Attachment

Earlier this year I was watching a show about genealogy featuring Bryan Cranston and his family tree. According to the research they were able to do, about three of his male forebears had started families and then abandoned them by running away and joining the army. It displayed something that could almost be described as an enduring pattern, but of what? My theory is that it exemplifies intergenerational attachment trauma being passed down from parent to child.

In the 1950's a scientist by the name of Harry Harlow conducted experiments in attachment on infant Rhesus monkeys. Today these experiments would be considered cruel, but in spite of their questionable ethics, they did teach us something. He took newborn monkeys from their mothers and put them in cages with surrogate mothers made of wire and equipped with a bottle for feeding. What he wanted to find out was whether attachment was purely out of self-interest, because mother = food, or if there was more to the bond. Alongside the wire mother was another dummy mother, but this one had soft cloth over it and no bottle. Some of the monkeys got the cloth mother, some of them only got the cold wire one. The monkeys who got the cloth mother and the wire mother to choose from would spend most of their time cuddling with the cloth mother, only going to the wire mother to feed. The ones who only got the wire mother became completely neurotic and tried to self-comfort to no avail. They were afraid of everything, and they got nothing in terms of comfort or reassurance from their wire mother.

Sometimes he'd put them in dark cages with no sensory stimuli. Sometimes he'd put them in cages with a robotic toy that would make noise and move and open its mouth to show teeth. He put mother-reared monkeys together with the wire mother-reared monkeys to see how they interacted. Having learned no social skills from the fake mother, the ones from the wire mothers were ostracized and treated with aggression by the normal monkeys. There was some sense of solidarity between the ones who had been deprived of a real mother in these situations though. When one of them was about to be attacked by the normal monkeys, the other wire-raised monkeys would signal to them. They recognized that they were different.

Harry decided to see if the monkeys could be rehabilitated in two ways. One was to get the attachment-deprived female monkeys pregnant. Since they wouldn't accept another monkey being near them, never having seen one before, they had to be strapped down to be mated, in other words, rape. Of the female monkeys this was done to, a third of them killed their babies. Another third ignored them completely. The final third accepted their babies and bonded with them. They became good mothers. They never accepted other monkeys, but they accepted their babies. Harlow decided to repeat the experiment. All of the mother monkeys repeated their previous behavior a second time. The ones that had killed their babies did it again. The ones that had neglected their infants did so once more. The mothers that had bonded with their first baby did so again. Once that group had learned how to bond, they were able to do it again.

The other way he tried to rehabilitate them involved another group of monkeys. This group was taken from their mothers at birth and isolated with wire mothers for three months. Then they were put together as a group to play. They developed their own social behaviors and bonded. They were never quite the same as mother-reared monkeys, but they recovered some of their ability to form social bonds. Then he took some of the six-month old monkeys he'd been experimenting on and put them one at a time in with the three month group. Bullying occurred because the other monkeys had already formed a group. No dice. Then he tried putting one of the three-month old monkeys with one of the six-month old monkeys. Basically what happened was that the three-month old socialized monkey wrapped its arms around the six-month old and held on until the six-month old gave up and accepted the contact. The physical contact seems to have been what did the trick. The monkeys bonded and were gradually able to be introduced to social groups successfully. They were never the same as a normal monkey, but they weren't the frightened, stereotypy-ridden basket-cases the un-rehabilitated monkeys were.

The takeaways were that babies bond with their mothers for more than just sustenance and they need physical contact and reciprocal attachment to develop normally. His research became part of the foundation for attachment studies soon thereafter.

His findings applied to humans too. There is a window in which attachment needs have to be met or development is severely stunted. If there is attachment trauma in this period it can affect the entire life of the person it happened to. For example, if a child loses an attachment figure within about the first year and a half of life, or if they are abandoned or mistreated. They learn that nothing is secure and that attachment figures cannot be depended upon. Infancy is an extremely vulnerable time because at that age infants depend on their caregivers for everything. They can't do anything for themselves or even protect themselves. Without their caregivers they would die. If they can't bond with a caregiver or feel safe, they never learn to bond securely to other people and spend their lives either chasing or avoiding attachment. In children with attachment disorders they can either become indiscriminate, basically asking everybody they meet, "Are you my mommy?" or avoiding all attachment even to caregivers. Our attachment style is set by the time we're about 18 months old. Once an attachment trauma has occurred, it can be very difficult to repair the damage it causes.

According to what I've read, an unrecognized or untreated attachment trauma in a child becomes a personality disorder when they grow up. Narcissistic PD, Borderline PD, Schizoid PD, Antisocial PD. I suspect they all have roots in attachment trauma, and before Harry Harlow's experiments and the subsequent studies into the nature of attachment, all attachment trauma was unrecognized and untreated. Even more damaging, there was a parenting theory which many people subscribed to up until the 1930's and beyond which said that holding children and showing them affection would make them soft and dependent, so many children were brought up without any parental affection. In addition, in America and many other places children were often taken from their parents or given up to orphanages when their parents couldn't afford to take care of them. The Native American generations sent to boarding schools come to mind as well. That's a lot of collective attachment trauma.

Something else worth thinking about is how people with different insecure attachment styles, the result of attachment trauma, pass on those styles to their children. After all, someone who only ever experienced neglect or abuse or abandonment could never have learned any better way to do it. Parents who were abandoned as children often reenact it with their own children. They don't know what attachment is, so how could they provide that to their own children? They don't know how. They don't know any other way. One attachment trauma four generations back might send ripples through all subsequent generations until someone breaks that cycle. This is what I believe happened in Bryan Cranston's family. The trauma kept repeating, generation after generation. It makes me wonder how many other families have the same thing happening through the generations without ever being able to trace it back to the source. How many of them have been passing it on like a family legacy?

I find myself hoping that one day soon we understand how important attachment is and what attachment trauma costs us as a society. In human terms, a traumatized child turns into a very unhappy adult, and unhappy people often do unhappy things. They form unhealthy relationships because they don't know how to form any other kind. They don't feel kinship to the other human beings around them and face social rejection because they don't know how to cooperate and participate in social groups. They turn to self-destructive coping mechanisms which end in incarceration or suicide or addiction or just a long, miserable life in which they never form an attachment to another human being. It costs them and it costs all of us. Probably if we ever figured this out and how to repair the damage, the crime-rate would go down drastically within a single generation and many, many people who would have had shitty lives would instead be productive members of society with healthy relationships in their personal life and their communities. Prisons might not be filled to over capacity. We might all be happier.

Harry Harlow - Wikipedia

Psychology Today - How Trauma Is Carried Across Generations

Institute for Attachment and Child Development - Why Kids Don't Outgrow Reactive Attachment Disorder

Science Direct - Outcomes of Children Who Grew Up In Foster Care

Photo by Thomas Brown - Rhesus Macaque (Macaca mulatta)Uploaded by mgiganteus, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=27451810