Heart's Cry Poverty Series: Relationship Poverty Part I "Defining"

Our children are facing a debilitating poverty.  

The real poverty of relationship.  

The lack of capacity to participate in real and meaningful relationships.

 A deep poverty of the soul.  A lack of connection, secure attachment and nurturing and responsive relationships.  My kids and yours were born hardwired to seek connection and relationship.  This provides the base for their future and yet, they are not finding us available and attuned.

It is not just our kids experiencing this poverty.  While we know relationships are the key to building individual capacity in all domains, we spend so little time exploring it and learning about it.  We medicate, ignore and minimize our needs for this connection.  And it is making us sick and incapable.  It reduces our capacity to succeed.  

We need to reflect on it and struggle with it.  But first, we have to define it.

What is a nurturing and responsive relationship?

What is the big deal around secure attachment?

  Don't take my word for it!  The experts are researching the dramatic epidemic of insecure attachment. 

 

Dr. Bruce Perry was born in my neck of the woods...North Dakota.   Dr. Perry has been an active trainer in the area of children's mental health and the neurosciences for over 30 years.  He is the author of "The Boy who was Raised as a Dog."

I have had the privilege of attending his conference and I study his work through books and online videos and webinars.  He states, "Every child in America lives in relationship poverty."  His non profit group, Child Trauma Academy is a wealth of resources. http://childtrauma.org/. 

This lack of attachment or poverty of relationship cuts across every socioeconomic status in America.  "As I’ve shown in previous posts, maybe 50% of Americans have some degree of attachment disorder, neurological areas which didn’t get Dr. Cloud’s “love on the inside.”  We don’t want to go around with parts of our brain dark." Dr. Perry  http://attachmentdisorderhealing.com/how-your-brain-works-101/

Dr. Henry Cloud, who co-authored my favorite book, Boundaries, has also written about "Getting Love on the Inside.   http://www.cloudtownsend.com/.  You can order audio, video and books about this topic at: https://store.cloudtownsend.com/s-552cd-getting-love-on-the-inside-cloud-cd.html

 Circle of Security International has taken attachment theory and created practical and responsive approaches to building a parents' capacity to meet their child's needs for attachment. http://circleofsecurity.net/  This class helped me to realize, I don't have to know the why or fix it, rather being able to look around the lens and meet my children's needs.  To accept where I am and move forward.

The Circle of Security Treatment Assumptions states:

The training in all settings is based upon the following assumptions.

1. Learning (including therapeutic change) occurs from within a secure base relationship.
2. The quality of the parent/child attachment, which is amenable to change, plays a significant role in the life trajectory of the child.
3. Interventions need to be based on a differential diagnosis that is informed by research-based theory.
4. Lasting change comes from parents developing specific relationship capacities rather than learning techniques to manage behaviors. The capacities needed for a secure relationship include:
• Observational skills informed by a coherent model of children’s developmental needs,
• Reflective functioning and the ability to enter into reflective dialogue,
• The ability to engage with children in the regulation of their emotions,
• Empathy.

Following is a description of these assumptions.

Secure Base Relationship
John Bowlby concluded that the most dangerous event for baby mammals, including humans, is separation from a protective adult. Conversely, Bowlby recognized the need for exploration as being essential to survival. His hypothesis was that when children feel safe and secure, their attachment system terminates, and their exploratory system engages. This allows for both optimal safety and the mastery of necessary skills. However, when children feel threatened, exposed, criticized, or vulnerable to attack, their exploratory system terminates and their attachment system is activated. 

The reciprocal relationship between seeking protection and developing new capacities presents a challenge for children and adults alike. This dilemma occurs because there exist a strong evolutionary advantage for seeking protection, when needed, to override all other systems, thereby becoming the only system active. In other words, people cannot adequately learn and defend themselves at the same time. When parents, especially high-risk parents who are often under social and legal scrutiny, take the risk of placing their caregiving approach under a magnifying glass their attachment needs (for protection and comfort) are often activated. This inevitably results in their need to take a defensive posture. Therefore, it is essential to provide a secure base environment to help terminate their attachment system. Only then can they be open to developing new capacities. This requires that parents view the facilitator as a kind, respectful, interested, caring, and concerned person capable of providing sufficient protection to allow needed safety, thus allowing them to calm their defenses in order to take in new experiences.

Parent/Child Attachment
Early intervention programs for at-risk parent/infant dyads are using increasingly refined procedures for defining goals, as well as for developing intervention protocols and methods for identifying change. There is an increasing emphasis on developing interventions that are focused on, in the words of Kathryn Barnard, “…specific challenges in the caregiving environment, and on specific opportunities to make a positive difference in the development of children and parents.” Barnard specifically emphasizes that promoting secure attachments between young children and their parents should be a focus of early intervention.

It is now well established that during the period beginning at birth and continuing through the end of the preschool years, the quality of the child’s attachment is related to concrete, definable parental capacities, caregiving behavior patterns, and internal working models. In turn, the quality of infant and preschool child-attachment status can be used to identify increased risk for future emotion-regulation struggles, behavior difficulties, and relationship problems as well as future academic difficulties. This is especially true in high-risk populations.

Recent longitudinal studies (birth to adulthood) at the University of Minnesota have found that secure attachment has served as a protective factor for children whose families have experienced high levels of stressful life events. In comparing competent children with less competent children from highly stressed families, researchers found that a history of early attachment-related competence proved to be a major protective factor against the adverse effects of stressful life events. The “early history of competence” was characterized by a secure attachment at twelve and eighteen months.

There is increasing evidence that an insecure attachment during infancy, especially one that is “disorganized,” is an important component of the cumulative risk factors on a developmental pathway toward maladaptive child outcomes. These outcomes are related to social competence with peers and teachers, impulse control, conduct disorders, anxiety, depression, dissociative disorders, and other psychiatric and legal problems.
Allan Sroufe, concludes that “Overall, longitudinal findings have indicated that the early attachment relationship provides an important foundation for later development and that a secure attachment may serve as a protective factor against the negative impact of various adversities and risk factors. Our findings and those of other investigators are quite compelling and suggest that efforts aimed at promoting a secure attachment may prevent various forms of problems among children in high-risk circumstances.”