I have been a psychotherapist for quite a long time now. I qualified in 2009 and before and during my four years of training, I worked in a therapeutic community surrounded by interesting and complicated mental health issues (both clients and colleagues!). Transactional Analysis has always been the solid foundation on which I have built my therapeutic processes and practices, but attachment theory, psychodynamic, person centred, humanistic and existential theories have become important to both my practice and myself personally.
Attachment theory in particular is a fond favourite of mine and I use it with pretty much every client that walks through my therapy room door. I read an article on attachment on the BBC website recently that made me think, the link to it is below:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cnv95790mgpo
It is a nice article and I am sure it will have been really useful to all those who read it, however when I read the four attachment styles as listed in it, I was left bemused as I had never heard of them! I will explain…
The article listed the four attachment styles as:
- Anxious attachment
- avoidant attachment
- fearful-avoidant attachment
- secure
Of these, I only really would have recognised ‘secure’ as an attachment style I would talk to my clients about. I would describe the attachment styles as:
- Anxious avoidant
- Anxious ambivalent
- Disorganised
- Secure
This then made me think, how was I taught about attachment? So, I got out my training notes and found the module on attachment from 2008. I found a handout that listed the attachment styles as:
- Secure
- Insecure – avoidant
- Insecure – anxious
- Insecure – disorganised
And in my hand written notes I had listed them as:
- Secure attachments
- Avoidant attachments
- Insecure Pre-occupied
- Disorganised
Because I was a bit of a teacher’s pet, the handwritten notes would have been faithful to what was put on the whiteboard by Robin (who trained me). I thought it was interesting though that I wasn’t a big enough teachers pet to not change the names of the attachment styles at some point over the last 18 years, to something completely different to what I was taught!
So in a short period of time I found that there are at least four ways to describe the exact same theory!
Just to add to my brain ache I got John Bowlby’s ‘Attachment: Attachment and Loss Volume One’ down off the shelf and re-read how Bowlby himself first labelled the attachment styles.
‘Pattern B
A main characteristic of infants classified as securely attached to mother, in most examples a majority, is that they are active in play and also in seeking contact when distressed after a brief separation, they are readily comforted and soon return to absorbed play.
Pattern A
Infants classified as anxiously attached to mother and avoidant, about 20 per cent in most samples, avoid her during reunion, especially after her second brief absence. Many of them treat the stranger in more friendly a manner than their own mother.
Pattern C
Infants classified as anxiously attached to mother and resistant, about 10 per cent, oscillate between seeking proximity and contact with her and resisting contact and interaction with her. Some are markedly more angry than other infants; a few more passive.’
So, the first time attachment styles were written about they were listed as:
- Securely attached
- Anxiously attached and avoidant
- Anxiously attached and resistant
Notice something missing? Disorganised was not on Bowlby’s radar and was only classified in the mid 1980’s after research by Mary Main and Judith Soloman identified a number of children whose behaviours did not match the existing attachment styles.
So until 1986 there were three attachment styles then after the research paper (https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4321742/ link here), was published, three became four as:
- Disorganised/Disoriented
Was put forward as the fourth attachment style.
I can imagine the few of you who have had the stamina to read this far are now saying to yourselves, ‘what is the point here Mark’. Well, there isn’t one really, other than to ponder why we feel the need to constantly change the name of therapeutic theories and suchlike.
I can remember running an attachment workshop for my supervisees because when attachment theory came up in supervision every one of them had said something along the lines of ‘ooo, I like attachment theory, but I don’t really understand it and I get the different styles mixed up.’. Chopping and changing the labels on identical theories adds to this confusion I think, people are being taught one set of labels, then they read something or are told a different set of labels by a colleague or supervisor and that then adds doubt and confusion the process of learning.
I met Sir Richard Bowlby (John Bowlby’s son) at a CPD event about 12 years ago (I shook his hand and everything, I was like a giddy teenager!) and he spoke about how proud his dad would be that not only were his theories still being used today, they were still being developed and further advanced so that they are able to help more and more people understand complex psychological processes and how we grow and develop of human beings. I am sure John Bowlby would really not give too much of a shit about what label we give the attachment styles as long as we are using what he observed, researched and wrote about to help and support another generation of people to understand themselves and heal and grow as people.
I don’t think it helps the new generations of counsellors and therapists to be taught the same theories under different labels though. No label is better than the other and the important thing is that the therapist using the theories understands them and how to use them with their clients. As long as they are doing good that is all that matters. So if you every feel insecure as a practitioner because you aren’t using the right label or therapeutic term, don’t, as long as you understand the theory and are able to help the client understand what the theory means and how it applies to them, then they will be able to take it with them in a positive way and that is all that matters.
Below is the last paragraph of John Bowlby’s first volume on attachment. I am putting it in because even though some of the language is a bit dated and of its time, it is lovely and as true today as it was in 1969 when he wrote them.
‘In conclusion let me outline the picture of personality development proposed. A young child’s experience of an encouraging, supportive and co-operative mother, and a little later father, gives him a sense of worth, a belief in the helpfulness of other, and a favourable model on which to build future relationships. Furthermore, by enabling him to explore his environment with confidence and to deal with it effectively, such experience also promotes his sense of competence. Thenceforward, provided family relationships continue favourable, not only do these early patterns of thought, feeling and behaviour persist, but personality becomes increasingly structured to operate in moderately controlled and resilient ways, and increasingly capable so despite adverse circumstances. Other types of early childhood and later experience have effects of other kinds, leading usually to personality structures of lowered resilience and defective control, vulnerable structures which also are apt to persist. Thereafter on how someone’s personality has come to be structured turns his way of responding to subsequent adverse event, among which rejections, separations and losses are some of the most important.’