Attachment as Precursor for Exploration

Attachment as Precursor for Exploration

From attachment research, we have the classifications of secure, avoidant,

and ambivalent/resistant organized attachment in children and corresponding

classifications of secure, dismissing, and preoccupied attachment in adults.

Avoidant status is associated with rejection (dismissing behavior) by the

caregiver. Ambivalent/resistant status is associated with insensitive and

unpredictable (preoccupied) responses by the caregiver. The status reflects

the defensive strategy that the infant has developed for maintaining

proximity and/or self-organization in response to the restrictions that the

parent places on proximity-seeking behavior or autonomous exploration.

A breakdown in the strategy results in disorganized status. This can occur

due to trauma especially if the parent is frightening or frightened, or if

the parent withdraws from the infant as though the infant were the source of

the alarm, or the parent appears to be dissociated.

In the therapy world, there is a tendency to think of insecurity as resulting

from traumatic experiences or at least from insufficient caring from

parents - as a deficit of caring. However as we all know, part of healthy

parenting is encouragement. The child needs to internalize the secure base

that the attachment relationship hopefully provides, but this is not simply

for the sake of feeling secure in itself. It is also so that the individual can

move from that secure base out into the world. I think of the role of the

parent in the bigger picture as being to help the child separate from the

parent gradually over time. Grossmann, Grossmann, and Zimmerman in a very

interesting chapter in The Handbook of Attachment (ed. by J. Cassidy and P.

Shaver, 1999, Guilford) consider the need to include " security of

exploration"