Childhood attachment is more than just the relationship you had with your parents or the experiences you had growing up. It is a core pillar of early cognitive development. It serves as the foundation for your relationships throughout life, creating the building blocks of how you relate to and communicate with everyone around you. As a result, attachment plays a key role in your mental and emotional well-being—even long after you reach adulthood.
Addressing childhood attachment with a Licensed Clinical Psychologist involves more than simply looking at the symptoms of attachment issues. To truly fix these problems, you must work through the source of the issue and the far-reaching effects it has on every facet of your life. Learn more about childhood attachment and how personalized treatment from a Licensed Clinical Psychologist can help you transform the quality of your adult relationships and future trajectories.
Attachment Is a Complex, Long-Term Issue
Childhood attachment is far from easy to understand. The experiences that shape one’s attachment style predate their own memories, making it difficult to clearly identify and address this issue. Attachment challenges are also often intergenerational, stemming from attachment issues, Mental Health Disorders, and other challenges that the parents of a patient faced.
In order to address such a complex, long-term issue, Licensed Clinical Psychologists must be willing to spend time building and following a tailored treatment plan for their patients. No two cases are the same, and a personalized and customized treatment is the key to properly explore the dynamics of childhood attachment as the source of Mental Health Disorders, Addiction Issues, Mood Disorders, Traumas, Marital Discord, Relationship Conflicts, and life satisfaction in adulthood.
At Blair Wellness Group, we know that repairing the ruptures of insecure childhood attachment requires taking the time to fully understand its origin and have a thorough understanding of the patient’s upbringing and home environment. Our tailored treatment plans are based upon evidence-based models and scientific approaches that address the underlying issues rather than just the symptoms of adulthood struggles. This allows for positive outcomes and lasting change for clients suffering from childhood attachment issues. This practice is based on creating customized treatment plans that require patience, perseverance, persistence, and fortitude, which does not sacrifice quality outcomes for the patient by not allowing them to cut corners or go through the numbers game. This approach needs to be more emphasized by medical training and practices alike in a concerted effort to provide meaningful treatment results for patients.
Lifelong Effects of Attachment Issues
Your attachment style is a reflection of your experiences during early childhood and your relationship—either stable or unstable—with parents, guardians, or other primary caretakers. These experiences leave a lasting impression on your mind and go on to define the way you view yourself and your relationships. A child who experiences a stable, secure relationship with their caretakers learns to see relationships as valuable, safe, and reliable. Meanwhile, a child with insecure relationships does not learn the value of comfort, vulnerability, communication, or physical closeness or emotional intimacy.
These dynamics influence mental health and emotional development for children throughout their lifespan. Those with a secure childhood attachment are able to explore their relationships and feel safe to do so. This gives them the space to learn how to empathize with others, communicate their internal needs adaptively, and learn how to explore the proper ways to relate and interact with others. This learning process is vital in learning adaptability, emotional resilience, self-regulation, self-soothing techniques, modulating of affect, mentalization, social causality, mindful behaviors, mental health, and more.
Defining Healthy Attachment
Many different factors contribute to and define attachment style, including opportunities for closeness between parents and child, the attitude of caretakers, and wider social and environmental factors. Parental attunement to a child’s emotions also has a major influence. Parents reflect their baby’s mood and thoughts through their tone of voice, expression, posture, movement, touch, and other actions.
In a stable, healthy relationship, this reflection is a source of regulation. It grants meaning to a child’s inner emotions and supports emotional and stress regulation before the baby develops the ability to self-regulate. Furthermore, this relationship allows for the development of trust, empathy, expression, and understanding—giving the child strong and healthy relationship models they can expect and refer to for the rest of their life.
Factors That Disrupt Attachment
Attachment issues often stem from an intentional or unintentional lack of parental attunement. Interruptions—such as parental Mental Health Disorders, Addiction Issues, stress, fatigue, parental divorce, childhood neglect, childhood verbal/emotional/physical/sexual abuse, or other issues—distract the parent from the needs of their child, making them an unreliable source of attention and care. The type of interruption defines the type of insecure attachment the child develops.
For example, a well-meaning parent dealing with a Mental Health Condition might offer positive attention to their child on an irregular basis. This irregularity leads to an ambivalent attachment style, where the child becomes desperate to gain and keep attention. In adulthood, this attachment style can lead to codependency, fear of abandonment, and an unhealthy reliance on external validation or attention-seeking by habitually acting out through chaotic behaviors, patterns of creating crisis or injecting drama in adult relationships.
Children with parents who are rarely attuned to their thoughts and emotions never learn the value of close relationships, and so they become uninterested in developing adaptive and meaningful relationships on their own. This is avoidant attachment, which leads to strict independence and rejection of emotional and psychological intimacy.
Meanwhile, a child with caretakers who switch between attuned and antagonistic simultaneously craves and fears attention. This leads to disorganized attachment, wherein one desires and rejects close relationships. Disorganized attachment also leads to hypervigilance, fear of vulnerability, and an inability to express emotions.
Addressing Childhood Attachment in Therapy
Promoting knowledge and understanding of childhood attachment and the effects it has throughout adulthood is a crucial goal for the medical industry. Because attachment is a complicated issue with far-reaching consequences, it plays a role in many Mental Health Disorders such as Depressive Disorders, Substance Abuse and Addiction Disorders, and Anxiety Disorders.
Understanding the influence of attachment on a patient’s life means taking the time to look closely at their childhood experiences and the role they play throughout adolescence and adulthood. This process involves exploring parental attachments and Mental Health Conditions, addressing adverse childhood experiences, and looking at a patient’s present circumstances through the context of their early childhood.
However, Licensed Clinical Psychologists that address childhood attachment as an all-encompassing issue can help build personalized treatment plans that target the root of the issue in a patient’s life. This allows for a more effective understanding and use of attachment in the therapeutic relationship, promoting healing, growth, and lasting positive change for patients.
Attachment in the Therapeutic Relationship
Licensed Clinical Psychologists resolve insecure attachment by building stable relationships and a secure attachment style with their patients. By taking the time to cultivate a deep sense of trust and rapport within the context of a therapeutic setting under the care of a well-versed, Licensed Clinical Psychologist, patients can work through their fears of emotional intimacy, rejection issues, abandonment history or the inability to be vulnerable, open, and humble. This secure relationship also gives patients the room to safely explore childhood attachment as the cause of the Mental Health Disorders, Traumas, Addiction Issues, Mood Disorders, Relationship conflicts, marital discord, lack of satisfaction with work, and other challenges they face in adulthood.
Achieving Effective Change With Blair Wellness Group
Addressing and resolving insecure childhood attachment requires time, nuance, and dedication. There is no standard path for psychologists and their patients to follow. Instead, Licensed Clinical Psychologists must work closely with patients to develop a tailored treatment plan and cultivate the necessary variables of rapport, alliance, respect, transparency, trust, and nurturing of a secure therapeutic relationship. Over time, this allows for positive outcomes, life satisfaction, treatment of Addiction Issues, Traumas, Mood Disorders, and meaningful changes in clients’ lives and intimate relationships by systematically and methodically repairing the ruptures of childhood insecure attachment styles.
Dr. Blair specializes in childhood attachment and its effects on adulthood. By taking the time to get to know her clients, she develops a deep understanding of their life experiences and creates a tailored treatment plan to serve their unique circumstances. If you are looking for a Licensed Clinical Psychologist in Los Angeles, Irvine, Beverly Hills, Newport Beach, Bel Air, Century City, Brentwood, Westwood, Huntington Beach, Mission Viejo, Aliso Viejo, and the surrounding areas, contact Blair Wellness Group to see how our evidence-based, personalized treatment plans can help you.
