Love & Attachment

Dr. Robin L. Kay
(310) 474-3020

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Love & Attachment

As children, we are born with a specific set of desires, needs and wishes that are inherent to us as unique individuals. These interests and needs, though, are impacted by the interactions we have with our caregivers and other important people in our lives. Our caregivers may impose demands or expectations on us that differ from our needs and wishes. This often creates conflict in our minds as we grow up and leads to questions:

Do we follow our instincts or the mandates (e.g., rules) of our caregivers?

Even more important, but rarely thought about or articulated, should we actually have been treated the way we were treated in childhood?

Should we have received more love, caring, and acceptance than we actually did?

And, how will the way others treated us when we were small affect us -- and our interactions with loved ones -- in the future?

We encode how we were treated as children and how we expect to be treated by others in the "attachment system" in our minds. It operates outside of our conscious awareness yet it contains all of our expectations that pertain to relationships, and it unconsciously shapes our behavior in each relationship we enter into. In other words, our attachment system becomes the internal model that we store inside us and use as an automatic system to determine how we treat ourselves and others. It also determines how we expect to be treated. It is the basis for how we automatically treat others (or particular people) whether we are pleased with our behaviors or not.

Our psychological attachment systems get activated when we are in the process of dating or coupling, marriage, relationship conflict, divorce, upon the addition of children to our lives, upon exposure to other situations or people who stir up feelings related to bad experiences of the past, and at many other times. All of these events have the capacity to be powerful triggers for unresolved attachment trauma (i.e., not receiving what you needed and wanted as a child, such as love, affection, understanding, encouragement, and acceptance). This trauma can evoke disruptive, unpleasant and unwanted psychological symptoms that serve to keep us from feeling our feelings. Feelings associated with childhood trauma (e.g., parent-child relational trauma, neglect, abuse—the feelings from your past) are repressed or dissociated (i.e., you are not aware of--and have no contact with--those feelings). These feelings get activated (brought to the surface) during relationships or life experiences that are similar to the unresolved attachment traumas, and many people become symptomatic upon engaging in an emotionally intimate relationship or upon having or raising children. In either gender, the mounting distress is frequently ignored or the cause of the distress is misdiagnosed or mislabeled which creates and perpetuates unnecessary suffering.

When an intimate relationship begins or deepens, or when a current trauma or emotionally provocative change occurs (like childbirth), the buried emotions associated with past disappointments are unearthed and begin to leak into or flood the "attachment system" inside us. At that point, any of a number of symptoms develop, e.g., anxiety, depression, "resentment of responsibility" and acting out, emotional or physical distancing, "commitment phobia," workaholism, addictive behaviors such as eating disorders, alcoholism, gambling, sex addiction, angry or tearful outbursts, extramarital affairs, psycho-physiological disorders...(the list goes on). These symptoms lead to anxiety and other psychological distress, marital discord and/or relationship termination.

Good, focused psychotherapy provides a wonderful opportunity for individuals (or couples) to resolve old (and previously repressed) relational trauma so they do not perpetuate their own distress, destroy relationships they value, or (perhaps worst of all) create an intergenerational transmission of trauma (i.e., trauma passed down from one generation to the next--from themselves to their children). With psychotherapy, change can occur inside of us and there is the possibility of changing our attachment styles so we can respond more flexibly to different people in different situations. We are destined to repeat what we do not understand, have not healed, or really have not changed. So, events in the present have the potential to activate buried feelings from the past, raise anxiety, and cause us to act in ways that are nonproductive, stifling, uncontrollable or destructive. With good therapy, though, people can understand how they treat themselves and others and learn how to feel their feelings—all resulting in changes in patterns of behaviors and the quality of their relationships.

The content on this site does not constitute medical advice, medical treatment or a patient-doctor (fiduciary) relationship.