Attachments
Let’s talk about Attachments
Attachment is defined as a bond that connects a person to another person through time and space.
Attachment is formed at the infancy stages of life, by which the infant is helpless therefore relies on the caregiver to provide them with their primary needs (food, water, shelter, and security). Attachment becomes the baseline for all social, emotional, and cognitive development.
Security and Attachment are directly related to each other. Security when discussed with attachment is defined as the ability to form a healthy relationship overtime.
Attachments are important because they are strongly related to:
-Emotional regulation – how define and manage negative and positive emotions
- Social Development – how you treat and interact with others
- Personality- qualities that form a person’s identity
-Coping Skills – consciousness/ skills used to solve personal problems
- cognitive development – how you think, explore to figure things out.
Attachment Styles
1. Secure – People generally experienced a healthy childhood and are better approaching intimate relationships. Security stems from having a healthy relationship with your parents or acting caregiver. The ability to explore and feel safe and protected is the foundation for this attachment. Secure people are better at accepting their partners' shortcomings, deal with grievances without becoming overly defensive, and secure that most of all of their needs will be met.
2. Anxious - – People that may find intimacy more of a struggle. They worry about being enough, have a difficult time living in the present, and instead place a lot of hope on their partner, therefore they have a higher probability of attaching to potential rather than accepting the person for who they are. People that fall in this attachment style could have suffered from trauma in early childhood, mistrust, neglect of one or more need, lack of parenting or witnessing negative relationship patterns of parents early in life.
3. Avoidant – People that completely avoid relationships all together or keep anyone new they meet at a distance. This is an unconscious tactic to protect oneself from the possibility of hurt, or to minimize the risk of that they will never again go through anything like they went through with their original caregiver.
Now that we have briefly discussed attachments, let's now apply some information.
As mentioned yesterday, Trauma directly affects anybody that has had to deal with it directly, but as we can see today it has the means to affect our ability to develop healthy attachments. Attachments are necessary in life as it relates to our social and emotional needs. Take away any additional trauma we have experienced throughout our life, Racial Trauma is deeply embedded, therefore it lives within Africans in America consciously and unconsciously. From the time we were captured and chained in Africa and brought to America we have encountered trauma. We must continue to examine ourselves and our relationships as it relates to our attachments. Only then can we go back (Sankofa) and rewrite what was written and begin again. By beginning again we lay to rest our trauma, what we have been cultivated to perceive as normal and reparent ourselves so that we can make it best practice when building secure attachments.
