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Excerpt from Creating Sanctuary: Toward the Evolution of Sane Societies. Disorganized attachmentMary Ainsworth and her colleagues have taken advantage of normal stranger anxiety to discover the different ways in which children attach to their caregivers (Ainsworth et al. 1978). The typical patterns of normal attachment are well-organized and consistent over time with that particular caregiver although the pattern may be quite different with a different caretaker. Longitudinal research has begun to show that these patterns of attachment are predictive of a child’s behavior in school, at home, and in social situations to at least to the tenth year. A child’s attachment style is also consistent with parenting characteristics and parental attachmentstyle (Berman and Sperling ,1994). The fourth, and most recently identified attachment style has been called the disorganized/disoriented attachment (Main and Hess, 1990). This style is characterized by a lack of coherent strategy of relating to the caregiver. The behavior of these children is inconsistent and contradictory without the usual sequencing of behavior and with the addition of quite unusual behaviors such as freezing and hand flapping. These children appear to be caught in dilemma - their attachment figure is also the source of fear. They respond to this conflict with mental, emotional, and behavioral disorganization and confusion. This style of attachment has been found to be highly correlated with parents who have unresolved traumatic loss in their own backgrounds. The parent’s state of continuing fear and the behavioral components of this fear state frighten the child (Main and Hess, 1990). Intergenerational TransmissionThis last disturbed attachment relationship paves the way for what we call “trauma-bonding” and is probably how the multigenerational transmission of traumatic experience actually happens. Considerable evidence suggests that an individual’s relationship history is an important variable determining parental behavior (Zeanah and Zeanah, 1989). In other words, we tend to raise our children similarly to the way we were raised. This does not mean that maltreated children inevitably maltreat their children in the same way. Only a relatively small percentage do. But what can be repeated, down through the generations, are attachment styles that become organizing themes of relationships (Zeanah and Zeanah, 1989).
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