How Psychotherapy Retrains the Brain to Expect (and Feel) Better – June 5, 2017 • By Alex Afram, PhD, GoodTherapy.org
Infant attachment styles are emergent responses to threatened loss of a caretaker. The pattern displayed provides an intuitive and emotionally sophisticated set of behaviors designed to keep a caretaker in proximity by reducing threat to the emotional stability of the caretaker. The four standard patterns of infant behavior: secure, anxious-ambivalent, avoidant, and disorganized-disoriented, correspond to parental behavior that is secure, preoccupied, dismissive, and alternately frightened/frightening/unresponsive, respectively. However, there is no limit to the number of matching enduring styles of behavioral responses that may occur between child and parent.
Interpersonal cruelty, abusiveness, humiliation, subjugation, and other modes of painful relating contribute to attachment styles that are routinely attacking in the misguided normalcy of their misery. These “attackments” contribute to experiences in the therapy room as provocative behaviors are enacted with clinicians. These patterns may be the best way in which a wounded person can tolerate being in proximity to another human being. Sadly, and fortuitously, these painful relational constellations exist; sad because they hurt, and fortuitous because there is relating that may evolve into something less problematic when “attackments” can be identified and explored.
I often share with my clients my perspective that what happens in the therapy room is a microcosm of what happens out there in the ‘real’ world. Together, we can look at patterns of responding and relating, amplifying those that are serving a positive outcome and confronting those that are perpetuating pain.
Psychotherapist Alex Afram, in his blog for GoodTherapy.org frames the response to “why does talk therapy work?” in the context of experiencing in a close relationship the uncoupling of painful affect and punishment. I find that most clients are perfectly able to find answers to their logistical questions (ie. to stay in a relationship of or to end it) once they learn to tolerate whatever painful emotion is attached to that decision. That emotional experience of giving way to love or letting it go is likely connected to a lifetime of associations and unconscious memories. Many of these are likely to play out in the therapeutic relationship, allowing for growth and emotional freedom.