Ep 39: Attachment Basics to Know Before Re-Parenting Your Inner Child
[INTRODUCTION]
Sawadee ka, and welcome to the Come Back to Care podcast. A place where we’re re-imagining parenting to be deeply decolonized and intentionally intergenerational. If you’ve been looking for ways to practice social justice in your daily parenting and nurture your child’s development while re-parenting your inner child, I’m so glad you’re here. I am your host, Nat Nadha Vikitsreth, a decolonized and licensed clinical psychotherapist, somatic abolitionist, and founder of Come Back to Care. A dot connector, norm agitator and lover of liberation. In this podcast, we turn down the volume of oppressive social norms and outdated family patterns so that we can hear our inner voice and raise our children by our own values too. We come back home to our body and the goodness within. We come back to our lineages and communities. And we come back to care… together. So come curious and come as you are.
[EPISODE]
I want to begin our conversation today with gratitude. Every time I picture you tuning in whether you’re driving, cooking, or doing laundry, I know you’re actively healing your internalized oppression wounds and loving up on yourself and your inner child, all while raising your child. It brings me hope to imagine you showing up in parenting less triggered and more centered and plugging into social justice advocacy in your community also less triggered and more centered…most of the time. I’m deeply honored to be in the struggle for liberation with you. Thank you for tuning in, for integrating our explorations into your daily parenting, for sharing this Podcast with those you care about, and for leaving a rating and review too. To put my gratitude for you into action, I’d love to offer a virtual gathering once a month for you to digest the information in the podcast with me and other social justice curious listeners. We’ll put awareness into action together with group accountability. I’ll facilitate this caring space and you come curious and come as you are. We’ll support each other in solidarity and co-create decolonized parenting and inner child re-parenting in action together. All the details are at patreon.com/comebacktocare. It’s patreon (p-a-t-r-e-o-n).com/comebacktocare.
Going against the oppressive status quo and familiar family cycles is hard but we do it together and we sure make it fun, don’t we? Welcome back to episode 39 of the Come Back to Care Podcast.
In this episode, you and I are going to explore a question that one listener emailed me about attachment theories: this listener asked me to explain what inner child wounds are and how to re-parent our inner child. And they asked me to keep it short and sweet. As a dot connector who loves nuances and complexities, I’ll do my best. So we’ll start by going right to the heart of attachment to explore why we need to shift from saying “attachment styles” to “attachment strategies.” Then, we’ll continue our exploration of why attachment discussions need to be grounded in a social-political analysis; otherwise, we risk perpetuating ableist, individualistic, and patriarchal illusions of mental health. We’re going back to basics together to get at the heart of what it takes to heal. If that sounds generative to you, please wish me luck as I’m trying to keep this exploration as brief as I can.
An amazing dad, Raj, gave me permission to share their question and they wrote quote: “Nat, my partner and I have been enjoying your podcast. We wish we knew about our inner child wounds sooner. That would have saved us a lot of arguments. We were trying to explain inner child re-parenting to our friends at a library playgroup and it was hard for us to give them the 411. I guess my question is how would you describe inner child re-parenting to someone new to the concept but make it brief? Thanks, Nat” End quote.
First, I love it so much when you email me with questions, takeaways, and celebrations. Thank you, Raj. Second, inner child wounds would make for a really fun party conversation, right? So, let’s begin with the business-as-usual aka Western attachment research. Then, we’ll layer a social-political analysis on top to practice decolonized mental health.
Translating Parent-Child Attachment & Adult Attachment Theories And Research
How safe and comfortable you feel about starting relationships, being in relationships, saying no or setting boundaries in relationships, and leaving relationships are all shaped by your earliest relationships between you and those who raised you. For example, if someone came to you when you cried as a baby- not all the time and not perfectly but predictably enough and consistently enough- you’re likely to learn that “I matter because I’m important enough for someone to care for me. It’s safe to ask for help because someone I trust will be there to help me...most of the time.” Fast forward to elementary school, you might have been struggling with a task so you asked for help from your teacher. Asking for help felt easeful and receiving help did too because from your past experiences, someone has consistently been there for you when you needed help. Plus, you knew that you matter, and your struggle didn’t diminish your self-worth. Fast forward to adulthood, you might feel a little nervous interrupting the team meeting because the manager said something that’s excluding and hurting your colleagues of color. But even with that nervousness, you feel safe enough to speak up. Stating your needs and standing up for what you believe in again feels easeful because you’ve done it many times throughout your history and it has been consistently safe for you to express your needs. In attachment literature, this relationship pattern is called a secure attachment according to a developmental psychologist and a pioneer in attachment research, Mary Ainsworth, in her studies back in the 1970’s.
To say it differently, your earliest relationships shape your current and future relationships. So what happens when you cried, asked for help, sought connections and comfort but no one was there to meet you where you were at? Maybe you asked for comfort but you were given criticism instead. Or, you asked for connection, but you were given rejection. Or, perhaps you were given that connection and comfort but it was so inconsistent and chaotic. And as a child, experiencing criticism, rejection, abandonment, or humiliation from those who were supposed to care for you and protect you is extremely painful.
To avoid experiencing this pain, you might have overlearned that “you know when I ask for connection, I get criticized. So I’m going to push my need for connection down and snuff it out. It’s safer for me to play quietly by myself even though I want my parents to play with me.” Fast forward to adulthood, asking for help, being vulnerable, and bidding for connection become really hard because throughout your history you’ve overlearned independence and you’ve under learned inter-dependence. Attachment researchers would categorize this relationship pattern as avoidant attachment.
So we’ve covered two categories of attachment so far: secure and avoidant. I’m sure that in your own research you might have come across the other two categories: anxious and disorganized. Knowing what types of attachment describe your go-to relationship pattern is important because you can pick the right medicine to heal the right wound. Especially because a parent’s attachment type can predict their children’s attachment type for about 75% of the time. That means if you have a secure attachment type, it’s very likely that your child will also have a secure attachment type. Do you remember the attachment pioneer I mentioned earlier in the episode, Mary Ainsworth? One of Mary Ainsworth’s students named Mary Main and her colleagues found this 75% predictability back in 1985. And from 1985 to now, three decades and 95 studies later, we have the data to confirm that caregivers pass down their attachment to their children. So when we casually say that family cycles or generational curses get passed down from one generation to the next, the science behind it is this…specifically the field of the intergenerational transmission of attachment. That’s my nerdy way of saying that knowing which category of attachment you have is important so that you can upgrade it and stop passing it down to future generations.
Problematizing Linear Thinking
Now allow me to add some nuance to the research we just discussed because attachment research, just like other fields of study in Western psychology, is rooted in Euro-American values. To actively practice anti-racism and anti-oppression, I believe we need to agitate two oppressive biases. First, the linear thinking of white supremacy and colonialism and, second, the individualistic conditioning from capitalism.
Micha Frazer-Carroll, the author of Mad World: The Politics of Mental Health, argues that in Western culture certainty is highly coveted. We love knowing that A leads to B and we love that the path from A to B is linear and clear cut. For example, if you have these symptoms, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders or the DSM tells you that your diagnosis is depression. Because the logic of colonialism requires that we be objective, hierarchical, and measurable aka scientific to impose social order according to Boaventura de Sousa Santos, a professor of sociology and the author of The End of the Cognitive Empire.
Coming back to our conversation about attachment, it might feel really good to have a label that explains your relationship style…labels like “an avoidant attachment style” or an anxious attachment style. It’s linear and clear cut. Point A is your caregivers attuned to you this way when you were little so Point B is you have this attachment style. Again, the science of attachment is quite solid. But once we have our labels or diagnoses, a lot of the time we stop there. When we describe our attachment style we think of it as something static. It becomes a part of our identity.
A good friend of mine went on a date and they asked me to be their wing woman because they wanted me to keep an eye out any red flag on this person they had an Internet crush on. We sat down at the park. I felt like a third wheel but I brought nuts to feed the squirrels at the park…you know as one does. Then, my friend introduced themselves “I’m a Scorpio, a goof ball, and an anxious attachment style.” I wish you could have seen my face then. First of all, a Scorpio being goofy? I don’t know. More importantly, no you aren’t an attachment style. You have attachment strategies.
Dan Siegel shared that Mary Main said to him that attachment isn’t a style. It’s not a style of shoes. That makes a lot of sense, right? Style is something you choose: you choose what shoes to wear but you don’t choose that you’re going to be anxious or avoidant. Rather, you adapted how to talk, walk, and behave to whatever your caregivers liked, accepted, or felt comfortable with; otherwise, you risked the emotional pain of rejection, humiliation, criticism, or abandonment. You adapted to blend in and belong. This adaptation is a survival strategy that children do.
So, no you and I don’t have attachment styles. We have attachment strategies…strategies we had to overlearn to protect ourselves from experiencing emotional pain. And over time our survival strategy or attachment strategy becomes second nature, like a habit or a personality trait. In the avoidant attachment example earlier, if bidding for connection is going to get you rejection, being alone is safer. Your friends might label you a lone wolf, or an introvert, or worse anti-social. How’s that resonating with you so far?
Words are powerful. My invitation is for us to unlearn that linear thinking that results in quote unquote “attachment styles” and to replace “styles” with “strategies.” And here’s why. Strategies bring a) compassion and b) action. I’ll elaborate. You’re independent, anxious, clingy, guarded, or people pleasing in relationships because you had to be since you were little to protect yourself. You have these attachment strategies because they kept you alive. It doesn’t mean you’re flawed or less than. You did what you had to do with the survival strategies you had to overlearn. These survival strategies were exactly what you needed for your protection as a child but they might be outdated now when you’re trying to be the parent you want to be. Being too independent, too anxious, too clingy, too guarded, or too people pleasing in parenting often disrupts how you make your child feel seen, heard, and loved. And that leads to our second point: action. You can upgrade these outdated survival strategies so that you have more options when it comes to how you want to show up for your child. When it’s a strategy, you’re not stuck. You can do something about it even though you keep sounding like your parents when you snap and yell at your child. It’s possible to shift from automatic reaction to intentional responses. The pain from the past doesn’t always have to be a pickle in the present. Dan Siegel and Tina Payne Bryson wrote quote “History is NOT destiny… Secure attachment can be earned and learned” End quote. That means once you understand where your caregivers were coming from and why they raised you that way, you can give yourself the care and love you wanted as a child that you didn’t get. In other words, you can re-parent your inner child or your younger self and heal those inner child wounds.
Let’s recap. We started by describing both parent-child attachment and adult attachment research. Then, we unlearned linear thinking conditioning together by shifting our focus from attachment styles to attachment strategies. This way we can do something about our past relationship patterns and stop passing them down to our children.
Problematizing Individualism
Speaking of doing something about our survival or attachment strategies, let’s talk about the how of re-parenting your inner child. You’ll hear me share the two foundations of inner child re-parenting that we practice at Come Back to Care and we’ll add some depth to it by talking about individualism and an indigenous philosophy of healing too. The two foundations of inner child wound healing are a) we do it with people we trust and b) we see our parents as people.
You might have heard me say this many times that inner child wounds are wounds that happened in relationships between us and those who raised us. Therefore, they need to be healed in a relationship.
When Dan Siegel and Tina Payne Bryson wrote that secure attachments can be learned and earned they meant that when you’re in a relationship with someone who can meet you where you’re at emotionally most of the time, you begin to feel like you actually matter and your needs are important too. Because of this, you begin to slowly set boundaries, ask for help, and so on without having to make yourself small or prove your worth.
And this is not new. Our beloved bell hooks wrote about this in 1999 in All About Love quote “rarely, if ever, are any of us healed in isolation. Healing is an act of communion." End quote.
Yet individualism has us believe that it’s our personal responsibility to embark on our healing journey as a solo assignment, with a checklist of self-improvement to work through on our couch alone. Just as we shift from focusing on attachment style to attachment strategy, I invite you to shift the question from what you do to heal to who you do this healing with.
Who in your ecosystem can hold space for you to feel what you feel when you feel it without judgment?
You can feel enraged about how ridiculously expensive childcare is with them without feeling like you’re spinning out of control.
You can shut down and check out for a bit and they’re right there next to you so you’re not feeling abandoned.
You can feel anxious trying to do baby-led weaning right and they’re right there holding space for your anxiety and the love for your child underneath it. They might ask “hey, if no one’s watching you, how would you do this baby-led weaning your way?”
Or if you go into people pleasing mode, they’re there next to you double checking “I know you’re easy going but what do you really want? Because your needs matter too.”
Each time these humans, pets, plants, ancestors, and the land are attuned to you and meet your emotional needs, it gives your nervous system a receipt that says “See? The fact that your co-parent didn’t text you back right away doesn’t mean they’re leaving you. You’re okay.” Or “see? The neighbor can pick the kids up from school so you can make dinner for you and the neighbor that evening. Asking for help doesn’t mean you fail as a parent. In fact, because you enjoy cooking alone in the kitchen your cup was a little fuller and so dinner with the kids that night went so well. Asking for help doesn’t have to mean disappointment.” These receipts or clinically speaking corrective experiences slowly re-wire your nervous system, re-program your attachment pattern, and re-parent your inner child.
The second foundation of inner child re-parenting is seeing our parents as people…people with their own attachment strategies and inner child wounds… people who are a byproduct of the white supremacy, colonialism, capitalism, and patriarchy of their generation. This insight can help us make sense of our upbringing. Dan Siegel again argues that when we understand where our caregivers were coming from and why they raised us they ways they did, chaotic childhood stories can become coherent. When our childhood story is coherent, we can see which parts of our family legacies we want to pass down to our child and which ones we want to leave behind. This doesn’t mean we condone our caregivers’ behaviors or throw away the boundaries we set with those who raised us. You do what you need to do to protect yourself. And…now as an adult, you can do it with more coherence of your childhood stories.
Let’s go back to the Western attachment research for a second. The premise is your caregivers attuned to you this way and that’s why you attach this way. And I get it, in research studies researchers want to know if A is related to B, right? But in real life those who raised us didn’t exist in a vacuum. Ignoring their social, cultural, and political contexts aka the water they were swimming (or trying to stay afloat) in paints an incomplete picture. Specifically, it paints a very individualistic picture that blames caregivers: “well if my caregivers attuned to me better I’d have a secure attachment.”
My invitation here is to contextualize our caregivers. Then, we can see that inner child wounds aren’t interpersonal but societal. It’s not only because “my mom didn’t love me,” but it could also be “my mom couldn’t love me in the ways I wanted to be loved because she was also surviving white, colonial, capitalist patriarchy.” To say it differently, your caregivers couldn’t attune to you because they had to attune to white, colonial, capitalist patriarchy. Your caregiver couldn’t play with you because they were occupied playing the Hunger Game of Capitalism.
Thomas Hubl, the author of Healing Collective Trauma: A Process for Integrating Our Intergenerational and Cultural Wounds, echoes this need to unlearn individualism from our healing, writing quote: “No matter how private or personal, trauma cannot belong solely to a family, or even to that family’s intricate ancestral tree. The consequences of trauma seep across communities, regions, lands, and nations.” End quote.
Whatever survival rules in society your caregivers were playing by seeps into your home as a family rule. If they had to look, dress, and talk a certain way to be perceived as quote unquote professional, no wonder why one of the family rules you grew up with was “do as you’re told, fix your face, keep your head down” and so on.
The idea that our inner child wounds are societal and intergenerational is not new to indigenous communities who have been shedding light on the inadequacies of Western psychology. Renee Linklater, the author of Decolonizing Trauma Work: Indigenous Stories and Strategies, wrote quote: “For the most part, Indigenous trauma has been largely quote unquote diagnosed through non-Indigenous theories. Western frameworks of psychiatry and psychology have medicalized the experiences of Indigenous peoples, applying diagnoses such as post-traumatic stress disorder, further pathologizing their trauma.” End quote. For example, Western clinicians often focus their interventions with their indigenous clients who are experiencing addiction on the symptoms of addiction. They neglect the intergenerational impact of genocide and land theft that inflicts what Eduardo Duran called a soul wound. As a result, these clinicians looking through the Western lens of trauma don’t see addiction, gambling, domestic violence, depression and so on as manifestations of a soul wound…as an adaptation or survival strategy people in the indigenous communities are using to cope with colonization.
When we miss the social-political-cultural contexts our caregivers were swimming in, we don’t really see literally where they were coming from. That makes it easy for us to either blame and shame them for not loving us the ways we wanted to be loved or to put a tight lid on our rage by saying to ourselves “oh you know they did the best they could.” And this pattern doesn’t help us heal our wounds.
I’m saying that inner child wounds underneath our parenting triggers are societal and intergenerational. So our healing has to be societal and intergenerational too. That’s why we’re upgrading our attachment strategies from childhood by re-parenting our inner child…so that we can bring our whole selves to abolish the system of oppression that fractured our souls.
Ah, my dear listener and co-struggler, thank you so much for going back to the basics of attachment with me. Sometimes a review needs to happen before we release what’s not serving us, right? Next episode I’ll dive deeper into one specific attachment strategy underneath codependence. Raj, I know I’m not meeting your request of making the information brief. But I trust in your capacity to make it brief for your library playgroup friends.
Every link to the research studies, books, and extra resources mentioned in this episode along with the transcript is in the episode show notes for you at comebacktocare.com/podcast.
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As always, in solidarity and sass. Until next time, please take care.