Beyond the Frustrated Self

Overcoming Avoidant Patterns and Opening to Life

Barbara Dowds

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780429911422
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

This book foregrounds the life struggles of an individual, Brenda, in such a way that argument and theoretical exploration arise organically out of experience. The "frustration" of the title is traced to avoidant attachment - pretending not to need others. In Brenda this is associated with a body-energy pattern that is both over-charged and over-contained, generating a self-frustrating process. Such a repressive defence works against her, so that she experiences her life as dry, soulless, and uncreative. A variety of existential difficulties are traced to how such core developmental issues interact with our socio-cultural environment. A way forward is outlined: play and finding meaning are identified as transformational hubs that bring wellbeing into Brenda's life and restore her capacity for experiencing.

PART I

THE FRUSTRATION OF ALIVENESS

CHAPTER ONE

How attachment styles are mirrored in energy regulation patterns

At the beginning of a long period of therapy, Brenda’s therapist experiences her as very polite, distant, self-analytical, and unemotional—apart from her eviscerating embarrassment about self-revelation and her crippling guilt about being in therapy at all when “there are so many people out there with real problems”. She distrusts warmth or compassion—what she spittingly labels as pity but is exquisitely sensitive to a therapist’s attunement and understanding. The slightest hint of not being heard or seen accurately or of unempathic analysis or rigidity sends her into retreat. Her presenting issue was lack of meaning in her life, and it was clear that she believed that she could analyse herself out of the problem if she—or her therapist—thought hard enough. The fact that she had been trying to figure out the point of life since her teens and still hadn’t by the age of thirty-eight caused her despair. But it has never occurred to her that there was any other approach to the problem than through thinking. She worked in IT and was quite good at it but found it soul-destroying and didn’t know how long she could continue to make herself do it; she wanted to return to college to study philosophy, anthropology, or English literature.

Brenda’s most painful secret concerned a wound to her self-esteem that was so raw and bleeding it couldn’t be touched. It was the central fact of her existence, but she couldn’t speak about it directly, being far too proud and angry to acknowledge the extent to which she had been hurt by her father and brothers, and—most treacherously of all—by her mother. When she did—later—talk about it obliquely, it seemed that nothing was ever said out straight in the family. It was all a matter of presumption—that women were more stupid, more fearful, weaker, more vain, and clearly (“the evidence was there”) had never contributed anything to civilisation. Therefore they should just accept their lot and get on with their menial duties to ease the lives of men. Most painfully, her mother never missed an opportunity to put down women or portray them as powerless victims who deserved no better. But Brenda felt equal or superior in intelligence, courage, and strength compared to her brothers with, in addition, an almighty will to succeed. Here, she had an inner stand-off. If she attacked the prejudice, this would reveal “their” victory in inflicting pain and hurt, and at the same time expose herself to the frustration and further humiliation when, inevitably, the charges would be denied. She was in a colossal energetic double-bind: damned if she defended herself; damned if she didn’t. Her solution was to make them eat their own shit: she would achieve and gain renown. There was only one problem: she had no particular talents and was shy and introverted; she had nothing but a moderate intelligence and gigantic willpower. So, she was constantly harried by the knowledge that her chances of achieving fame or distinction were pretty meagre. At the same time, the drive to achieve was directly at odds with her longing to escape to her childhood bliss of blending into landscape and place or into the novels she read so voraciously. She was eternally caught in this battle between ego and soul: she believed one had to be sacrificed for the other, but at the same time she knew that she needed both.

Brenda remembers few specific incidents in her childhood, but has been told that because of a vomiting problem (that subsequently vanished of its own accord) she was in hospital for two weeks at the age of eighteen months. Here she was strapped to the bed, and by the time she was discharged she was no longer able to walk. Her parents were deeply wounded people, though possibly not exceptionally so for their time and place—Dublin in the 1970s. She describes her family of eight as seven planets (father, five sons, and one daughter) revolving round the burning out, almost extinct star that was the mother. At their most peaceful, they remained at a planetary distance from each other—as distant as Mercury and Venus or Mars and Jupiter. At other times, contact was of the harsh repulsing kind that arose out of frequent collisions in too small a space—a small soulless semi-detached suburban house—and in a family with few emotional resources. There was no tenderness, support, or intimacy—instead noise, crush, and ruthless competitiveness between the siblings, and sneering, shaming emotional brutality from the father. Unfortunately, this did not lead to the children becoming united against a common enemy and supporting each other. The doormat mother did not shield them but was another victim who protected herself by disappearing psychically. If you were to represent contact styles physically as a fist being met by a palm, the mother’s palm is the one that evaporates as you approach so that you end up pushing into cloud. No meeting, no holding: immensely frustrating for the child seeking contact and relationship. In Brenda’s adolescence, anxiety and self-loathing led to attacks of nausea and vomiting, which continued as a reflex long after her stomach was emptied. Her relationship with her parents deteriorated further with rage at her mother’s betrayal and refusal to stand up for herself and an even greater loathing for her contemptuous, bullying father. At school, Brenda did well enough academically, but socially she was shy, lonely, and quite unable to connect with her classmates in the all-girls school. However, she had an iron-willed determination to succeed driven by her feminist-fuelled anger and her desperation to get out of a home where only boys were valued. She would never give up her independence to a man nor give over her power of self-determination to children. However emotionally ill-equipped she was, she would learn to fend for herself. In the meantime, she withdrew more and more and hid anything of importance from her parents and brothers.

Brenda’s frustrating relational and energy patterns are superficially explained by the circumstances mentioned above, but understanding the deeper foundations requires attachment theory.

Attachment theory

Attachment theory originated with John Bowlby and was subsequently elaborated by Mary Ainsworth and Mary Main (Bowlby, 1971, 1973; Holmes, 1993, 2010; Gerhardt, 2004; Siegel, 2012). It was initially based on observation of animal and child behaviour, showing that the infant seeks proximity to the parent or other caregiver. Attachment kicks in at the same time as the child is becoming mobile around the age of six months, and is believed to function to keep the child safe from harm and separation from the group. Bowlby (1973) made it clear that the child sought, not just proximity, but emotional engagement with a responsive attachment figure, and Mary Ainsworth found that it was maternal sensitivity, rather than warmth per se, that was correlated with secure attachment (Siegel, 2012, p. 100). Secure attachment provides the individual with resilience to trauma or loss, whereas insecurity places the person at risk of emotional disturbance (Siegel, 2012, pp. 114–115). The attachment pattern in infancy is associated with characteristic processes of emotional regulation, social relatedness, access to biographical memory, and development of self-reflection and narrative (Siegel, 2012; Holmes, 2010). Schore (2003a), following Bowlby, argues that “attachment theory … is fundamentally a regulatory theory. Attachment can thus be conceptualised as the interactive regulation of synchrony between psychobiologically attuned organisms” (p. 64). Secure attachment, then, facilitates the maximisation of pleasant feelings as well as modulating the intensity of affect. Thus, the over-excited child is calmed and the torpid child is stimulated (Gerhardt, 2004). “Separation stress, in essence, is a loss of maternal regulators of the infant’s immature behavioural and physiological systems that results in the attachment patterns of protest, despair, and detachment” (Schore, 2003a, p. 65). Later in the chapter, I will elaborate this view of attachment by examining what is happening to the body and energy economy in insecure attachment.

In the Strange Situation test, devised by Mary Ainsworth, infants were assessed for their response to being in a strange environment: with mother; with mother plus a stranger; with the stranger only; then alone; and finally reunited with mother (Siegel, 2012, pp. 97–98). Children’s responses to separation and reunion broke down into four classes: secure attachment with three kinds of insecure (anxious) attachment: avoidant, ambivalent (resistant), and disorganised. The secure child feels grief on mother’s departure and runs to her for comfort on her return, after which he is able to resume play. The avoidant (now called deactivating) child ignores the comings and goings of mother, while the ambivalent (now called hyperactivating) clings to mother on her return but cannot be comforted (Holmes, 2010). The disorganised response displays a mixture of need and fear of the mother. Here I will contrast the avoidant—of which Brenda is a classic example—with the ambivalent, of which her partner is an example. The disorganised individual lacks a coherent defence, stemming from relational trauma, and will not be further mentioned here.

Attachment is most vividly experienced in its absence: when we are away from our loved ones we feel anxious, sad, or lonely. When we are with them we feel safe, good about ourselves, and comforted in times of stress: we are in a state of relaxed alertness and can begin to explore the world and pursue our interests and work. “All of us, from the cradle to the grave, are happiest when life is organised as a series of excursions, long or short, from the secure base provided by our attachment figures” (Bowlby, 1988, p. 62). In childhood and adulthood, “distress triggers attachment behaviours. Once activated, attachment overrides all other motivations—exploratory, playful, sexual, gustatory, etc.” (Holmes, 2010, p. 31). But how may the insecurely attached adapt to their situation? They have learned that they cannot trust human relationships. The ambivalent cling and the avoidant ignore, but there is no secure attachment with the primary caregiver. However, if they have a loving grandparent, aunt, uncle, or neighbour, they may be able to attach to an alternative. On the other hand, children may not have a primary caregiver if they grow up in an institution with harsh, impersonal, or constantly changing staff, but even in this situation it may be possible for them to divert their attachment needs to the other children. But if there are no older children capable of forming such relationships, or if supportive relationships between the children are discouraged, then the individual is severely damaged emotionally. Parts of the brain that normally develop in the first year in the context of relationship simply do not develop, and if this continues up to the age of about three the individual may have a lifetime of being unable to feel empathy, regulate their emotions, relate to others, or manage stress, as found in Romanian orphans who experienced virtually no mothering (Gerhardt, 2004, pp. 38, 77, 127).

Insecure avoidant attachment

The avoidant child tries to minimise her needs to forestall rebuff by the caregiver; in this way she maintains some contact but at the price of both emotional expression and freedom of exploration (Holmes, 2010, p. 138). Both the neediness and the rejection remain out of awareness by a defence which Bowlby called defensive exclusion. This blocks processing of painful affect which leads to persistent feelings of hate and abandonment (Holmes, 1993, pp. 79–81). In Brenda’s case, she won’t allow herself to feel needy out of pride. If, in the interests of truth (which is important to her), she admits some needs to her therapist, it is without any affect—she wouldn’t give them the satisfaction of having hurt her. Brenda’s avowed hatred is focused on her parents’ lack of respect for her. The rejection didn’t seem directed at her as an individual since all the children received the same impersonal, indeed depersonalising treatment. But what did and does hurt her is the way she was singled out as the inferior one on account of her gender. This humiliation, rather than any generic parental distancing, is behind her hatred. Just as in society it is not poverty but inequality that generates social discord, in families it is not the nature of the relationships so much as an unfair difference in valuing that creates hatred and despair and crushes self-esteem.

Avoidant children tend to have neglectful or rejecting parents for whom power is more important than sensitivity (Holmes, 2010, p. 69) and who are emotionally unattuned and unresponsive. These children suffer from a lack of being seen, heard, understood, and mirrored. They do not react to mother’s absence in the Strange Situation test because experience has told them that she doesn’t meet their emotional needs. But their apparent insouciance is not matched by their physiology which shows increased heart rate and stress (Gerhardt, 2004, p. 26; Siegel, 2012, p. 120). In response to mother’s failure to see the world from the infant’s perspective, the child displays disappointment, self-soothing (like the rocking of Brenda and her siblings to get themselves to sleep in childhood), and gaze aversion. This last observation warrants some attention. The child has lost hope and given up seeking mirroring, understanding, or help in the face of an inept, non-empathic parent, or in the case of an actively hostile parent, they are avoiding the aggressive or annihilating gaze. During Brenda’s first years in therapy, on her arrival at sessions, she was able to look her therapist in the eye and engage in normal, albeit very polite and shy social contact. However, once she got in touch with her own process, she could no more make eye contact than put her arm in the fire. At the end of sessions, the reassembly of her defences was palpable. When her therapist suggested that she might try to look her in the eye during a session, she confessed that if she forced herself to look, her hatred might kill the therapist. Brenda was caught in an agonised double-bind between a desperate need and an equal dread of being seen and heard. Her inner life was a raw wound into which she expected salt to be poured. As stated above, attachment theory is primarily a regulatory theory. For the avoidantly attached child, “the emotionally barren and non-cooperative nature of the patterns of communication lead to a non-responsive virtual (representational) parent and to excessive reliance on internal constraints to achieve self-regulation” (Siegel, 2012, p. 203). This, as Brenda illustrates, is an armoured substitute for the real thing, and we will see later some of the energetic consequences of this defensive structure. Siegel goes on to state that “reflective function is not developed well, in that the parent’s mental state is not available to the child” (ibid., p. 203). In Brenda’s case, her ability to reflect and mentalise was in fact quite advanced, a consequence, perhaps, of extensive reading of classic literature along with modelling by some exceptionally mature classmates in her teenage years. (See Holmes, 2010, Chapter Two for a detailed definition and justification of the term “mentalisation”.)

Avoidant two-year-olds are hostile and distant with peers, and at age six are over-controlled; they are likely to be socially isolated as they grow up (Holmes, 1993, p. 115). By adulthood, insecurely attached people have learnt to have negative beliefs about themselves and others. Furthermore, according to Holmes (1993, p. 120), their distorted and restricted ability to generalise from events to basic beliefs about self and others leads to an inability to revise their working models in the light of love offered in adulthood. While Brenda certainly holds negative beliefs, she would disagree about the reasons. She claims that she doesn’t actually want love. To her, love comes with far too many strings attached and she believes she would have to compromise something more precious—her authenticity. What she wants from others more than anything is respect. Her mother’s masochistic insistence on women’s inevitable inferiority and her father’s sneering alongside her older brothers’ wholesale swallowing of the family myth meant that she always felt under attack—it was like living in the trenches, but with the enemy on all sides and within the trench as well. Avoidant people remain on the emotional periphery of relationships—in Brenda’s case often the third person in a triangle of women. While she can thereby have some contact without being overwhelmed by it, mainly this enables her to occupy her favourite position—that of fly on the wall observing others.

Avoidantly attached people exhibit a low tolerance for feelings. They repress feelings because, not having had emotional regulation, they don’t know what to do with them. In families where feelings are denied, or even punished, “negative” feelings in the child such as anger, envy, or jealousy bring up discomfort in the parent who will push the feelings away—with anger or disapproval or a pretence that nothing is happening. Alternatively, all feelings, even the positive (joy, excitement, curiosity, etc.), may be rejected because the caregiver cannot tolerate the child’s aliveness, as was the case for Brenda’s exhausted mother. In effect, the child learns to protect the parent against her feelings by denying they exist or by blocking their expression. This blocking may be held in persistent body tensions, stress, and an unbalanced autonomic nervous system which sooner or later (e.g., in midlife) create pain or illness. One downstream effect of the inability to acknowledge or express feelings is suppression of the immune system leading to increased susceptibility to a variety of diseases (Gerhardt, 2004, pp. 96–97). The emotional and social outcomes of the negation or non-mirroring of feelings include the development of a false self, as well as lifelong difficulties with relationships. Of course, the details of the downstream effects of avoidant attachment depend on the totality and nuances of the family environment. Was the parental response hostile, punitive, or simply vague or absent? In Brenda’s case, she had one of each: an emotionally absent, out-of-contact, doormat, powerless mother with a panicked, hand-wringing response to Brenda’s “bilious attacks”, combined with angry, contemptuous, bullying fathering. (The imbalance of adjectives reveals the respective weight of each parent in her psyche.)

Avoidant vs. ambivalent attachment

In contrast to the avoidant type, the ambivalent (resistant) class of insecure attachment is characterised by inconsistent parenting, which entails that the child has to focus closely on the parent’s state of mind. The feelings of such children are very available and indeed exaggerated, creating a needy, hysterical, codependent pattern that can compromise the development of independence (Gerhardt, 2004, p. 26). While avoidants are terrified of contact, ambivalents are terrified of separation. They differ too in how they tell the stories of their lives; avoidants having a dismissive narrative style, whereas ambivalents have an enmeshed style (Holmes, 1993, p. 163) as discussed below and in Chapter Eight.

In comparing avoidant and ambivalent attachment issues, it seems clear that people do not always fall neatly into one type or another and that one can fear both abandonment and impingement; that one can be terrified of contact and of separation. This is because, underlying the avoidant’s denial of their own neediness, the need for attachment is always there. The abandoned avoidant child may appear unconcerned, but in fact “their heart rate and autonomic arousal is rocketing” (Gerhardt, 2004, p. 26). Brenda knows the truth of ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• ABOUT THE AUTHOR
• INTRODUCTION
• PART I: THE FRUSTRATION OF ALIVENESS
• PART II: IMPINGEMENT AND LOSS OF SELF
• PART III: THROWNNESS AND LIMITATION: NAVIGATING THE SOCIAL WORLD
• PART IV: BEYOND FRUSTRATION: TOWARDS INTEGRATION AND WELL-BEING
• REFERENCES
• INDEX