BRRRR…. Negative Autocratic Unresponsive

Creates Unstable and Unsustainable Bond (DUMB):

Dissatisfaction Unhappiness Malevolence Bitterness

The Avoidant partner either fails to message back or sends consistent messages refusing support. With negative, autocratic, and unresponsive messaging the partner requesting assurance handles the rejection by lowering their expectations of support from their partner resulting in rawness, ruptures, resentment, rudeness, and inauthenticity within the shared life.

The touch-response system breaks down over time as a partner’s signals for creating closeness; asking for reassurance, need for support, etc. are met with an ongoing and consistent flow of negative or absent responses, regardless of Attachment style pair bonding.  In so doing, over time, the frayed threads within the tapestry of their shared life are shredded in bitter, neglectful, or malicious ruin. Shared language is either fear-based {Insecure+Insecure}, or upside-down backwards to trust-based language {Insecure+Secure}.

DUMB: Highway to Hell!

SCIENCE OF ATTACHMENT— SECURE VS. INSECURE—YOUR BRAIN ON FAMILY TRAUMA – PART I

Have you struggled with Divorce, one or more broken relationships, unresolved personal conflicts, job loss, etc.? For many of us, so often throughout our lives, our feelings have not been validated, which left us feeling misunderstood and alone.

You are not alone. Many of us have struggled with life outcomes that have left us confused, reeling from the pain broken relationships, and or blindsided to how we ended up with undesired life outcomes. You are not alone.

The bulk of our emotional life plays out at the crossroads of feeling and understanding where emotion thwarts reason; and, which cannot be ‘logically’ explained. The world is full of men and women who encounter difficulty in loving and or being loved and whose happiness gravely depends on resolving that condition with an all-out stopgap to overcome the struggle.

Maybe you have heard the term ‘Attachment’ or “Attachment Style” and wondered what the term meant. On the other hand, maybe this is the first time you have come across the subject.  Either way, I hope your curiosity and search for personal knowledge and growth will keep your eyes and your mind open to learning how you may relate to others in the context of adult interpersonal relationships. The unique dynamic of touch and response and definition of Attachment is:

A special and essential psychological/emotional relationship that involves an exchange of comfort, care, and pleasure, a “lasting psychological (and physiological) connectedness between human beings.”2

Human Attachment is a key element to the unique human higher ordered skill of language. The human species is completely dependent on caregivers for survival for many years through infancy and adolescence, unlike other mammals.  Due to that dependence, early experiences with caregivers in childhood are critical to language development and in influencing development and behavior later in life as an adult, especially behavior related to interpersonal intimate relationships. Our early Attachment styles are established in very early childhood through the infant/caregiver relationship, by the age of 12-18 months.

Complex relational, lingual, and neural biological maps of Attachment paradigms are usually well established by the age of five. Parenting and familial dynamics and behaviors either promote healthy Attachment or impede the development of identity and the skill of mentalization, which is a developmental milestone profoundly rooted in the quality of early relationships and is vital to self-organization (identity) and emotional regulation.

Mentalization develops within the context of an Attachment relationship in early childhood usually around the age of three to four. Mentalizing, a uniquely human skill, is a form of imaginative mental activity, namely perceiving and interpreting human behavior (the human condition of self and other) in terms of intentional mental states (i.e., needs, desires, feelings, beliefs, goals, purposes, and reasons).1 This process and skill becomes a constant feedback loop of understanding of ourselves and others throughout our lives. The quality of empathy is rooted within the skill of mentalization. If a child has accomplished the developmental stage of mentalization, you can witness a three year old give comfort and care to a distressed other while maintaining a self identity that they are not the cause of distress. But they can offer the uniquely human skill of empathy without identifying or being enmeshed with the other. We’ve also witnessed small children overcome in distress at the sight of another person in distress, unable to differentiate themselves from the other person as an other’s distress becomes their own distress.

Works Cited

1 Fonagy, P., G. G. (2010). Affect Regulation, Mentalization, and the Development of the Self. New York: Other Press.

2 Bowlby, J. (1969). Attachment and lo ss. (OKS Print.) New York: Basic Books.

**A large-scale study using Artificial Intelligence to analyze 29 long-term studies determined this:

“The top relationship-specific predictors of relationship quality were perceived-partner commitment, appreciation, sexual satisfaction, perceived partner satisfaction, and conflict. The top individual-difference predictors were life satisfaction, negative affect (neuroticism), depression, attachment avoidance, and attachment anxiety.” —PNAS