world and of others. If our caregivers are unreliable, unresponsive and do not comfort us when we need to be soothed, we are likely to develop difficulty feeling safe and connected to others later in life.
In The Power of Attachment, Diane Poole Heller explains that in the first year and a half of life, we lack the cognitive development to create a story out of our experiences. Heller notes that experiences are stored as “an amalgamation of pictures, feelings, events, colors and sensations that goes not into our conscious memory, but into our implicit memory, our “not conscious” memory”. Although most of us can’t access these very early memories, we may have a sense when they’re triggered.
If you’re raised in a prosocial family in which you feel safe and cared for, “your brain prunes away some of the defensive parts of the brain that you’re born with, emphasizing the more relational aspects instead”, explain Heller. This allows you to feel less hypervigilant, always anticipating a threat. Growing up in an environment in which we can trust other people allows us to develop a secure attachment, in which we expect a sense of safety and responsiveness from others. However, if you grow up in an environment in which others cannot be trusted to care for us, the opposite happens. In order to respond to this danger, our threat response becomes exaggerated.
“We all make adaptations as children to whatever relational environment we grow up in. All of that typically isn’t conscious but embedded in our bodies, so that’s how we relate to others-according to our implicit memory...which informs everything we think about the world”, says Heller.
Heller identifies four different attachment styles; secure, avoidant, ambivalent and disorganized. To learn about your attachment style, take this quiz, developed by Dr. Poole Heller.
In this upcoming multi-part blog series, I will outline the differences between these attachment styles, how they are developed, and how regardless of what attachment style you currently have, you can work towards developing more secure attachment.
To learn more about your own attachment style and how it affects your relationships, make an appointment today.
Written by: Kate Loewenstein, LCSW