Furthermore, if she falters or falls in that new arena, it is him to whom she will go for comfort. Secure attachment offers an essential safe haven. The eminent attachment scholar and psychotherapist Sue Johnson writes, “The presence of an attachment figure, which usually means parents, children, spouses, and lovers, provides comfort and security, while the perceived inaccessibility of such figures creates distress. Proximity to a loved one tranquilizes the nervous system.12 It is the natural antidote to the inevitable anxieties and vulnerabilities of life.”13 We all know that life is inherently uncertain and that hard times are unavoidable, but it is easy to lose sight of the restorative power of connection, a reprieve that only a committed, loving other can provide. From the perspective of attachment theory, we are not meant to endure hardships alone. The need to retreat from uncertainty and into the arms of someone who shelters us from it all, even temporarily, is inborn and adaptive. It recalibrates and strengthens us so we can press on.
When my older son emerged from general anesthesia after a tonsillectomy at age five, he was extremely distressed. He felt severe pain in his throat and terrifying disorientation from the anesthesia. He was thrashing about, coughing, screaming, and sobbing all at once. His state was terribly painful for me to witness, but instinctively, I climbed onto his hospital bed and held him close to me and tried to soothe him with my voice and my touch. What he did not know is that I was, myself, in tears. Seeing my little boy in such despair created a state in me from which I also needed relief—and it was my husband who was my safe haven. He climbed onto the bed also, putting his arms around me as I had my arms around Noah. He soothed me immediately, in turn improving my capacity to give Noah what he needed. As much as I wish that moment never had to happen, I see it now in my mind’s eye as a beautiful image of layered safe havens.
In the parent-child relationship, the safe haven concept is easy to understand; a parent is an almost literal haven for a child, cradling a child in her arms when he is tired or afraid, or scooping up a child who is in danger, just in time. In an adult love relationship, our partners may not envelop us in the same literal fashion, but through emotional attunement, they act as havens just as powerfully. Research even shows us that happily married, securely bonded spouses are physiologically soothed in times of stress or uncertainty simply by touching each other or looking into each other’s eyes.14
There is good reason attachment is best known as a framework for understanding the primary bonds of childhood, more so than one that helps us understand adult love. The quality of the essential connections we make with our primary caregivers when we are young has a profound impact on who we are and how we relate to others. Perhaps most important, those early connections determine lifelong emotional skills, which are at the heart of our ability to understand ourselves and connect with those we love. Secure connections early in life allow for more nuanced understandings of our own and others’ emotions, as well as more effective ways of coping with them. In the absence of significant strain or stress, a person with insecure tendencies may have only a little bit of occasional trouble naming her own emotions or tuning into those of her partner. But that same person, in the face of some stressful disruption or threatening scenario, is likely to have a lot more trouble handling her own emotions and staying accurately attuned to those of her partner. This has everything to do with how readily we get into an attachment-related “high alert” zone, and how readily we make negative assumptions about whether we can count on the other during hard times.
So what are the ingredients for secure attachment? Emotional accessibility and responsiveness are critical components of creating a healthy bond. The face-to-face, intimate interactions that unfold over and over again between a parent and baby are the raw ingredients for a secure bond. This means a mother’s ability to pay attention—the quality of her antennae for detecting her child’s emotional signals—is of primary importance. The physical presence or proximity of an attachment figure is important, too, of course, but it is not the foundation of a bond. When an attachment figure is physically present but emotionally absent, this provokes separation distress in the other as reliably, and perhaps even with greater force, as physical absence. Emotional responsiveness from an attachment figure tells us that figure is not just present but interested, concerned, and intent on reading our cues. As Johnson states, “In attachment terms, any response (even anger) is better than none. If there is no engagement, no emotional responsiveness, the message from the attachment figure reads as ‘Your signals do not matter, and there is no connection between us.’”15 Remember the study showing that women with repeated episodes of postpartum depression had husbands who were indifferent, not necessarily hostile or critical? Remember Julia, who wasn’t sure which was worse, her aggravation toward her husband or her indifference toward him? Viewed from an attachment angle, it’s clear which is worse. Anger is a form of protest against unmet needs. When we’re angry, we’re still in the ring, fighting to get our needs met. Indifference, on the other hand, signals resignation. We’ve walked out of the ring, convinced there is no point in fighting anymore. The flames of anger have burned out, leaving behind the ashes of apathy.
Viewed from this perspective, it’s easy to understand why disconnection is often the presenting complaint among couples entering therapy. They aren’t likely to use attachment language, but they do say things like “We’ve drifted apart” or “We just can’t seem to understand each other” or “We don’t communicate very well.” And it’s easy to see why research has identified “stonewalling”—one partner shutting out the other during a discussion of conflict—as so damaging. It’s a behavioral emblem of disconnection. The stonewaller is not just missing the partner’s signals or lacking in emotional attunement skills; he or she is blatantly unresponsive. Stonewalling has been identified by prominent couples researcher John Gottman as one of the top predictors of relationship demise, and as such is one of his “four horsemen of the apocalypse.” When I teach about these “four horsemen” (the other three are criticism, defensiveness, and contempt), I show my students video clips of couples in Gottman’s lab engaging in each behavior. Stonewalling is invariably the most painful to watch. Contempt is difficult, to be sure; students become very uncomfortable when viewing members of a couple mocking each other or rolling their eyes in disgust. But even worse are the moments of silence on the videotape in which a partner, having just seen and heard his partner cry, or protest, or plead, says nothing. That silent partner’s face betrays no emotion; it is the quintessential poker face. It says to the despairing other, You have no impact.
While attachment needs are fundamental, ever-present, and lifelong, they are not insistent at all times, asking to be met all day, every day. Rather, we can think of them as being triggered, or activated, by certain situations. During times of fear and uncertainty—such as illness, trauma, loss, or other stressful circumstances—our attachment needs become pronounced. During periods of stability, they may be “quiet” or even lying dormant because all is well. But when all is not well, the mere presence and attention of an attachment figure is a potent source of comfort, and we are inherently motivated to seek out that comfort.
The attachment system may also become activated in the face of some threat, real or perceived, to the attachment relationship. If a partner is perceived to be distant, preoccupied, or otherwise unavailable, this is experienced as an assault on the attachment bond and will give rise to strong emotions and attachment-oriented behavior. We may take steps to reestablish closeness, demanding answers or reassurances from our partner. We may protest in anger. Whatever we do, we do it in response to a perceived threat and in hopes of restoring stability to the attachment relationship.
We can think of “attachment behavior” as any behavior designed to keep or restore closeness with an important other. We won’t see the behavior all the time. Sometimes babies are quietly looking out the window instead of crying or squealing or reaching for their mothers. But if, suddenly
, Baby looks for Mom and she isn’t there, or Baby sees something scary through the window, or Baby is hungry or doesn’t feel well, she or he will surely cry out. Sometimes spouses are occupying distant corners of the house, each engaged in his or her own separate task. But if, suddenly, a torrential downpour hits and lightning strikes and the power goes out, those partners will seek each other out in the darkness. That dependency need gets triggered when we feel unwell or unsafe, or when we begin to doubt the other’s availability.
During the transition to parenthood, both types of triggers are likely to be present. It is a time of stress and compromised physical and emotional functioning, and for most, though perhaps not all, it is a time of direct threat to the attachment bond.* Remember, fear and uncertainty activate attachment needs. I propose that in no other normative, allegedly happy life event is there greater fear and uncertainty, on so many levels, than in the transition to parenthood.
In love, in the bond of marriage, there is so much at stake. So much risk. So much potential. So much yearning. So much hurt, and so much healing. Only in our most intimate relationships is there simultaneously so much to gain and so much to lose.
These dualities are often encapsulated in the act of withdrawal. On the face of it, the behavior of withdrawing seems to say, “I don’t want to be near you.” But quite often, the person withdrawing is filled with longing and aching: longing to be pursued, understood, soothed. A wife turns her back because she’s too scared to let him see the trembling of her lip. A husband turns his back because he feels rejected. He turns his back because it’s too painful to look at the disappointment in her eyes. She turns her back because his words sting with truth.
When couples are new to parenthood, withdrawal is likely to make its way into their relationship, if it was not already there. Its manifestations may be many, and it may be mutual or one-sided, but it will always hurt. And, left unchecked, it has a way of growing. As we will explore in more depth in the next chapter, quite often wives and husbands are feeling equally excluded from each other’s worlds, but for different reasons. Witnessing their wives’ growing intimate bond with the baby, fathers may feel displaced on some level—even if they have a strong connection with the baby, too, and even if they are genuinely delighting in fatherhood. Many new mothers are resentful of their partners’ relatively intact routines and work lives when their own have been disrupted so completely—even if they wouldn’t send their babies back for the world. They may have an eagerness to connect with their husbands, only to feel put off by what he chooses to share or how little he seems to know, or wants to know, about her world. Discouraged or annoyed or angered by the disconnect, they feel themselves pulling away from the same person whose company they were craving.
Similarly, more than one client has confessed to me that she has pretended to be asleep when her partner came to bed in the hope that he would not reach out to her sexually, only to cry herself to sleep moments later, feeling so alone. As exhausted mothers, we often resent our husbands for having any interest in sex because it’s just one more piece of evidence that they have energy we do not have. Their requests for sex show that they obviously have no clue exactly how drained we are or exactly how uncomfortable and unsexy we feel in our post-childbirth bodies. A fluctuating or nonexistent libido in a new (or even not-so-new) mother is entirely normal, but her partner’s expectation that she’ll be receptive can send the message that she “should” want it. In this context, our husbands become just one more person placing demands on us, and particularly demands on our bodies, when we are “touched out.” In other words, their interest in sex is proof that they aren’t with us, don’t get us, and don’t see where we are, and possibly that they’re selfishly pursuing gratification of their own needs. There may well be validity to those interpretations of our husbands’ desire for sex, and certainly there is validity to our decreased desire and our need for physical boundaries. But the irony is that sometimes, their sexual overtures may well be their way of saying, I’m right here. I see you and I want to be with you. I’m reaching for you.
The irony is that we turn our backs to our partners, attempting to protect ourselves from something—vulnerability, pain, rejection, shame—at the moments we most need to know our partners are there. And our partners, sensing our unavailability, eventually turn away as well. And then there are two lonely people lying in bed next to each other, longing for connection, drifting off to sleep with imagery of a wide and deep chasm between them that cannot be traversed.
Sometimes, quite literally, a baby has come between them. “Honey, something’s come between us,” said my wryly smiling husband one night when our baby son was snoring in the middle of the bed, each of us on one side of him and wishing that just once, in the last many months, we’d been able to fall asleep in our preferred “spoons” position. In the best of scenarios, a couple can experience a shared sense of loss, longing, and frustration and maybe even have some capacity for a sense of humor about it. More often, though, there are formidable tensions around why, and for how long, and for whose benefit, the baby is sleeping in the bed.
Like so many other parenting decisions, the choice to bed-share or not is an individual one, and I am not here to offer an opinion on the matter. But what is undeniable is that a baby’s actual presence in the marital bed, or in the bedroom, is an antiaphrodisiac. Also, I am certain that for some couples, the tangible obstacle of the baby between them is easier to tolerate than the many intangible, perhaps painful, perhaps subconscious reasons they may not be drawn to each other sexually. Almost always, these reasons are rooted in attachment concerns.
Attachment theory gives us a framework for understanding so much of what unfolds within an adult intimate partnership, especially as that partnership adapts to the strain of parenthood. It helps us understand why even the smallest perceived rejection may carry tremendous emotional weight, and why one partner may fight, flee, or freeze when the other is perceived to be unavailable. This “fight-or-flight response” is more commonly known to occur during a brush with some obvious, imminent danger, like a car veering toward us or a bear on the hiking trail, but research tells us that it occurs with regularity in the context of close interpersonal relationships. To be rejected, abandoned, or shut out by an attachment figure is, at a physiological level, akin to facing a life-threatening situation. No wonder people act “crazy” in relationships and go to desperate lengths to restore an attachment bond that has been weakened or broken.
When our attachment needs get activated in a stressful situation, especially a prolonged one like the transition to parenthood, we may find that old wounds feel new again. Early experiences create lasting vulnerabilities that play out in our adult relationships, explaining—if we can bring all this into awareness—the frustrating and sometimes deeply hurtful dynamics in which we become entrenched. My client Tess has probably always struggled with unmet attachment needs, for reasons that extend back to the earliest days of her childhood, growing up with a depressed, emotionally unavailable mother. When Tess and David first got together, their many mutual interests helped them forge a connection that was comfortable, and enough, for them both. They spent a lot of time together and had very little conflict. When she became pregnant with her first child, however, she began to feel painfully lonely. Her world and David’s world seemed to veer off in different directions when she became engrossed in the experience of pregnancy and the anticipation of motherhood. David, on the other hand—though certainly not unenthusiastic about impending fatherhood—carried on in his usual mode of immersion in his career as an architect. The seeds of their distress as a couple were planted then, when Tess sensed that he wasn’t fully with her as she readied herself for something so monumental. And once the baby was born, those seeds grew into noxious, invasive weeds that are now choking out what was once beautiful in their garden. As Tess faced the full catastrophe of life as a new mother, she turned to her partner over and over, only to perceive that, more often than not, he was
n’t there.
What about my friend with the sleep-defying baby and the husband who was just a little too oblivious to how crucial it was for their bedroom to be absolutely silent once the baby was asleep? The questions fueling her distress are essentially the same as Tess’s. She feels great aggravation toward her husband because doesn’t he get it? Does he not understand what her world is like right now, and can she not count on him anymore? I’m sure the gravity of Tess’s situation appears greater, and indeed it is: she is a lot further down a desolate path of feeling unseen and unwanted by her partner, and she is in despair. My friend is just plain mad, and a bit incredulous, but not (yet, and hopefully not ever) despairing. Still, for both women the fundamental issue is the same one playing out in the homes of countless new parents. The parents of a newborn are faced with the task not just of developing an attachment bond with their new child, but of doing so while preserving the existing attachment bond between them. For a great many couples, the endeavor to integrate a child into their lives is the first opportunity they have to demonstrate—or fail to demonstrate—that they have the capacity to remain connected and responsive to each other under the most trying of circumstances.
8
In the Weeds
The greatest gift a parent has to give a child—and a lover has to give a lover—is emotionally attuned attention and timely responsiveness.
—Dr. Sue Johnson, Love Sense
Sam and Ivy started couples therapy when their daughter was just under a year old and their twin sons were four. I remember a moment during their first session, when Ivy swept a tear-soaked strand of her long red hair away from her eyes while Sam looked away. I thought about how different it would be if Sam were the one gently moving that lock of hair, telling his wife with that one small action that he was listening, concerned, interested. Instead, his averted gaze and his arms folded across his chest seemed to confirm for Ivy what she was describing in that moment: he doesn’t listen and he doesn’t care. Not the way he once did. Not for a long time.
To Have and to Hold Page 16