Cherri. He showed me Mary’s mother’s silver tea set, which he’d inherited, and a painting by her favorite artist, Herman Maril, of a boat in a Maryland harbor. Bob and Cherri took me out for dinner. We drank red wine and talked about Mary. Bob and I cried.
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I STARTED TO see attachment everywhere. It kept showing up in articles that I thought were about something else and in books that had always been on my shelves. And I started to see it in the world—in the outstretched arms of a toddler looking for an uppie, in the way a baby’s eyes rest on her papa on the subway, in a husband and wife searching each other’s faces for comfort, in an otherwise distant kid wanting a cuddle when ill, in every Snapchat streak or FaceTime exchange. Every time I turned around, there were people being moved by a deep and physical need to be close to a special someone.
Bowlby put it this way: Young mammals and birds, when afraid, run to a place—a den, burrow, or nest. When we humans are afraid, we run to a person. As Bowlby wrote to his wife, Ursula, in a letter in 1958: “Most people think of fear as running away from something. But there is another side to it. We run TO someone, usually a person.” Everywhere I looked, there it was again: someone running to someone, seeking comfort.
A baby rabbit hops to its mother when a hungry fox appears. A human baby is happily playing in a room when a stranger enters, then looks to her mother to confirm that all is well. An adult woman is thrown into total psychic shock when her own baby arrives. She scrambles and searches. She reads and wonders. She begins to feel felt by an idea.
chapter thirteen
On a weekend in December, some of our monastery friends—psychotherapists like Thayer—visited from Toronto. They were fans of Bowlby and Ainsworth and had just gone to a lecture by the well-known writer, neuroscientist, and attachment researcher Dr. Dan Siegel, and they had a whole other perspective on attachment, one I had not yet heard of.
After we got Azalea to sleep in a mountain of stuffed animals, we brought out the wine and cheese and sat in the dining nook of our now-blue house, ready for a serious catch-up. After delving into our personal details and family updates, they told us about an attachment research tool called the Adult Attachment Interview, which was basically a Strange Situation for adults. It was created by one of Mary Ainsworth’s star pupils, for the purpose of revealing the “internal working model”—the mental representation—of an adult’s attachment system.
The AAI is an interview of twenty questions about a person’s early relationships. It is administered by researchers, then transcribed verbatim. Through his or her responses, an individual’s attachment “type” is discerned, like the secure/insecure categories of babyhood, but for adults. The categories are “secure/autonomous,” “insecure/dismissing,” and “insecure/preoccupied.”
Researchers have found that there is a massive 75 percent correlation* between an adult’s attachment security as determined by the Adult Attachment Interview and the future Strange Situation results of their unborn child. In other words, you could predict the attachment security of your kid based on this test before he or she was even born. I was floored. Just what was it that was being measured?
As our friends explained that evening, the thing that is being looked at and what is being classified in the AAI isn’t what happened to us as kids. It’s the “mind in relation to attachment” that the AAI elicits—our present-day, very much alive experience of the past, not the past itself—which, of course, is long gone. Kind of, sort of.
Our friends explained that through our language—the words we use to tell the story of our first relationships—researchers claim to be able to track the way we think and feel about love. And that internal story develops into a way of being in our relationships, especially our most important attachment relationships. More than behaviors, it’s that way of being we pass down, hence the 75 percent predictability.
Something clicked.
My life as a Zen student had taught me many things—how to be utterly still, how to clean a bathroom like I