I gravitated towards the attachment theory early on in my counseling program. I grew out of a Rogerian way of thinking. Rogerian, because it naturally aligned with my humanistic and Catholic ways of living. And to be clear, these were ideal identities not so much how I could be seen. Karen Horney opened up my understanding to the idea of needs and relationships in a profound way. She elegantly describe this complicated dynamic from a medical perspective. This sparked my interest in and induction into the bodies role in relationships. It also became the junction that helped me leave the counseling professional systems.
A women, in a world of male dominated ideas, had the courage to label neurosis as complex first before disease. Again this is my perception and not a statement about the psychoanalytical world. Dr. Horney saw the movement and transfer of energy between experiences and encounters, and had the fearlessness to make it shared across all of us versus calling it dysfunction. Her promotion of directions taught me early on how we have a preference for clarity, or maybe exactness, while functioning in a realism of unknowns and the infinite.
Dr Horney helped me see the complexity that human relationship creates in the context of existential safety. This is completely out of the colonial concept of safety. A safety that might have been birthed from the idea or mentality known as civilized. Safety in the moral sense, maybe. Regardless it was a safety that has continued and possibly expressed best as the idea we now call dignity.
Centuries after Dr Horney challenged the likes of Freud and Jung, we still arrive at the necessity of healing. The torch was passed in several directions and this is what a counseling foundations course will describe. All the different attitudes towards one destination, wellness. The evolution of healing might best be described in an anthropology of medicine track. And we all can't enroll in a program to gain the knowledge that informed me of how we are constantly wounding ourselves while also satisfying our survival needs, trying to unrealistically maximize our pleasures. This cannot be a sustainable understanding of civilized.
After reading the works of Dr Dan Siegle and Dr. Bessel Van der Kolk I was pulled into needing to know more about how much our physiology impacted our behavior. I couldn't undo the rational that the behavioral strategies were suffocating the healing process. I could see the criticality of propagating the message that our physiology and neurology are profound and dealing with their shortcoomings were counterintuitive to addressing the notion of healing. The counterintuitive will be the basis of this book because I see the counterintuitive as the pathway into the clarity of paradox.
The trauma work of Dr. Van der Kolk and the mindfulness neuroscience of Dr. Siegle were layers in my maturity as a counselor, giving me concepts that started to overlap. Like a venn diagram's layers falling into place, overlapping to create areas of opacity. Lets call, for simplicities sake, these layers as trauma, brain as part of body, and attachment. The areas that I was now see standing out, bolded. These insights in retrospective were most effective in my practice.
I think this is where I began to graduate out of the ideas that the child attachment research taught me to think of and categorize myself and my clients as being in a condition. It may be that the four attachment styles were meant to be seen as loose boundaries, and I feel inspired to take it further. I want to preach the necessity for the chaotic sojourner and teach the essentials of orientation versus condition. I began to recognize how the counseling profession either wasn't even looking at the attachment perspective or convincing families that our wellness could be found in a simple willful explosion of better cognitive decisions, choices, or worse morality.
Without going too much into what attachment is; there are endless literatures on the foundations of attachment theory. Attachment has been the evolution of several people's life work and can't be summarized into a well intention blog on how attachment theory is incomplete. I see it as the biological perspective to describe how our early neurobiology is informing, constructing, and distributing energies from our environment, genetics, and consumption of numerous natural and artificial resources. These variables are just a summary to hint at the vastness of what goes into our psychology. And keep in mind I cannot speak with truth about this.
What I share is through observation first. Observations gathered as an inspired broken man working through my own experiences and my finding opportunities for growth. Secondly through my work as a counselor and the progress of the families I've witnessed. These variables mentioned are how I see us generating and sharing energy at a quantum level. I suggest this because I learned that it is often helpful to see it as as small as a molecule and as significant as a hormone, from something as powerful as a hurtful phrase to a car accident. It could be the amount of vegetables your mother ate during her pregnancy to the trauma your grandmother experienced in her childhood. These variables are also well written about and, most importantly, still being written about.