Recently I was talking with a woman I met while at a fitness class I frequent. In the midst of our chit chat she asked about what I do for a living. When I told her that I am a counsellor she responded in a way that has become all too familiar, “Ha!” she said, “You’re one of those, are you? So, what? People come into your office and whine about their problems and you tell them to blame their mom, right!?” This is a common perception of the work of therapy – to sit in a small room, perhaps reclined on a couch, and analyzing the ways in which your parents messed things up for you. Meanwhile, as a therapist who works from an attachment perspective, I do know the benefit of hearkening back to our days of ole in order to utilize this for healing in our present and for hope long into our future. So let’s talk about attachment – what it really means, and how it should be utilized effectively in therapy, not for the blame game but for personal growth and healing.
In essence, the therapeutic function of looking back at childhood is that this is where we began. Research has shown that many aspects of our brain are formed by the age of two. Our early learning is a mold for what we anticipate the world to be like, and often we interact in the world throughout our lives in patterned ways developed in childhood. The work of therapy, from an attachment perspective, is around discovering the links of our current difficulties to our past learning – not for the purpose of blame, but in order to develop strategies that target the original learning.
Think for a moment of a dripping pipe…drip…drip…drip… Now I don’t know about you, but I don’t know how to fix a pipe, so I would grab a bucket to catch the drip, get a towel and mop up the mess, and then turn on my radio so I can ignore the annoying noise. In doing these things I have dealt with the symptoms of the problem – I no longer have water going everywhere and things seem under control. Meanwhile, if this is all I do there are likely to be bigger problems up ahead because I haven’t dealt with the actual problem, just the result of the problem. This is what people tend to do when there are attachment issues – we find temporary ways of patching ourselves up so we can keep living as if nothing is wrong until we reach the bursting point. It is at this point that people tend to seek counselling and learn that patching the problem will not fix the problem – that in actual fact we need to look to where the problem stems from in order to solve the rest. In going through this process, the result is an incredible “trickle-down effect” (no pun intended…) that trickles down effecting change and healing from our early learning all the way through to our current symptoms.
When I have explained this to clients, I often continue to receive resistance to the concept of looking back into childhood issues. One of the main concerns I hear is that people do not want to insinuate that their parents did a bad job or blame their primary caregivers for problems they are now experiencing in adulthood. I certainly understand these concerns, and truly empathize with the desire to protect the image others have of our family. Socially we are taught to value familial relationships very highly, that blood is thicker than water and that we are responsible for protecting our family and the way the family is perceived by others.
Often rules exist within families in order to protect the family unit – these can come in many forms but may include family secrets (e.g. we don’t talk about dad’s drinking), or unspoken expectations and subtle learnings (e.g. it’s not o.k. to voice my opinions; children are meant to be seen and not heard). In addition to the social and familial pressures to protect the family’s image, there is also the fact that we truly love and care for our family members and want them to be perceived well by others (generally, although this is not universally true). In the midst of this though, is the reality is that people are not perfect, and this means that parents are not perfect. No matter how wonderful one’s childhood might have been, often there are defining moments that impact us – this may have been due to one or both of our primary caregivers or perhaps from another key figure in our lives. Remember, the point of attachment based therapy is not to look back and say, “Wow, it seems like your mom’s inability to nurture you totally messed you up” but rather to identify the defining moments or characteristics of our childhoods in order to heal them, thereby healing the current problems we may experience that are linked back to those childhood experiences.
I’ll take a moment to give an example, with permission from the person whose story this belongs. Someone close to me had, in her early elementary school years, been yelled at by a teacher who she was very fearful of. The teacher said something to the effect of “you are nothing and you will never get anywhere in life” and had done so in front of the entire class during silent reading time. The effect on the child was fear, humiliation, and self-doubt. Because of the child’s fear of this teacher, she never told her family about the incident (this is important to note as there were no adults in the child’s life dis-confirming the teacher’s statement, in a child’s mind making it seem true). The child grew up and was constantly seeking the approval of others, fearful of being embarrassed, and always striving to be the best. This individual has continually struggled with feeling like an impostor – as though she is a great pretender fearing that eventually someone will find her out and discover that she is, in fact, nothing. The experience this individual had with this teacher was a defining moment, one that reached through the sands of time and continued to exert a significant impact on her life well into adulthood. This is an example of the material that may emerge in therapy, material that may then be used to heal the current “impostor syndrome” by going back to where the story began and working through the needs of that child.
So what, then, does attachment therapy look like? Well, it can take many different shapes and forms. There are many ways attachment therapy is done, but at the end of the day the work is meant to benefit you the client, so if you are uncomfortable with the procedures proposed to you by your counsellor, or are dissatisfied with the progress you have made consider discussing this with your counsellor or seek another therapist. All good therapy should be, at times, uncomfortable – it is the nature of the work that it will not always be comfy cozy, but nor should it cause you significant distress. Ideally attachment based work should be a mutual process between client and counsellor that gradually touches parts of the past while connecting them to current areas of distress, and balancing this with tools and strategies to help cope in the present as well as nurture the hurts from way back when. If the past was a scary place, this work should happen particularly cautiously and gradually in order to prevent the client from feeling overwhelmed by the process – however having done this work with many individuals with particularly horrific childhood experiences, I know the healing that can come from this work and have seen the way it can completely revolutionize a person’s life.
It is my hope that I have provided a provocative argument for the use of attachment therapy and that you, my diligent reader, might consider the ways in which this type of work might reach into your own life and create positive change. It is just one more way to help you to grow.change.live.thrive.About the Author
