Attachment Theory
Psychological and Spiritual Considerations
I’ve always loved language, and irony, and find it endlessly amusing that the third noble truth says, ‘the way out of suffering involves freeing ourselves from attachment’ , which appears to clash so spectacularly with attachment theory. Attachment theory, developed by John Bowlby and Mary Ainsworth, whom we could think of as its grandparents, says: as humans who are hardwired to connect, try to work your way towards earned secure attachment in adulthood. But ‘working’ your way towards ‘earned secure attachment’ politely ignores the fact of impermanence: in our shakti bodies, in the realm of becoming, there is no such thing as earned secure attachment. Granted, any attachment-based therapist would
acknowledge that what did or didn’t happen, attachment-wise, will have huge implications on our subjective well-being, our felt sense of security. We can’t really ‘opt out’ of attachment dynamics, given that we’re born into them. Our nervous systems, how we think about ourselves and our sense of belonging in the world, all of these are going to be influenced by something (and someone) completely out of our ability to control.
If you’ve read my article “Why Oneness Isn’t Codependence” (which I highly recommend, if you haven’t!), you’ll remember me saying that it can feel like I’m paradigm-juggling to go from a psychotherapy session to a nonduality teaching session. In that piece I talked about how I’ll show up as a psychotherapist, going over how boundaries are important with clients, then step into my nondual teacher role, where I find myself talking about transcending boundaries. Spending time with a psychotherapeutic conceptualization of attachment theory, and then jumping over to a nondual understanding of non-attachment, certainly requires the same type of dexterity.
From the psychological attachment side of the fence, let’s go over the nuts and bolts of attachment theory. Thinking biologically and developmentally, attachment theory acknowledges that it is actually the case that we begin our human lives dependent on our caregivers. As tiny tater tots, we need our caregivers to regulate us. We need them to nourish us. We learn to understand our own separateness by seeing ourselves reflected in their eyes. Attachment theory says that since this attachment is so crucial for our survival, we start developing strategies to find and maintain connection with our caregivers. Looking at the needs of the infant, and the capacities of the caregivers, attachment theorists started to lay out ways to measure whether caregivers did a ‘good enough’ job of caregiving. Traditionally, a whole complex mess of stuff constituted ‘good enough’ parenting: responsiveness (goes with the baby’s not verbalized question, ‘can I count on you?’); availability (‘can I find you?’) and emotional engagement (‘can I feel you here with me?’).
Interesting recent research shifted the paradigm a bit, focusing less on the emotional sensitivity aspects of attachment, and more on “secure base provision” meaning, “aspects of caregiving that tell an infant about the caregiver’s availability to serve as a secure base, such as soothing to cessation of crying and providing a present and safe base from which to explore.” The main researcher, Susan Woodhouse, summarizes: “What we found was that what really matters is not really so much that moment-to-moment matching between what the baby’s cue is and how the parent responds. What really matters is in the end, does the parent get the job done — both when a baby needs to connect, and when a baby needs to explore?”
Current research on infant mental health, and what ‘good enough’ secure attachment looks like from infancy, parallels research on adult ‘earned secure’ attachment. This adult attachment research says there are two main pieces for adult attachment: 1) that the Other is attuned (we can think of attunement as the “quality of emotional communication”) about ⅓ of the time, and 2) that there’s the ability to do repair (restore connection) when there’s been a rupture. As a field, I think we’re getting better and better at helping people understand their own attachment history, and we’ve gotten quite good at equipping people with relational skills to ‘do’ the ‘good enough’ attunement. For adults, ‘good enough’ equals approximately 30% of the time. For infants, Woodhouse’s research gestures to 50% of the time. Neither data set says we have to be perfectly attuned 100% of the time. We’ve also gotten better at teaching adults how to recognize they need repair, and move towards one another.
But what gets a bit funky when you practice adult couples therapy, vs. attachment-based infant mental health, is that you start to see how the major hurdle when working with couples isn’t teaching the concepts– it’s getting each person in the couple to actually want to inhabit the role of the adult, instead of unconsciously vying for the role of the baby. To reference a charmingly hilarious rom-com, I’ll bring in the famous line that Mona from Who’s the Boss tells her adult daughter, played by Goldie Hawn, in the late 80s
Interestingly, research (like the research cited in the Gottman article I linked to, “Repair is the Secret Weapon of Emotionally Connected Couples”) shows us that the single most important variable in whether a repair attempt ‘works’ is “the emotional climate” between partners. Benson writes: “In other words, your repair attempt is only going to work well if you have really been a good friend to them, especially lately.”
classic Overboard. She says, “But darling, if you have a baby, you won’t be the baby anymore.” Generally, we’re much better defended than Mona’s character. We come up with elaborate justifications as to why ‘the Other’ should be behaving differently than they are. Much of what transpires within couples therapy has to do with one person expecting that their partner should be attuning to them, that their subjective experience is the subjective experience that ‘counts’, and that they are the ones whose needs aren’t being met: they are the innocent one being failed.
I remember how, after years of practicing as a couples therapist, and struggling occasionally in my own relationship, I started to realize how much I’d been relating to attachment theory as if it was ‘true’, a basic premise of human life. I was reading James Hillman’s book, The Soul’s Code on a self-retreat, when I got to the “Myth of the Parents” section, where Hillman argues that individuals, and especially psychotherapists, get obsessed with blaming our parents and our childhoods for everything. He argues, what if we chose our parents–specifically!–so they could fail us in exactly the ways we needed them to? As a therapist fairly smitten with attachment theory, it felt revolutionary to consider Hillman’s point deeply. Prior to this, I’d read Your Soul’s Plan (which aligned with Hillman’s perspective). Somehow, Robert Schwartz’s book, in which he interviews psychics who tune into the planning sessions that occur between lives, ended up being the single most helpful resource I’d encountered for allowing me to change my perspective about my mom. The idea that I’d chosen my mom, and we’d agreed to inhabit these exact roles with one another, moved me out of disappointment, hurt and blame and into gratitude to her (for playing her part perfectly).
What I was starting to perceive (through direct experience, my own and in sessions with clients) was that there was no clear line for us–no age at which we recognized we weren’t dependent anymore. I’ll walk a bit of a fine line here when I say that from my perspective, it’s all too easy for our dichotomizing minds (and more accurately, our ego parts) to jump to extremes. It’s quite clear from the research that people who didn’t end up with the conditions for secure attachment in their youth got ‘the short end of the stick’. Thus I’m not at all suggesting attachment dynamics don’t matter, that they don’t shape us. But what I am positing is that our polarizing ego parts try to take the implications of attachment theory to arrive in one of two places:
More than grad school, more than years of therapy, more than the book I would give second place to: Karyl McBride’s Will I Ever Be Good Enough?: Healing the Daughters of Narcissistic Mothers. Simon and Schuster, 2008.
- Direction one (taken by Object Relations theorists, and most psychodynamic approaches): validate and support a person who’s coming into contact with the various wounds, internalized messages, schemas and strategies that they developed in order to deal with what did or didn’t happen, attachment-wise. Essentially, this work says “let’s connect the childhood dots with the adult’s symptoms.” People can (and do) choose to hang out in anger, disappointment, hurt and blame, feeling (understandably) chapped that they lost the attachment lottery at birth.
- Direction two (perhaps a Hillman-inspired direction): say “get over your childhood! No one had it perfect. Just dwelling in what wasn’t great does you no good!”. Various approaches, like DBT, Gottman’s skills-heavy couples work, and solution-oriented therapy, (and/or people with other temperaments) seem to gravitate towards saying, ‘ok, what happened is in the past, get it together now and use skills to move forward.’
While both of these approaches make perfect sense in some ways, it’s easy to see how either path can take you to a conceptual prison. We can see how the first approach often leads people to the ‘stuck in the past’ conceptual prison. It doesn’t really seem to be a very nice position to inhabit. People who hold this worldview tend to be the ones who get caught in their own pathology, endlessly focusing on what happened in the past (and best case scenario, from within a psychotherapeutic frame, they orient to processing the wounds of the past to try to get to ‘earned secure attachment’). Whereas the second approach trends towards the striving conceptual prison. Getting to earned secure attachment in adulthood, for this camp, often means relationship hacking, acquiring relational skills and becoming, or finding, a ‘good enough’ partner. Neither approach seems to lead to self-realization, or enlightenment.
To understand this better, let me share an excerpt I read that made me laugh aloud. I chuckled in recognition when I came across Anthony De Mello’s zinger of a collection called Awareness. In the chapter “Are We talking about Psychology in this Spirituality Course?” he says:
I’m a psychologist myself, and I practice psychotherapy, and I have this great conflict within me when I have to choose sometimes between psychology and spirituality. I wonder if that makes sense to anybody here. It didn’t make sense to me for many years. I’ll explain. It didn’t make sense to me for many years until I suddenly discovered that people have to suffer enough in a relationship so that they get disillusioned with all relationships. Isn’t that a terrible thing to think? They’ve got to suffer enough in a relationship before they wake up and say, “I’m sick of it! There must be a better way of living than depending on another human being.” And what was I doing as a psychotherapist?
People were coming to me with their relationship problems, with their communication problems, etc., and sometimes what I did was a help. But sometimes, I’m sorry to say, it wasn’t, because it kept people asleep. Maybe they should have suffered a little more. Maybe they ought to touch rock bottom and say, “I’m sick of it all.” It’s only when you’re sick of your sickness that you’ll get out of it. Most people go to a psychiatrist or a psychologist to get relief. I repeat: to get relief. Not to get out of it.
This passage from DeMello started to give me a clearer sense of what had become repellent in my psychotherapy work. I did not want to (only!) provide relief. Because I’d historically enjoyed couples work, I found it particularly troubling and upsetting that for the past few months, I’d been spending 90% of the couples sessions in an internal snit.
It wasn’t until I read John Welwood’s book that I had insight into what was playing out (not only in the couples work, but especially in couples work). Welwood says, in a nutshell, that we as humans get tricked into thinking there’s only one love tap, which exists outside of ourselves. And if we feel like that one love tap isn’t on, we go into either “grievance against self” (putting ourselves on trial for all the ways we’ve failed to get the love) or “grievance against other” (putting the other on trial for failing to give us the love). Welwood’s point is that you could spend forever going back and forth, playing grievance tennis (internal grievance tennis, where you go into self-hatred, shame and anger at yourself, or external grievance tennis, where you build grievance against your partner, who may or may not be lobbing your grievance serves back at you). Welwood says you could explore the grievances, you could try to resolve the internal grievances, or you could try to change your partner so they stopped ‘causing’ you so much grievance. Ultimately, though, none of that would get you ‘out’ of the grievance game.
Moreover, Welwood helps us see that staying in grievances means we actually move further and further away from what we yearn for, further and further from the genuine presence and connection that can really only come from being in contact with the truth of our nondual nature. And that this “journey of the heart” –going in to find the unlimited, flowing tap within ourSelves– is the starting point for true intimacy and authentic love. What I was realizing, as I put together Hillman’s, Welwood’s and DeMello’s conceptualizations, is that a lot of couples came to therapy–some consciously and others unconsciously–looking for a referee (or judge) in front of whom they could air their grievances. And most thought the ‘point’ of the process was to try to ‘win’ the grievance game. Individuals came to therapy trying
to find an audience for their grievances, wanting relief, but not (yet) wanting a way out. Like Welwood, I agree that we could play grievance tennis forever. Our belief that our grievances are justified, our belief that we will get the love we want by getting rid of the grievances (by changing ourselves or our partners), keeps us totally stuck in suffering. Like DeMello, I agree that it seems like we have to get fed up with playing endless grievance tennis. We have to get so sick of the dependency model, and see so clearly that we never ‘get there’ within the dependency model, no matter how skillfully we relationship hack, no matter how compelling our grievances, that we decide to throw in the towel and find a way out.
What I was starting to suspect, after having a strong: “THIS IS IT!” reaction upon reading Welwood’s ‘grievance’ theory, is that almost all narratives are just grievances, with varying degrees of plot. And in a way, our grievances make perfect sense from the perspective of our parts, especially our child parts. When we were young, we were literally dependent on our caregivers. We couldn’t feed ourselves, we couldn’t attune to ourselves, we couldn’t regulate our own nervous systems. We could say, we started off honestly believing that we needed an Other to keep the bad feelings away (or to help us feel better if the bad feelings arose anyway), and to provide the good feelings. But at some point,the first step out of duality involves taking responsibility for oneself, stepping into our own fullness and completeness as adults.
I started fantasizing about mandatory prerequisites for prospective couples who wanted to work with me: I wanted them to read Welwood’s Perfect Love, Imperfect Relationships, and Almaas’s theory of holes, and then I wanted them to have done their own individual processing work (ideally using a blend of IFS, EMDR and Polyvagal) before we started the couples work. What I wanted them to understand, while noting that I myself seemed to struggle with truly understanding this, is that ironically (or paradoxically), the way ‘out’ actually seems to involve going in. In the old (dependency) model, we’d started with a faulty premise: that there was only one love tap, and it was ‘outside’ of the true Self. Given how we start out in the world, in vulnerable, squishy, baby bodies– entirely dependent on our caregivers–it makes sense that we begin with the idea that the love tap is outside. We get an early start on robust careers of grievance around not getting this ‘outside love’ that we want (and feel we need). People like Tara Brach, author of Radical Acceptance, say that instead of staying in grievance and suffering, let’s stop fighting how things are, cease reacting with impulsive or destructive behaviors when life doesn’t go the way we want, and release the anger and disappointment that keeps us in suffering loops.
While I agree that radical acceptance beats suffering any day, I remain uncertain about whether it gets us ‘out’ of the dependency model entirely. What I was noticing with myself is that relational wounds would crop up, and I would feel them. Almost instantly, a scolding part of me would say “whoa! You’re suffering! Stop being upset about this!” and then I would promptly squash the feeling. In the practice lab of client sessions, I noticed that clients who didn’t have as robust scolding parts as I did just kept articulating grievance stories. And the more they aired their grievances, the more energy and language they gave to them, the heavier and more real they seemed. As a clinician, it felt like there was only so much ‘grievance against self’ & ‘grievance against other’ I could take. Or a different, perhaps less self-critical way of framing this was: it felt like the sessions themselves– because of the focus on the content–convinced each person more and more that their suffering and their parts weren’t ‘illusionary’ at all. As Peter Fenner says in Radiant Mind, “Some ‘Western nonduals’ argue that it’s wrong to give any thought at all to our conditioned existence. They say that any attention we give to our livelihood, health, relationships, etc., only fortifies the ego, prolongs our suffering, and delays our final liberation. Nondualists are right to continue to bring this to our attention, because one of our main difficulties is that we’re already consumed by the dictates of our desires.”
Recognizing that grievances signaled a concept of unfulfilled desire, I started to feel deja vu. Unfulfilled desire thinking brought me all the way back to Freud, a land wherein the best we could hope for was to render the unconscious content conscious, thus ‘arriving’ at functional neuroses. It seemed to me that Freud, and attachment theory, really do a wonderful job of fleshing out the first and second noble truths–that life is suffering, and it’s attachment that causes the suffering. But from my perspective, attachment theory doesn’t help us at all with the 3rd and 4th noble truths. Instead it leaves us apparently stuck. How can we wrap our minds around what was truly painful (actual pain, not suffering) in our childhoods? If God(dess)/Source etc was benevolent/loving/good/not an asshole, then why was there so much fucked up shit happening for people, relationally? How could it matter so much who our parents were, and whether they were good enough caregivers or not?
From my perspective as a therapist, I couldn’t pretend that I was responsible for how securely or insecurely attached I was—yet it seemed just as disingenuous to dig my heels in and stay pissed off for the rest of my life, continuing to tell wound stories and looking for an Other to fill the hole of attunement need. The postmodernist part of me recognized that the constructs we collectively co-create,
maintain, rebel against, avoid—like racism, sexism, heteronormativity, ableism, ageism, etc–influencee and act on me whether or not I personally agreed or participated with any of it. Hearkening back to Bateson, I felt myself to be in a bizarre double bind: on the one hand the message seemed to be, ‘stop pretending you are a powerless victim, and blaming everyone else for everything in your life.’ On the other hand, ‘stop going into suffering, self-hatred, self-blame, and the illusion of control.” It seems like our ever-extremist, dichotomizing ego parts love to pretend we’re omnipotent, and blame ourselves for everything, or that we’re powerless victims, who have control over nothing.
From my perspective now, I see that we start out afraid that we are our wounds, feeling desperate as children who need nurturing adults to make it all better. As we deepen into our spiritual and healing paths, we find that we have everything we need already inside us. Flowing between de-tachment (or non-attachment) from our wound stories, to compassionate understanding of ourSelves and of our desire to find completeness in a living Other, we move through, and ultimately past, our yearning for ‘someone else’ to fill us up. When we allow ourselves to come into contact with the Divine within, we realize we are both the wounded child, and the healed adult: ever-healing in our Becomingness, already perfectly complete, lacking nothing, in our Beingness.