Dr. Sarah (00:00):

The secure base is us, the parent. Our child’s trust in us as their secure base allows them to relax and explore their world. They know that they can return to their safe and waiting caregiver us whenever they need to refuel and regain a sense of comfort and security, they know that we will be there.

(00:16):

Welcome back to Securely Attached. This week we’re revisiting a foundational episode on a topic that is at the heart of everything we do here, and that is attachment theory. I wanted to bring this episode back because it’s been almost three years, and these principles are so essential and understanding them can be such an absolute game changer in parenting and beyond. So it’s a really good place to start for anyone new to the show and also a good refresher for anyone who has been here for a while. In this episode, I’ll dive into what secure attachment means and why fostering these connections is one of the most impactful gifts you can give to your child.

(01:03):

I’ll explore how early attachment bonds shape a child’s self-esteem, emotional development, and even how they relate to others as they grow. And I’ll break down the different attachment styles and offer one of my favorite parts of this theory, a perspective that I think really frees parents from feeling like they have to be perfect to foster secure attachment relationships with their kids. And if you haven’t yet downloaded my free guide, the Four Pillars of Fostering Secure Attachments, be sure to go to the episode description wherever you’re streaming your podcasts. You’ll find a link there and download it before you listen to or after you’ve listened to this episode because in it I offer some straightforward strategies to help you attune to your child’s brain and body and how to use your parent-child relationship as the key to helping your child feel safe and seen and secure. So this free resource is a really helpful guide that you can use along with this episode to help you know exactly what to focus on to strengthen your child’s detachment security. So just grab it from the episode description or go to drsarahbren.com/secure. That’s drsarahbren.com/secure to get it now. And let’s listen in to one of my favorite episodes of all time.

(02:24):

Hi, I’m Dr. Sarah Bren, a clinical psychologist and mom of two. In this podcast, I’ve taken all of my clinical experience, current research on brain science and child psychology and the insights I’ve gained on my own parenting journey and distilled everything down into easy to understand and actionable parenting insights. So you can tune out the noise and tune into your own authentic parenting voice with confidence and calm. This is Securely Attached.

(02:58):

Okay, so let’s talk about attachment theory. What is attachment theory and why is it important? So let’s start at the beginning. John Bowlby, who’s a British psychologist, developed the theory of attachment in the late fifties. What he states in this theory is that attachment is a primary biological process in which infants instinctively form a bond with the parent that serves to increase their proximity to safety and decrease the potential exposure to danger.

(03:30):

That’s it. It’s that simple. We need to be bonded to our caregivers so that we survive. The theory has been expanded upon greatly since then, both by Bowlby and a myriad other clinicians and researchers. But what Bowlby really explains in his attachment theory is that there’s four behavioral systems that he associates with attachments, and he refers to these as the attachment behavioral system. So this is the thing that the person is doing or the baby is doing behaviorally to maintain that attachment. One is proximity maintenance. So this is how close physically we are to our attachment figures. Two is the secure base. We’re going to talk a lot more about the secure base later in this episode. But the secure base is that the parent is able to be a reliable source of comfort, safety, and love, and a child’s knowledge of this secure base allows them to relax and explore their world.

(04:33):

The third in this attachment behavioral system is a safe haven. So when we return to our secure base, when we need to refuel or seek comfort or safety, when we experience a threat that we can go to this safe haven, the environment in which our secure base exists. And then the fourth is separation distress, the expected and natural anxiety that occurs when the attachment figure is not present. And I’m going to talk a little bit more about where you see this and how naturally this occurs in a child’s play, but we’ll get to that in a minute. First, I want to talk a little bit more about the research behind this theory and the history of how it’s been measured and operationalized, which means how we can identify consistent elements of secure attachment that we can measure in a scientific setting or in an experimental setting.

(05:31):

So Mary Ainsworth, she’s a very important figure in the theory of attachment. She’s a Canadian American psychologist, and when she was following the theories of John Bowlby, she was studying this in the seventies and she created an experiment called the Strange Situation in which she was able to measure the quality of these attachment relationships that Bowlby identified. And this is the first time we’re really able to identify that there are qualitative differences in these attachment relationships, how secure this attachment is within the relationship, and how that’s really able to be empirically studied in a lab. And since then we’ve extrapolated it to be able to identify it outside of a lab and our relationships. But basically it’s this idea that there’s something happening in these attachment relationships that are measurable, which means they keep happening across all different types of relationships. In fact, it’s really interesting because Mary Ainsworth first did this study in Uganda and then later in Baltimore.

(06:44):

So she’s looking at very different populations and finding very similar findings in the qualities of these attachment relationships. She identified four different styles of attachment. So these four different styles of attachment that Mary Ainsworth is able to measurably identify in all of her research are secure, secure attachment, avoidant attachment, ambivalent attachment, and disorganized attachment. I’m going to go through each one of these briefly. So secure attachment. Basically in this study, when the parent is present, the child is able to freely explore the environment using the parent as a secure base. And again, we’re going to talk more about secure bases in a bit. But when the separation occurs, there’s distress that the child is wary of the experimenter when the baby, when he or she’s separated from the mother, the child expresses relief and happiness upon the return of the parent and is able to be comforted and soothed by the parent.

(07:55):

This is what’s happening in the study in these experimental settings upon separating and reuniting and then avoid. An attachment is identified by sort of an indifference in the separation. Mom leaves and I don’t really notice. I don’t really care. I’m fine being alone with the stranger. I don’t have much shift in my behavior when I’m alone with the stranger. I may avoid my parent or show very little interest in them when they come back, and I am not very fazed by this separation at all. In an ambivalent attachment, a child will display extreme distress upon separation. They’re very wary, they’re very afraid of the experimenter. They’re hesitant upon the return of the parent. They’ll go to them, but they’ll resist them. They have a lot of difficulty being sued by the parent. In general, this child cries more and explores their environment less than the other two types of attachment styles.

(09:00):

And an in disorganized attachment style. Upon separation, you see a tremendous amount of confusion, apprehension, and a very unusual sort of freeze like behavior, both when the parent separates and when they return. This is very common in instances of trauma where the child is frightened of their parent and that might be due to abuse or neglect. This is not a common attachment style thankfully, but that is sort of the extreme end of the spectrum. That’s sort of the attachment style that we end up seeing. So let’s go back to this idea of the secure base and why it’s so critical and why it’s so central to the idea of attachment theory. The secure base is us, the parent. Our job is to be this secure base. So what is that job? We have to be a reliable source of comfort, safety, and love. Our child’s trust in us as their secure base allows them to relax and explore their world.

(10:05):

They know that they can return to their safe and waiting caregiver us whenever they need to refuel and regain a sense of comfort and security. They know that we will be there and we can see this secure base interaction play out with a child. Think about the last time you observed your child on the playground and think about how your child, you’re sitting there, they’re with you, and then they go off and they start to play. And as they start to play this idea of the natural incremental separation distress, the expected and natural anxiety that comes from being separate from our attachment figure, it starts to mount right, they’re off on the sandbox or on the slide. And as they spend more and more time away from us, their anxiety from being separated from us mounts in their body until it hits some sort of tipping point where they’re no longer comfortable enough to continue playing without checking back in.

(11:06):

And so you see a kid run back to their caregiver or maybe they just make eye contact with them, but they do some sort of interplay with that person to fill back up, to check back in and to know, okay, they’re still there. Alright, I’m safe and then I can go back out. So there’s this filling up with the secure base that allows the child to then feel I’ve got enough of them in me to go off and play until it runs out and then I got to go back and refuel. And so really this is that interplay that you see, the dance that you see between a child and a parent or a child and a caregiver that really reinforces for that child over and over and over again that this is person who is reliable, a reliable source of comfort, safety, and love.

(11:58):

And now in that knowledge, I can kind of be free to go play and it’s very powerful and it’s very reinforcing of a secure attachment to that person. And importantly, you can have a secure attachment and you can have secure bases who are many different people. Obviously we want our children to be attached securely to us, their parents, but we also, our child can have a secure attachment, their teachers to their nannies, to neighbors, to extended family. The more different individuals in their life with whom they can have a secure attachment, the better. It’s never going to be as profound as the one they have with their primary attachment figures.

(12:46):

Typically their parents, sometimes extended family or nannies can serve this kind of primary role too. But the more the better because again, and we’re going to talk about this idea of a blueprint, but this blueprint gets richer and richer and richer as it gets built. More and more secure relationships get added to it. And initially this idea of the secure base is an external concept. That’s my mom or that’s my nanny, or that’s my dad. The secure base eventually becomes internalized by the child and it becomes something that they actually, it becomes part of their sense of self and their relationship to the world. So the sense of soothing I get from coming over to my mom is something that I physically have to go seek out externally initially. Then as I start to internalize it, I might be able to conjure up an image of my mom in my mind.

(13:49):

Like let’s say I’m at daycare and I miss my mom, or I have an urge for soothing. I might be able to then conjure up an image of my mom in my mind and find that comforting and eventually this sort of much more abstract idea that I myself am in some ways capable of soothing my own self. And my construct of mom is actually a part of who I am as a person. This is like our identity formation, our sense of self, our personality and our confidence in the world and how we think other people will receive us. So if our attachment figures were reliably meeting our needs and interested in our feelings and our perceptions of the world, we would assume that other future people we interact with will treat us in a similar fashion. If however, we have attachment figures who are dismissing of our internal or our shaming of us for expressing our emotions, we are likely to assume most other people we meet will do the same and we might adjust our behavior accordingly.

(15:06):

So that might look like if every time I express anger at my parent, I’m yelled at and punished or their affection is removed, I remember my drive is to attach to that caregiver and have proximity to that caregiver. So that’s going to trump any need of mind to express my anger. And so I will cut off that anger. I will cut that experience of anger out of my conscious awareness. I will suppress it so that I can maintain closeness with my caregiver. And as a result, as I get older, I’m going to start to assume that most people will shame me or not accept me if I have anger. So I will continue to keep that anger out of my life. Unfortunately, that means that this individual who will inevitably feel anger is just not necessarily going to have an integrated relationship with that anger.

(16:01):

So how our secure basis, how our attachment figures receive us and how we internalize that has a huge impact on our development, both in our personality development, in our development of our sense of self, in our development, our development in our interpersonal relationships, in our development of our ability to sort of have a robust emotional life. All these things, it’s very important. Okay, so let’s go back to the secure base. We’ll be referred to this process of internalizing the secure base as creating an internal working model of oneself and of others. So I like to refer to this as a blueprint, something our children will refer back to in order to anticipate how others might respond to them and whether or not they expect their needs to be met by others as they continue through life. They are going to use this blueprint to navigate new relationships as they learn new things about people, they can edit the blueprint with new information.

(17:00):

So this blueprint really is the foundation of one’s sense of self and it’s deeply rooted in our early attachment experiences. So let’s go back to the beginning of the creation of this blueprint and how as parents, we can support the most healthy version of this blueprint being created. So I position, I suggest that there are four critical components for us as parents to keep in mind, in order for us to be the secure base through which secure attachment is going to get fostered. The four components are trust, comfort, safety, and met needs. So how do we create these things? I would suggest that in all four of these components rely on something called authentic attunement. Authentic attunement means that we are being a curious observer of our child. We are thinking of them as a fully whole individual from birth who can and will show you who they are and what they want and they need. And it’s our job to trust in them.

(18:11):

If we can do this, we will create a relationship that has elements, sort of naturally elements of trust, comfort, safety, and our child’s experience of their needs being met by us. Now, it’s really important We don’t have to get this right all the time for it to take place. And this is critical. We do not need to get this right all the time for this to take place for us to be a secure base. In fact, we do not want to get this right all the time. It actually is not how a secure base and secure attachment is formed.

(18:49):

This is an idea kind of put forth by a British pediatrician and psychoanalyst named Wincott, Donald Wincott. He coined this term the good enough parent in 1953. And if you kind of remember at the beginning I was talking about bull. We was doing this stuff in the sixties, Winnicott’s doing this in the early to mid fifties. These are all kind of happening in the same time. Wincott is an object relations theorist and attachment theory and object relations theory, and I’m getting kind of heady in the psycho babble. But these are theories that are very intertwined and very deeply rooted in complimentary of one another. So this good enough parent, good enough parent, is this idea that, okay, we are, we’re human beings. We cannot read each other’s minds. We are going to do our best. Try to understand what our kids need in the moment, right?

(19:49):

You’re a new mom, your baby’s crying. You got to guess, you got to guess why they’re crying and you make educated guesses, right? Going back to that idea of authentic attunement, we’re going to be kind of attuned to our child and get it right most of the time. But there are going to be times where our baby’s crying because they’re cold and we feed them or they’re crying because they’re tired. And we burp these misattunements in our relationship with our baby that actually leads to our child’s sense of self that they are a separate being from their caregiver. And in this space between me and mom, that space as I realized like, oh, I’m a separate person from her, that space is the relationship. This is where the relationship forms, and that is where attachment happens. If I’m merged with my mother, if I don’t know that I’m a separate being from mom, I don’t have a relationship with her.

(20:52):

I’m one with her, I am her. And when our babies are born, it is that there’s this blurry, amorphous boundaryless sense of me and my mother. I don’t know where I end and my mother begins, but as the brain develops and the body and the nervous system develop, and this relationship develops that does have misattunements, that does have moments where I feel as the child unknown by my mother, my parent, my attachment figure or my needs aren’t being appropriately met in this moment, I begin to understand that I’m a separate being from this person. And that is the space in which I start to understand that I am in relationship with this person. And this is just the natural development of relationships and of child development and attachment. So what do we know about secure attachment? Why is it so important that we understand that that relationship that a child has their attachment care with their primary caregiver, their mother, their father, their grandmother, why is this so important that it’s secure?

(22:06):

So it’s been studied profusely in the field of psychology and child development, and it’s really been shown that secure attachment is a predictor of so many important things. It’s a predictor of increased mental health, self-esteem, self-reliance, independence, lower reported instances of anxiety and depression. Individuals who demonstrate secure attachment styles have healthier relationships with others throughout their lifespan. It’s been associated with a reduced stress response with better physical health, with better education and achievement, academic achievement, better workplace achievement. The list really goes on and on and on. And I say all of this because I really want to help you understand how to optimally support your child’s development of their own sense of self and of their interpersonal relationships. Because misconceptions around this concept of secure attachment and of the good enough parent, they’re often a huge source of guilt for parents. I think there’s this tremendous pressure we put on ourselves as parents that we need to be perfect.

(23:23):

We need to get it right all the time, otherwise we’re going to mess up our kids. And that puts us in a position of either over paving the way helicopter parenting or the kind of parenting where we really, I think they call it snowplow parenting, where you plow away all the obstacles your child, because we’re so afraid that if we don’t do this, our child is not going to thrive. And in reality, allowing our child to have struggle, allowing our child to work things out on their own, this is a way, while being there for them in that struggle allows them to know that we trust them and allows them to internalize that sense of being trusted and being resilient and being capable into that blueprint that we were talking about earlier.

(24:23):

So yes, it’s very important to support secure attachment for the many reasons we just covered. But it’s also important to remind yourself that perfection in parenthood is not a predictor of secure attachment. In fact, as we know about this idea of the good enough mother or now we call it the good enough parent, but actually perfectionism and parenthood is often far more predictive of anxiety, of codependency, sometimes even narcissism. It’s not optimal. We need to be real. We need to be human. We as parents need to have our own needs. We need to model self-care for ourselves, and we need to model self-compassion, and we need to be curious about our child’s inner world and understand that they are them and we are us, and we are separate individuals who cannot read one another’s minds. So we need to be curious and we need to communicate, and we need to understand we will get it wrong sometimes and give ourselves grace and humility and apologize authentically without heaping on a tremendous amount of guilt on ourselves. This is all how we support secure attachment in our relationship with our children, by being known and by knowing them, by creating safety and allowing for mistakes without judgment of ourselves or of our children.

(25:47):

If you enjoyed listening to this conversation, I want to hear from you, share your thoughts and your feedback with me by scrolling down to the ratings and review section on your Apple Podcasts app or whatever app you’re listening on. And let me know what you think of this episode or the show in general. Your support means the absolute world to me, and just a simple tap of five stars can make a real impact in how the show gets reached by parents everywhere. So thank you so much for listening and don’t be a stranger.