That Time I Thought Attachment Theory Was Nonsense!

Two years before I began fostering, I was working with a young girl in a children’s home who had a diagnosis of ‘attachment disorder’.  The home was a standard local authority run residential.  As such, staff had no specialist training around therapeutic approaches but training was beginning to be developed in that area.  I had been working in residential for approx 8 years at this point and knew nothing about attachment.

Because of this girl’s diagnosis, staff began to be enrolled on attachment training courses.  I was part of the second group to be trained and three of us trotted of to a day course called ‘The Impact of Adverse Environments on Child Development’.

I remember that day well.  I remember sitting in a room with over a hundred people from different social care sectors learning about the role that trauma, abuse and neglect plays on brain development.  How poor relationships with birth parents impacts a child’s ability to form and sustain future healthy relationships.  And how different behaviours develop to enable a young person to deal with their fears around safety and shame.

I remember thinking that it completely made sense of the girl I was working with.

And then thinking it made sense of me.

That was not a comfortable thought.  Over the rest of the day I began to think more and more about how I created and maintained relationships, where I felt safe, how I experienced shame and the behaviours and characteristics I had developed to manage my life.

It was simply too overwhelming to think about.

I returned to the home and discussed the course with a senior member of staff.  When he dismissed attachment theory as a ‘load of mumbo-jumbo’ it allowed me to dismiss it too.  I didn’t think about it again until years later when fostering children who also had diagnosis’s based on attachment difficulties.

From my work now as an attachment-based psychotherapist, I know that I am not alone in dismissing the concept.

Being opening to learning around therapeutic parenting theories and approaches means not only applying them to our children, but also to ourselves.

It does not matter what techniques we use as parents, if we don’t feel safe ourselves we can’t help our children to feel safe.  And if we want to teach our children that they are worthy of love, we must believe that of us too.

Many of us come into fostering and adoption having experienced our own struggles. It’s easy to think that challenges in the parent-child relationship have their origins in the early life experiences of our children. This may well be the case but it is rarely this simple. Many factors are often at play.

One of the challenges for my parenting has been in understanding and accepting when my own unresolved issues are unhelpful to the parenting process. Some of the views I have held about what it means to be a child, to be a parent and to live together as a family have had to be re-examined. Some of the difficult life experiences I thought I had overcome became re-triggered when parenting children with their own difficult life experiences.

The truth is that we can’t really help our children to heal if we haven’t allowed others to help us to heal too. Foster and adoptive parents and professionals do best in helping children when they are open to not only considering their child’s development, but also their own.

And for this exploration to occur, we much create safe, non-judgemental spaces for parents as well as children.

What do you think?