Do you engage in baby talk or have your own unique language with the one you love?
Babies and caregivers engage in baby talk. Healthily romantic adults also engage in baby talk.
In a healthy love relationship, grown adults have been known to use silly, sugary baby talk that only the couple themselves can understand. They may also have a common sense of humor, with inside jokes, winks, and nods that enhance the loving bond between them.
But when a relationship takes an unhealthy turn, one partner may take on the role of an angry, displeased, shaming, never-satisfied parent while the other person becomes like a child or servant who is less powerful than the abusive partner. The relationship becomes all about control, defensiveness, and shutting down, often flailing and flopping from one form of abuse or neglect to another.
If you find yourself in an unhealthy, abusive relationship as the weaker partner, you would be best advised to extract yourself as soon as possible. That doesn’t mean immediate divorce. It means getting yourself (and any children) to a safe place and then working to get yourself strong and well. It may sound simple, but it rarely is. Instead of acting, moving forward, and getting better, we can easily get stuck in a pattern of reactive detachment in an effort to survive.
Adult Reactive Attachment
To more clearly define what reactive living looks like in adults, it may be helpful to draw some comparisons to a widely known but comparatively rare childhood condition known as reactive attachment disorder (RAD), which is typically found when a child has extremely insecure attachments from being raised in an institution or by neglectful or cruel parents. When RAD occurs and these typical scenarios are not the cause, the source of the disorder can be difficult to determine.
We know parents who have adopted children from China, Russia, or Korea, and the adopted children have been able to attach and bond into healthy family relationships. We have also seen many instances where the adoptive parents are baffled at every turn by children who seem to resist every movement toward them, rebel against every rule meant to help them, and exhibit bizarre behavior in reaction to healthy nurturing efforts. When these parents take their children to get help and are given a diagnosis of reactive attachment disorder, it can produce great relief to know that someone else understands the problem and that there is a treatment for it.
As we look at some parallels between RAD and adult reactive living, we trust you will find encouragement and hope in knowing that a reactive way of life is common, it has identifiable symptoms, and there is help available to treat it. Each subhead below will list some symptoms of RAD, and we will explain how these behaviors manifest themselves in adults who are caught up in reactive living.
Emotionally withdrawn behavior toward caregivers
Acting out is negative behavior that is obvious to everyone who sees it. Abuse, violence, affairs, drunkenness, conflict, yelling, breaking things, hitting, and bingeing all are reactive behaviors. They are choices that hurt people emotionally and sometimes physically. When a woman whose husband has been unemployed for six months tells him it’s time to start looking for a job and he storms out the door, goes to the nearest bar, and gets drunk, he is obviously acting out—or we might say reacting out.
The opposite behavior, which includes many forms of emotional withdrawal, might accurately be reclassified as reacting in. Rather than overt conduct that knocks other people back on their heels, reacting in is a silent withdrawal from connection and attachment, back into ourselves and away from others. We lose our ability to trust, or we have such anxiety in proximity to other people (often those closest to us) that we mentally and emotionally “move out,” even though we may not actually go anywhere. This emotional detachment can be subtle and is often seen only in hindsight. We may not be aware of the drift, but looking back, we can often pinpoint a time when we felt as if we had moved as close as possible to the other person before choosing to move on—though, again, only internally. Building walls of resentment is often a construction project we undertake to protect ourselves. Passive-aggressive interactions—that is, saying the right things but doing something else to sabotage the other person’s efforts—are also common.
When we stop seeking comfort from our closest relationships, we find other ways to comfort ourselves. We eat, drink, fantasize, view, seek out, consume, or use anything we can latch onto for some relief from our misery. When efforts are made to reach out to us, help us, and comfort us, we resist at every turn. We either don’t respond or turn away. We appear not to enjoy or desire any kind of attention. Our unspoken message is fairly clear: Go away.
Chances are we don’t even know what we’re doing. We’re just surviving by doing what we think anyone would do who has been treated the way we have been. We’re not out to hurt anyone else or destroy ourselves. But by cutting ourselves off from other people, we break the link between ourselves and the healthy nurturing of our souls that we so desperately need.
We soon discover, however, that withdrawing from the battlefield doesn’t keep us from getting hurt. So we redouble our efforts, perhaps trying to curl up into a smaller ball. Our walls grow thicker, our resentments deeper, and our detachments wider. More and more, we live inside our heads: dreaming and scheming, plotting and planning, spinning our obsessions as we gradually take back any emotional investment we’ve made in the relationship.
My (Steve’s) wife, Misty, works with women who are waking up to their need for healing, recovery, and a new way of life. More than once, she has encountered a woman who wanted to remain single and never wanted children but now finds herself with a husband and four kids, feeling trapped with no way out. These women may start to react in with fantasies, or react out through online affairs, or even physical affairs. When they seek help, they come to understand that being single would have produced the same feelings of emptiness and longing that they are experiencing now. Their desired scenario may not have been a good option. Withdrawing, isolating, and acting in are also not good options. They have to face the truth of their devastation from past wounds and initiate the process of taking their lives back by discovering healthy and healing relationships with healthy and healing people.
Persistent social and emotional problems
Regulating our emotions is an adult behavior that some of us do better than others. In some ways, this difficult skill marks a boundary between teenage behavior and full adulthood. Both of us have raised teenagers and have seen the extreme emotional responses of adolescence go flying through the house, causing everyone a little—or a lot—of discomfort. It can be exciting, but also extremely draining, to do our duty as parents and help our teens rein in the unruly feelings that can take them down a path of immature alienation. But if teens don’t learn how to regulate and modulate their emotions, the social consequences are disruption, destructive behavior, and sometimes even death from desperate acts.
This disruptive pattern is repeated in adulthood when we react in and stop responding to others. We become very adept at not giving others the satisfaction of our response. If someone is kind to us, we look away. If someone is uncaring, we act as if it’s normal. We don’t react outwardly toward others, but we react within, further burying our healthy emotions. People may say we are aloof and detached, but they have no idea how attached we are to an internal world that we’ve created for ourselves.
What others might see in us is unwarranted irritability. We may be fuming on the inside, but we’re not going to let that be seen—until we lose control. Until then, our mild irritation or prickliness is only the simmering edge of a lava flow of anger that we hold inside. With the bland or noncommittal face we often turn to the world, no one could know the depths of our dark depression and hopelessness. We would be happy to experience the little bit of sadness we might show on the outside, rather than drowning in the well of despair we carry within us. And if we reveal our uneasiness or anxiety at being close to someone, it is merely the blunted edge of our fear that we’ll be abused, neglected, or ignor
ed as we’ve been before. We don’t want others to see how afraid we are because they might tear down everything we have created for our own protection. So we hide as much as we can, and we deny any evidence that we are not ourselves.
Persistent lack of having emotional needs met by caregivers
This is how we’ve learned to roll. We go to the bar, surf the Internet, or seek out anyplace other than home to have our needs met. If we are stuck at home, we use busyness, clutter, eating, drinking, or anything else we can find to numb or stimulate ourselves. But our needs are never met, and we’ve stopped trying to have them met in healthy ways. Just like the baby in the orphanage who stops crying and no longer asks for assistance or recognition, we gave up long ago. People look at us and think we are self-sufficient. Our outward system of orderliness covers the chaos on the inside and makes it appear as if all our needs are being met. But we’re not going to let other people disappoint us again by showing them a need and having them walk away from it or use it against us.
Limited opportunity to form stable and secure attachments
In this respect, adults with reactive attachment issues are not unlike children reared in an orphanage, who have limited opportunities to form healthy attachments because there are no healthy people around with whom to bond. We all have many opportunities. Support groups and recovery groups are everywhere. Amazingly helpful counselors and therapists are practicing everywhere. If we look, we can’t miss them. Couples therapy and intensive workshops to build intimacy are there for us to experience, but we don’t. Any of these resources would turn us around so we could form secure attachments. But as we react, we destroy stability. As we run from healthy responses, we intensify our insecurity. As we react in, we refuse to seek help that would promote healing and establish healthy bonds, which would meet our ongoing needs and lead us toward fulfillment.
Responding to Reactive Living
If we react to our reactivity, it only gets worse, and we become more and more miserable. Responding rather than reacting is the option we want to move toward. The proper response to our crippling condition is to seek out the safe and stable living conditions that we missed in our earlier years. Typically, we don’t know how to do that, so we need a guide or a sponsor to assist us. That could be a therapist, a counselor, or a knowing pastor who could help us find what we need. If we forgive ourselves and others, we can replace our bitterness with some positive interactions.
For some people, getting to safety is the first response they need help with. If we are reacting in order to protect ourselves, we need an environment safe enough that we don’t feel a constant need for vigilance and self-protection. We need help finding new places that stimulate our creativity and give us new focal points beyond our internal miserable selves. We need consistency and continuity that will allow us to explore what it’s like to be ourselves with others, absent of any shame or blame as we stumble toward becoming responsible adults. We have a lot more to say about this in Part II: The Responsive Life.
Reactive attachment disorder is a clinical diagnosis for a child. Adult reactive attachment disorder is not an official, clinical diagnosis. It is a way of life. It is how we have come to process life, and it has left us wanting and unfulfilled. Hope comes from seeing the problem, wanting something different, and being willing to do whatever it takes to heal and meet the unfulfilled needs of our lives. If you’ll stay with us, we will help you make the astounding transition from reactive living to responsive living.
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SURVIVING BROKEN ATTACHMENTS
GOD DID NOT design human beings to live reactive lives. He wired us to connect with other people. We don’t do well when we are reacting in or reacting out. An illustration of this basic need to connect can be seen in a newborn baby’s brain, which has about 200 billion nerve cells. But by the time the child reaches five years of age, that number has been reduced to about 100 billion nerve cells. And that’s normal.
What happened to the other half? As the child grows and experiences a variety of events, circumstances, and people, nerve cells in the brain are connected to other nerve cells. Those that connect survive. The half that fail to connect will die. Don’t feel bad; it’s part of God’s design. He determined that about 100 billion nerve cells is the right number for an adult brain. This “wired to connect” principle applies to life in general, as well. When we don’t connect with other people, a part of what makes us healthy human beings also begins to die.
In the previous chapter, as you read about various types of unhealthy family environments, you may have wondered why anyone would be loyal to such dysfunctional people. But because we are wired to connect, we must find some way to bond with other people when we are growing up, even though it may be an unhealthy, dysfunctional, or insecure attachment. Regardless of what our family of origin was like, we all needed to connect in some way, even though some of us were forced to adapt or limit our connections because of our internal pain.
If you were raised in a family that made healthy connections difficult, you already know that your parents’ anger, fear, shame, or anxiety made home a highly unsafe place. Even in the best of families, the attachment between parent and child is freighted with the anxiety, fear, and uncertainty of both people.
During the second half of the twentieth century, psychiatrist John Bowlby developed a theory of how children form relational attachments, especially with their parents. The prevailing theory at the time was focused on the child’s inner world, but Bowlby believed that the real-world attachment between mother and child was more important than the child’s inner world. His work laid the foundation for understanding both healthy and unhealthy attachment relationships.
In Bowlby’s definition of a healthy mother-child relationship, the mothering person provides a stable base of operation for the child—a fortress in which the child feels safe and secure. Gradually, the child will feel safe enough to venture out from the fortress to explore other parts of the world. When a child begins to feel uncomfortable, anxious, or unsafe, he or she is able to return to this protected base and enjoy safety and security once again.
Bowlby developed his ideas in part by watching mothers and toddlers in the parks of London, where he saw several different patterns of behavior emerge. Some toddlers, when taken out of the stroller, would hang around Mom for a while and then go off and play. The mother would interact with the other moms, but she also kept an eye on her toddler. Occasionally, the toddler would check in visually with the mother to make sure she was still there. Sometimes the child would even come back to the mother to get a hug, or simply a touch, from her. This pattern characterized what Bowlby called a secure attachment. The toddler expressed and experienced a measure of freedom and independence, but always within the safe and secure realm of relationship with the mother.
Bowlby also noticed a second relational pattern between some mothers and toddlers. These toddlers, once freed from the stroller, would go off to play, either alone or with friends. But in this relationship, the child never came back to the mother, and seldom even looked at her, until she called out that it was time to leave the park. These toddlers seemed indifferent toward their mothers, and the mothers seemed indifferent toward these children. A mother would occasionally check to see where her child was, but most of the time she was deeply engaged in conversation with other mothers. These children seemed secure, but they also seemed to know that the mother was primarily interested in her friends. It wasn’t necessarily neglect, but it was a lack of attentiveness to the child. Bowlby referred to this type of self-sufficient mother-child interaction as anxiously avoidant attachment.
In a third type of interaction between mothers and toddlers, the child would hang around the mom, never going very far away. This child also tended to be clingy and would intrude on the mother’s conversations. At the same time, the mother didn’t want her child to go too far away. In some cases, it even seemed as if the mother needed the child to be close more than the child needed the closeness.
It was as if she derived some protection from the child. Bowlby referred to this type of mother-child connection as anxiously ambivalent attachment.
Further research done by developmental psychologist Mary Ainsworth and others identified a fourth type of insecure attachment—one built on a foundation of fear rather than anxiety. In one observation of a mother and son in Ainsworth’s experiment, the boy moved toward his mother with arms outstretched—a normal part of a mother-child reunion. But midway through his movement toward the mother, the child stopped, turned around, and backed into her. Ainsworth later found that this child had been physically abused. In the pending reunion, he didn’t know whether he would be hugged or hit. His style of connection was a fearful attachment.
Let’s look at each of these early attachment styles, how they express themselves in adults, and how they lead to classic codependency.
Insecure Attachment: Avoidant
We’ll begin with the second relational pattern—anxiously avoidant attachment—to see how it manifests in adult relationships. At first it might appear that codependency wouldn’t be part of an avoidant adult’s experience. After all, he or she is thought to be self-sufficient. But the appearance of self-sufficiency is a symptom of anxious attachment. Typically, adults who learned to attach this way were raised by an anxious mother, and their needs, as children, were not that important to her.
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