sharpened in “the individual [who] may urgently need to reflect upon the minds of sometimes—or frequently—malevolent caregivers, and challenging sibling relationships. Being able to predict forthcoming hostility directed at the self, to have a theory of the malevolent other’s mind, may prove essential to survival.”
And so it made perfect sense to me that my reflective functioning was pretty high.
However, there was one little loophole that was bugging me.
In the adult attachment literature, there is one type of secure adult—the F3B—who is considered “earned secure.” This rare classification is reserved for a person who reports a lot of adversity in his or her childhood but is deemed secure now. The thinking is that this person was insecure as a baby and in childhood, but somewhere along the way—through therapy or a loving relationship or spiritual practice—had healed himself or herself into having a secure/autonomous internal working model. I wondered if this was me.
The problem with this “earned secure” category is that there are so few longitudinal studies that show a child’s classification in the Strange Situation and also include their adult classification for comparison. And in the few that do exist, such cases are rare. Attachment tends to remain consistent, and negative events have more of an impact than positive ones, usually leading a person in a more insecure direction rather than a more secure one. But I wanted to be sure. Had my adult security been passed down to me, or had I earned it through all my hours on the meditation cushion, in therapy, in self-reflection? If the generational transmission of attachment is as robust as the field claims it is—75 percent!—then there was one way to be at least 75 percent sure. I wanted to triangulate my own data.
After Thayer and I had finished our two-week AAI training with the Steeles, my mom came to visit.
Dear reader, you know where this is headed.
My poor mom was reluctant to go through the Adult Attachment Interview, even with her beloved son-in-law, Thayer. She put on her game-like spirit, though, and said, “If it will help you with the book, I’ll do it.” But she was not happy. She was, understandably, like some of the mothers in Baltimore driving with their babies and Dr. A to the Strange Situation lab at Johns Hopkins, afraid of how she would “do,” and I must say I was a little worried, too.
It was hard to imagine my mom being able to really share openly about her past, with fresh speech and spontaneous detail. My sense of her was that she was actually pretty resistant to going too deeply into things, which frustrated me to no end. Once she told me about a “wild dream” she’d had, and when I asked her what she thought it meant, she kind of shuddered and said, “I don’t even want to know!” The more I learned about what it takes to be scored as an autonomous adult, the more I doubted my mom would make the cut.
If my mom turned out to be dismissing—I didn’t think she’d be preoccupied—it might plant a seed of doubt about Azalea’s and my classification. I wanted to hit an attachment home run.
On the day Thayer and my mom were set to do the AAI, they both seemed to be, well, avoiding the task at hand. Finally, after going back and forth about the best place in the house to do their interview, Thayer got them all set up downstairs on some couches, with his phone as the recorder and a white noise machine for an attempt at privacy.
When they got started on our lower level, I was in the kitchen, at the top of the stairs, puttering around trying to distract myself. I immediately realized that I could still hear Thayer’s clinical voice from downstairs, asking my mom to describe the people in her family growing up. I didn’t want to interrupt them, so I just went into my study to keep myself from eavesdropping. But then I had to “get a drink of water” and heard this:
THAYER: I’d like you to just try to describe your relationship with your parents as a young child. And if you