Why Healthy Attachment is so Important to our Mental Health

We come into this world with a need to be attached to another person for our very survival. We would not last more than a day without the care and attention of a caregiver. 

We are not born complete and ready to care for ourselves. We need another person, often a mother, to care for us lovingly so that we can thrive in our lives.

We have an innate need to be held, sung to, fed, and treated with respect to begin our life journey.  

We as infants are passive receivers of this care, and this first part of life is called “the being stage” as we are incapable of doing anything beyond breath, eat and defecate.

And in the undifferentiated world of the infant’s mind, our mother is the world and if we are well received and loved then that is what we are set up to feel about the world we live in. 

A critical need is to have a caregiver who is emotionally healthy and capable of self-regulating themselves. In an ideal world that person would have received love, care and nurture in their own childhood. That way they could be there to help us learn about emotional self-regulation by soothing us when we are upset and crying.

If we are attached, we get our needs met in a healthy way by a loving person who places our wellbeing above their own. Then when we are upset and crying, we are responded to with a calm, loving response that helps us calm and relax again. 

But let’s say that our caregiver is highly anxious themselves, or depressed or angry. Then we don’t receive the help we need to learn to self-regulate our emotions.

We will grow up into a person that relies on only themselves when they struggle. They will become what is called “compulsively self-reliant.” They will struggle with accepting help, expecting that it is not available and surprised when it is offered. Other outcomes might be that they struggle to calm themselves after a fight with their spouse. That essential mother-infant connection that would have wired their brain to manage stressful situations and difficult feelings is not available to them.

So how can any of this lack of connection and healthy bonding be corrected?

Finding the right therapist is a key step in working on healing this early life trauma. You will need to conduct interviews with several therapists and ask yourself how it feels to sit with this person and answer questions in your head like: Do I like them and do they help me feel calm? 

Someone said finding the right therapist is like trying to find your soul mate. So it may take a lot of metaphorically, “Kissing a lot of frogs” before you find the right one for you.

When you are looking, ask them if they are skilled in understanding human development and know about what is involved in healthy parenting. 

In your sorting our process to find the right person you are working on finding someone you can attach to and begin the essential work of filling in the missing pieces in your own attachment story.