 Liotti,
Giovanni. "Trauma,
Dissociation, And Disorganized Attachment: Three Strands of a
Single Braid." Psychotherapy:
Theory, Research, Practice, Training 41.4 (2004): 472–486.
Traumatic losses and severe traumatic
events in the life of the dissociative patients' mothers that took
place in the interval of 2 years before to 2 years after (my
emphasis) the patients' births proved to be a significant risk
factor for the development of dissociative disorders. Since the
traumas/losses in the life of the patients' primary caregivers
(likely still unresolved) exerted their effects in the period when
the patients' early attachments were shaped, a legitimate interpretation
of Pasquini et al.'s finding is that early disorganized attachment
is the mediator of this risk factor.
(476)
I was thunderstruck after reading this. My mother
was 22 years old when my father was killed, and I was born two
weeks later. I knew my father's death must have impacted
me, but I never understood how. I never knew
him, so I never felt his absence as I might have if he'd hugged
and kissed me goodbye one bright morning and never returned. Yes,
it was severe trauma. Yes, there must have been sadness in my house,
but how would an infant absorb it?
I need to read John Bowlby, but in
the meantime, here's how Liotti (who rocks, by the way) explains
attachment theory:
Attachment theory holds that humans, like
other mammals, are born with a strong, evolved tendency to seek
care, help, and comfort from members of the social group whenever
they are facing an overwhelming danger. the care-seeking or attachment
system...
is powerfully
activated during and after any experience of fear, physical pain,
or psychological pain. Usually, the propensity to seek protection
and comfort is met with positive responses from significant others.
The inborn disposition to care for one's kin. which matches the
equally inborn tendency to ask for help, provides the basis for
a relatively smooth functioning of caregiving- careseeking interactions.
(477)
A mother who's
not devastated by blinding grief will instinctively respond to
care-seeking behavior from her baby with care-giving, but...
When unresolved traumatic memories surface
in the mind of parents while they are responding to the attachment
requests of their children, the mental suffering linked to these
memories activates the parents' attachment system together with
their caregiving system. That the attachment system is normally
activated not only in children but also in adults. by any type
of suffering is. a central tenet of
attachment theory. In the absence of soothing responses from significant
others (perceived as "stronger and/or wiser" than the suffering
self.) the activation of the attachment system arouses in the
parent strong emotions of fear and/or anger. Thus, while infants
are crying, "unresolved" parents may interrupt their attempts to
soothe . with unwitting, abrupt manifestations of alarm and/or
of anger. (these) are always frightening to infants. The innate
defensive reaction of escaping from the signal of threat (e.g.,
by distracting attention or avoidance of gaze) ensues in the infant.
The increased relational distance, however, further activates the
(equally inborn) infant's attachment system, because increased
distance from the attachment figure innately strengthens the need
for protective proximity, whatever the behavior of the attachment
figure may be. The attachment figure . is "at once the source and
the solution". of the infant's alarm, and this leads to fright
without solution. That is, the infant has no way out of this paradox.
There is no single, coherent behavioral or attentional strategy
able to interrupt the loop of increasing fear and contradictory
intentions (approach and avoidance) in the infant's experience. Disorganization
and disorientation of early attachment closely mimic the collapse
of the integrative functions of consciousness that characterize
any dissociative experience and may be the first instance of dissociative
reactions during life. .frightened/ frightening parental behavior
is the link between an infant's disorganized attachment and a caregiver's
unresolved state of mind concerning attachment. .a parent's state
of mind, unresolved as to traumas, may interfere in the communication
between parent and child. It is noteworthy that parents' unresolved
states of mind can induce fright without solution and dissociative
reactions in the infant even when the parents' behavior
does not obviously constitute maltreatment .(477-8)
This is great news for
two reasons. A. Because I have no memory of overt neglect or
abuse when I was young, and B. Because I don't want to have memories
of overt neglect or abuse. I want my mother to be the person
I think she is, and I want compassion and understanding for
what happened to her and also for who she is. This explains my
dissociation.
My mother must have tried to respond to my cries
for food or affection, and been overcome by grief and fear.
She was a very young 22-year-old mother, who just two weeks before
my birth was abandoned in a foreign country by
the death of my father. She had to give birth to me, and fly
home to live with her parents, with a small
baby who wanted nothing to do with her. I can only imagine her
overcome with grief while trying to nurture me. And being reviled
by her baby. I would turn to her for nurturing and she could only
respond with sadness.
.some parents . seem to seek safety and
comfort from the infant, in a patent inversion of the attachment
relationship. (478)
Or... she might have turned to me for solace
from her grief. And that explains my sense of always having
to take care of her. My sense of having been born old, and
always feeling older, wiser and sadder than my mom.
...when early attachment disorganization
is followed by traumas inflicted by the parents during childhood
and adolescence (not a rare occurrence), the new traumatic interactions
are a renewal and a confirmation, on a wider scale of intensity,
of the frightening parent- child relationship that was responsible
for attachment disorganization since infancy. (478)
Chaos, arguing, separation. I remember terror
as a small child when my mother left me alone with my grandparents.
I remember being 12, and having to leave the home I grew up
in, because I was excrutiatingly shy, and didn't
make friends easily. I cried every night alone in my room for months
until we moved. Within a
year of that move, my mother married a man
22 years older than she and my grandmother,
with whom we'd always lived, abandoned us,
and we went to live in my stepfather's house. Four absolutely awful
years followed, involving pistol brandishing and a suicide attempt
by my mother. I'll journal about them later, but in reaction to
these events I started severely dissociating. And yes, those
years were bad, but I never thought they constituted the level
of abuse the literature implies a child responds to
with dissocation. But if the dissociation was originally caused
by my mother's grief when I was a baby, then everything makes sense.
I responded to these events as I did because of what happened preverbally.
Internal Working Models = IWM = a cognitive
structure based on generalized memories of past interactions with
the attachment figure. provides expectations as to the attachment
figure's future responses to the child's attachment needs. When
activated, an IWM can co-opt all the typical emotions of the
attachment motivational system (fear of separation, anger-protest
at expected separations, sadness, joy at reunion, felt security,
etc.). At the beginning of life, the IWM is a structure of implicit
memory. that is, a part of the type of memory that does not require
language nor consciousness for its operations. (478)
That's why it's so hard to remember my past,
even when I actively try to stir up my memories. When I start to
go back, and get into a similar
mindset, it's incredibly painful and scary. I see now that it's
because I'm remembering the time before I had words to describe
what was happening to me and the people around me. Without understanding,
all I had was fear. Fear of abandonment and even fear of death.
If my caretaker responded to me with anger, it probably felt likely
that I could die.
IWMs of insecure attachment... convey
expectations that the attachment figure will not be available or
will respond negatively to requests of help and comfort. The IWM
of disorganized attachment... not only prefigures negative consequences
of asking for help and comfort, it also brings on a dissociated
(nonintegrated) multiplicity of dramatic and contradictory expectations...
(479)
Welcome to a life of shitty
self-esteem and crappy, unfulfilling relationships.
The attachment figure is represented negatively,
as the cause of the ever-growing fear experienced by the self (self
as victim of a persecutor) but also positively as a rescuer.
The parent, although frightened by unresolved traumatic memories,
is nevertheless usually willing to offer comfort to the child,
and the child may feel such comforting availability in conjunction
with the fear. Together with these two opposed representations
of the attachment figure (persecutor and rescuer) meeting a vulnerable
and helpless (victim) self, the IWM of disorganized attachment
also conveys a negative representation of a powerful, evil self
meeting a fragile or even devitalized attachment figure (persecutor
self held responsible for the fear expressed by the attachment
figure). Moreover, there is the possibility, for the child, of
representing both the self and the attachment figure as the helpless
victims of a mysterious, invisible source of danger. Since the
frightened attachment figure may be comforted by the tender feelings
evoked by contact with the child, the implicit memories of disorganized
attachment may also convey the possibility of construing the self
as the powerful rescuer of a fragile attachment figure (i.e., the
little child perceives the self as able to comfort a frightened
adult .formerly disorganized infants assume, when they reach school
age, either caregiving (rescuer) or punitive (persecutor) attitudes
toward their caregivers.(479)
I always felt like I had to take care of my mother.
The intrinsically dissociative IWM of disorganized
attachment intervenes (together with the not always overwhelming
emotions evoked by the stressor) in determining the dissociative
response. This type of pathogenetic process may explain the intriguing
cases of delayed manifestation or exacerbation of a dissociative
disorder years after the original traumatic experience and without
any repetition of the trauma. (481)
And that's why I started dissociating
in earnest as a reaction to the traumas I experienced from ages
12 to 16.
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