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The Power of Attachment: How to Create Deep and Lasting Intimate Relationships

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The more we learn about genetic markers of resilience and vulnerability, the more it becomes obvious that predicting children’s development is fantastically difficult. Perhaps this is why resilience has not caught the public’s imagination in the way that attachment has. Simple causal relations are attractive because they are easy to grasp. Understanding the idea that secure attachment leads to successful development, whereas insecure attachment leads to unsuccessful development, isn’t challenging in any way. Getting your head around the complex web of developmental pathways highlighted by the resilience literature is considerably more difficult. In her rather scathing review of ‘ The predictive power of attachment’ (January 2017) Elizabeth Meins takes aim at misguided opinions about attachment that circulate in the policy arena. Certainly, policy makers, in an attempt to secure public money that children, families, and schools badly need, tend to exaggerate claims about the critical importance of early experience. The public discourse however should be sharply differentiated from the scientific discourse. Here we focus on Meins’s critique of attachment research. We list some of her comments about the evidence and show that they are largely mistaken. Filled with wise guidance based on decades of clinical experience and scientific training, Dr. Poole Heller provides a wealth of clear, practical tools that anyone can use to improve their relationships and enrich their lives. With warmth, honesty, and a gift for teaching, she weaves together insights from attachment research, neurobiology, and life experience to provide easy-to-use tools to connect more deeply to others and heal our hearts and minds in the process—creating a valuable resource for us all.” —Ronald D. Siegel, PsyD, Assistant Professor of Psychology at Harvard Medical School and Author of The Mindfulness Solution: Everyday Practices for Everyday Problems Jaffee, S. R., & Price, T. S. (2012). The implications of genotype–environment correlation for establishing causal processes in psychopathology. Development and Psychopathology, 24, 1253-1264. doi:10.1017/S0954579412000685 Attachment researchers understand the nuances in van IJzendoorn and colleagues’ meta-analyses. The problem is that nuanced interpretations are lost when findings are digested for the wider public. Their complex meta-analytic results on attachment and internalising and externalising behaviours are simply interpreted as insecure attachment in infancy causing children to become mentally ill. The real concern is that these caricatures of attachment research are informing policy and practice for children and families in the UK. My article sought to highlight the dangers of intervening in people’s lives on the basis of a simplistic, deterministic view of the predictive power of attachment.

Personally, I think Bowlby and Ainsworth have provided us with an extremely powerful framework for characterising individual differences in social relationships. My problem is that somewhere along the line, the idea that early attachment is the best predictor of all aspects of later development has gained credence. We need to get out of our ivory towers and unite in calling out this caricature of our research. Throughout life each of us will form thousands of relationships. These bonds take many forms. Some are enduring and intimate — our dearest friend — while others are transient and superficial — the chatty store clerk. Relationships, in all forms, create the glue of a family, community, and society. In truth, this capacity to form and maintain relationships is the most important trait of humankind — without it, none of us would survive, learn, work, or procreate. UCL> Provost and Vice Provost Offices> School of Life and Medical Sciences> Faculty of Brain Sciences> Div of Psychology and Lang Sciences> Clinical, Edu and Hlth Psychology But there’s good news, too. We can do something about it. We’re all born with an amazing capacity to survive, heal, and thrive, which is precisely the reason we’ve made it this far to begin with. It’s what we’re built for.Insecure attachment is being pathologised and vilified. It is not abnormal – at least 39 per cent of us are insecurely attached. Different types of attachment simply reflect the kind of individual differences you’d expect to see in any aspect of children’s early development. People are perfectly happy with variation in toddlers’ height, weight and ability to walk and talk, but don’t want variation in attachment relationships. Secure attachment is wrongly being set up as a benchmark for all toddlers to attain.

Our brain is designed to promote relationships. Specific parts of the human brain respond to emotional cues — facial expressions, touch, scent — and, more important, allow us to get pleasure from positive human interactions. The systems in the brain that mediate pleasure appear to be intimately connected to those that mediate emotional relationships. Indeed, the capacity to get pleasure from other people becomes a major learning tool of infancy and childhood: young children want to please you and model their behavior and attitudes on yours. Now, I should just preface my comments there by saying that no judgement of other parenting styles is intended here at all. We all do our best with the knowledge and resources available to us. However, learning about attachment theory, and the extensive research surrounding it, was a turning point in my life.

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Filled with wise guidance based on decades of clinical experience and scientific training, Dr. Poole Heller provides a wealth of clear, practical tools that anyone can use to improve their relationships and enrich their lives. With warmth, honesty, and a gift for teaching, she weaves together insights from attachment research, neurobiology, and life experience to provide easy-to-use tools to connect more deeply to others and heal our hearts and minds in the process--creating a valuable resource for us all." -- Ronald D. Siegel, PsyD, assistant professor of psychology at Harvard Medical School and author of The Mindfulness Solution: Everyday Practices for Everyday Problems

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