Ambivalent Attachment

Goleman: Let me unpack something that I think is implicit in what you’re saying. Which is that the interactions between a parent and child actually are neurally active ingredients in the wiring of the brain as it’s growing. That the more a child experiences something, either a detachment to emotions or attention to emotions, the stronger the circuitry becomes in either direction, that’s how the brain is sculpted. Is that right?

Siegel: Absolutely. That’s a beautiful way of saying it. Thank you. Let’s look, for example, at the child with an ambivalent attachment. Let’s go back to my daughter who encounters me with a preoccupied attachment, meaning that I am filled with unresolved garbage from my own childhood. What happens then is I see her being hungry. I can’t come to her with any kind of clear emotion that resonates with her because I’m intruding my own past. She becomes being filled with fear and hunger, and now she's being fed. Fast forward to repeated experiences like that. What might be ingrained in the neural connections in her brain would be something like this: “When I feel a drive, like to satisfy my hunger, instead of just motivating me to seek connections with others so I can be fed, for some reason, I’m filled with fear and anxiety. So now I have hunger, fear, and anxiety. I can’t really just satisfy my hunger with food because even as I’m eating, I’m still fearful. Over time then, I look at food with fright. Even my experience of fear is filled with anxiety because I don’t know where it’s coming from. So I’m frightened of my own anxiety, which makes me anxious, and I become fearful of anxiety. It’s all wrapped up like that.

Now I’m a parent, and my child is uncomfortable. My resonating circuits in the social circuitry of my brain begin to make me feel uncomfortable. I haven’t learned how to comfort myself. I haven’t learned self-soothing, because of this problem I had with an ambivalent attachment relationship. So, the exact transmission of emotional communication, which is what attachment is, shapes the circuits in the brain. Especially those circuits in the prefrontal region, and how they can keep the lower limbic areas coordinated and in balance. In this case, I’m flooded with all sorts of emotions that influence my thinking, and I don’t know what to do with them.

Goleman: How does this change? How does the way parents and other people in a child’s life deal with it matter in different phases of childhood? Because the circuits of the brain grow in stages.

Siegel: Right. Let me address that by giving an example of unresolved trauma, the forth grouping that we didn’t address yet. We have secure attachment as one form. We have the ambivalent attachment that we just described, which comes from a parent who has a preoccupied attachment. We have the avoidantly attached child, who grows into the dismissing one. Those are the ones we’ve talked about. Then there’s one called disorganized attachment. This is where children experience from their parents terror or frightened looks on the parents face, or the parents are doing things that are terrifying. In either of those cases the child feels terrified and has a biological paradox. Part of their circuitry, the attachment circuitry says, "Go to the parent for soothing." But, in this situation, the parent is the source of the terror. That is called 'fear without solution', and it leads to a kind of fragmented self in the child. Where when the child gets a little older they’ll have something called disassociation. If we look at that example and say, well, what can parents do with that? What the research shows is that those parents have unresolved trauma and grief. The important issue is that trauma and grief, if unresolved, can be treated and can lead to resolution. Then those parents will not produce the same terrifying experiences for the children. It’s not just cases of abuse. This is also in cases where parents have unresolved trauma and loss but they’re just acting in ways which are scary. For example they might space out. They themselves might disassociate. They might think their loved one who passed away is still alive and start interacting with them in a way that assumes this dead person is there. The children get very frightened of that.

Goleman: What does it mean to resolve trauma or loss?