Do I Have Anxious Attachment?

How understanding attachment theory becomes a doorway to the real self

The classifications of attachment developed by Mary Ainsworth have been useful for research and understanding the links between quality of caregiving and childhood psychopathology. But in my mind, the two most significant and useful components of attachment theory are John Bowlby’s notion of internal working models and an understanding of procedural memory.

In the working model of the world that all of us build, a key feature is the idea of who the attachment figures may be, where they may be found, and how they may be expected to respond. Similarly, in the working model of the self that all of us build, a key feature is the idea of how acceptable or unacceptable is the self in the eyes of those attachment figures.

In healthy attachment, a real self grows through a secure attachment with a caregiver that facilitates the self to keep on differentiating and growing and eventually, separating. During that process, if there’s a caregiver that cannot respond appropriately to the child’s needs, several things happen. For the development of children where there has been chronic misattunement, neglect, or abuse, the child’s feeling responses to those experiences go underground in the form of abandonment depression and the child will start to develop a representation—a map of the self—as somehow unacceptable in the eyes of the caregiver. As adults, they can tell you how bad they feel about themselves as unloveable, unacceptable, worthless, no good. But what they are describing is the self representation that is buried in procedural memory that dictates so much of their behaviour and forms part of their internal working model for understanding their world.

Neuroscience has revealed to us how we have different memory systems in our brain, such as episodic and autobiographical, which are part of the declarative part of the memory systems. The non-declarative, implicit parts, include procedural memory.

Procedural memory is present before birth. It does not involve recall or recollection, and is wired into our nervous system within the first two years of life. Procedural memory is encoded in terms of what goes on between caregiver and child. It is unconscious, and this simply means that when a child and caregiver go through an elaborate dance of scanning each other, the child is building non-conscious mental models of what’s happening, and these models are foundational in the development of the self in the nervous system. Procedural memory is the first form of memory that’s there. It doesn’t require focal attention for encoding but we use focal attention to drill down into procedural memory.

Because procedural memory is formed in infancy, prior to the development of language, it is not semantically organised and yet, it continues to be stored in implicit form and encoded in our minds as implicit relational knowing throughout life. It doesn’t require conscious awareness and so procedural memory has an intuitive quality: “this is just how things work” in how we negotiate our attachment needs. This understanding of procedural memory is foundational because this is what we work with if we want change at the core of the self.

A young woman feels responsible for all her siblings. She’s been the caretaker and so the only way she gained a sense of self is as a little mother caretaker and so that’s what she clings on to. That’s what her implicit relational knowing is all about. She has been implicitly wired to give up self activation. When you notice a failure in the capacity of the real self, you don’t have to drill down too far to start understanding the implicit relational wiring that goes with that.

Edward Tronick’s still face video, “the good, bad, ugly”, demonstrates what happens to a child if they are stuck with a caregiver where there is nothing on offer for the self to grow; the experience is felt by the child as a type of free-fall that robs them of the relatedness that provides structure to the developing self. The child feels a developmental anxiety and depression, which James Masterson called the abandonment depression. It feels like a part of the self is cut off from the supplies necessary for life and growth. The “ugly” in Tronick’s video is the formation of the abandonment depression. The depth of the depression, depends on the severity of treatment by the caregiver; the severity of their growing up experiences. It’s extremely painful. The child stores, non-consciously, in the right brain, images of the caregiver and images of the self and had to regulate the affects of that depression. This is important for the concept of the false, defensive self—an impaired real self that’s neuronally wired but doesn’t quite have the potential to grow because what’s blocking that potential to grow is what we call a false, defensive self.

To avoid the fear and depression that would result if the real self did emerge, a false self arises to restructure life and make it “safe”. But it is a perverse rescue operation pulled off by an inner saboteur who says “I will give up my real self and that will make me truly happy in exchange for never feeling the fear of being alone with my real self and the pain of abandonment” (Masterson 1988).