Mourning and Attachment

Mourning And Attachment
The injured self
by Gary Reece, Ph.D.

For the past many years I have been working on a book focusing on the effects of trauma on children.  In the course of my research I have learned a lot about the concept of attachment.  This is the reason for this blog.  Human development from its very beginning is transactional and dialectical. What does that mean?  That from the very beginning of our lives we are developing in an environment of relationships.  Attachment is the process by which we develop into human beings.  Even the structure and workings of our brain is influenced by the quality of our original attachment bond with whoever is the primary caretaker.  It is a biologically based survival mechanism.  All species survive because of the skill, care and nurture of  adults.

Through attachment we develop our essential sense of self.  Our identity is the sum total of all of our attachments.  Through attachment we learn a “working model of the world.”  We form a template of how to relate to others.  Through attachment we learn to regulate our feelings as well as how to soothe and comfort ourselves.  We also learn how to deal with separation and failures of attunement or relationship breaches through the dialectic dance of intimacy and separation.  Hopefully we also learned how to repair disruptions of attachment and separation.

If we had loving, consistent, stable, secure attachments as children, then it is said we will have a secure attachment style and have probably created an adult world where we feel at home and have a “secure base.”  If we had difficult or traumatic attachments in infancy, then we may as adults have attachment problems:  be insecurely attached or ambivalent in our attachments.  In severe cases we may not be able to sustain relationships and intimacy will be difficult for us.  In extreme cases of abuse, disrupted attachment, or trauma we see the origination of violent, abusive, character disordered individuals with no capacity for empathy.

We carry all of this, in fact we embody all of those very early attachment experiences into adulthood.  The child is the parent of the adult.  So how does all of this relate to grief and mourning?  Very simply.  Any loss is an injury to our sense of self.  The greater the loss, then the greater will be the injury. This is why we react with pain, anxiety, depression, and anger when we  have a blow to our attachments.  If we learned how to deal with early separation, abandonment, and frustration due to loss then we will be better prepared to grieve our loss, heal our wounds and regain our equilibrium.

Through mourning we go through the very process of sustaining the original blow and losses to our attachments.  Those which are the foundation of our personhood and the world we have created for ourselves.  In my experience loss opens old wounds, and we find ourselves grieving every loss.  Losses in life all tend to be connected in our emotional memory banks:  they plunge us back into the experience of feeling alone, vulnerable, fragile and helpless:  like an abandoned child.

The severity and type of loss and our attachment history determines how long it will take us to heal.  By the active process of mourning we must to deal with powerful emotions, deep wounds, lost attachments, and the disorganization which comes when our world gets shaken at its very base.

Mourning is a dynamic process of healing in which we are dealing with the emotions of loss, working through whatever issues are raised by the loss, trying to make sense of it, dealing with the practical aspects of keeping  life going while all this is happening, and finally being able to create new attachments that will give us meaning, purpose, joy and hope.  Attachment is the ability to care, to experience intimacy, to trust, and engage with others: it is what makes us human and is the defining experience of life.  The reason I say it is transactional and dialectical is because  life is a struggle: it is a test of our ability to sustain love and faith in spite of what happens. We are always existing in a state of trying to maintain our equilibrium and dealing with things which threaten our identity. Mourning is an essential skill for the well lived life.