Attachment theory is the science of love | Anne Power | TEDxWaldegrave Road

The story I bring you today is about an idea that arose in this city of London 100 years ago. It has been refined by thousands of research studies and is trending today on social media platforms around the world. What is this idea that continues to spread? It's about

love

. You can say that there are no new ideas about

love

and I would say that this is not romance, it is

science

. Attachment

theory

sees love as part of our evolutionary design and the term Des

attachment

describes a particular type of close bond between two people, the type of connection that when together they feel secure and when apart they can feel loss.

I believe that understanding

attachment

theory

can make a profound difference in the way we love and the way we allow others to love us. I hold this conviction from two sources 25 years as a therapist helping people repair their early attachments and 65 years as an individual making sense of my own attachment story today I would like to give you three takeaways about attachment, but first let's begin that story Towards the Origins of theory, let me take you back to the 1930s, north London, to an elite professional group. The Institute of Psychoanalysis. There is a new member in the group.

John Bulby, but it doesn't fit in his mind. He's too much of a scientist to win friends here within a few decades. His ideas will be known and studied in universities around the world and in the 21st century they are appearing in our news feeds, influencing how we raise our children and work on our relationships. Bobby believed that all behavior makes sense in context, it is a belief that can inspire curiosity and respect for our own behavior and the behavior of those around us and inspired Bulby to make sense of the Bond father and son. Here we are looking at an image of an experiment from the 1930s in which a baby monkey has been removed from its real life. mother and placed in a cage there are two options in the cage a w mother who can provide milk and a cloth mother who has no milk but whose softness provides a crumb of comfort the experiment showed that the monkeys chose the cloth mother each time and only look for mother W when they really need to feed.

Bobby studied these experiments and noticed that young creatures become attached to their caregiver, they become attached to someone who provides them with security and comfort, and he emphasized that this attachment to another supportive person is not just for babies. We all need someone to turn to whose presence calms us when we are worried. Obi saw evolution in action. This bonding behavior is so deeply ingrained in us because it supports the survival of the species. His team noticed that human babies, like baby monkeys, adapt. their behavior to get the best care in their given situation, so let's imagine two different homes and see how the babies cope there.

If my mom only wakes up from her depression when I make a human cry, then that's what I'll learn to do in the future. In the next house, the baby learns just as fast, but his mother has a different character that she is not comfortable with feelings, so this child will adopt a different strategy to get the best attention from his mother. She will learn to keep her feelings a secret. Researchers would say that the first child who amplifies feelings is developing an anxious attachment strategy and the second child who minimizes is more avoidant Now, at this point those of you who are parents might be thinking what hope for us are we doing the best? that we can and maybe Like adults, you might be thinking: What if our own parents had emotional struggles when we were young?

But I don't want to give you the feeling that these two children are going to have terrible lives. They are not normal children. Many of us are a bit like one of these, but if you are going to have satisfying relationships then you are going to need to unlearn some of that initial training, but now, going back to our story, we have reached the 1950s and attachment theory is coming in. in conflict. With the system, you may not know that hospitals did not always allow parents to stay with their children in the wards during the austere regime of Britain in the 1950s.

Visits were limited to one hour a week on Sundays. The staff were so convinced of the rightness of this. They allowed one of Bulb's collaborators to film a 2-year-old girl as she was admitted to the hospital, imagining her alone without a parent by her side. The subsequent black and white images were so moving that they allowed the activists to achieve a complete change in the rules, but the campaign was still a struggle because we find change difficult and we find it more difficult when we feel unsafe and that leads us to the next slide security allows us to learn when we feel safe and confident we are free to learn and explore when we feel threatened learning continues Through the window let's imagine a girl in the park playing and exploring like the two boys, a huge dog appears and the scares, what happens next, he runs to his parents, fear has activated his primitive brain and in terms of attachment, this child is surely searching. your parents because being close to your parents will literally change your body chemistry and then you can get back to your games and these paths between anxiety and calm also exist in us as adults if we trust our attached person, calming can be quite easy With a touch.

Send a text message and when we feel safe again, our brain can fully function again. Now we have come to the current chapter of our story and I think this chapter, if it were in a textbook, might be titled The Application of Attachment Theory to the Bond Adult Couple, so I don't know if there are any couples here, if you You identify with that title, but let's see what is happening now in the world of attachment. John bulby um always emphasized that attachment was a necessity from the cradle to the grave, but his own focus was more on that infant parent.

Bond researchers who came after him studied adult Bond and found the same key markers of attachment, meaning two people seek closeness when they need protection and protest when separated. That is the small separation that can occur in a disagreement or the ultimate separation of death and as with children, if the attachment is secure, a secure attachment in adults provides two key functions: a place of safety and a platform. for growth because security allows us to learn to remember. the two groups that struggled to control their feelings, the avoidant group that needs to keep things secret and the anxious group that wants everything to be on the table, what happens if you put those two in a couple?

Some of you might know the answer. but another psychologist, Susan Johnson, has studied this in detail and has noticed how these two characters activate each other and, in fact, get into a very unhappy dance, a kind of loop in which they get stuck when describing the couple more anxious as one pursuer and the other. More avoidant than withdrawn, she has created a new map and the map shows us what has been hidden and what has been hidden behind the bitter exchanges are the precious vulnerable feelings that connect two people. Once couples can read their own map, they can see that their partner's behavior makes sense in context and when the blaming stops, learning can begin because safety allows for learning and, by the way, this is equally a good idea. news for single people because accepting our attachment patterns is great preparation for all close relationships and for those of us who are parents, whether our children are still young or adults, this understanding can deepen the connection and, if If a repair is necessary, it can also help, but most of us know that it is one thing to understand a pattern and another thing to change it and that brings us to our final conclusion slow down for the obstacle slow down for safety and learn some of the biggest obstacles and Triggers we find in our lives come from our own attachments, losses and longings, it could be grief, betrayal, rejection, some of the most common triggers come from within us it could be a self-critical voice that puts us down, how can we help ourselves overcome these obstacles when our attached person is not available?

Learning to pay conscious attention to ourselves is of great help with difficult feelings when we are active our breathing and our heart rate accelerates, that is the adrenaline, if we can learn to reduce them, we create a window where we can look with curiosity and respect at our problematic feelings and that will give us the opportunity to interrupt the fight and flight mechanism before it happens. sends us into attack or retreat, so that's our final conclusion, but let's recap the three of us with the last slide: all behavior makes sense in context, keeping safe allows learning and slowing down can create that safety, so let's learn to use a slow exhale to calm our heart rate.

As our reactions soften, our curiosity can grow. Curiosity brings openness towards the other. Openness brings vulnerability and vulnerability is the heartbeat of all intimate relationships and that is why attachment theory is the

science

of love. Thank you.