BIS Psyche & Soul 3. Childhood Foundations of Healthy Relationships 2: Secure Attachments

The podcast of this post is available at:

https://anchor.fm/boscom/episodes/2-3-Psyche--soul---Foundation-of-Healthy-Relationships-Trust-12-egs0te

This is Jose Parappully, Salesian priest and clinical psychologist at Sumedha Centre, Jeolikote, with another edition of “Psyche & Soul”

This weekend we shall explore another important foundation of healthy relationships– namely, Secure Attachments in childhood.

Let me begin by telling you about Mrs Miranda.

Mrs Jessie Miranda is very popular with the teachers and the girls of the college where she is Principal. Parents of students as well as others who interact with her like the way she treats them. She is also a very competent Principal, who has been able to raise the standard of the college considerably since she took over.

Her family finds her a very loving and sensitive wife and mother. Members of her parish have very good opinion of her. She is friendly and actively engaged in parish activities. Young women in the parish often seek her advice with their problems.

When asked what was the secret of her popularity she referred to the good time she had in her own family as a child. She felt her parents really cared for her. Whenever she experienced some distress or was in some need they responded with care and sensitivity.

This kind of sensitive responsiveness on the part of her parents helped the young Jessie to develop self-esteem and self-confidence which helped her to relate to others in a friendly way. She was able to internalize the sensitive responsiveness of her parents toward her and manifest the same to others. Naturally, she grew up to be a very likable and helpful person.

Jessie’s profile fits that of a child, and later the adult, who experiences what psychologists today agree is a necessary foundation for healthy relationships– namely, secure attachment in childhood. There is a whole school of psychology built on this conviction. It is known as Attachment theory and is one of the cutting edge contemporary psychological theories.

Unlike many other theories in psychology, Attachment theory is based on thousands of hours of direct observation of parent-child interactions, both in the real world and in the laboratory. It is widely regarded as probably the best research-supported theory of emotional development yet available.

Attachment theory underlines the powerful influence parents, particularly the mother, have on the emotional development of children, especially on the development of self-trust and trust of others, so necessary for healthy interpersonal relationships.

Attachment theory presents four types of attachment styles. Secure attachment, two kinds of insecure attachments – ambivalent and avoidant, and a disorganized attachment style.

In the pattern of secure attachment, as exemplified in the case of Jessie, the child is confident that its parent (or parent figure) will be available, responsive, and helpful when it seeks protection or comfort, or encounters adverse or frightening situations. With this assurance, it feels bold to explore the world. It is such “exploration from a secure base,” as it is called, that leads to development of a sense of competence and self-confidence in the child that enables the child and later the adult to relate in healthy ways to those in its surroundings.

As children we seek some adult to whom to attach ourselves. The more sensitive and responsive this adult is to our needs, the deeper and more secure our attachment and greater the likelihood that we will develop healthy and fulfilling interpersonal relationships.

……

Here we can recall the experience of the disciples of Jesus on the sea when the sudden storm arose. They are frightened and feeling very insecure. However, the comforting words of Jesus “Why are you afraid? I am here.” gives them security. Both their inner fears and the storm outside subside.

We all require the calming presence of a sensitive and caring other in our childhood to provide us a sense of safety and security, especially in times of trouble and danger. The secure attachment we develop to this person makes us confident to reach out to others in trust and build satisfying relationships necessary for health and happiness.

You may now want to stay a while quietly with whatever this reflection on foundations of healthy relationships is evoking in you:

• How does Mrs Miranda’s story affect you? Is your experience similar to or different from hers? In what way?
• As a child, did you experience your parents as available, responsive and helpful when you needed them? What memories of such experiences or their opposite come into awareness?
• Stay a while with the feelings these memories evoke in you.

…..

The Jesus who provided assurance to the disciples during the storm at sea is present to you here and now. You could place all these childhood memories and the feelings they evoke in the hands of Jesus and spend a few moments listening and talking to him.

……..

Have a pleasant weekend where you feel secure in the closeness of your dear ones and nearness Jesus who walks with you. Bye for now.

Please send your comments, and questions to me at sumedhacentre@gmail.com

Images: Courtesy google Images

IMAGINATION AND CHARACTER

Imagination is one of the greatest of all human faculties. Without it life would be dull, and life would be dangerous. It is our capacity to imagine that warns us of danger and goads us to walk away from it.  

Our memories are products of our imagination. It is our imagination that enables us to recreate the past and create the future. Without imagination creativity would dry up – and when that happens life becomes absolutely drab, if at all it survives. It is imagination that produces endless possibilities.

Jungian Analyst James Hillman argues that “character and imagination are inseparable” (Force of Character, p. 182). Imagination is not images. Imagination is presence. And we see character as the presence, not just the image of a person.

Our body, Hillman, points out, is not just a composite of anatomical structures. It is also an imaginative structure. It is the imaginative body that creates “dance and sculpture, and impels the rhythms of oratory, music, and writing.” (p. 184).

The character of a person is a “complexity of images.” So “to know you I must imagine you, absorb your images,” writes Hillman. “To stay connected with you, I must stay imaginatively interested, not in the process of our relationship or in my feelings for you, but in my imaginings of you. The connection through imagination yields an extraordinary closeness. Where imagination focuses intently on the character of the other—as it does between opposing generals, guard and hostage, analyst and patient—love follows.

“The human connection may benefit from exhortations to love one another, but for a relationship to stay alive, love alone is not enough. Without imagination, love stales into sentiment, duty, boredom. Relationships last not because we have stopped loving but because we first stopped imagining.” (pp. 185-186)

MUSINGS ON THE HEART AND CHARACTER

'There are more hearts than the one that shows up in clinical imaging."

"Could heart troubles in later years also refer to a troubled heart? No doubt, somewhere along the way each heart has failed. To medicalize these painful seizures into failures of the bag of blood inside your rib cage constricts the hart's rich implications."

"Character is concerned with the heart failures of love, inner truth, and honor, and with the suppression of beauty. For it is a daily fact that we tend to keep beauty out of our lives lest it strike our hearts and kindle fierce longings we do not know how to appease. An ECG will not reveal anything about these weaknesses, nor can a stress test expose them. Times when courage failed, when we held back our cordiality, lacked pity, or betrayed our heart's calling can preoccupy later years as much as any lab findings. Heart disease and heart unease may be as near each other in fact as in language."

"...character demands attention to core essentials, which require other sorts of discipline than giving up smoking and cutting out butter. Life review in an armchair can be an exhausting exercise of imagining, stretching the heart-core of character at least as far as a brisk walk with the dog."

"Perhaps it is not only the attrition caused by life's stresses that hardens the heart, but failed contrition for our heart's smallness."

"The heart crushed by its own faults is suffering another kind of massive coronary event that brings deep pain"

"As you lie rigid in your bed or stare out over water, the heart reenacts how you betrayed your friend forty years ago, played the evil sister, the negligent daughter, the shirking friend. You see clearly and feel fully the injuries caused to spouses, parents, lovers, partners, dependents strewn in the wake of your self-centered demands and delusional beliefs. Of all these injuries, those done to your own calling through failure to respond with passion to the heart's imagination hurt most. With its relentless attacks, contrition exposes the heart's failure."

"It is not the past that is tempered by contrition, but the gnawing guilt about it....
Contrition lifts from the heart the weight of the dead past, making mercy possible."

from James Hillman, The Force of Character, pp. 119-124 passim)