He introduced himself as someone with disorganised attachment. He said it several times like he needed to show he knew who he was. I listened but also wondered. Words can be windows which open out onto the world. But words can also be blinkers leading us into narrower truths.
Attachment studies is one of the biggest areas of research in modern psychology. Thousands of research papers. People have caught onto it to map themselves in an attempt to understand what is going on in their lives. And as with any map it can be useful.
It was Mary Ainsworth who formulated the three fundamental attachment categories – secure, anxious, avoidant – in her research work with Bowlby and her famous Strange Situation experiment. Later researchers added the fourth category of disorganised attachment. Bowlby was working with children who were troubled after they had been forcibly displaced out of cities in England during the Second World. Bowlby was actually looking at what happens in a child when there is a loss of attachment.
In a healthy child/parent relationship when the child experiences rupture the child may express some kind of anger when the relationship is re-established. Bowlby demonstrated that this was a healthy expression which should be embraced and welcomed rather than be punished by the parent figure. This understanding had a significant impact on reducing the use of corporal punishment in schools and institutions.
In this context the word attachment is paradoxically not about attachment itself but about how someone will react when there is a reconnection after a rupture. In other words attachment refers to a relational process with an inter-relational and intra-relational dimension occurring simultaneously in the child / parent figure dyad at a very particular moment.
He continued to talk about his history of childhood and adult traumas, and how they had accumulated and impacted his current life. He spoke about this history in a very insightful and organised way. I kept wondering. And then there was a pause. And I asked him which moment had been the most difficult for him out of all of this.
The question clearly caught him off guard. Because a smile suddenly crept across his face and his eyes and head swept backwards as he considered what I had just asked.
“That’s really curious,” he said, ”because what I am connecting to has nothing to do with anything I’ve just told you. In fact I am connecting to something that happened just a year ago.”
He told me how one night when he was sleeping an intruder broke into the apartment. He heard the sound of someone and thought it was his flatmate coming in late after a party. He went to the living room and saw a shadow with a small torch searching through the drawers.
As he realised this person was foe rather than friend, his body froze and he found himself unable to move. The intruder realised someone had come into the room and also froze. For a brief moment the two of them were staring at each other immobile. The intruder moved first and within seconds was out the front door. Disorientated he went back to bed and lay awake for the rest of the night not knowing what to do.
I suggested that maybe we could work on this more recent event he had just described. He identified an active ocular position* where we were looking right at each other – clearly mimicking the moment when he found himself face to face with the intruder. As soon as he settled, his eyes widened and mouth opened spontaneously into a frozen expression. And then a wave of emotion came through as his face twisted. He looked away and cried deeply before looking back at the pointer. His eyes widened and mouth opened again before his face twisted once again – his body following some kind of internal movement path necessary for the release to occur.
As his body processed the emotional charge in waves oscillating between crescendo and release, I could feel how strong the eye contact was. It felt like his whole body was leaning against me for support. There was also an odd coolness to the contact too, as if I could feel the depth of what was frozen inside. And something told me that there was already something frozen in him before the intruder came into the apartment.
“I didn’t know all of that was in there,” he said afterwards. “I thought I had resolved all of that.”
Coming out of rupture and into reconnection can take time. Today I felt he had begun the journey he needed to take. Some of the buried sorrow was beginning to come through. And no doubt later on there would be more of the anger. But all good things in their own time.
*Brainspotting setup
