Attachment Mediates Risk

As a clinician, I was taught that my goal was not to become the most important person in a child's life.

Instead, I look for the most important person in a child's life and try to promote the bond between them by facilitating their communication, attachment and attuned responses.

Working at a school, either the child, or I, is gone after 10 weeks, one semester or a year. Even if we had more time together, is the goal for the child to be in therapy for the rest of their life?

Resiliency research shows that family members are the number one resiliency factor for most kids. School staff are number two. Therapists didn't even make the short list.

If not all young people who are exposed to traumatic events develop Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, then what mediates this risk?

Research shows, over and over again, that attachment does. Put another way, what helps most children and adolescents to be resilient? It is social support.

But how do you access social support - how do you reach out for it or accept it when it is offered - if your core belief is that you are not worthy of being responded to and that your attempts to draw someone near for comfort and protection will go ignored based on disrupted or negative attachment interactions? How do you draw to you and take advantage of social support when you don't trust others?

In a classic study on resilience by Emmy Werner, she found that individual, familial and environmental resources buffer the negative effects of life stressors. In order to cope, attuned responses by an attachment figure or a secondary attachment figure mediate the development of traumatic stress symptoms.

So what happens? What gets in the way of the biological system that is meant to protect children from danger and help them cope?

When I first meet with parents, they describe their child in only the most negative of terms. I half expect to see the student walk in bearing horns. Instead, I sit across a mousy young girl.

When I meet with students, they report fear at the thought of having a conversation with their parents/guardians. Then I meet the parent/guardian and recognize an adult who has taken time off from work at their own risk, and I see them in all their imperfect humanness trying to show their love and concern.

Difficult conversations are to be avoided because they are painful to self and other. That is my impression of the underlying thoughts when I meet with parent and child.

I am open to difficult conversations. I have seen their power in videotapes of family therapy sessions by master therapists. I have lived them in real life with my own mother or daughter and managed to get to the other side. I have watched them transform my clients' relationships. The trick is getting to the other side - where all has been said, as best as you can, with love and honesty, and an intention to listen and be understood - where you reach a level of deeper understanding, love and connection.

Sometimes, these conversations need to be facilitated. Otherwise, parent and child walk around with walls between them - unnecessary and unhelpful - like characters in an O. Henry short story - dying to connect, to know and feel heard, to feel felt - in a dance of rejection instead of intimacy.

Teens say - "nothing," "go away," "I don't want to talk about it." Feeling rejected and unskilled, parents/guardians obey.

Children say - "She comes home tired from work, I don't want to give her more problems." Parents complain, "You talk to her, she won't tell me what's wrong."

Supporting each member of this important dyad to see and understand the other - that is the role I gladly take on.