by Donna Eden
In terms of self-initiated change, this “curious paradox” applies to all of us. Up to this point, the instructions in The Energies of Love have not tried to change you. Yours and your partner’s Element, Energetic Stress Style, biochemistry, and gender are all inherited. What you have been learning is how to become more adept in the way the two of you avoid clashes in your inborn styles while building on your strengths. This begins by understanding and accepting what cannot be changed in your natures. Other core dimensions of how you relate to one another, however, were learned early in your life and may also seem to be fixed and unchangeable. But they are not. Learning to recognize, accept, and change them is the topic of Part 2.
PART
2
The Learned Aspects of Love
5
The Energies of Attachment
The Nitty-Gritty of Intimacy
[The infant’s] profound attachment to a particular person is both as strong as, and often as irrational as, falling in love, and the very similarity of these two processes suggests strongly that they may have something in common.
—JOHN BOWLBY1
While your Energetic Stress Style is inherited (Donna can see it in the energies of a newborn infant), the way you bond to others, called your attachment style, is to a large degree a product of learning. Behavioral scientists have studied in-depth the way your early experiences are likely to impact your adult relationships.
How the Infant Brain Gets Wired
At birth, your brain was a book whose story line was yet to be written. The pages, the binding, and overall organization were already apparent in their embryonic forms, but the words had not yet been inscribed. Your genes determined the basic structure of your nervous system and even primal temperamental patterns, but the early experiences that would come to shape the life you are now living would only unfold as a result of your interactions with your environment.
While the mutual influences of nature and nurture are no doubt familiar to you, what you may not know is how directly the neural pathways in your developing brain were impacted by the subtle and not-so-subtle ways your primary caregivers responded to you. Life was a stream of sensation. Hunger pangs would intrude into a peaceful rest. You would cry reflexively. If you were met with soothing words, a tender embrace, and the taste of warm milk, all was good again. The neural pathways that would eventually form meaning about hunger pangs would not link to neurons that activate anxiety. Hunger would eventually become associated with positive expectations. If, however, your cries went unheeded, that episode established a different set of pathways. Hunger was not only a temporary pain. It became pain laced with anxiety, uncertainty, and negative anticipations.
• THE ENERGY DIMENSION •
Infant Being Nurtured
When an infant’s needs are responded to promptly, it is very beautiful. The surrounding aura moves in toward the baby and then gently moves away. This steady rhythm comforts the body like a pulsating warm blanket, keeping all the baby’s energies in a tender glow.
Infant Being Neglected
When an infant is crying out of unmet need, the energy reaches out toward the caregiver, but it looks confused. It is disorganized and sometimes jagged. When the baby finally stops crying from exhaustion, the energies are pulled back from the world, the aura looks collapsed and thin, and its natural pulsation seems subdued.
As an infant, you could not soothe your discomforts. While the part of your nervous system that mobilizes action in response to stress and pain (the sympathetic nervous system) was already well developed by the time you were born, the part that would allow you to soothe yourself in the face of distress (the parasympathetic nervous system) was still undeveloped. Nature gave that job to your parents, counting on them to soothe you and to teach you about soothing yourself. When discomfort roused you into action, your repertoire was limited mostly to squirming and crying. When your caregivers held you and cuddled you and cooed soothing sounds, you were not only comforted; you learned about self-comforting.
These early learnings shaped your most basic assessments about yourself and your relationships. They told you whether you were worthy of intimacy, confirmed whether or not you could rely on your intimates for support and protection, showed you how to care for and be cared for by those to whom you were closest, and guided you in how to manage your emotional needs.
Early Imprints of How to Be in a Relationship Are Usually Lasting Ones
In the wild, a child’s survival depended on establishing a close bond with whoever would provide care. The infant’s brain is wired to seek, bond, and communicate with a caregiver, and it is from caregiver relationships that skills for self-nurture and relating intimately with others are, for better or worse, formed. John Bowlby—the British psychiatrist who blazed the trail for our current understanding of the infant’s attachment to a primary caregiver and its lifelong impact—provocatively claimed in 1951 that the young child’s hunger for the mother’s love and presence was as primal a drive as the hunger for food.2 No survival without food, but also no survival without nurture and protection. And bonding is the route to securing each. The baby is driven by inner forces to seek proximity and contact with the caregiver.
Bowlby’s assertion that the child’s need to bond is as primal as the need for food was put to a test a few years later in classic experiments by Harry Harlow. Baby rhesus monkeys would bond to and seek comfort from a terry-cloth mother they could cling to, though it provided no food, rather than to a wire mother outfitted with a nipple that provided milk.3 Infant monkeys placed in an unfamiliar room with their cloth surrogate parent would cling to it until they felt secure enough to explore. If the cloth surrogate was not present, they would crouch and freeze in fear, perhaps also rocking, sucking, crying, or screaming. This behavior was displayed in the absence of the cloth surrogate even if the wire surrogate—which they had suckled but could not physically embrace in a manner that produced bonding—was present. That primal is the infant’s drive to bond with a caregiver.
In the infant’s impulse for attachment, the sight of the caregiver’s face, hands, and hair are triggers for grasping and clinging. The caregiver’s voice and caresses initiate smiling and babbling behavior. Communication had to, of course, first be accomplished without words. Facial expressions, eye contact, voice tone, gestures, postures, timing, and intensity showed on the outside what was happening to you on the inside.4 Before you could talk, this was the primary information available to your caregivers about your moment-to-moment experience. The accuracy with which they read and were able to respond to your needs determined a great deal about your sense of well-being. Their attunement or lack of attunement was your first, deeply imprinted lesson about what to expect in a close relationship.
These early imprints are usually lasting ones. Bowlby compared the sweeping effects of maternal deprivation on psychological development to the impact of poor nutrition on physical growth.5 His first speculation on the role of early emotional deprivation traced to experiences prior to his psychiatric training when, as a volunteer at a residential school for delinquent and other troubled children, he noticed how some children would show anger and rejection even to those who tried to befriend them. Their self-defeating interpersonal styles seemed to have been established during their troubled home lives.
Fast-forward eighty years. Study after study suggests that early attachment relationships set the foundation for subsequent personality development. Infants who enjoyed a secure attachment relationship with a primary caregiver, as inferred by systematic assessments, grew up to have higher self-esteem than children whose primary attachment relationship was insecure. They also developed closer friendships, greater social competence, more fulfilling romantic partnerships, greater capacity to regulate their emotions, more ability to accomplish their goals, greater resilience, enhanced leadership qualities, and less anxiety and depression.6
• THE ENERGY DIMENSION •
Infant in a Secure Moment
The infant’s energy moves outward into the world, whether or not an adult is there. It is as if the energy is exploring the environment. Then it comes back in and soothes the infant. Then back out into the surrounding world. Like the breath, the energy moves inward, bringing the infant support and harmony, and then outward, securely contacting the world.
Infant in an Insecure Moment
The energies look confused, disorganized, and chaotic. Because the infant can’t make sense of what is happening and can’t control it, there is a surrender into powerlessness. The energies do not focus or coalesce, and they become disconnected from the environment.
Secure Attachment; Anxious Attachment; Avoidant Attachment
We are wired to bond to only a small group of intimates, with one special person at the top of the hierarchy, and it is during times of threat or separation that this wiring is most strongly activated. However, the way we will react when it is activated is shaped by our experiences. The dynamics of “secure” and “insecure” attachment styles have been investigated in hundreds of studies.
Secure Attachment
Secure attachment in childhood sets the stage for greater ease with intimacy as an adult. People with a secure attachment style tend to be optimistic about their primary relationship. They have a strong sense of self-worth, expect closeness, warmth, and comfort in their relationships, and they tend to find it. They are effective in communicating their needs and feelings, and they accurately read and respond to their partner’s emotional cues. They are able to soothe as well as self-soothe, and they are capable of moving easily between intimate engagement and independence, leading to the emotional and behavioral interdependence required for a successful relationship.7
Insecure Attachment
Insecure attachment in childhood sets the stage for later troubles with intimacy. Children who are insecurely attached did not receive the imprinting from their caregivers that would help them learn to regulate their own nervous systems, making them vulnerable to emotional difficulties throughout life.8 Insecure attachment generally involves anxious clinging or emotional avoidance in intimate relationships:
ANXIOUS ATTACHMENT
Anxious attachment is typified by a strong need for closeness, worry about and preoccupation with the relationship, and reliance on strategies such as clinging, angry, and controlling responses that attempt to minimize the emotional distance from the partner.9 People with an anxious attachment style tend to be extremely sensitive to small fluctuations in their partner’s moods and behavior, to take them personally, and to be easily upset by any sign of real or imagined distancing. Because they may alternate between clinging when their partner is available and showing anger because of times their partner was not available—or refusing comfort for that reason—this attachment style is sometimes called anxious-ambivalent.
• THE ENERGY DIMENSION •
Secure
The aura is full. It fluctuates easily in response to others, influenced by them but then returning to center. There is also a fullness in the chakra energies, which reach out in front of the person as if to greet others. This fullness in the aura and the chakras is soothing, leaving the person less dependent on others for emotional and energetic support.
Anxious
The energy of an anxious aura is jittery, its patterns unstable. Sometimes it will engulf or cling to the partner’s energies. Other times it will repel them or appear to attack them. This makes it difficult for another’s energies to connect and dance with those with an anxious-avoidant style.
Avoidant
The energy is pulled back into the avoidant person, or it focuses or fragments in other directions, any direction but toward a person where commitment might be called for. This may be toward projects, acquaintances, casual social situations, entertainment, surfing the net, or intellectual pursuits.
AVOIDANT ATTACHMENT
Avoidant attachment is typified by exaggerated self-reliance and strategies that maximize emotional distance from the partner.10 Adults with an avoidant attachment style tend to be isolated, unaware of their emotional hollowness, and put off by any suggestion that they might have more needs for intimacy than they recognize. They view their emotional detachment as a sign of strength and independence. Research, however, shows that when the relationship is at risk, individuals with an avoidant attachment style are just as distressed on physiological measures (such as the galvanic skin response) as other people. They are simply better at keeping themselves from expressing or even experiencing such thoughts and feelings.11 Avoidant partners have the same core need for a primary relationship but manage it by attempting to deny it.
MIXED ANXIOUS/AVOIDANT ATTACHMENT
Mixed anxious/avoidant attachment is a combination of both strategies, characterized by seeking closeness and then fearfully avoiding it. A traumatic or abusive relationship with a primary caregiver is often found in the person’s history. Borderline personality disorder often corresponds with an anxious/avoidant attachment style (which is sometimes called disorganized attachment). Closeness with the partner is longed for as a source of comfort and intimacy, but at the same time, intimacy provokes fear and anxiety. Anxious/avoidant attachment is typified in the quip, “If you won’t leave me, I’ll find someone who will.” This paradoxical style is relatively rare but can be extraordinarily challenging for the partner.
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While the descriptions of attachment styles are, by necessity, of “pure types,” human beings are rarely pure types within any classification. A given individual may be a mix of these qualities or more like one type in a particular situation and more like another in a different situation, and the person’s primary attachment style may also shift over time.
The potential for developing a secure attachment style is there in your genes. It is what nature intended. But the way this capacity manifests or doesn’t manifest is shaped by your experiences. Secure attachment helps individuals, intimate relationships, and human communities thrive. Even though no parent is perfect, nature teams with the family to achieve secure attachment more than half of the time.12 The rest are divided fairly evenly between the anxious and the avoidant styles, with a minority having the disorganized anxious-avoidant style. However, such classifications don’t capture the rich nuance in an individual’s ways of relating intimately. Even within the “secure” majority are innumerable traits and habitual patterns that may dampen or strengthen intimacy.
When the attachment bond is strained or threatened by the inevitable hurdles in building any close, creative relationship, primal responses that trace back to early attachment experiences are evoked. Understanding how your style and your partner’s style were once upon a time adaptive strategies for less than perfect circumstances allows you, when such primal responses erupt, to proceed with greater compassion for yourself as well as for your partner.
• THE ENERGY DIMENSION •
When Donna witnesses couples interacting, the choreography of their energies is exactly the way you might imagine it to be:
Secure Relating
When two people engage intimately during a secure moment, the energy interchange Donna observes is smooth and strong. That is exactly what would be predicted by the “smooth, ordered, coherent patterns” that spectral analysis revealed in the electromagnetic field radiated by the heart during moments of love or appreciation.13
The Anxious Style in Relationships
The energies around a person with an anxious attachment style seeking contact with an intimate partner who is not responding in the moment tend to become disorganized and move somewhat chaotically but forcefully toward the partner.
The Avoidant Style in Relationships
The energies surrounding a person with an avoidant attachment style tend to contract so much that they take on what looks to Do
nna like a shell. These compacted energies then retreat from an intimate partner who is making an emotional demand. In interactions with others, the avoidant partner’s energies may be much more fluid and engaging. This corresponds with clinical observations. People who seem well adjusted and at ease in most social situations may still use an avoidant (or an anxious) attachment style in their most intimate relationships.
The Anxious-Avoidant Trap
Combining the above two descriptions provides a vivid picture of what has been the “anxious-avoidant trap,” in which one person’s energies move toward the other and the other’s retreat inward or move away.
Is your attachment style—whether secure, anxious, or avoidant—also reflected in the electromagnetic energies emanating from your body? Of course our answer is yes. One of the most interesting discoveries for David as he learned about Donna’s work is that memories, emotions, and behavioral programs are stored not only in the brain but also in the body’s energy systems. The secure, anxious, and avoidant ways of responding when feeling distressed are not just products of your mind. They are visible to Donna as patterns of energy.
The Dance of David’s and Donna’s Attachment Styles