our deepest longing is to have stable
satisfying relationships but the painful
fact is that very large numbers of
relationships have one painful episode
after another or seemingly intractable
miserable conflicts running through them
it’s one of the biggest questions there
is why is it so hard to be happy and
love the huge and not yet fully digested
insight of psychoanalysis is that the
challenges of relationships always start
when we were children
it was the contribution of a great
English psychoanalyst called John Bowlby
to trace the tensions and conflicts we
have with our partners back to our
earliest experiences of maternal care
his ideas are sound in part because he
drew so deeply and honestly on his own
experiences in order to formulate them
born in 1907
Bowlby had a quintessentially upper
class British childhood young Bowlby
hardly saw his parents and was looked
after by a nanny who was let go when he
was just for leaving young Bowlby bereft
at seven he was sent off in line with
the conventions of his class to boarding
school he hated it and later declared I
wouldn’t send a dog away to boarding
school at the age of seven
Bowlby became a brilliant medical
student and an imaginative researcher
when he was a consultant to the World
Health Organization in the early 1950s
Bobby wrote a report maternal care and
mental health
he attacked prevalent assumptions and
argued that kindness doesn’t smother and
spoil children it’s as if maternal care
were as necessary for the proper
development of personality as vitamin D
for the proper development of bones he
wrote this insight initiated a wave of
reform the visitation rules of many
health institutions were reformed to
allow parents to stay with their
children where they’d once been allowed
only to visit and never touch it sounds
like a dry bureaucratic move but it
ended countless afternoons of quiet
sorrow and evenings of solitary anguish
in a book published in 1959 called
separation anxiety Bobby looks at what
happens when there isn’t enough of this
kind of parental care
he described the behavior of children
he’d observed who’d been separated from
their parents if the child is separated
for too long they still crave the
attention
love an interest of the parents but feel
that anything good may disappear at any
moment they look for a lot of
reassurance and get upset if it’s not
forthcoming they become volatile they
take heart and then they despair and
then they’re filled with hope again this
is the pattern of what Bobby called
anxious attachment but the degree of
separation from the parents may lead to
another sort of problem the child could
feel so helpless they become what Bobby
called
detached they enter their own world to
protect themselves and become remote and
cold they experience what Bobby calls
avoidant attachment that is they see
tenderness closeness emotional
investment is always dangerous and to be
shunned they may in truth be desperate
for a cuddle or for reassurance but such
things look far too treacherous the
focus of Bobby’s thinking was about what
happens to a child if there are too many
difficulties in forming secure
attachments but the consequences don’t
magically get restricted only to the age
of 8 or 12 17 their life long our
attachment style is fed by our earliest
experiences
it’s a pre-existing script that gets
written into our adult relationships
usually without us even realizing that
this has happened in line with Bobby’s
views about how children relate to their
parents there are three basic kinds of
attachment we can have to other adults
firstly secure attachment this is the
rare ideal when you’re securely attached
if there’s a problem you’ll work it out
you’re not appalled by the weakness of
your partner if your partner’s a bit
down confused or being a bit annoying
you don’t react too wildly because even
if they can’t be nice to you you can
take care of yourself and have hopefully
a little time left over to meet some of
the needs of your partner you give the
other the benefit of the doubt when
interpreting behavior you realize that
maybe they had a tricky time at work
that’s why they’re not so interested in
your day the explanations are
accommodating generous and usually more
accurate but there’s another kind of
attachment anxious attachment and this
is marked by clinginess
texting and calling all the time just to
check where the other is and keep tabs
on what they’re up to you need to make
sure the other person hasn’t left you or
the country and
attached people become coercive and
demanding and focus on their own needs
not their partners anxious attachment
involves a lot of anger because the
stakes feel so high a – slight a hasty
word a tiny oversight can look to the
anxiously attached person like huge
threats they seem to announce the
imminent breakup of the whole
relationship one feels the reason you
don’t tell me that the minestrone soup I
made is delicious is that you don’t love
me and are planning to leave me when the
true explanation may simply be that
one’s partner is mulling over a very
tricky bit of news about a contract at
work avoidant attachment means that you
would rather withdraw and go away than
compromise get angry or even just get
close to another person if there’s a
problem you don’t talk your instinct is
to say you don’t need the other person
especially if you’re lonely avoidant
spouses often team up with anxious ones
it’s a risky combination the avoidant
one doesn’t give the anxious one much
support and the anxious one is always
invading the delicate privacy of the
avoidant one Bowlby helps us to feel
more generous and more constructive
about what these partners are doing when
they upset or disappoint us almost no
one in truth is purely anxious or purely
avoidant we’re just a bit like that some
of the time so alerted by Bowlby we can
see that a partner’s apparent coldness
and indifference is not caused by their
loathing of us but by the fact that a
long time ago they were probably rather
badly hurt by intimacy and it opens
possibilities of self-knowledge which
can help one reform if only a little one’s own rather eccentric behavior
satisfying relationships but the painful
fact is that very large numbers of
relationships have one painful episode
after another or seemingly intractable
miserable conflicts running through them
it’s one of the biggest questions there
is why is it so hard to be happy and
love the huge and not yet fully digested
insight of psychoanalysis is that the
challenges of relationships always start
when we were children
it was the contribution of a great
English psychoanalyst called John Bowlby
to trace the tensions and conflicts we
have with our partners back to our
earliest experiences of maternal care
his ideas are sound in part because he
drew so deeply and honestly on his own
experiences in order to formulate them
born in 1907
Bowlby had a quintessentially upper
class British childhood young Bowlby
hardly saw his parents and was looked
after by a nanny who was let go when he
was just for leaving young Bowlby bereft
at seven he was sent off in line with
the conventions of his class to boarding
school he hated it and later declared I
wouldn’t send a dog away to boarding
school at the age of seven
Bowlby became a brilliant medical
student and an imaginative researcher
when he was a consultant to the World
Health Organization in the early 1950s
Bobby wrote a report maternal care and
mental health
he attacked prevalent assumptions and
argued that kindness doesn’t smother and
spoil children it’s as if maternal care
were as necessary for the proper
development of personality as vitamin D
for the proper development of bones he
wrote this insight initiated a wave of
reform the visitation rules of many
health institutions were reformed to
allow parents to stay with their
children where they’d once been allowed
only to visit and never touch it sounds
like a dry bureaucratic move but it
ended countless afternoons of quiet
sorrow and evenings of solitary anguish
in a book published in 1959 called
separation anxiety Bobby looks at what
happens when there isn’t enough of this
kind of parental care
he described the behavior of children
he’d observed who’d been separated from
their parents if the child is separated
for too long they still crave the
attention
love an interest of the parents but feel
that anything good may disappear at any
moment they look for a lot of
reassurance and get upset if it’s not
forthcoming they become volatile they
take heart and then they despair and
then they’re filled with hope again this
is the pattern of what Bobby called
anxious attachment but the degree of
separation from the parents may lead to
another sort of problem the child could
feel so helpless they become what Bobby
called
detached they enter their own world to
protect themselves and become remote and
cold they experience what Bobby calls
avoidant attachment that is they see
tenderness closeness emotional
investment is always dangerous and to be
shunned they may in truth be desperate
for a cuddle or for reassurance but such
things look far too treacherous the
focus of Bobby’s thinking was about what
happens to a child if there are too many
difficulties in forming secure
attachments but the consequences don’t
magically get restricted only to the age
of 8 or 12 17 their life long our
attachment style is fed by our earliest
experiences
it’s a pre-existing script that gets
written into our adult relationships
usually without us even realizing that
this has happened in line with Bobby’s
views about how children relate to their
parents there are three basic kinds of
attachment we can have to other adults
firstly secure attachment this is the
rare ideal when you’re securely attached
if there’s a problem you’ll work it out
you’re not appalled by the weakness of
your partner if your partner’s a bit
down confused or being a bit annoying
you don’t react too wildly because even
if they can’t be nice to you you can
take care of yourself and have hopefully
a little time left over to meet some of
the needs of your partner you give the
other the benefit of the doubt when
interpreting behavior you realize that
maybe they had a tricky time at work
that’s why they’re not so interested in
your day the explanations are
accommodating generous and usually more
accurate but there’s another kind of
attachment anxious attachment and this
is marked by clinginess
texting and calling all the time just to
check where the other is and keep tabs
on what they’re up to you need to make
sure the other person hasn’t left you or
the country and
attached people become coercive and
demanding and focus on their own needs
not their partners anxious attachment
involves a lot of anger because the
stakes feel so high a – slight a hasty
word a tiny oversight can look to the
anxiously attached person like huge
threats they seem to announce the
imminent breakup of the whole
relationship one feels the reason you
don’t tell me that the minestrone soup I
made is delicious is that you don’t love
me and are planning to leave me when the
true explanation may simply be that
one’s partner is mulling over a very
tricky bit of news about a contract at
work avoidant attachment means that you
would rather withdraw and go away than
compromise get angry or even just get
close to another person if there’s a
problem you don’t talk your instinct is
to say you don’t need the other person
especially if you’re lonely avoidant
spouses often team up with anxious ones
it’s a risky combination the avoidant
one doesn’t give the anxious one much
support and the anxious one is always
invading the delicate privacy of the
avoidant one Bowlby helps us to feel
more generous and more constructive
about what these partners are doing when
they upset or disappoint us almost no
one in truth is purely anxious or purely
avoidant we’re just a bit like that some
of the time so alerted by Bowlby we can
see that a partner’s apparent coldness
and indifference is not caused by their
loathing of us but by the fact that a
long time ago they were probably rather
badly hurt by intimacy and it opens
possibilities of self-knowledge which
can help one reform if only a little one’s own rather eccentric behavior
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