provide him or her with a sensitive caregiver. And remember, as Mary found early on and as thousands of studies since have affirmed and validated, this sensitivity is a state of mind that can always be accessed by anyone—regardless of wealth, race, ethnicity, sexuality, or how much time our kids spend in daycare.
Attachment security is a state of mind.
Mary Main has a phrase that I love and think about all the time: “attentional flexibility.” This is the term she uses to describe the ability of the infant in the Strange Situation to move her attention from the parent to her toys, and back again, as her attachment system is aroused and soothed by her caregiver’s presence. An avoidant baby can’t as readily move between parent and separation, sticking to toys even when afraid or uncomfortable in the episodes of separation, instead of going to the door and wailing as many secure babies do. It’s as if, as early as one year old, the avoidant baby has a plan for how to deal with her disappointment—and she’s sticking to it. The resistant baby chaotically moves back and forth without ever settling. The attachment relationship isn’t doing its job of bringing the baby back to homeostasis.
Likewise, Main found that the adult in the AAI expresses this same quality of attentional flexibility in the ability to move back and forth (or not) between describing experiences (what happened) and evaluating those experiences from the present state of mind—two different types of cognitive tasks. The resonance between what the adult reports as having happened and the way those events are evaluated indicates the adult’s state of mind in relation to attachment. Is there a fluid back-and-forth that makes sense, that is clear and concise and relatively supported by a reasonable level of detail? Not so much as to overwhelm and get the adult mired, and not so little as to not reveal anything significant? Is he or she (or they) an “excellent informant”? Or is the person’s attention stuck somewhere like a branch in the river of life, to use the metaphor I read the first time I picked up Joko Beck’s book Nothing Special in the Barnes & Noble? This lack of flexibility gets in the way of manifesting our life’s function, whatever that may be.
Attentional flexibility is a way of understanding Missy’s ability to manage herself in the Play-Doh-cookie-sharing incident. She was obviously upset, so she took herself away from the action and then, once she’d settled herself, was able to return. This aspect of experience is called “emotional regulation.” The capacity to self-regulate is strongly associated with attachment security, and it is the thing, in my opinion—the holy grail of human experience. Why? Because being able to regulate our emotions and physiological responses allows us to be present—in the moment—which, after all, from a Buddhist point of view, is where life really happens.
The popular Buddhist teacher Pema Ch?dr?n writes, “To the degree that we’re willing to see our enmeshment or grasping and our repressing [our avoidance and preoccupation] clearly, they begin to wear themselves out…That’s what we’re doing in meditation: Up come all these thoughts, but rather than squelch them or obsess about them [because we have attentional flexibility and we don’t get stuck], we acknowledge them and let them fade.” It’s not surprising that many studies have found a direct correlation between mindfulness and attachment security, and that the capacity to self-regulate is considered the mediating factor connecting those dots.
Which is why it seems to me that if we want our children to take full advantage of the lives we work so hard to offer them, a good way to do that is to help them build the type of mind that can take it all in.
And how do we do that?
Regardless of who we are, or our bio-or-otherwise connection to the child we hope to raise well, we nurture secure children by becoming secure in ourselves, by becoming more supple and receptive and flexible in our own minds. As I’ve shared here, through work like the Steeles’ and Bob Marvin’s, it’s never too late, even for parents whose own upbringing was far from ideal.
One powerful example of attachment training,