Attachment theory and story telling

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Summary:

The development of our mind and the patterns of our attachments are highly determined by the way we are brought up in our family. The four kinds of attachments from the attachment theory helps us to understand our own attachment patterns. The first kind of attachment known as the ‘secure attachment is the typical kind where the child keeps on crying when the caregiver leaves; when the caregiver returns the child gets pacified, and the child starts playing again. In the second type of attachment known as the ‘avoidant attachment,’ the child does not show the signs of distress or anger in the parent’s absence; when the child rejoins the caregiver, the child just continues to play. Such a child does neither get excited seeing the caregiver nor gets disappointed when the caregiver leaves. In ‘ambivalent attachment,’ the babies acted inconsistently - sometimes they felt distressed and wary, and at other times they felt joy and playful. In ‘disorganized attachment,’ the infant is completely frightened by the glance of the caregiver and obviously it's a terrified child. 

I myself belong to the first kind: ‘secure attachment’. I found that the biggest pain in my life was being left alone by my mother on the first day of my school! I felt extremely sad and afraid, lonely - I started screaming and crying uncontrollably. I even dared to dodge the teachers and to run to see my mother – she walked away in my sight! This experience has left me always in the space of solitude and fear of abandonment. I always get attached to my partner, friends, and my children and I feel extreme sadness in case of a break-up. 

 

Description: 

By identifying the attachment type that we hold as per our childhood growth, we can determine what our predominant nature is. For example, my nature is being harmonious in my relationships. At times, I tend to control my loved ones not to be left alone at any point in time. An avoidant child will be rigid in nature. If you are an ambivalent child, chaos will be your predominant nature in mind. And if you are ‘disorganized type,’ then you'll have rigidity and commotion as predominant nature in your self. Disorganized children often collapse in front of a challenge and go into depression and irrevocable mental disorders. 

As a secure child, I found that I had high intelligence, good relationships, and an excellent career. Effectively, I could regulate the emotions to great extent. This looks like a prefrontal middle prefrontal function where healthy body regulations, attunement with others, emotional balance, response flexibility, fear modulation, empathy, insight, and moral awareness become the default nature. In my case, I found that I'm highly intuitional as well. Secure children develop the integrity fibers of the middle prefrontal region and develop healthy interpersonal neurobiology. I've seen ambivalent children who are completely controlling others and being constantly rejected by their peers. Rarely can create loving relationships. Independent of genetics, adverse childhood experiences affect children’s brain development. While ‘avoidant children’ showed lesser signs of distress, disorganize children regularly fell into depression. 

Childhood development affects adult nature. An adult who had a secure mind will be developed as a secure person who can think clearly, communicate well, balance emotions. He becomes successful in relationships, In addition, they are also most successful in their career. In my own experience as a secure child, I found that I was successful in my career because I had the ability to communicate, to connect, and relate with people well, especially my customers. 

Nevertheless, attachments created intense pain in me whenever I got separations in my relationships. This includes friends and colleagues as well. However, because of the emotional resilience that I gained as a secure child, I coped up with the situations. I regained my stability and balance, and a raised myself back into action in a short time. Negative events never obstructed my endeavors my goals in life. Comparatively, my friends who had a ‘dismissing mind’ developed through the avoidant attachment always existed in a state of separation and aloneness. They excel in their left-brain activities like intellect, memory, monotonous jobs and they perform well in engineering and accountancy jobs. They do have their cortex brain active but their connection between the left brain and right brain (corpus callosum) gets blocked preventing the energy and information to be sent to the right brain and vice-versa. They are not the ones who get hurt when people leave them and thus, they are resilient. However, their partners and children will find them numb. 

Ambivalent children develop a preoccupied mind. As they developed in confusion, they inhabit a conflict and a worrying mind. They are inconsistent and unreliable. They can change their words and their decisions at no time and they cannot be taking up the jobs of responsibility in their careers. They can be expected to drop their entire responsibilities and leave the organization instantly. When they fall in love, they commit to the relationships but eventually break up leaving the partners in turmoil. Furthermore, they get emotionally entangled quite easily and they connect, and they resonate and feel the other negative emotions. If they come to a place where another person is anxious, they too become anxious. They find it difficult to disentangle. They quite often find people push their buttons and control them. 

The fourth kind the ‘unresolved mind,’ as the name shows is completely jumbled and fragmented. Their internal world would be disoriented, and they will not have a clear timeline of their past in their mind. The lack of structure leads to lostness and they remain in constant fear of a future tragedy. Carrying a ton of unresolved traumas, they create frequently get stressed just by thought alone. Rarely they know themselves and apparently, expect others to understand them! In fact, they never understand anyone truly as they are emotionally detached and are predominated by brainstem instincts. Their limbic brain is rarely activated and thus will they display animalistic nature. In relationships, they will be inert. Actually, they will need a life of a regular life off eating, working, having sex, and sleeping. They cannot understand or think about the higher dimensions of human life. They will have constant thinking, calculation, planning, talking going on in their brain. They repeatedly conclude a negative projected event and create negative stories in their mind putting them in suffering. Thus, it is very difficult to deal with these people; they will seem absurd and terrified. Many of these people engage in rebellious activities and extreme addictions. 

In truth, these personalities are nothing but the surface film over a large pool of pain. It is the pain during childhood that drives the attachment personalities. Even though we project a positive image outside, we know the hidden agenda behind our motives and we always feel that we are an imposter waiting to be found. In order to avoid the encounter with the unconscious mind, we constantly engage in addictions such as cigarettes, alcohol, sex, drugs, etc.  a way of meaningless escapism. All the pleasure encounters would eventually be found terribly painful. 

So how do I integrate different states of mind and be in stress and come? How do I come out of the post-traumatic effect in my mind, the intense emotional fluctuations that I carry? How do I create an integrated self, composed of different states of mind, and collaborate and function as a unified whole? 

According to mindsight by Daniel Siegel, “ a state is composed of a cluster of neural firing patterns that embed within them certain behaviors, a feeling tone, and access to particular memories.” Effective linking of the neural networks gives rise to a plausible state of mind for functioning. For example, if we're getting ready for swimming, then her body will prime us to access our motor skills, revisit our good strategies, and bio-memories. We will also get connected to the neural networks that remind us of all the tips and tricks that we learned through intelligence strategies. In brain terms, shifting states of mind is nothing but a shift between the ‘cortical columns’ - a stack of six neurons on top of one another clustered to form a network like an interconnected honeycomb. This vertical cortical column coordinates the pulses to different parts of the brain - the occipital lobe for seeing, temporal lobe for hearing, and parietal lobes for touch. Our image and that of others are stored in the columns of neurons in the middle prefrontal area. My best state of mind is a state where I experience reality as it is, where the sensory inputs enter through the brainstem to the bottom layer of the neurons in the cortex and then move upwards creating the experience of the fragrance of touch or of taste. Generally, we are always perceiving the sensory inputs through the window of our past experience, and during sensation, this information is sent to the top layers of the six neurons deep column. Perpetually, it continues building perception. In function during sensation, it sends signals upward from the neuron layer six to five to four and simultaneously downloads from the neuron layer one to two to three. The top-down information and the bottom-up information flash together at the neuron levels three and four, and this is what we experience as distortion. Our current experiences are always distorted by our past experiences. In fact, a state of integration is achieved not by a homogeneous neuron activity but through the coordination among the various collection of states within us. As we integrate into our “self”, we come to know that to engage in relationships, we need to move into a we-state. 

So how to integrate without being obliterated? 

Definitely wiping out the aspects of “I” that is repetitive, destructive, and compulsive is not the right option. “Let me be separate and I will destroy them” approach simply does not work in the long term. We need to find ourselves what our unfulfilled desires are and integrate our inner selves through understanding our deeper needs, identifying and fulfilling them through adaptive and healthy ways. We need to find our different needs such as the need for play, the drive to run your lives, the drive to reproduce and create a family, the need for exploration, the need for social isolation, the need for fame name, and significance, the need for security, the need for love, etc. and prioritize them as per our current stage of life. 

The related and distinct clusters of our self-states need to be reorganized and restructured to have a sensible structure within. It is interesting that in our relationships we seek to activate this self-state a reproduce the past dramatic events (dramatic reenactment). By attracting a mother resembling a woman and relating with her in exactly the way that you related with your mother, it produces the same kind of traumas. For example, by being punitive, getting scolding, punishing, controlling, etc., you can feel at home and feel real. 

The best way and the only way to disengage from this self-destructive self-state is to go through a ‘moment to moment’ fast emotions glancing guided process by an experienced mentor. In the emotional process, the raw childhood experience of rejection and terror surfaces, and one encounter and release. As we release more and more memories, the negative self-state loses its domination over you and you will find it easier to manage them with effectiveness. 

 

At the core, the self-states’ hidden agenda is to find a connection, to be creative, and to be social. To move into these positive states, to shift the existing negative states to positive states, engage in special activities of interest like music, sports, swimming, etc. Find a new partner or discover new ways to deal with the existing partner to disidentify the existing self- state (possibly change the nicknames even) and both could enact the emergence of the new self-states, a new mode of self-state through receptiveness, openness, and connectedness. This will move us from the self-state to we- state functioning in creativity and productivity. In my experience, I found that by pursuing my artistic talents, I could redirect the energy which I used to spend in dopamine-driven impulsive sensory indulgence. Thereby, intelligence, creativity, and productivity sustain in the long term. I found serenity in singing and musical composition. As I published and got public appreciation, the irritation and frustration subsided and thus I switched to the emotional journey of music. The attachment circuits in my brain are no more seeking the opposite sex for soothing and pacification. I found a large number of people appreciating my creative work (music) and loving me, I recognized the superior pleasure of collective love. This led to my transformation. Thus by managing the coordination between the self-states, I shifted from insecure attachment to secure love. 

 

End