Essay About Parent Places And Defensive Strategy

Attachment as Precursor for Exploration
Essay title: Attachment as Precursor for Exploration
Attachment as Precursor for Exploration
From attachment research, we have the classifications of secure, avoidant,
and ambivalent/resistant organized attachment in children and corresponding
classifications of secure, dismissing, and preoccupied attachment in adults.
Avoidant status is associated with rejection (dismissing behavior) by the
caregiver. Ambivalent/resistant status is associated with insensitive and
unpredictable (preoccupied) responses by the caregiver. The status reflects
the defensive strategy that the infant has developed for maintaining
proximity and/or self-organization in response to the restrictions that the
parent places on proximity-seeking behavior or autonomous exploration.
A breakdown in the strategy results in disorganized status. This can occur
due to trauma especially if the parent is frightening or frightened, or if
the parent withdraws from the infant as though the infant were the source of
the alarm, or the parent appears to be dissociated.
In the therapy world, there is a tendency to think of insecurity as resulting
from traumatic experiences or at least from insufficient caring from
parents – as a deficit of caring. However as we all know, part of healthy
parenting is encouragement. The child needs to internalize the secure base
that the attachment relationship hopefully provides, but this is not simply
for the sake of feeling secure in itself. It is also so that the individual can
move from that secure base out into the world. I think of the role of the
parent in the bigger picture as being to help the child separate from the
parent gradually over time. Grossmann, Grossmann, and Zimmerman in a very
interesting chapter in The Handbook of Attachment (ed. by J. Cassidy and P.
Shaver, 1999, Guilford) consider the need to include ” security of
exploration”