Humanitas EAP
Build A Secure Attachment
Each time, or at least, most times, you walk up the garden path towards your front door, you should be able to feel yourself relaxing now that you are home. That moment, each day when the two of you reconnect you should feel safety and comfort that you are in a calm port in the midst of the storm. An intimate friendship is like that. You feel you have a secure base from which to launch off into the world and a safe haven to which you can return and renew yourself. Those are the special benefits of a successful relationship.
From the moment of your birth, you are involved in a search for safety and security. That is what enables you to survive. You share this need with all the other members of the animal kingdom, and are programmed for it through your evolutionary heritage.
The first task of infancy is to form a secure relationship with your primary care giver - usually, your Mother. The relationship with Father comes a little bit later. In most cases, mothers and infants form a secure attachment in which the infant feels safe and well looked after. Caregivers wrap their arms around the infant to provide an extra layer of protection from the world beyond.
When the care giver is attuned to the infant and can appropriately and predictably provide for the infant’s needs, the relationship becomes secure. Your caregiver comes to be seen as reliable and responsive to your needs. She engages in teaching you the first lessons about life. She soothes you when you are distressed, feeds you when you are hungry, comforts you when you are afraid. Your father also is part of this system of emotional regulation. In childhood, sound families are a secure base from which you can launch out and test yourself in the world outside. When you are hurt or afraid, you return to the safety and comfort of your parents. They become your safe havens.
However, if there is trouble, illness, injury or upset in the family system when you were born, the process of developing a secure attachment can become disrupted. Your mother may not always have been able to be there for you in those critical early years; too busy, too upset, too distracted to reliably or appropriately respond to your needs. You may become insecure in your attachment as you learn early in life that you cannot count on your care givers to meet your needs.
Developmental psychologists tell us that these formative experiences are crucial to what you come to learn about others, yourself and the world outside. What you learn in the early years of life, you carry with you in an internal working model of how things work. Later, in childhood and adolescence these internal images and expectations influence your interactions with peers and others in your world. They affect the way you relate to others and are affected in turn by others in a continuous cycle of learning and experience. They also impact who you choose as a partner and how you relate in that intimate relationship. These experiences influence much of the way you conduct your life and relationships as an adult.
The goal of an intimate relationship, like that of your first relationship with your care givers, is to build a secure base and a safe haven.
A secure base means that your intimate relationship is one you come to trust will always be there for you as long as you work to maintain it. A safe haven is your sense that you can be comfortable with your intimate partner and feel safe with that person. You always know he or she is on your side.
If your early experiences as an infant (which you likely will not remember) led to secure attachment, then you will look for and value the above in your relationship. If not, you may be cautious, even fearful of getting too close to another human being because you have learned the person you trust the most can let you down or even cause you pain. You may preserve your safety by not letting yourself get too close or too dependent.
In intimate relationships, we struggle to build trust and to prove ourselves trustworthy. We risk being vulnerable. We find the balance between our need for independence and our need for dependence on another person. We ask our partner to provide comfort and security at times when we are distressed or upset. Our internal working model then informs us as to how likely it is to happen. Each of us goes about this in our own unique way. We all are more or less trusting, vigilant able to meet our partner’s needs or have them meet ours. We may easily feel that secure attachment, or we may find it to be an ongoing struggle.
The good news when it is a struggle is that we never need to be trapped by our history. Steven Covey suggests that between the stimulus of our life (our personal history) and the response we make to it (our future), we always have a choice.
A choice however is the easy part. The hard part is the struggle to learn intimacy. That can take years. Sometimes it requires expert help. But in a committed relationship security and safety can be built.
Here is a model of four attachment styles. Think about your own style growing up and how it is now.
Talk It Over...
What style have you each developed?
What works for you in building intimacy?
How well do you each tolerate being close?
How comfortable is it for you to feel dependent?
How could you build safety and security in each other?