Strange Situation, page 2
Visiting and chatting with twenty-six Ganda mothers and their babies every couple of weeks, watching the babies crawl, scramble, and toddle back and forth across the floor to their mothers’ laps, Ainsworth began to wonder what made some of the relationships feel so easy and pleasant, while others felt disconnected and fraught, and she started to form a hypothesis. Though her Uganda study was a little scrappy and off-the-cuff, it was the first of its kind, and it set the stage for what is now the long, complicated history of attachment research.
And for the insights that have changed my life.
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IN THE OPENING of the third edition of the Handbook of Attachment (2016), Jude Cassidy and Phillip R. Shaver write of Mary Ainsworth and her colleague John Bowlby that “it seems unlikely that [either of them] dreamed for a moment that their theoretical efforts would spawn one of the broadest, most profound, and most creative lines of research in 20th- and 21st-century psychology.”
While there is no way Ainsworth could have imagined that an online search—which of course did not exist in her lifetime—for “attachment” would turn up millions of entries, she did know she was onto something big. On January 2, 1968, she wrote in a letter to her graduate student and research partner Sylvia Bell, “This is really a tremendously difficult, subtle, and yet highly significant area of research we have gotten into…We can’t really miss!”
And she was right. As the boom in attachment research now reports, pretty much everything we do—how we love, work, marry, create, lead, pray, scroll, drink, eat, study, sleep, have sex—can be seen in light of our earliest attachment relationships. And the field itself has evolved to become ever more subtle and fine-tuned, influencing other areas of study such as psychopathology, physical health, neurobiology, and genetics. While mothers were the original parental figures studied, it is now widely accepted that babies form the same attachments with fathers and nonbiological caregivers as well. Today, researchers believe that our pattern of attachment, entrenched enough by one year of age to be observed and classified, is more important to a person’s development than temperament, IQ, social class, and parenting style. According to Marinus van IJzendoorn, attachment’s most prominent statistician, the Strange Situation has been used for research in approximately twenty thousand studies around the world, with many kinds of children and parents—neurotypical and non-neurotypical, perfectly ordinary and uniquely challenged, rich and poor. It’s simply the gold standard in psych labs everywhere for assessing security between children and their caregivers. Some researchers have even used the Strange Situation to look at the relationships between humans and their companion cats, dogs, and chimps.
To give just one example of the wide-ranging application that attachment theory has achieved, a study recently published by a team in South Korea considers Airbnb hosts’ attachment relationships to the Airbnb brand:
To build a robust attachment to the platform company, the firm manager should realize and acknowledge hosts (i.e., individual product owners) as business partners who deserve to be known, connected, shared with, updated, and collaborated with regarding any matters of the company. This sense of belonging leads hosts to be attached to the firm or peer hosts, finally resulting in citizenship behaviors.
I’m not sure if Mary would chuckle at such an extrapolation of her research or quibble with it. I’d love to ask her. I know she’d have something clever and surprising to teach me.
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AS I BEGAN to travel into Mary Ainsworth’s world, my interest in attachment started to grow and shift. I started to admire not just her work, but who she was. Far from being some aloof genius who theorized from an academic perch, Ainsworth was a brave intellectual who loved to roast chicken and drink bourbon and talk all night long and dance and watch tennis on TV. She was a real mush, a sucker for beauty who loved clothes, pretty things, people, and ideas. I was captivated by the sound of her frank but formal voice as I pored over her letters and the raw data from her studies of mothers and babies. And I was in awe of the way she began to discern these universal patterns of attachment out of the wilderness of her observations of families and her own very real relationships. And it was through the flutter of my own heart in reading about her life and her work that I started to really understand attachment, and how close to the bone it is, and must be.
If fact, I became so smitten with Ainsworth, this woman I would never meet, that I started to feel as if she were teaching me from the great beyond. I began to internalize her, approaching my life with her eyes, trying to understand the attachments of my own heart as she might. We became intimate, in my mind, even though she had been dead for ten years when I started my research. And as scary as it was, I wanted to be seen by her—the kind, sympathetic, but disarming expert—and to see myself and my relationships as she might.
It was my desire to merge with Ainsworth’s wisdom that inspired me to go on this journey into the science of attachment. I white-lied my way into an attachment lab in New York City in order to see a real live Strange Situation. I flew to Akron, Ohio, to read Mary Ainsworth’s letters in her own tidy handwriting and typing. I signed up for a training usually reserved for psychologists to learn how to code the Strange Situation. I also traveled to Charlottesville, Virginia, where Ainsworth’s protégé and executor, now white-haired, showed me the boxes of her original Strange Situation notes and her parents’ silver tea set. When I heard about the Adult Attachment Interview (AAI), which identifies an adult’s attachment classification—like a Strange Situation for grown-ups—I maneuvered my way into going through it myself with one of the world’s experts, even though it’s not usually administered to random individuals, nor do people usually receive their “score,” like I did. Still not satisfied with someone else’s assessment of who I was, I attended—with Thayer and a group of PhD students and clinicians—a two-week intensive to learn how to code the AAI myself.
At every step along the way, I held Azalea in my heart and in my mind—noticing the person she was becoming, watching our life together, imagining her future—all in the context of what I was learning.
“Are you a psychologist?” people ask me all the time.
“No,” I say.
“A social worker? Therapist?”
“Nope,” I tell them. “Just a writer. And a mother. And a daughter, trying to understand how attachment works.”
Just a woman knocking on the door of Mary Ainsworth’s lineage.
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AT THE HEART of Mary Ainsworth’s impressive legacy is something deceptively simple, and charmingly unscientific:
It is interaction that seems to be most important, not mere care, and particularly conspicuous in mother-child pairs who have achieved good interaction is the quality of mutual delight which characterizes their exchanges.
It is this quiet but revolutionary notion of delight that has changed everything for me. Delight, as an aspect of attachment, took me years to understand and absorb, and even longer to experience. Today I approach my entire life through the question of delight. Do I delight in Azalea? Do we delight in each other? Do I delight in my life the way Mary delighted in her own, and in those wonderful babies and their imperfect mothers? Do I delight in myself? Even a little?
I do. Not all the time, but every day some flash of delight comes over and through me. Azalea laughs. I laugh. Delight. Butter sizzles in the pan. Delightful. My new shoes fit perfectly. Someone watches someone else as they tell a story from their day. I yell, I recover. A book I’m excited to read comes in the mail. Azalea kicks her first goal in a soccer practice I happen to be watching. I sleep. I awaken. We all do. The sun falls behind the trees. My heart moves along with it. To be truly delighted is to let it all in, even the end of a day. I hear Thayer drive up to our house in the cold winter dusk and I know we have an evening together to look forward to.
What I’ve learned by loving Mary Ainsworth is that I don’t have to work so hard to love. I’ve learned that love, when working well, is automatic, intrinsic to who we are, almost imperceptible, stitched into our very being like digestion or respiration. If only loving were as simple as breathing.
But it’s not simple. In fact, love is so nuanced, it’s taken me almost fifty years and an expert spirit guide to find it; at the same time, it’s so a part of my very being that it’s taken me almost fifty years to see it. In fact, what I used to consider my anguish is my love, because of the way it reaches toward love. It’s like that optical illusion I used to stare at in the backs of magazines when I was a little girl hiding out from my family in the privacy of my room. One moment it’s two faces staring at each other in profile, a mirror image. The next, the outline between them becomes a lamp. Then two faces again.
Anguish turns to love. Separation becomes connection. Without the pain of aloneness, I never would have discovered the depth of my relatedness.
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OVER THIS PAST decade of studying the science of attachment, I’ve come to understand that, though it is one of the most important schools of thought to come out of the twentieth century, at its core is a mystical insight: Attachment is not something we do, but a state of mind. The securely attached “autonomous” adult is simply of the mind to value attachment. That’s it. And as the Vietnamese Zen master Thuong Chieu said, “When we understand how our mind works, the practice becomes easy.” So while what follows is about me, my hope is that it will be read like a proof, clarifying an important theory of mind that will make the practice of love easier, as it has for me.
Which is not to say that the journey’s been easy, or direct; far from it. My path these past many years has often felt more like a dreamscape than a straight line. As I’ve held the jewel of attachment up like a prism through which I could see the world—my world—in its shimmering, always changing light, I’ve questioned and requestioned my understandings and assumptions. And I’ve often wondered why I was going to all the trouble. Why so much effort to understand something so foggy and elusive and complex?
It’s only now that I can see that it’s because I love Azalea so much that I’ve spent the past ten years of my life trying to get to the bottom of that love, only to see that it’s bottomless.
And though I had always felt broken, by studying attachment I’ve learned that we are all born with something utterly, totally, miraculously unbreakable, which is why my story of loneliness, of something being wrong, of the shame of feeling separate, has fallen apart.
This is the untelling.
part i
untelling
I had thought that she would be a very intellectual mother, but although her understanding of B [Baby] has been helped by her reading…she has learned quite a lot about the way her baby signals his states…She likes to touch B and does frequently. She kisses his head and shows all sorts of little gentle, affectionate signs. There is no indication whatsoever that she considers this baby a burden, but on the contrary I think she is surprised at how much she is enjoying him.
—Mary Ainsworth, Case 18
chapter one
In 2005, I lay in bed beneath the Christmas lights in the loft of our little house in the Catskills, The Baby Book propped against my giant round belly. This encyclopedic volume by Dr. William Sears and his wife, Martha, a nurse, is the seminal guide to what they call “attachment parenting,” the controversial approach to raising kids that encourages mothers to breastfeed, co-sleep, wear their babies in a sling, and engage in what they call the “Seven Baby B’s of Attachment Parenting,” all designed in response to an infant’s innate need to be close. That made good sense to me, though I knew that many people felt some resistance to this method, especially the fact that it seemed to ask an awful lot of parents and particularly women.
I, however, welcomed the Searses’ invitation to wholehearted—though some said over-the-top—parenting and their insistence that “when a hungry or an upset baby cries, he cries to be fed or comforted, not to control.” And they made it sound so simple: “All parents, especially mothers, have a built-in intuitive system with which they listen and respond to the cues of their baby.” What would it be like to listen to my baby’s cries? I wondered. Would I sink into this magic realm of knowing what to do? I had heard so many stories about colicky babies and tantruming toddlers and parents losing their shit. And I had seen that mom in the grocery store, the one who ignored her crying child. I thought, Just pick the kid up! How hard can it be?
While Dr. Sears says that attachment is an “intuitive system,” the technical term is a “set goal” behavioral system, and, as I have come to understand, we all have it, not “especially mothers.” Caregiving, attachment, sexuality, affiliation, fear—these are called set-goal behavioral systems. We are all equipped with these whole body/mind organizations that kick in when needed to work tirelessly until they reach their goal. When we lose track of our child in Target, there will never come a moment when we say, Oh well, now that my kid’s disappeared I get to sleep in on the weekends, and give up the search. Likewise, there will never come a time when our lost child settles in among the school supplies or wanders off with a stranger, never looking back. Attachment works like fear, which, once ignited, never stops until the threat is gone, or like a state of sexual arousal, which won’t rest just because we want it to.
When Azalea was seven years old, she and Thayer were riding the chairlift up a mountain at our local ski area. Lost in a daydream, Azalea missed the spot where she and Thayer had planned to get off, leaving her on the lift without her dad, who had skied off the chair, only to discover with a start that Azalea was not right behind him. Realizing that she was alone and her beloved father was gone, rather than wait until she got back to the bottom of the mountain, the next safe place to get off, Azalea jumped! Falling ten feet through the air, luckily she landed safely on her skis. That’s the kind of commitment attachment inspires. That’s the kind of danger love incites.
Once we get riled up, like Azalea alone on the chairlift, the only thing that slows the caregiving and attachment systems’ primordial effort is reaching its set goal—of togetherness, of safety, of intimate connection, of what researchers so tenderly call “felt security.” And when that goal isn’t reached, we keep searching for it. Forever.
Felt security. It’s not up to anyone but us to say when we get there.
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LYING PREGNANT IN the winter sun with our cats, the snowy mountain outside our bedroom window, I didn’t know any of that. It just felt good to imagine devoting myself to the needs of my unborn baby. It felt healing. After all, I knew the pain of feeling unloved. And something really resonated with me when I read from The Baby Book, “Studies have shown that infants who develop a secure attachment with their mothers during the first year are better able to tolerate separation from them when they are older.” A “secure attachment” sounded like something worth having, and I wondered if I had one. Thinking back to my own childhood, and with a quick scan of all the trouble I’d been in and caused, I figured probably not.
One of my earliest memories is of being in the kitchen with my mother and asking her a question. She was busy. I was not. It’s a posture that defines my childhood—her back to me, her motion; my stillness. Her just going about my business stance; my something’s missing longing to be rescued from the pain of feeling alone in the house, unseen by my parents and shut out by my older brothers. My mom always said that being a mother was her true calling, which I found odd, since she really didn’t seem all that into it. Regardless of the insults or violence that rose up between my brothers and me—their taunts sometimes led to physical aggression—she watched from the sidelines, choosing to stay moving and focused on taking care of things instead of me. Even as a little girl climbing onto her lap, I often felt disappointed. Her distracted, stiff cuddle just didn’t satisfy me, and I would get down, still searching for something. As adults, my two brothers and I don’t see one another much, and we see eye to eye on even less, but one thing we can all agree on is that my mom was obsessed with housework, particularly vacuuming, and especially in the morning, when her house of teenagers was asleep. And we can even—sometimes—chuckle about how she once told my brothers to go “clean up” the woods surrounding our house.
When I was pregnant, I was determined to be a warmer, more present, and more loving mom than mine had been. I had a feeling it might be tricky, since I also knew how much we tend to be just like our own parents. And in fact Azalea wouldn’t dream of eating in my new car, and she scrambles for the paper towels whenever she spills something. But there’s so much more to our relationship than cleaning up, I tell myself. And she doesn’t need protection, I tell myself. Not like I did.
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“HEY, BETH, YOU’RE UGLY,” Sam, my oldest brother, reminded me one typical Saturday morning from his seat on the couch, wrapped in Grandma Beryl’s afghan, our cat Tasha curled in his lap. I was eight years old, though even today, at forty-eight, I can hear his voice when I look in the mirror. I had just walked in from my room down the hall, looking for a place to sit, to settle, to be. No such luck. Matt, my middle brother, sat on the floor as they watched Abbott and Costello, the comedy duo. He hissed a laugh, like a balloon letting out air. We were all in our pajamas, our parents still asleep. Two empty cereal bowls sat on the coffee table, bathed in snow-light.
