Jessica Heller-Bhatt: Defining “attachment” as the things we do to stay safe

The term attachment has become increasingly common parlance in everyday discourse, with people frequently using it within the context of parenting and intimate relationships.

When we think of attachment, we invoke images of being close, showing affection and striving to connect with others dear to us.

Surprisingly, attachment means more than that — in fact, it may mean the exact opposite!

Decades of research into infant mental health and relationship dynamics between parents and their young children have taught us that, from the most tender age, infants learn how to best behave in response to the way their parents care for them.

This phenomenon makes for interesting differences observable in the child’s behaviour.

Children who feel insecure about their parents’ attention and predictability of caregiving tend to adopt behaviours that keep them in the parental spotlight.

Examples are clinginess, difficult behaviours resulting in frequent conflict and struggles, and feigning a lack of competency expected from their developmental stage.

Other children feel safest when attended to minimally because interactions with their parents can be stressful or create a sense of rejection.

For yet another group of children, life is more straightforward — they learn to express their needs as they arise.

These children are neither preoccupied with parental attention nor do they prefer a comfortable distance to avoid feeling worse.

Most of the time, they feel understood and attended to by their primary caregivers in the most appropriate way. They experience “attuned caregiving”.

All of these children have one thing in common — they figured out the most effective way of contributing to their own psychological safety and wellbeing by moulding themselves around their parents’ behaviour.

This allows them to make the best of the family environment they were born into, which helps them thrive and, sometimes, survive.

Therefore, attachment can be best understood as strategic behaviour, innate and in response to caregiving, that is, in essence, self-protective.

A child who does not like to be cuddled when sick or prefers to self-soothe when distressed is as attached as a child who seeks constant parental proximity.

Their ways of attaching differ because their caregiving experiences require them to use different strategies to stay safe. What a feat of resilience!

To keep matters interesting, we do not stop attaching when we grow up.

Most of us use the same behaviours learnt with our parents today and, sometimes, with negative outcomes. But this is a topic for another time . . .

Jessica Heller-Bhatt is a clinical psychologist registrar specialising in attachment theory and practice operating out of Denmark Family Practice and via telehealth and founder of ConnectMe Psychology.