Read the full transcript of couple therapist Anne Power’s talk titled “Attachment Theory Is The Science of Love” at TEDxWaldegrave Road 2024 conference.
Listen to the audio version here:
TRANSCRIPT:
ANNE POWER: The story I’m bringing you today is about an idea. It emerged in this city, London, a hundred years ago. It’s been refined by thousands of research studies, and today it’s buzzing on social media platforms around the world. What’s this idea that goes on spreading?
It’s about love. You may say, there are no new ideas about love, and I would say, this isn’t romance, it’s science. Attachment theory sees love as part of our evolutionary design, and the term attachment describes a particular kind of close bond between two people, the kind of connection that when they’re together, they feel safe, and when they’re apart, they may feel lost. I believe an understanding of attachment theory can make a profound difference to the way we love, and to the way we allow others to love us.
I hold this conviction from two sources, 25 years as a therapist helping people repair their early attachments, and 65 years as an individual making sense of my own attachment story. Today I would like to give you three takeaways about attachment, but first, let’s begin that story into the origins of the theory.
Origins of Attachment Theory
Let me take you to the 1930s, to North London, to an elite professional group, the Institute of Psychoanalysis. There’s a new member in the group, John Bowlby, but he’s not fitting in.
His mind is too scientific to win friends here, yet within a few decades, his ideas will be known and studied in universities around the world, and in the 21st century, they’re popping up in our newsfeeds, influencing how we raise our children and work on our relationships.
Bowlby believed all behavior makes sense in context. It’s a belief that can inspire curiosity and respect for our own behavior, and for the behavior of those around us, and it inspired Bowlby to make sense of the parent-child bond.
We’re looking at an image from a 1930s experiment, where a baby monkey has been taken from his real mother and placed in a cage. There are two options in the cage, a wild mother who can provide milk, and a cloth mother who has no milk, but whose softness provides a crumb of comfort. The experiments show that the monkeys chose the cloth mother every time, and they only reach for the wild mother when they really need to feed.
Bowlby studied these experiments, and he noticed that young creatures attach to their caregiver. They attach to the one who provides safety and comfort, and he stressed that this attachment to a supportive other is not just for babies. We all need someone to whom we can turn, whose presence soothes us when we’re troubled. Bowlby saw evolution at work. This bonding behavior is so deeply embedded in us because it supports survival of the species.
His team noticed that human infants, like the baby monkeys, adapt their behavior to get the best care in their given situation. So let’s imagine two different homes and see how the babies there are coping.
If my mum only rouses from her depression, when I make her hue and cry, then that’s what I’ll learn to do. In the next door house, the baby is an equally quick learner, but his mum has a different character. She’s not comfortable with feelings, so this little boy will adopt a different strategy. To get the best care from his mum, he’ll learn to keep his feelings under wraps.
Attachment researchers would say that the first child who amplifies feelings is developing an anxious attachment strategy, and the second child who minimizes is more avoidant. Now at this point, those of you who are parents might be thinking, what hope for us? We’re doing our best. And perhaps just as adults, you might be thinking, what if our own parents had emotional struggles when we were young? But I don’t want to give you the feeling that these two children are going to have terrible lives. They’re not. They’re normal kids, and many of us are a bit like one of these. But if they’re going to have fulfilling relationships, then they will need to unlearn some of that early training.
Attachment Theory Faces Resistance
But now back to our story. We’ve reached the 1950s, and attachment theory is coming into conflict with the establishment. You may not know that hospitals did not always allow parents to stay alongside their children on the wards. In the austere regime of 50s Britain, visiting was kept to one hour a week on a Sunday. Staff were so convinced of the rightness of this, they allowed one of Bowlby’s collaborators to film a two-year-old as she was admitted to hospital. Picture her, alone, with no parent by her side. The subsequent black and white footage was so poignant, it allowed campaigners to achieve a complete change in the rules.
But the campaign was still a struggle, because we find change difficult, and we find it hardest when we feel insecure. And that leads to the next slide. Safety enables learning. When we feel secure and confident, we’re free to learn and explore.
But when we feel threatened, learning goes out the window. Let’s imagine a young girl in the park, playing and exploring like the two boys. A huge dog comes along and scares her. What happens next?
She runs for her parents. Fear has switched on her primitive brain. And in attachment terms, this secure child is seeking her parents because the closeness with her parents will literally change her body chemistry. And then she can return to her games.
And these pathways between anxiety and reassurance exist in us as adults, too. If we trust our attachment person, the soothing can be quite easy – a touch, a text, a look. And when we feel safe again, our brains can return to full functioning.
Application of Attachment Theory to Adult Relationships
Now we’ve come to the current chapter in our story. And this chapter, I think if it was in a textbook, it might be entitled, “The Application of Attachment Theory to the Adult-Couple Bond.” So I don’t know if there’s any couples here, whether you identify with that title, but let’s see what’s happening now in the world of attachment.
John Bowlby always stressed that attachment was a need from cradle to grave. But his own focus was more on that parent-infant bond. Researchers who came after him studied the adult-adult bond, and they found the same key markers of attachment, which means that two people seek closeness when they need protection, and they protest when they’re separated, whether that’s the small separation that might happen in a disagreement, or the ultimate separation of death.
And just as with children, if the bond is secure, a secure bond in adults provides two key functions. A place of safety and a platform for growth, because safety enables learning. You remember the two groups who struggled to manage their feelings? The avoidant group who need to keep things under wraps, and the anxious group who want it out on the table. What happens if you put those two into a couple together?
Some of you might know the answer to that, but another psychologist, Susan Johnson, has studied this in detail, and she’s noticed how these two characters trigger each other, and in fact they get into a very unhappy dance, a kind of loop where they’re stuck. By describing the more anxious partner as a pursuer, and the more avoidant as a withdrawer, she has created a new map, and the map shows us what’s been hidden, and the thing that’s been hidden behind the embittered exchanges are the precious, vulnerable feelings that connect two people.
Once couples can read their own map, they can see that their partner’s behaviour makes sense in context. And when the blaming stops, learning can begin, because safety enables learning. And by the way, this is equally good news for single people, because coming to terms with our attachment patterns is a great preparation for all close relationships. And for those of us who are parents, whether our children are still young or fully grown, this understanding can deepen connection, and if repair is needed, it can help with that too.
Slowing Down for Safety and Learning
But most of us know that it’s one thing to understand the pattern, and another thing to shift it, and that takes us to our final takeaway. Slow down for the bump, slow down for safety and learning. Some of the biggest bumps and triggers we meet in our lives come from our own attachment losses and longings. It could be bereavement, betrayal, rejection.
Some of the most common triggers come from within us. It could be a mean, self-critical voice that puts us down. How can we help ourselves weather these bumps when our attachment person is not available? Learning to pay mindful attention to the self is a great help with difficult feelings.
When we’re triggered, our breathing and heart rate speed up. That’s the adrenaline. If we can learn to slow those down, we create a window where we can look with curiosity and respect on our troubled feelings. And that will give us a chance to interrupt the fight-flight mechanism before it sends us into attack or retreat.
So that’s our final takeaway, but let’s recap on the three with the last slide. All behaviour makes sense in context. Safety enables learning, and slowing down can create that safety. So let’s learn to use a slow out-breath to soothe our heart rate.
As our reactions soften, our curiosity can grow. Curiosity brings openness to the other. Openness brings vulnerability. And vulnerability is the heartbeat of all intimate relationships.
And this is why attachment theory is the science of love. Thank you.
