Relationships are based on feelings of mutuality, trust, and security. These feelings provide blueprints for how we love, negotiate, compromise, and problem-solve. Like a dance, they guide you on how you respond to your partner's moves. But you’re not just dancing with your partner. How you dance harkens back to early attachment relationships with primary caregivers—relational strokes and feedback loops can be positive and negative. How you connect as an adult with family, friends, co-workers, and partners can be traced to these early attachments.

In this blog series, I offer insight into how we learn to relationally dance, focusing on how positive and negative strokes lead to positive and negative feedback loops. No matter your current attachment style, the good news is that like a bad dance move (think Elaine, Seinfeld), you can retrace your steps and learn a better way of dancing with the people in your life.

What is attachment

In 1969, the British psychoanalyst, John Bowlby diverged from Freud’s belief that children are guided by the pleasure principle, noting that infants and toddlers seek comfort, protection, and food when developing connectedness. Recognized as the father of attachment theory, Bowlby defined attachment as “a lasting psychological connectedness between human beings.”

In conjunction with Bowlby’s groundbreaking work, developmental psychologist Mary Ainsworth conducted a study known as “The Strange Situation,” in which 12-month-old infants and their parents were brought to a laboratory and, systematically, separated from and reunited with one another to observe how children responded to their mothers leaving them and then returning.

Ainsworth identified three styles of attachment:

1. Secure attachment: Exhibits distress when a caregiver leaves; avoids interaction with a stranger in absence of caregiver; happy when caregiver returns; caregiver viewed as safe harbor to explore world and other people. [70% of all infants.]

2. Insecure, avoidant attachment: Exhibits no distress when caregiver leaves; engages with stranger in absence of caregiver; exhibits little interest in mother upon her return; child comforted equally by caregiver and stranger. [15% of all infants.]

3. Insecure, anxious-ambivalent attachment: Exhibits extreme distress when mother leaves; fearful of stranger; approaches caregiver upon his/her return but may reject her/him; child cries and lacks interest in exploring environment. [15% of all infants.]

A fourth category, Disorganized Attachment, was identified later and represents the most distressed of the categories: Exhibits exaggerated resistance and distress to receive needed attention from caregiver; often cries prior to separation; comfort does not reassure child, and engenders anger and anxiety.

Childhood attachment: Positive & Negative Strokes

Bowlby’s and Ainsworth’s work has been further researched, and attachment styles remain standard tenets of early development models and relational models. This short video features an experiment known as, “Still Face,” first conducted by Dr. Edward Tronick in 1975. Watch as the attachment between mother and infant shifts and spotlights the subtleties of emotional and physical bonding experienced by the child.

Dr. Tronick’s original experiment has been conducted with similar results for three decades. The main takeaways include:

The still face experiment demonstrated that very young infants already have several basic building blocks of social cognition in place. It suggested that they have some sense of the relationship between facial expression and emotion, that they have some primitive social understanding, and that they are able to regulate their own affect and attention to some extent. The infants' attempts to re-engage with their caregivers also suggest that they are able to plan and execute simple goal-directed behaviors.

In other words, re-engaging serves as a supportive salve, encouraging the infant to return to the primary relationship to navigate future-oriented plans and directives.

Child Attachment & Adult Engagement

How we dance—how we engage in feedback loops—develops in early childhood, as we attempt to get our needs met. When our needs are met, our experiences are positive. You respond with a giggle, smile, or reduction in crying; and your primary caregiver responds positively with a soft touch, a smile, a bit of food, or a coo. These are known as “positive strokes,” and when two individuals engage in them repeatedly, they form a positive feedback loop.

When our needs aren’t met, however, we develop strategies, e.g., dance moves, to gain the attention of our primary caregivers. You may respond by crying, running away, hitting, biting, or throwing a temper tantrum in an increasingly desperate need to get your caregiver’s attention. These behaviors can lead to scolding, avoidance, punishment, angry facial expressions—or giving in and allowing the child what they want. These are known as “negative strokes,” and, when repeated between two individuals, they can form a negative feedback loop.

These early connections are wired, i.e., engrained, in your brain and shape your autonomic nervous system—the same system that regulates involuntary responses such as heart rate, blood pressure, digestion, respiration, and sexual arousal.

How we learn to connect as children impacts how we connect as adults.

The good news is that because of our brain’s plasticity we can actively rewire connections that are harmful or not useful, even in our 70s and 80s!

Shedding life-long fears of abandonment, dependency, or intimacy is possible! Whether you are an individual seeking therapy or a couple interested in improving or enhancing you relationship, working with a psychotherapist can help you understand your attachment style and grow new and meaningful ways to connect with others.

Lisa A. Rainwater, PhD, MA (couns) LCMHC, CCMHC, CGP, CT is the owner of Rainwater Counseling in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, where she provides depth psychotherapy and relational attachment and grief counseling to individuals and couples. She earned a master’s in German Studies from the University of Oregon; a master’s in Counseling from Wake Forest University; and a doctorate in German and Scandinavian Studies from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Lisa is a Certified Thanatologist through the Association of Death Education and Counseling and is seeking certification in Grief Therapy as Meaning Reconstruction at the Portland Institute for Loss and Transition. She is currently enrolled in a year-long program, Jungian and Post-Jungian Clinical Concepts, at the Centre of Applied Jungian Studies.

I invite you to contact me for a free 30-minute consult, so we can learn more about each other.