Attachment gets programmed in childhood. It shows up in a few different ways: anxious, avoidant, disorganized, and secure. Many people reading this probably don’t fall into secure, but all of us can get there.
It forms around the people who are our caregivers, our village, so to speak. And along the way, misattunements happen. A misattunement means not being responded to in a way that meets the current need.
Let me go all the way back to infancy. A baby is crying, and the caregiver offers a bottle because the baby must be hungry. The baby keeps crying. Attunement is noticing that the feeding isn’t working and asking what else is going on. Is the position wrong? Is the milk too hot or too cold? Is there a dirty diaper? Is the baby hot, cold, gassy, sleepy, or simply in need of contact? Attunement means tuning in to the need that has to be met. Infants can’t do that for themselves. They are 100% reliant on a caregiver to figure it out and provide it.
Misattunement can have any number of causes. A caregiver might assume it has to be food. Or it’s the middle of the night, they can’t get up one more time, and they hope the baby will fall back to sleep. But a baby’s little nervous system doesn’t get breaks while it cries, and “crying it out” is actually the nervous system shutting down. The research on this has been out for a while, that letting a baby cry themselves to sleep is not good for tier little systems. So to attune, we go in, figure out what’s going on, and soothe the baby. Sometimes what they need is contact and co-regulation, sometimes food, a dirty diaper needs changing. We do what it takes to figure it out and if it is not clear we provide comfort and contact to help co-regulate their little system.
None of this is about blaming caregivers. Mis-attunements can be subtle. Sometimes the person simply wasn’t available, for any number of reasons. They might have been preoccupied with making dinner, dealing with other kids or something that has their attention, they may be inebriated and the attuning isn’t hitting the mark or isn’t available, a babysitter who wasn’t sure what to do just bounced the baby over and over. No blame, no shame, because even the most well intentioned care giver can miss the mark.
So as adults we have a tendency toward a specific style of attachment. If you fall into one of the non secure versions, it can feel pretty uncomfortable in life, in relationships particularly and in navigating a career.
In the next post, we’ll look at how these early patterns show up in adult relationships, and how to spot your own style.
