I’m not a big believer in what get called attachment styles. It’s like buying clothes from a mass-market store, on-line, without trying them on first, and without any real sense of what S, M, L, XL, or XXL might relate to. However, thinking about attachment through the lens of Panksepp’s PANIC system allows for a little more imagination. It’s more like trying something on and then being able to make adjustments before you take your clothes home.
Thinking about PANIC and the ways in which we might find life plagued by HESITATION (or maybe you can think of your own label based on your experience?) allows you to examine the effects of mediation. The pull towards addressing PANIC can leave you and the people around you (all with their own sense of PANIC to try and deal with. Attachment understood like this has to be seen as a ‘group’ phenomenon; a process of interdependence that Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok called the ‘Dynamics of Intersubjective Functioning)’ experiencing life with different degrees of mutual mediation.
Mediation Styles
Above are some drawings of the kind I do for my clients in sessions. The four I have shown are among the ones I most commonly find myself drawing.
In number one there’s a sense of the carer being comfortably ‘in the world’ and able to pass this sense of realism and lack of anxiety across to their child. The child receives the world mediated by someone who has a good idea of how the world operates and who manages to balance feeling getting what they need with what others need, and so on.
Number two shows a carer crushed by the world. Their child receives a sense of the world as alarming, threatening and overwhelming. ‘stick close to me at all times’, might be a message the carer implicitly passes on. Or you will PANIC. Another kind of message might be ‘Head for the hills, everybody for themself’. I come up with messages appropriate to each client. What would your message have been, do you think, and how are you still living it? How can you rewrite the script you were given?
Number three shows a child taking in confusion. Their carer can’t make sense of the world.
Number four shows a child standing between their carer and the world. That’s no fun at all. That child has to stand up to the world like an adult while their carer shelters. Sometimes the carer really needs to get their act together. Sometimes the carer needs help from a doctor or someone like that … and their child needs help from other adults so they can go on being a child while their body, their brain, their mind develop less acutely.
There are dozens of drawings like these to be made. They help show how all of the drives might be adapted to.
Think about one of those optical illusions where you see something … and see something quite different if you look at it again. It’s the same image but you see it differently. Most importantly: it feels very different.
Ask yourself: does your life feel worth it? If the answer veers towards yes then we might assume something happened in your early life where your carers regularly and helpfully mediated whatever life threw at you. If the answer is less certain than perhaps an important sense of protection was never granted you. You learned to live in FEAR.
Living your life in FEAR means somehow remaining hidden, protecting yourself by not being quite ‘there’: presenting a facade, existing in other places (for example in your professional work or in your art. These can be places where you can more safely be yourself because different rules apply compared to the unpredictability of everyday life).
Live your life as if it is absolutely worth protecting. Live it as if you believe this. You need the feeling that comes from such an experience; not, to begin with the experience of believing in the thought of your life being worth protecting
With the feeling that comes from the experience of living your life as if it is worth protecting you can lead a life where you might then feel yourself. Without an experience of this feeling you may never feel yourself.
See life differently to feel it differently.
Life begins properly for you when there is barely an as if. There’s a feeling of you and felt from this place life will seem so different. Possibilities, opportunities, connections and experiments will occur to you that would have remained hidden when you were.
Sometimes it’s hard to see the reasons why you feel anxious or distressed. Think about it: do you feel frustrated? If you feel frustrated it’s likely to be because of your capacity to recognise unfairness. When you recognise it, like a cat with a ball of wool you will not feel able to let it alone. Unfortunately, people whose form of stuck involves FRUSTRATION will never be able to avoid the distress that comes from looking on as terrible things happen in the world. You may do all that you can to right wrongs, to stand up to abuses of power, to campaign or vote or speak out – but that distress will never leave you.
Partly this is because the world provides a steady supply of bad things for you to fight against (and good, we must); and partly this is because your capacity to recognise unfairness will almost certainly relate to personal experiences of unfairness that you were unable to address in your attempts to receive CARE. Your RAGE instinct was not enough to get you what you needed.
There is much I could say about all of this. Psychotherapists tend to dig deep into the effects of resentment and so on. Don’t worry about all of that for now.
Instead search through your life (if possible with a good friend who seems good at caring for themself) and create a list of all the things you haven’t addressed which are addressable. There will be several things, each with a pseudo-reason attached. Maybe you haven’t written to a friend for a while (too busy), or seen the dentist (too scared), or gone for a walk (see ‘written to a friend’, etc). Those pseudo-reasons are excuses not to try and look after your own interests. In the distant past your mind, your body, if not you, consciously, knows that something bad happened when you felt an urge to care about your life and it didn’t go well. Maybe you haven’t signed a contract. Perhaps you haven’t asked for a promotion. Maybe your neighbours make too much noise. Perhaps your pillow is too hard.
Addressing the things that affect you up close and personally is the only way to ease your distress. If you do this then the world’s intractable problems will feel more bearable and you will be able to deal with them more effectively.
On a similar and more complex note you may be interested in reaction formations. People who say they care are sometimes surprisingly cruel. And finally, on the subject of care:
People talk about feeling part of a group. If you feel inclined towards to ALIENATION you will still feel this ‘groupishness’ (a hard to describe combination of unity, solidity, possibility and protection), but probably in relation to a select group of one. Yourself. You may believe that you can do the ‘team player’ thing but I imagine that, on reflection, you might acknowledge that you never properly feel part of a group.
To begin to resolve this, without losing the special, clear sense of yourself that you already have practice stopping interpreting.
Pick any situation and when the part of your mind that starts to suggest to you why someone is doing something, or what they are doing means or symbolises, STOP.
Yes, STOP IT.
Lose yourself in the process of what another person is doing. Recognise how this affects you. If you really have to say anything at all maybe draw that person’s attention to what they are doing. If, for instance, you believe they may not be aware that they are doing something: ‘oh, you’ve got your wellingtons on’ (and it is sunny) … or ‘that was quite loud’ (when someone speaks with more volume than a situation seems to demand, ie in a cinema during a boring bit), or ‘you’ve got your arms folded’ (when a large adult is standing in front of a timid child and looking very defensive). That sort of thing.
You will be surprised how this way of being with someone, bracketing or setting aside your thoughts and allowing theirs to come to light while you somehow keep a beat going (like the rhythm players in a band) do, protecting ‘the beat’ of your time together (a way of thinking about life’s rhythm, perhaps), will allow you to feel connected.
You will be more connected to someone else instead of to your own internal sense of life with all of its suppositions, predictions and ways of forming conclusions.
You may have heard people talk about ‘attachment’, meaning the way you feel a solid connection to someone or something in the early years of your life and how this affects your relationships as you grow older. People with attachment problems often hesitate (see the posts about HESITATION).
What about your connection to the future? All of the drives are involved in trying to ferry you, in as good a state as possible, to tomorrow. Let’s look at your FEAR drive for a moment, though. INEXPERIENCE troubles you if your responses to your FEAR drive have been difficult. Part of managing how to safely do things, to assess risks, for example, engages with how present you can feel right now – and in the future. Discovering how to find a sense of safety that isn’t also likely to limit you (hiding all of the time, for instance) will leave you with a sense of direction.
You will find yourself sticking to arrangements that you make, and plans that you draw up for yourself because you know that a certain degree of selfishness is essential if you are to be of any use to anyone apart from yourself. This way the future happens best. Not as a fantasy that avoids difficulty or the truth but as a movement resilient enough and fluid enough to give you the best chance of imagining yourself happily doing something in the future.
How can you get this kind of thing going for yourself? Arrange some things each week just for yourself and stick to them. Talk to other people who do things that you feel you’d like to do. Approach them, whoever they are. My career has been hugely affected by people I have approached like this and who took time to offer me some advice.
Don’t hold back. What have you got to lose, really?
I’m not a big believer in what get called attachment styles. It’s like buying clothes from a mass-market store, on-line, without trying them on first, and without any real sense of what S, M, L, XL, or XXL might relate to. However, thinking about attachment through the lens of Panksepp’s PANIC system allows for a little more imagination. It’s more like trying something on and then being able to make adjustments before you take your clothes home.
