Mothers of anxiously avoidant children are often preoccupied with themselves. In their relationships with their children, they can range from being mean to simply being cool and detached. Though the degree of detachment will vary, the common denominator is that the mother doesn’t respond in an attuned way to her children’s needs. An attuned mother will know when her child is hungry or tired and will respond accordingly. An avoidant mother will eventually get around to meeting the child’s needs, but she doesn’t adjust to the child’s pace, even when the child is an infant.
Eventually, children raised this way will figure out that they’re on their own. But they aren’t happy about that internally. Some will express their anger through random acts of aggression. They may become bullies later in childhood or even in adulthood. As adults, they often blame others for anything that goes wrong. As children and as adults, they become adept at using lies to worm their way out of responsibility.
Another example of avoidant attachment is the shy loner, who may seem almost emotionless outside the home. As adults, some are content to have their primary relationship be with their computer, while others will have one or two friends at the most but won’t spend a lot of time with either one. When they marry, they basically shut down emotionally. A spouse may spend a lifetime trying to get a shy loner to come out of hiding, but that only makes the loner feel more unsafe and want to stay in hiding. The majority of children with avoidant attachments will grow into this type of adult.
A third type of avoidant attachment results in adults who are more severely wounded by the neglect and abuse of their parents. These children escape reality by daydreaming a lot, and they may have trouble functioning normally as adults. They show little interest in the real world and may still be financially dependent on their parents well into adulthood. In the home, they may allow their anxiety to show by being clingy and demanding. They struggle with trust issues and believe that everyone will be as unreliable as their parents were when it comes to meeting their needs. It is difficult for children to feel accepted when their parents are unavailable and unresponsive, and these deficiencies carry over into adulthood.
Adults with avoidant attachments can easily get caught up in codependent behavioral patterns. Because they have essentially taken care of raising themselves, they may exhibit unhealthy levels of narcissism. This often shows itself in compulsive perfectionism, which they probably developed as children in an effort to gain their parents’ approval or capture their attention. When that failed, they may have decided to help others do things perfectly—which comes across as very controlling. In addition, they are cut off from their emotions, and they may be uncomfortable with physical touch.
Simmering beneath their perfectionistic tendencies is a deep anger over what they didn’t get during childhood. They may not even be aware of their anger, but others certainly are. We can imagine how their codependency developed: If they can give what they didn’t get, maybe they’ll get the love and approval they long for. They do this by taking care of others.
Like every other codependent, those with avoidant attachments have had to bury their real self. Because they didn’t get the nurture and attention they needed, they grew up thinking that there must be something wrong with them. This is a common theme with all insecurely attached adults, but those with avoidant attachments conceal their insecurity with an air of self-sufficiency.
Insecure Attachment: Ambivalent
Adults who grew up with ambivalent attachments have absorbed their parents’ ambivalence and anxiety. As infants, they tended to cry a lot and to be very clingy and demanding, both at home and away from home. Their anxiety is rooted in the fear that they will be abandoned—first by their parents and then by their spouse and even their children. They are also very angry, but they typically control their anger because it would otherwise negate any chance for solace and connection. When the mother is away for some good reason, the child feels abandoned and protests the separation with tears. When the mother returns, the child is angry but quickly becomes clingy and even babyish in his or her reactions.
Parents of this type of child are ambivalent about their role as parents. Sometimes they are there for the child; other times they are emotionally or physically absent. Children raised in ambivalent homes often wonder how their parents—particularly the mother but also the father—feel about them: “Do they even love me?” They have a continual feeling of abandonment, or impending abandonment.
The parents’ anxious ambivalence is transferred to the children as they grow. The children are often impulsive, tense, unable to fully concentrate, and easily upset by failure. Other characteristics include hypersensitivity to life’s difficulties, a failure to take initiative, and a tendency to give up too easily on difficult tasks. The parents may or may not be available and may or may not be responsive. And because the unpredictability of the parents’ attention causes anxiety, there is little chance that children from an ambivalent home will feel accepted.
When these children become adults, they often exhibit a high degree of pain, along with a haunting sense of separation that is sad to observe—and even sadder to experience. They struggle with feeling unworthy of love and with feelings of incompetence. They are especially frustrated by a sense of being incapable of getting the love they need and want. They struggle with the fear of being left alone or rejected.
As adults, these children almost universally become pleasers. But they are ambivalent pleasers. Sometimes they try to please; other times they give up, feeling that they can’t even do that right. After all, that was their experience as children. Sometimes they tried to take care of their parents; other times they weren’t even noticed by their parents.
Typically, those with ambivalent attachments are still dependent as adults on one or both of their parents. At the same time, they are in the midst of an ongoing, angry, emotional war with their parents. Often, they have tried so hard to get their parents’ approval that they stay enmeshed with them, still hoping for what they never got as children. When they marry, they may expand the emotional war to include their spouse. But because they so desperately want to avoid being abandoned, they cannot maintain their warlike posture, or else they might force their parents or spouse to leave, resulting in actual abandonment. Neither can they pretend to be self-sufficient, for that may also drive people away. So they try to please everyone, with the hope that they may finally feel loved and accepted.
By burying their real self—because they believe it is the cause of their pain—and working hard to create a false self that will finally earn the love and respect they desire, adults with ambivalent attachments epitomize classic codependency. But all that effort never works! We can’t fix internal problems with external solutions.
Insecure Attachment: Anxious
Though all insecure attachment styles are rooted in anxiety, there is a form of attachment that is especially anxious. Adults with anxious attachments often come from homes in which the parent-child roles were reversed and the child became the responsible “parent” to their irresponsible, chronically ill, or incompetent parent. As a result, these children were robbed of their own childhoods. They feel anger, but it is often expressed passively because they fear rejection if they were to reveal their true feelings.
Anxious attachments occur when the parents themselves are extremely anxious and fearful about life—especially when they are anxious about parenthood. Some become “helicopter parents,” transferring their own anxiety about the world to their children. These parents’ anxiety may be a result of the ungrieved death of a loved one or the chronic illness of one of their own parents. Whatever it is that undermines the normal parenting role, the child becomes an emotional or physical caretaker for the obviously needy parent.
This reversal of roles only adds anxiety to the child’s life. Children are unprepared emotionally for the responsibility of caring for their parent’s needs. As they have to parent the parent, they become an extension of the parent and forfei
t their childhood in the process.
As adults, people with anxious attachments become the self-appointed caretakers of the world. After all, that’s how they were raised! They tend to marry irresponsible or needy people, such as alcoholics or other kinds of addicts. Even when they vow not to repeat the pattern, they have an unconscious need to have someone to take care of.
Underneath their caretaking behavior is an anger that can be punishing at times. They are good at being encouraging and positive, but these traits only go so deep before these people run into the anger and humiliation they feel. They are comfortable in adult relationships or careers only when they can be the parent. They are simply too accustomed to being in control.
Insecure Attachment: Fearful
Another subset of insecure attachments is one in which the child becomes fearful of connection because of abuse. When a mother is physically abusive, her children never know whether she is going to show them love or punish them. That creates tremendous confusion and fear. Sometimes the abuse occurs because the mother doesn’t know how to protect her children from someone else who is abusing them. She feels inadequate, helpless, and out of control, and she may lose control over the children, as well, because they can no longer trust her for safety and stability. Sadly, many adults who grew up with fearful attachments pass along that fear to the next generation, often through the very same kinds of abuse they suffered as children. Taking your life back entails breaking dysfunctional patterns and cycles and forging healthy relationships with healthy people.
Moving toward Forgiveness
All people who have insecure attachments blame themselves for their anxiety and insecurity. They are convinced that their real self is bad or worthless; therefore, they feel undeserving of love, affirmation, and positive attention. That’s a painful reality, so they learn to bury their real self and create false selves that they hope will eventually earn them the love, respect, and connection they long for. They often do this by finding people they can take care of. Codependency is alive and well when one needy person meets another.
Adults with insecure attachments may struggle with the impact that their parents have had on their lives. But that doesn’t mean the situation is hopeless. Insecure attitudes toward our parents tend to take one of two paths. Some people believe that we should never say anything negative about our parents. This viewpoint is often expressed in words such as these: “My parents may not have been perfect, but they did the best they could.” It’s true that we should be grateful that our parents took as much care of us as they did, but that’s no reason not to deal constructively with their shortcomings and the effects they had on us. And it’s better than the other common attitude, which is unrelenting anger, bitterness, and blame for all of the problems they caused us. But truthfully, neither attitude is helpful in taking your life back.
Instead, we need to remember and understand what happened, place and accept responsibility where it belongs, grieve what was lost in our childhood, protect ourselves from repetitive hurtful behaviors, and ultimately forgive our parents. Forgiveness means we cancel a debt that can never be repaid—the only possible resolution for an unpayable debt, as I (David) explain in detail in my book Forgiving What You’ll Never Forget.
Just as important as recognizing where and how we were wounded, we must also be able to identify our own attachment issues. Remember, “you can’t heal a wound by saying it’s not there!”[22] As you’ve been reading, we hope you’ve been able to identify and come to grips with the insecure attachments that may have dominated your growing-up years and may still be at work in your adult life. In Part II, we’ll discuss what to do about them.
What about Secure Attachments?
The mother of a securely attached child has provided a safe and stable base from which the child can venture out to explore without anxiety. When the child begins to feel anxious, he or she can return to the predictable safety and security of the mother. Securely attached children feel confident that their mother will be available, caring, and nurturing. Children may cry when the mother leaves, but they are always happy when the mother returns. They also willingly allow the mother to comfort them when she returns.
We cannot have a secure connection unless both people—child and parent, or husband and wife—are available. A parent can be too available, as in the case of helicopter parents or controlling parents, or too unavailable, as we’ve seen with rejecting or neglectful parents. But God designed parenting so that all a parent has to do is be “good enough.” One key for determining what is good enough can be seen when parents and children reunite after a period of separation. How do both the parent and the child handle the relationship when the parent returns? If there is a healthy attachment, they will have a comforting and cheerful reunion.
Children who are raised with secure attachments are also able to express their negative emotions constructively. They may cry, shout, or pout, but they know they will get a meaningful response from the parent. These negative emotions will not make the child feel all-bad; nor will they cause the parent to become defensive. Instead, such behaviors are simply curtailed by the parent without characterizing the child as bad or evil. Secure parents are not threatened by a child’s negative behavior, and they are able to express their negative emotions to the child in appropriate ways. When parents and children have a secure attachment, the parents will be responsive to the child.
When my (David’s) mother-in-law was a child, it was not unusual for her father to create turmoil at the dinner table. He would make a noise, such as a grunt, and the others at the table would suddenly be in a panic trying to figure out what he wanted. If they didn’t figure it out quickly enough—say, that he wanted the butter—he would become enraged but still would not say what he wanted. He was available—that is, he was physically present—but he was not responsive. For whatever reason, he was unwilling to simply ask for what he wanted. Availability and responsiveness must go hand in hand.
Acceptance is the third leg on the tripod that creates safety and security in a relationship. How the parents handle their own negative emotions, as well as their ability to respond positively to the child’s frustrations and negativity, goes a long way toward making the child feel accepted.
All three elements—availability, responsiveness, and acceptance—are necessary to form healthy, secure attachments. Because no parent does it perfectly and no child is able to do it perfectly, even the best attachments won’t be perfect. And it’s impossible to avoid being wounded to some degree by these imperfections. That’s simply the human condition in a fallen world. So even with secure attachments, we will struggle in some way with the issues we’ve discussed, especially with feeling accepted.
Growing up with secure attachments does not guarantee that all our adult relationships will be healthy, or that we won’t be codependent (though secondary dependence is more common than classic dependence when a person comes from a healthy background). And it doesn’t mean that we’re in touch with our real self (though the search may be a shorter process). Regardless of our background or the quality of our attachments, finding our real self and taking our life back involves pursuing adult relationships that are based on healthy and secure attachments. And even in the best of situations, we may still struggle to some degree with the issue of toxic shame. Let’s now turn our attention to that important topic.
7
SHAME ON ME
AT 12:04 A.M. ON MARCH 24, 1989, an oil tanker bound for Long Beach, California, from Valdez, Alaska, struck Bligh Reef in Prince William Sound, spilling more than 11 million gallons of crude oil into the water and onto the surrounding coastline. The Exxon Valdez spill is still considered one of the most devastating human-caused environmental disasters in history. The effects of the spill, including some sickening images of wildlife covered in oil, can still be viewed online.
As I (Steve) was watching a video of some rescue workers cleaning up a large bird that was completely covered in black sludge, in my mind’s
eye I saw a picture of my former self at a time when my life was saturated with shame. At one point, I had become so aware of my mistakes and failures that it was as if I were slathered with the ugly black sludge of shame, to the point that it had become my identity.
Shame is pervasive like that. We don’t just feel it; we wear it. And it’s ugly. If we bring it under control enough to cover it up from others, we only intensify its impact exponentially. Our shame-filled secrets can make us sick and can even become deadly. Whenever I hear of a male suicide, I wonder whether it was caused in part by sexually generated shame. Sometimes, when a man is caught or exposed in sexual sin, the shame of facing a future in which other people know what he has done can be unimaginable. But whether it is through gradual deterioration or a sudden end, secret shame is toxic enough to kill us.
Reacting to Shame
Not all shame is bad, but toxic shame is a reaction that defines and destroys us by causing increasing devastation as it flourishes and begins to overtake more and more of our lives. We have a friend who became a stripper after losing a baby about four months into her pregnancy. Although she had been raised as a Christian, she was estranged from her parents and was living with her boyfriend at the time of the pregnancy. It took the loss of the baby for the shame to set in. But her feelings of shame did not cause her to return to a life more consistent with her values. Instead, she ran in the opposite direction, straight into a lifestyle that would own her for several years before she finally woke up to what she was doing. Shame took her hostage, pulling her deeper into sin and away from the person that, deep down inside, she really wanted to be. Mistakes piled upon more mistakes until she became convinced that she was a defective person unworthy of anything good.
Take Your Life Back Page 8