What Impairs Attachment?
A big pet peeve of mine is the label “attachment disorder.” This is a diagnosis given to kids who have typically experienced severe disruption in the natural order of what should have been the effortless, instinctual connection we’re designed to make from the very beginning. They were prepared at the 
Many children with the most severe cases of “attachment disorder” had this expectation crushed in a way that has left a primal imprint. Can you think of a time when you were totally, ecstatically primed for a connection and it for whatever reason did not happen? Or it happened and then went away without warning or explanation? I’m speaking here of a romantic situation. Remember the disappointment, the deflation of your entire being? Now take that feeling and multiply it by an order of magnitude of a thousand. Ten thousand. As if there was nothing to you but that deflation, that floor pulled out from beneath you. As if the floor pulled out from beneath you was you.
Broken Trust
And can you remember the feeling you’ve had — c’mon, almost all of us have had it — “That’s it, I’m done with <men / women> — they all suck”? Your trust had been broken and you probably gave a cold shoulder to <men / women> for a while. This was usually just momentary — a few days, or weeks, maybe months, sometimes years — until you’d licked your wounds and nursed back your willingness to trust. The thing is, before this happened, you had gathered decades’ worth of experiences that taught you that people in general could be trusted. You had a life’s worth of data to gradually erode the new distrust caused by your recent heartbreak.
A baby who has experienced early separation has no previous data upon which to conclude the world can be trusted. A child whose world is imploded by trauma, family upheaval, and disruption of his sense of secure base, has very little such data. Ever since Freud, psychologists have taught us that the first stage of psychological growth includes the development of trust as a foundation for secure relationships with others.
Whatever the cause, the result can be a child who learns early on that the world is not a safe place, not a place to trust people. Trying to love this child can be hard. The love and care we offer can have a hard time getting in. As Primal Wound author Nancy Verrier says of her relationship to adopted daughter, “I discovered that it was easier for us to give her love than it was for her to accept it.” On very deep levels, those who have experienced early disruption of their connections* may unconsciously feel that it’s too dangerous to love and be loved, authentically and deeply; how can they trust that they won’t be hurt or abandoned again?
Connection Disruption, Rather than “Attachment Disorder”
*See what I did there? Rather than saying “those with attachment disorder” I said “those who have experienced early disruption of their connections.” This is a far more fruitful perspective to take, because it recognizes (very accurately) that attachment is a dynamic, reciprocal process. As Daniel Siegel writes, “attachment is a relationship measure, not a feature of the child alone.”
And yet we don’t see parents being diagnosed with attachment disorder when their child is struggling with attachment! This is why I prefer the term “attachment disruption” rather than “attachment disorder.” It captures the fact that a process has disrupted rather than a person is disordered. In fact, the responses to disrupted attachment are usually quite brilliant and extremely adaptive!
When we can expand our perspective and apply an adaptive lens to the behaviors and developmental issues of kids who’ve experienced disruptions in their connection (and thereby in their ability to trust), we can see them as brilliant adaptation strategies that have gotten stuck. They are no longer adaptive. They are no longer useful. They get in the way and cause problems. When a child who has been moved from one mother to another cannot allow himself to accept the love and care his adoptive mother has for him, in bucketsful, it’s painful for both of them.
An adaptive lens interprets children’s behaviors and expressions in light of what they have experienced. Participating in a panel presentation on ADD at an adoption conference years ago, I proposed a new label to use for children who had suffered through maternal separation — which essentially engraves the threat of annihilation in their nervous system — and who years later could not gather their attention and focus on a particular task. The new label I proposed was: Natural Organismic Response to Massive Abandonment or Loss—acronym, NORMAL.
Who Is Responsible for Fixing / Fostering Attachment?
This is why people who do brilliant work with attachment-challenged families — Daniel Hughes, Bryan Post, Heather Forbes — see as the #1 goal to create conditions of security and trustworthiness for the child. And the job belongs to nobody other than to the parents. Extreme situations contain instructive seeds for more average ones, and that is the case here. Thus, the answer to the question posed in my title: In every family, it is the parents’ job to foster attachment. To be a safe, secure place. To be a home base. It is solely the child’s job to be. Period. To be.
Dr. Gordon Neufeld
This is why I flinch when watching the YouTube video (which won’t play here because of its ads) of an expert whose book I recommend as frequently as my own. I flinch when I hear Gordon Neufeld’s response to the interviewer’s question, “Why are parents so confused?”
Along with too much information (“so many people telling them what to do”), which I agree contributes significantly to parental stress and confusion, Neufeld goes on to say,
Part of the problem is that our children are not pulling the best out of us, they’re not pushing the right buttons.
Here’s the thing: it is our responsibility as parents to make those “right buttons” so irresistible that our kids can’t not push them! When we cultivate within ourselves the calm authority our children need and seek, it organically fosters the “right relationship” Neufeld speaks of.
When children are in right relationship with their parents, when they’re dependent upon them, it brings the most wonderful alpha provider instincts out of the adult. But many of our children are not attaching properly, they’re not attaching deep enough, and then we lose our confidence that we’re their answer.
Despite his wording, I doubt Dr. Neufeld believes secure attachment is the child’s job. His book Hold On To Your Kids (which I recommend almost as often as my own book, especially to parents of tweens and teens) is full of excellent recommendations for parents who want to enrich and strengthen the attachment process with their children.
If you actually posture yourself as if you’re your child’s answer, it pulls out the right place in you.
Oh how true this is! The heart of coaching I do with parents addresses the downward spiraling loss of confidence so many parents experience today. Neufeld also hints at one of the unsung virtues of healthy connection — its positive effect on discipline:
Children need to be in right relationship with their parents for their parents to be able to have the context to parent them and have the power they need to do their job. The secret and the key to it all is in the child’s attachments to the adults responsible.
Indeed — a child enjoying a secure, connected relationship with her parents experiences it a privilege and a joy to behave in harmony with their wishes. In this way, robust attachment is like the power steering of parenting!
So yes, it is your job to create the conditions for healthy relationship with your child. But take heart, for as I point out as often as I can, this is not about perfection but rather about striving. There is tremendous power in striving, even proven by neurodevelopmental research. As Gordon Neufeld so wisely points out,
When you rise to the occasion to become the parent your child needs, it grows us up, and we find that we can find a way there.
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Image of mother and baby by Lisa Pflaum, used with permission
About Marcy Axness
I'm the author of “Parenting for Peace: Raising the Next Generation of Peacemakers," and also the adoption expert on Mothering's expert panel. I write and speak around the world on prenatal, child and parent development, and I have a private practice coaching parents-in-progress. I raised two humans, earned a doctorate, and lived to report back. On the wings of my new book I'm delighted to be speaking at many wonderful conferences all over the world in the coming months, and I'm happy to be sharing dispatches and inside glimpses with you here on Mothering.com! As a special gift to Mothering readers I'm offering "A Unique 7-Step Parenting Tool."
Ms. Axness clearly has never lived with a child who has a RAD diagnosis. Had she woken in the middle of the night to a child holding a knife over her body, had her milk spiked with Drano, had urine splashed in her refrigerator, been falsely accused of child abuse, or one of the many other nightmares that we as RAD parents face, she may have a very different opinion of how hard we work to facilitate attachment with our kids. Often times we as parents are forced into the sad realization that no matter how hard we try, or children may not ever become attached to us. To blame or indicate laziness on the part of the parent demonstrates a distinct lack of understanding concerning attachment. Life might be ponies and rainbows at Ms. Axness' home, but for those of us who live and deal with traumatized children, life is a long, difficult road, sometimes without a "happily ever after."
Taking responsibility always, in every instance, only means one thing: You are responsible for how you think, feel and behave. No one else can control that. The moment you allow another whether adult or child, to dictate to you your own feelings and behaviors then you are no longer taking responsibility, you are being reactive. When we are being reactive then we are being held hostage, victimized by the other. There is no freedom in being victimized, only fear, stress, and pain.
Arguments about labels and diagnosis go nowhere. It's all pain and the sooner we transcend labels and focusing on such the sooner we will get down to really facing the pain and fear that gives root to them. Otherwise we'll only continue to add another diagnosis or another medication and where does that get us? Nowhere...just more confused.
Can someone who's never been an alcoholic counsel an alcoholic? Before we can answer we must understand what counsel means...to give counsel or advice...it does not indicate to be the all knowing authority. Axness is offering advice based on personal and professional experience but it is only advice and it is not blaming. Her words are wise counsel. Listen as openly as you can, take what feels good and let the rest go. Try to feel good today...right now...in the midst of it all...even as the child circles the house with a can of gasoline threatening to burn it down...there you will find some peace. When you find peace then you can try to find understanding. When you find understanding then you can find love. And in that space if you do not feel safe, if you can no longer go another day, if you don't want to be a parent to your child anymore, that won't make you bad and it need not make the child bad either, it is just what is. No blame.