The Power of Attachment: How to Create Deep and Lasting Intimate Relationships

Product Information

When trauma robs us of our physical self through dissociation or loss of boundaries, how do we become embodied and safely connected again? I’ve also started thinking of trauma in terms of connection. The theme of broken connection has come up in my work repeatedly over the years: broken connection to our body; broken connection to our sense of self; broken connection to others, especially those we love; broken connection to feeling centered or grounded on the planet; broken connection to God, Source, Life Force, well-being, or however we might describe or relate to our inherent sense of spirituality, openhearted awareness, and beingness. This theme has been so prominent in my work that broken connection and trauma have become almost synonymous to me.

How do we integrate our diverse experiences and all the parts of ourself that feel so broken and fragmented? We are fundamentally designed to heal,” teaches Dr. Heller. “Even if our childhood is less than ideal, our secure attachment system is biologically programmed in us, and our job is to simply find out what’s interfering with it—and learn what we can do to make those secure tendencies more dominant.”In her rather scathing review of ‘The predictive power of attachment’ (January 2017) Elizabeth Meins takes aim at misguided opinions about attachment that circulate in the policy arena. Certainly, policy makers, in an attempt to secure public money that children, families, and schools badly need, tend to exaggerate claims about the critical importance of early experience. The public discourse however should be sharply differentiated from the scientific discourse. Here we focus on Meins’s critique of attachment research. We list some of her comments about the evidence and show that they are largely mistaken. Type: Filled with wise guidance based on decades of clinical experience and scientific training, Dr. Poole Heller provides a wealth of clear, practical tools that anyone can use to improve their relationships and enrich their lives. With warmth, honesty, and a gift for teaching, she weaves together insights from attachment research, neurobiology, and life experience to provide easy-to-use tools to connect more deeply to others and heal our hearts and minds in the process—creating a valuable resource for us all.” —Ronald D. Siegel, PsyD, Assistant Professor of Psychology at Harvard Medical School and Author of The Mindfulness Solution: Everyday Practices for Everyday Problems Professor Meins is correct – and brave – to point out the clinical and empirical inadequacy of the ABC+D model of attachment. Nevertheless, it appears that Meins confuses ‘attachment’ (Bowlby’s construct) with ‘individual differences in attachment’ (Ainsworth’s contribution). Attachment is an innate human characteristic that promotes survival of both individuals and, more importantly, the species at all ages from infancy (institutionalised infants often die when not provided with an attachment figure) through childhood (e.g. fostered children’s development is distorted when they experience too many changes of caregiver), to adulthood (when individuals who live alone suffer more depression and illness, and earlier death than individuals who have attachment relationships). In all of their meta-analyses, the majority of studies predict development in the preschool years: 80% of studies measured social competence in children aged 5 or younger, with only a single study conducted on children older than age 10. Similarly, 68% of studies measured internalising behaviours at age 5 or younger, with only two studies on children older than 10. It’s difficult to see these findings as evidence for early attachment setting the long-term course for development.

Why do we need to talk about attachment? The focus should be on equipping parents with evidence-based information on babies’ development and how best to interact and play with their children as they grow and develop. It seems madness only to want to do this if it means that babies will become securely attached. Surely supporting people to be the most effective parents possible is a good enough end in itself. However, when it comes to the serious end of maltreatment, it is harder to accept the proposition that parents are unable to make choices about how they respond to a child’s difficult behaviour. We can’t think of another area of bad behaviour in which we would think it acceptable to talk about the person on the receiving end as having somehow caused it, let alone ‘triggered’ it. There would be an outcry, and rightly so. Fearon, R. P., Bakermans-Kranenburg, M. J., van IJzendoorn, M. H., Lapsley, A.-M., Roisman, G. I. (2010). The significance of insecure attachment and disorganization in the development of children’s externalizing behavior: A meta-analytic study. Child Development, 81, 435-456. doi: 0009-3920/2010/8102-0002Her book Crash Course, a guidebook on how to resolve auto accident trauma, is used as a resource for healing many types of trauma, both in the US and internationally. Attachment bonds are the first and most important of all relationships. These are first created through interactions with our primary caregivers, usually parents. This first relationship helps define our capacity for attachment and sets the tone for all of our future relationships. Diane Poole Heller proves herself a superb guide to the new exciting science of attachment theory. In clear, readable, touching prose, The Power of Attachment gives you the practical tools you need to understand yourself and your partner at the deepest level. It has the power to change your life.” —Terrence Real, founder of the Relational Empowerment Institute and author of The New Rules of Marriage: What You Need to Know to Make Love Work Individual studies often combine the three insecure classifications into a single insecure group in statistical analyses to combat problems associated with low numbers in the individual insecure groups, but it is important to underline how fundamentally different children in the insecure groups are from one another. Treating ‘insecurely attached’ children as a homogenous group is therefore problematic.

This version is the author accepted manuscript. For information on re-use, please refer to the publisher’s terms and conditions. When trauma hits us or we’ve experienced a lot of relational wounding, we can feel like we’re utterly disconnected—like we’re a tiny little me who’s isolated and all alone, as if we’re in our own little bubble floating around in a sea of distress, cut off from everyone and everything. I think it’s our work to pop that imaginary bubble, or at least to build bridges that connect us to others we care about. Unresolved trauma, in my opinion, has led to a nationwide epidemic of loneliness and hurt. And it isn’t just in our country. The evidence of this type of pain worldwide is readily available any time you turn on the news. That’s not the whole story, fortunately. We can heal and change. All of us are capable of healing and repairing these severed connections: to ourself, other people, the planet, and whatever it is that holds it all together. From our earliest years, we develop an attachment style that follows us through life, replaying in our daily emotional landscape, our relationships, and how we feel about ourselves. And in the wake of a traumatic event - such as a car accident, severe illness, loss of a loved one, or experience of abuse - that attachment style can deeply influence what happens next.Since it is true that all of us have some complication with healthy attachment, I am thrilled to be introducing you to this book. I have been fortunate in knowing its author, Dr. Heller, for several decades. Diane was one of my brightest students, and someone whom I continue to admire and cherish greatly. Her qualities of warmth, energy, caring, and insight have benefited thousands of her clients and students over the years. Her gifts and wisdom are ever-present throughout The Power of Attachment, a book that will provide you with an accessible yet exemplary framework for identifying your own unique, sometimes complex attachment struggles, delivered with Diane’s wit and breezy, unpretentious tone. The included exercises will certainly help you rediscover your true, embodied self, and will guide you to renegotiate your own obstacles to connections with others. I’m not sure how Vetere and colleagues’ discussion of the Dynamic-Maturational Model of Attachment and Adaptation (DMM) is relevant to my article. Do they think that research using this model is less prone to misinterpretation and misuse by non-experts? Clearly, this overrated/underrated feature in The Psychologist is not the place to conduct the scholarly review they desire. The DMM has gained traction in some studies involving clinical and forensic populations, but I’d be interested to see references for the 500 publications Vetere and colleagues mention. My Web of Science and Scopus searches respectively returned 27 and 42 articles. The Power of Attachment is a beautifully written book, exploring the definitions and manifestations of attachment styles from a strengths-based perspective. Diane’s warm and optimistic voice continually empowers the reader to reaccess and strengthen their capacity for secure attachments and to heal relational wounds. Powerful creative exercises, guided imagery, and concrete strategies help the reader to be more internally resourced while deepening their ability to forge secure relationships through repair, empathy, corrective experiences, and compassion. For anyone who works with traumatized clients or has experienced attachment wounds firsthand, this book is a gift—nurturing, enlightening, and healing.” —Lisa Ferentz, LCSW-C, DAPA, author of Finding Your Ruby Slippers: Transformative Life Lessons from the Therapist’s Couch In The Power of Attachment, Dr. Diane Poole Heller, a pioneer in attachment theory and trauma resolution, shows how overwhelming experiences can disrupt our most important connections— with the parts of ourselves within, with the physical world around us, and with others. Laying so much emphasis on attachment isn’t helping anyone. Telling parents that secure attachment in the first two years of life is critically important for their children’s future development is likely to give many parents cause for concern. What if you suffered from mental illness after your baby was born or if your baby was severely ill or in need of special care in the first months and years of their life? Parents are unnecessarily being made to worry that they’ve scuppered their children’s chances before they’re even out of nappies.