Attachment Theory: Friend or Foe?

I recently read an article here on Substack who’s message was that attachment theory is not your friend because it is embedded with a hidden and sinister agenda, namely to propagate a narrative that whiteness is the “ideal” that all of us should strive for. I was alarmed at the premise of this article because as a therapist, I have my own understanding of what attachment theory is for and I know why I use it in my practice, and the authors words didn’t resonate with me. I felt I had to speak up and definitively say, at least in my case, this author has misconstrued my intentions. The logic I follow is that the author is making a statement of fact, which means that he’s claiming to be pointing at a universal Truth, and all it takes is one exception to disprove that an assumed universal Truth is True.

Then the next question that jumps into my head is which is more likely to be true? Is it more likely that I know myself better than this author knows me, or is the antithesis of that statement more likely to be true. This is the premise which I have to engage with now to further investigate this question. I say to myself, “I’ve been alive for 52 years. My sensory perceptive devices, like my ears and my eyes, have been with me all this time. I am aware of my inner sensations so I know that I’m alive and conscious. If someone asks me about my values, I can list them.

Hmmmm, I wonder if the author could list my values if someone asked him for that information. Logical reasoning tells me, probably not, because he doesn’t know me that well yet, but that could be tested if he were willing to try and identify my values. If I’m honest. I can’t find a single logical premise that could point at the Truth that this author knows me better than I know myself. That appears, on the surface at least, to be a very weak argument to base an article on, so I took issue with the article on the basis of its illogical premise.

I have engaged with this author since reading his article, and he has told me repeatedly that I’m deceiving myself if I think I’m using this tool, attachment theory, for the reasons I think I am.

Here's how I think about attachment theory. Yes, the ideal that attachment theory is pointing at is a “secure” attachment. What “secure” really means in this context is “safe”. The author makes an argument that attachment theory is a system of pathologizing “insecure” attachment styles like anxious preoccupied, dismissive avoidant, and disorganized (fearful-avoidant). The argument of the author, if I’m interpreting it correctly, is that the therapist who is putting a label on someone of anxious-preoccupied, or dismissive avoidant, is judging them as broken or deficient in some way as they put the label on them.

I’d argue that would be a judgment that exists in the mind of the therapist who is using the tool. The therapist knows the purpose that they are using the tool for. I might say to that particular therapist, “Hey, I think you’re using that tool wrong. It appears as though you’re using it to pathologize this other person. That’s not what this tool is for.” But, let’s not make broad sweeping statements about everyone who uses attachment theory. We may have had past experiences of one’s who do, but it still isn’t a safe assumption to make that everyone who’s using the tool is using it with the wrong purpose in mind. That’s a bit of a stretch, don’t you think? Let’s ask the people who are using it what they’re using it for. That’s a better way to acquire information that is accurate.

Do I think that a secure attachment style is a superior attachment style? Well, technically, yes. Are you asking me if feeling safe is a superior way of feeling than feeling unsafe? Yeah. Do I wish for people to feel safe? Yeah. Maybe attachment theory, a tool designed with a particular purpose in mind, is really trying to explain why we don’t feel safe. It’s based on the premise that if you better understand why you don’t feel safe, you will end up feeling a little more safe.

When we don’t understand something, like a system of thought for example, we can’t predict things within that system; we don’t understand the many aspects of that system, and how its parts relate to one another. A greater degree of certainty about the outcome of a situation, sometimes attained through gathering more information, does transform into a feeling of being safer, and the more you understand how the system works, the more you can predict outcomes. A lot of people are walking around today, recognizing that they don’t feel safe, and not understanding precisely why that is. I use attachment theory to explain to them why, in certain contexts, that might be. A lot of people don’t feel safe in their primary relationships and they don’t understand why. That’s what I use attachment theory for, to help them better understand why. The system that they don’t understand as of yet is the mechanical workings of the unconscious mind. Attachment theory explains a lot about the innerworkings of the unconscious mind and that is why it is a helpful tool for discovering things about one’s self.

I don’t relate to attachment styles as pathologies; as signs that you are broken and dysfunctional. It’s not an assessment of your character. It’s an assessment of your state of being, either feeling safe or unsafe. It’s an acknowledgment that is quickly followed by a reason why.

The author I’m referring to published another article in response to all the pushback he’d received from his provocative hypothesis. In his second article, he clearly showed me that he has a different definition for “safe” in this context. He’s perceiving “safe” as a character trait, as in “someone who is ‘safe’ is emotionally regulated, they can be trusted not to act in violent, reactive ways, they will not be the squeaky wheel.” I’m just defining it as a state of being. “Safe” is the feeling that you are safe and protected. It’s a superior state of being in that it feels better to feel safe than to feel unsafe.

The findings of attachment theory might not be the reason why you’re not feeling safe, but it is at least a possible reason why, so we might want to explore to see if it resonates with your experience.

Let’s stop and consider the experience of a baby. What does it feel like to be a baby? I’m very small compared with the people around me. They all move around freely through space but I don’t have that ability. They all open their mouths and say gobble-dee-gook to one another. I wonder what that’s about. When they leave the room, they no longer exist for me. I wonder if they still exist at all? I can’t be certain? Sometimes, they appear frightening when they open their mouths and say that gobble-dee-gook at a higher volume and make scary faces at each other and sometimes at me. It makes me wonder if I’ve done something wrong. Sometimes they seem really interested in me, they give me their attention, and sometimes they don’t appear to know that I exist. I wonder what they think of me? Here’s one thing I know for certain. I can’t feed myself, I can’t even clean myself up after I poop. I can’t swaddle myself to make myself feel safe and secure. I can’t move through space unless one of them picks me up and takes me with them. I’m pretty much at the mercy of their goodwill towards me. I have to ensure that I am liked by them if I want to survive.

If we really think about a baby’s experience, we have to admit they are not thinking these thoughts, right? It’s clear, by all the references to gobble-dee-gook that this baby hasn’t mastered words yet. We think in words, so actually, the baby isn’t thinking these things at all. But the baby is feeling the ways that the words are pointing at even if they can’t think them, right? You can feel unsafe even if you can’t put words to it. You can feel unsafe and not be able to understand why you feel unsafe.

Attachment theory is explaining why we feel unsafe. The statement that the feeling itself is sourced from the unconscious mind, is just another way of saying that the feeling was there before the words to describe the feeling were there. The mechanics of how something that is unconscious becomes conscious, is by naming it. We only became conscious when we started naming things, because we think in words. Babys aren’t thinking but they are feeling, and most of the information they’re taking in through their senses,is going directly into the unconscious; the space in which meaning is hidden because there are no words there to give it meaning. The experience of a baby, when we really stop to think about it, is one of pure, unadulterated vulnerability. If I were a baby, my very existence would depend on me being in the good graces of these creatures who I rely on for my basic needs but without the words to understand any of these vulnerable feelings.

I also want to bring some principles from quantum mechanics into the conversation because they are very relevant to the experience of a baby. Quantum entanglement has a lot to do with a baby’s sense of safety. Let me explain without getting too deep into the weeds. There is a concept called object permanence that is very relevant to the experience of babies even though they don’t know it. Object permanence is the idea that a perceived object exists even when I’m not perceiving it. Babies don’t have this idea implanted in them yet for the first few months of their lives. Without thoughts and words, they can’t perform the intuitive leap that would suggest that when the object—mom—is out of their presence, she still exists. That’s maybe why babies cry uncontrollably when mom leaves the room. They’re not certain that she still exists. When mom pops back into the room, the baby can confirm that she exists now and that she is with them, but they still don’t know for certain if she exists independently from their mind. Babies haven’t formed abstract knowledge yet. They can’t even think about these questions; they can only feel the effects of this uncertainty and it feels unsafe. It feels vulnerable.

Gradually, another possibility does begin to sink in for the baby. It’s probably a product of social learning. The baby notices that dad doesn’t completely lose his shit when mom leaves the room. The baby begins to consider another possibility; that maybe mom exists even when she’s not in my presence, and, she’ll probably come back. Now the baby feels a little safer. It’s hard for us to step out of our own experience and imagine the experience of a baby, but if you think about all the stuff that a baby isn’t certain of yet, this all makes sense.

The unconscious mind is filled up with uncertainty and feelings of unsafety because it is the part of us where our baby memories reside. Our baby memories are not conscious memories because there were no words around to name the experiences. They just left emotional imprints on our unconscious minds, or our central nervous systems, that we can’t explain. Attachment theory can explain it.

I will return to the quantum entanglement issue later, but for now, I’d like to just stay in the realm of emotions for a little while. Let’s consider what’s going on between a baby and a mother when they’re breastfeeding. Attunement is an experience that often happens in this exchange. A baby’s felt sense of a profound vulnerability and dependency on it’s parents seems to be an inevitable conclusion about the experience of being a baby. A mother and baby dyad don’t have words yet to effectively communicate but they do both have access to other communication devices. Eye contact is a communication device. It communicates that I see you. Tone of voice is a communication device as is volume of voice. Facial expressions indicate something about the state of being of another person. A baby probably realizes pretty quickly what smiles mean. If the baby makes eye contact with the mother while breastfeeding and sees her smiling back at them, we can imagine that some information is being transferred. If mom is cooing gently at them as she smiles, they can feel even more certain of one thing: This person cares about me. This person sees me. If this person, who appear to be very capable of bringing me nurturing resources that I cannot acquire by myself, cares for me, as indicated by her smile and her coos, I might just be safe. If I’m safe, I can take a nap now, and I am really sleepy, yawn….zzzzzzzzz. Of course, again, all of this without the words, for a baby, they’re just feelings or sensations.

This is what attachment theory is about, and I’m sure this happens everywhere around the world.

There are circumstances in life that could explain why a mother is breastfeeding her baby and not smiling and making eye contact. Imagine that she is a single mother and she’s very uncertain as to how she is going to manage to pay her rent this month, to keep a roof over her and her baby’s heads. Mom’s anxious and preoccupied. This isn’t her fault. This isn’t a sign that she’s broken or dysfunctional. It’s a sign that she doesn’t have the money she needs to gather resources and that she’s feeling a lot of uncertainty. That’s not a judgment so much as a fact. If she’s feeling anxious about that, then it’s a fact that she’s feeling anxious. If the degree of anxiety that she feels rises to the level that she is not smiling while looking down at her baby, it’s logical to imagine that the baby might be feeling unexplainable feelings of uncertainty and unsafety as well. The attunement is not present. Mom seems distracted, like maybe there’s more important things happening besides me, even as she is feeding me.

What might be going on here is that the baby is misinterpreting the reason that mom appears distracted. The baby might assume it’s because they are not that important to mom, that mom doesn’t really care for them. But if mom is just anxious and worried about paying her rent, that would have been an incorrect interpretation. It’s also an incorrect interpretation that will likely lead the baby to feel less safe.

Attachment theory is all about unconscious tendencies (or impulses) because an attachment style is determined during the phase of life where language is not a part of one’s experience. The degree of attunement between caregiver and child is at the heart of this mystery. The baby and dad dyad exists if there is a dad around, so there’s an attachment style between them that is separate from the attachment style between mom and baby. Dad might be avoidant. That would signify that dad is not one who expresses his feelings, likely because dad grew up in a household where the rules were don’t get emotional because it distresses other people. The avoidant person believes in self-soothing; they were taught to self-soothe by the lack of other options. Disregulated emotions feel overwhelming. We all develop strategies to cope with this fact.

We can also have attachment styles with other caregivers, like grandmothers, uncles, neighbors, and babysitters. I heard it said in the article that attachment theory is prejudiced against the “it takes a village” paradigm of parenting that is often found in other cultures. I interpret it differently. I don’t see it as intending to make that judgment since it includes all those other dyads in its description of attachment theory.

Instead of seeing avoidant and anxious as pathologies, I personally see them as neutral strategies that you can select from as a coping strategy for the fundamental unsafeness of life and of relationships. They are methods of coping with the fear that you are not being seen as significant or as worthy of being cared for. The anxious-preoccupied person is one who more often chooses to draw closer and communicate. Sometimes all the AP person wants to know is how the other person feels. They might be seeing signs that this other person is dysregulated. APs can be hypervigilant about reading cues. They’re noticing the tone of voice, the facial cues, the physical gestures of the other person. They desperately want to know, with as much certainty as possible, if it is safe to approach the other person right now. The AP simply thinks that asking the other person “How are you feeling?” is a better way of attaining that information. They’re right. It is. But, they actually get punished for asking sometimes, like when the other person is currently not feeling good.

There is usually one dismissive-avoidant(DA)person and one AP in most relationships. This is something I have observed in about 98% of the couples who walk into my office. A person with secure attachment can start to form a preference that is opposite of their partner’s over time. For the secure person, they really need to check all of their own assumptions at the door to remain secure. I describe the dance between the avoidant and the anxious person as an energetic dance. If you’re familiar with how magnets work, you can really feel into the energetic experience that is taking place. When you put two magnets together, one magnet’s negative charge and another magnet’s positive charge are pulled in together, click. If you turn one of those magnets around so the positive charge meets the other magnet’s positive charge, they’re not going to come together. There’s an invisible force field between them that resists joining.

We feel the way those magnets feel when we’re in an anxious/avoidant relationship. One magnet is usually approaching, and the other magnet is usually drawing away. Both are distressed about the dance, but neither can understand what’s happening because they can’t put words to it. It’s just energy. The impulse to draw nearer is an energetic impulse like an irresistible urge. So is the impulse to draw away from. They’re effects of your experience as a baby being imposed upon the present moment and you don’t understand why it’s happening. That’s what attachment theory is used for by some of us therapists. It’s used to name this energetic dance, so the people who are doing the dance better understand what’s really going on. If they understand it, they have named it, and by naming it they have made it conscious. Now they can behave a little more consciously, and they have more free will. They can choose to resist the urge to pull away or to draw nearer. Before, they were being pulled and pushed by unconscious impulses.

I described the experience of an AP in an anxious/avoidant attachment dyad three paragraphs ago. Let’s look at the DA’s experience in that same situation. The avoidant person was taught by the culture of their home of origin that withdrawal or disengagement is the best choice for avoiding unpleasant conflict That’s what they’ve been taught. It’s the right way to do things. All this checking in their partner insists on doing feels like scrutiny. It feels like their partner is always trying to determine if they are “safe” in the sense of emotionally regulated as this other author conceives of the word “safe”. Different things can happen depending on the emotional states of the two people. I guess the same word can mean two different things depending on if you’re the observer or the observed.

Situation one: The DA is presently feeling good so their emotions are regulated, and the AP, reading their facial cues, is misperceiving their present state. In this case, the avoidant might say something like, “I’m fine”. What if the anxious person doesn’t believe them? They’ll likely press on with, “You don’t seem fine”. If the avoidant person really is fine, they can simply correct the other person’s assumption, and possibly with some additional reassurance, like a hug, or a hand on the arm, saying, “No dear, I really do feel quite regulated right now.”

Sometimes, what happens in this situation, is that the avoidant person isn’t entirely certain of their own feeling of safety, perhaps they’re feeling a little wobbly emotionally. In this case, the AP’s assessment of the DA’s present state of being can end up winning out. The DA considers the possibility that they’re not interpreting their own energy correctly, they begin to doubt their own assessment of themselves, since their partner is clearly seeing something different in their nonverbal communication. “I appear unsafe to them” is the conclusion they reach. That’s a scary idea to consider. This other person, who I love and trust, and who I want to love and trust me back, sees me as a dangerous and unsafe person right now.

This is alarming to both people. The person who see’s someone else as scary, doesn’t usually think about how the “scary person” is feeling about the fact that they are being seen that way. I’ve been in their shoes before, as the one being told his energy is scary, and I know that I don’t like that feeling. I check in with myself at this point, to see what I’m thinking about. “Am I thinking hateful thoughts?” No. “Am I feeling aggressive impulses?”, “nope” If the other person keeps insisting my energy is scary as I’m calmly correcting them, I actually start to get really upset. The frustration I’m feeling comes from concluding that I’m not really being seen truly by the other person. This is a point I will return to later, when I zoom out a little bit from personal relationships to less personal relationships.

Situation 2: If the DA is feeling unsafe, then a different dance may arise. When the AP tries to communicate with them; to check in and see how they’re doing, the DA will focus entirely on the projections of the anxious person. The truth is they want to be left alone right now, to reckon with this feeling of unsafety. Why? Because they were taught that was the right way to deal with their negative emotions. “Go self-soothe until you’re feeling better and then you can come back and be with us”. That was the message they received as a child again and again. If you’re in emotional distress, you’re the squeaky wheel, you’re the one who’s broken. Go to your room.

Now, the DA has a neurosis of sorts starting to develop. If I feel unsafe, I must be doing something wrong. That’s like feeling guilty for being emotional. But they were taught that the cure for emotions is to self-soothe, so they think, if this other person wants me to get back into emotional regularity, why won’t they leave me alone so I can self-soothe? They become increasingly irritated with the check-ins. The anxious and the avoidant simply have different preferred strategies for re-regulating their emotions. No judgment here as to which is superior. They’re just different. One’s preferred process is to communicate, but their partner isn’t willing to do that. The other’s preferred process is to be alone and self-soothe, but their partner isn’t willing to let them do that. This is the view from above the battlefield. This is the view of attachment theory.

There’s another twist in this story. One final twist that really does make the whole thing a little more mysterious. Remember the part about quantum entanglement and how it wound its way to a concept from psychology called object permanence?

Brace yourselves for this.

The 2022 Nobel Prize for physics was awarded to three scientists who proved that quantum entanglement is in fact a real phenomenon. It’s a thing that Einstein once assessed as “spooky action at a distance”. It’s about information transfer. Einstein had proposed there was a universal speed limit for how fast information can be transferred, and he called it “the speed of light”. Quantum entanglement suggests this speed limit can indeed be broken. The other thing they proved while proving this, is that the psychological concept of object permanence that I mentioned before, isn’t true. Yes, you heard me right. Mom doesn’t exist when she’s not with you. To be more precise though, her body doesn’t exist when she is not with you. Mom is a conscious agent, and we do exist as conscious agents. The concept of local realism is the part that relates to object permanence. It was legitimized by the awarding of the 2022 Nobel Prize in physics. It’s kind of freaky but it’s true.

This is the same question as “when a tree falls in the forest, does it make a sound?” It has to do with a tension between the observer and the observed. The Double slit experiment, when interpreted the way that many people like myself interpret it, suggests that the object does not have a physically measurable state of being until there is an observer present to measure it. The object remains in superposition until the moment the observer observes it. The state of being of the object is determined by what the observer expects to see. The object gets fixed in time and space—like a particle—because the observer wills to see it a certain way. It was a wave of infinite possibilities until the moment the observer gave it their attention, and fixed it in time and space. That’s what’s happening with the whole Schrodinger’s cat thought experiment.

The truth about the tree by the way is that it doesn’t make a sound, fall, or exist unless a conscious agent is present. This is the absolute truth as established by the 2022 Nobel prize for phsyics. It also means that mom doesn’t exist when she’s not in the room with me. This sucks! And… this is exactly what attachment theory is all about. There’s a part of us that knows this, and there’s a part of us that does not want to accept it for very good reasons. We spend the first four months of our lives learning not to accept it. We won’t feel safe if we accept it.

We created the abstract notion that mom still exists even when she’s not present with us to give ourselves a false sense of security. We also chose to overlook the abstract truth that atoms are comprised of 99.999999999996 percent, empty space. We probably learned this in elementary school. If we accepted this truth in every waking moment, and accepted that our floor is comprised entirely of atoms, we might be afraid to walk across the floor. We want to believe the floor is solid, and so we see a solid floor. That’s how the Double-slit experiment is explained. It’s called the observer effect. That 99.9999999999996 percent of the atom isn’t really quite empty. It’s filled with possibilities. All the different possible ways this could turn out. They run the spectrum from falling through the floor, to successfully reaching the other side of the room, but the outcome is determined by what the observer wants to see.

There’s a question to ponder about attachment theory here. Why would the AP want to see their partner as scary or unsafe? The AP already believes the world is unsafe, that’s why they’re anxious. Believing the world is unsafe, the AP has developed a strategy for maintaining their sense of safety, by learning how to read other people’s energies, and determine whether they are safe to approach or not safe to approach. It’s a survival strategy. Nothing wrong with that. We all want to survive. The AP is often hyper-vigilant about gathering information needed to determine whether they are presently safe or not. They’re afraid to just ask because in their past experience, the question has sometimes been met with a benign “I’m fine” but sometimes it has been met with, “Why are you bothering me right now?” They’re uncertain of the outcome, that’s why they’re anxious.

The dyad of observer and observed works different when both are conscious agents, than it is when one is not. If I’m a conscious agent who wants to see a spoon right now, because he wants to shovel some food into his mouth and he knows, from past experience, that spoons are a good way to do that. I open up the drawer where I expect I will see some spoons, and sure enough, the spoons are in the drawer. Reality meets my expectations. The spoons only sprang into existence in the moment that my gaze fell on them, but that’s not important right now. What’s important is that I feed myself.

What if I also see a mouse? My initial reaction will be surprise. My attitude towards mice will determine what I do next. If I think mice are scary, because of some past experience, I might scream but it is because that past experience still haunts me. Back to the human/spoon dyad. We can all probably agree that spoons don’t have a personal agenda. They don’t care what they’re used for. Mice on the other hand? Well, they’re likely conscious agents too. We can imagine that it feels a certain way to be a mouse, but we can’t imagine it feels a certain way to be a spoon.

If the dyad in question is between two human beings, then there are many other complexities because they’re both, both the observer and the observed. We both want to observe things that make us feel safe and secure. We both want to be observed as people who are safe and secure to be with. We don’t want our partners to be afraid of us. When we do feel safe and secure and our partner is seeing us as dysregulated, we can become upset that this other person isn’t seeing us truly for who we are right now. They see us as a person with possibly bad intentions, when we don’t have any bad intentions. This is why “the gaze” needs some closer scrutiny.

We need to establish whether the gaze of another person holds good intentions towards us or bad intentions towards us. We need to know how the other person regards us to feel more certain we are safe around them. This a part of the human condition that is frustrating. Our sensory perceptions stop at the skin. Our senses can’t drill inside of them and feel what they are feeling. If we add the power of intuition to the sensory perceptions, then yes, we can infer how they are feeling, by reading their tone, their facial cues, and their bodily gestures, but we still can’t know for certain.

The only way to know for certain is if we ask them, and they tell us, and we believe them. Without all three steps, uncertainty is maintained. More conscious and deliberate communication is the prescription for most of these attachment issues in relationships. I talk about that more in my article, "The Ecology of Communication." By understanding these hidden variables, we have a better sense of the whole dance, and with more knowledge comes greater certainty, and with greater certainty, the world is easier to navigate. That’s the purpose of attachment theory.

Let’s talk about “the gaze” some more. I’m going to focus on a particular passage of this author’s article and unpack it. It’s a quote from the great Toni Morrison:

“but damage, as Toni Morrison reminds us, is not in the body, it is in the gaze that deems the body damaged.”

So, what I interpret Toni as saying is that the hurtfulness is in the meaning of the gaze of the other person. I imagine her walking down the street and meeting the gaze of a white person. The logical point I want to make is that the one who is feeling the damage is not the one deeming the body damage. That other one knows whether that gaze means what she thinks it means. Isn’t there, at least, a possibility that this is not what the gaze of this person means? It’s possible that Toni might be misinterpreting their gaze. I’m not insisting she’s misinterpreting all the racist gazes she’s experienced, only some of them. Until we peer into the box (another reference to Schrodinger’s cat) we don’t know for certain. Until we ask this what they meant with that look, we can’t know for certain. Again, if they were to tell us, that wouldn’t be sufficient unless we believe them. It is possible we’re projecting things onto other people from our past experiences, and not really seeing them. It’s all very frustrating, all the uncertainty we have to deal with in life.

If this other person has had the experience of being called out for racism all of a sudden even though they were not thinking anything racist, they might just be afraid of that. Everyone’s afraid. It sucks. Both people, in this case, are wrestling with the space between their pre-conceptions and their perceptions.

We have to be careful with the broad strokes. It’s one thing to say the system is racist. I agree. I don’t like it anymore than this other author does. I can hold the fact that I am privileged to have a paler skin tone because the system treats me better, and still protest that it is this way because I view it as unjust. I can be a part of this nebulous system and also not agree with anything in this system.

I believe it is wrong to try and dismantle diversity. I think that diversity should not be looked at as one of our options. Diversity is a fact of our existence. We have diversity both in appearances, and in our ways of seeing or thinking about things. Both are healthy and beautiful aspects of life that we can enjoy if we have the right attitude towards them. If we think diversity shouldn’t be, and diversity IS, then we’re going to get upset that it is. We couldn’t erase diversity if we tried because diversity is a fact of this life. And, Oh, have we tried! Our only choices, really, are to accept it and embrace it, or not to. Hitler decided not to. He tried to cancel diversity, but because diversity is simply True, and he wasn’t powerful enough to deny what’s True, he was destined to fail.

There’s the justice.

In these times of polarization, suspicion, and distrust, we need to get in touch with something that’s just True. We are one big human family, divided only by illusionary symbols of separation like skin tone and gender. We can interpret them anyway we will to, as significant differences to divide us further, or as benign differences that say nothing more than what they’re saying.

But this disagreement we are having is about the object called attachment theory. So let’s talk about that. Imagine, that as a therapist, I have a symbolic drawer full of tools that I regularly use in my practice. The spoons symbolize attachment theory, the knives symbolize some modality, and the forks represent sciencey explanations. Because of the issues my client is presenting in session with me today, I’m going to reach into my drawer and find a spoon. What am I going to use the spoon for? Well, spoons were designed as tools for shoveling food into our mouths, they have an additional usefulness in that you can stir things with them, you can also hang them on your nose if you’re just feeling silly, or you can poke somebody in the eye with them. I’m going to argue that last thing, harming other people, is not the purpose for which this tool was designed.

Attachment theory wasn’t designed as a tool for pathologizing people who feel unsafe. It’s not so you can judge them. It’s for helping people. You’ve already created millions of reasons to judge other people. Do you really need another reason? If that’s what you think this tool is for, you are mistaken, and that’s why you’re misusing this tool. If you’re using the tool to prove that whiteness is superior to blackness or browness or yellowness, you’ve gotten even further from the purpose of the tool. You’ve added things to it that were not part of its foundational purpose.

The eugenicists did the same thing with natural selection. Because they tried to view natural selection through the filter of their racist ideological beliefs that white people are superior to black people, they misinterpreted natural selection, and what its purpose is. Natural selection’s purpose is to affirm that life goes on. Period.

I agree whole-heartedly with the author that if people are using attachment theory to propagate these sorts of ideas, then they are misusing the tool. I wouldn’t necessarily extend that to everyone I see using the tool. I haven’t yet condemned the spoon itself. This other author made the argument (metaphorically of course) that we should change our attitudes toward spoons, but spoons don’t have bad intentions or good intentions. They’re just spoons.

Why has this distorted meaning for attachment theory arisen? Well, let’s try to explain it through looking at that old game of telephone that we used to play. You remember that game, right? The word gets transferred around a circle of people through whispering into ears. When the word gets back around to the beginning person, it is almost unrecognizable sometimes.

And that’s just a single word. Imagine the game of telephone with “the meaning and purpose of attachment theory” standing in for the single word. Now, there are so many variables—all the separate words uttered—that are all open to misinterpretation. It’s easy to imagine how that word “attachment theory” will sound unrecognizable to the therapist who originally explained it. That’s how I’m feeling. I had never heard before that attachment theory could be used in the way the author was describing it. I was taught about attachment theory at a school with a very DEI faculty. Nobody on that faculty ever informed me that attachment theory was a tool for fighting against social justice because that’s not what the tool was created for. It had never occurred to me before that people were using this spoon to poke each other in the eye with. I hope that I have explained sufficiently what the purpose of the tool is, and that you’ll stop using it for that other thing which is harmful to other people. But we do still need the tool. Let’s not throw it out. Instead, lets educate people on it’s proper uses.

Lastly, I’ll say this. Most of our big emotional experiences that we describe as negative, have to do with our reckoning with the question of whether we are guilty or innocent. The trend these days, as always, is to conclude that we are guilty, but most of us, for the sake of surviving, don’t include ourselves in that category. That’s good, but. Can we see ourselves as innocent while seeing others as guilty? I don’t think we can. I believe in a God who created us all, and I believe this God created us ALL EQUAL in EVERY WAY! That would mean, we’re either ALL GUILTY, or we’re ALL INNOCENT. I’m suggesting that if we go with the ALL GUILTY path, we’re going to see a fearful world in front of us. If we choose to only think thoughts of LOVE AND INNOCENCE; choosing to see everyone as innocent. We will see an innocent world. Which is going to lead us out of polarization and divisiveness? The latter, hands down. It’s a choice. We just have to start thinking truer thoughts if we want to believe what’s True about us.