So what does this mean you may ask?

It is fascinating to me how important the first years of life are in creating these styles and patterns within us – that is where it all starts truly:) We may very much want to leave it all behind and believe that we can do just that.  Perhaps it gives us a sense of power to feel we can rise above our parents influence – however, understanding attachment can be useful – if not interesting.

The relationship as an infant with our [mothers] is instrumental in creating what is referred to as secure or insecure attachment.  This comes down to developing an ability to both approach other people and separate from other people. The ease to which we can do this is determined by how in tune our mothers were with us in those first few years of life. Of course we don’t remember those years but we can often get a sense of it from how our relationships with those  people (mother)  or from information regarding events such as hospital admissions.  So what are our[mothers] doing that so affects us?

Being in tune with an infant is the ability to focus on the infants needs and respond to help the baby regulate their distress.  A baby cries and the mother responds with soothing and the baby’s nervous system learns to ‘calm down’. If the mother is not soothing the baby does not learn to calm down. If this happens over and over again, the babies nervous system starts to take on ways of dealing with this and develops what is referred to as insecure attachment styles. The mother can ‘misattune’ in a number of ways; by just not paying attention and being self absorbed, only responds in a cold and practical manner, gets frustrated or feels a lot of anxiety herself, avoiding mutual gaze, resisting physical contact, wanting attention from the infant when the child does not. These things happen on occasions with all mothers, but your parents have their own attachment styles that gets reflected in their ability to respond to you as a baby on an ongoing basis.

Of course if you throw into the mix more extreme forms of abuse and neglect then the baby may develop a much more extreme insecure attachment. Adults who have had these experiences find relationships very challenging and people around them often don’t know if they are coming or going.

So often in relationships as adults we can find ourselves in relationships with partners that challenge our attachment styles – just like my husband and I do. His style developed in response to an unattuned mother who would resist being emotionally connected. So he learned to avoid emotional connection. He is on the end of what is called insecure avoidant. As adults these people tend to avoid emotional intimacy, keep their internal world to themselves, appear as if they don’t need anyone, and find dependency frightening.  In other words they tend to get anxious the closer they become to others.

And people like me who have what is called an insecure ambivalent style tend to feel more anxious when separated from people close to them. This comes from a mother’s inconsistant and unpredictable response. So these mothers will tend to encourage connection and then withdraw from it depending on their own emotional moods. So a baby may sometimes feel soothed by the mother and than abandoned.  As adults we know that being close can feel good but what we don’t feel secure about is being separated from others. So we can perhaps see how my anxiety would get activated by my husbands avoidance of emotional connection and his anxiety gets triggered if I come in too close. The good news is that we can change these patterns to create more secure attachments.