The Secret Teachings of Attachment Science (PART I)

I was recently invited to an Instagram Live with the super smart sleep consultant, Rachel Shepard-Ohta. Before our chat, she invited followers to ask questions for us to explore. 

Here’s just a few of the many:

Baby won’t let me put him down in his crib. Is this ok?

Is it a bad sign that my 8 mo doesn’t cry when he meets new ppl?

Will formula feeding impact my daughter’s attachment to me?

Do you see a theme?

I’m used to it.

Since I started writing my book, Strange Situation, over ten years ago, I’ve been fielding people’s anxiety about whether or not they were good parents, as per Dr. Sears *so-called* attachment parenting, which I’ve talked about many times (for instance, here).

To summarize: attachment has nothing to do with slings, sleep, or food delivery (breast or bottle). And everything to do with how we—as parents—feel about our own attachments. 

But I totally understand. 

After all, my journey began with my own fear. 

I loved my baby girl so much, I was terrified I would hurt her through my lack of love.

See how nutty this whole parenting business gets?

The patriarchy makes it hard for us (all of us—not just women!) to be human. It’s nearly impossible to simply explore ourselves, our weakness, our faults, and honor our desire to improve without beating ourselves up. As if we are supposed to already know what to do. And to be perfect at it.

Being curious is eclipsed by fears of SUCKING.

Which is why I always start every conversation talking about how attachment—even insecure attachment—follows patterns, makes sense, isn't an indication of being a bad person, and can change. 

That’s why I focus so much on delight. 

But I also know some of us really do struggle AND we want to improve AND—from a spiritual point of view—we’re perfect and complete, lacking nothing. 

So this week, I'll begin sharing Mary Ainsworth's Maternal Caregiving and Interaction Scales (MCIS), a coding instrument that she and her team developed to assess the mothers from her Baltimore Study in 1964. 

When I discovered this 20-page appendix of her opus, Patterns of Attachment, I was terrified to think of being judged according to these meticulous, intricately detailed standards, but I trusted Mary enough to read it anyway.

Boy/girl/they/them, am I glad I did.

This secret teaching—only secret because we live in a patriarchy that has A: continually referred to her as John Bowlby's student and B: not valued her contributions to science—is the most intricate, rigorous, beautiful, and helpful treatise on love I’ve ever seen. 

It’s not always easy to read, and Mary is pretty rough sometimes, but I think she’s right to look closely and honestly. I, for one, am willing to go under her microscope. Not only because I think she’s right, but because I also happen to know that so much of her work is filled with tenderness and understanding toward all of these mothers, even the “oblivious” ones.

Ok. SO.

In 1964, Mary and a small team of researchers set out to watch attachment form. 

They spent 21 weeks observing familes—70 hours total—in 26 homes in suburban Baltimore, watching mothers and babies (and fathers and nannies and housekeepers and other children) relate to another. 

Using a stopwatch to remind them of when five minutes passed, they wrote down what they noticed. They were looking specifically for “critical situations,” such as feeding, changing, napping, crying—and their faves—separations and reunions. After the visit, they typed up their notes.

Together, these notes make up a 7,744-page PDF, sitting on my desktop. 

Here’s just one page, typed up and written upon the queen herself.

M is Mother/B is Baby.

At the end of Week 21, the family was taken to the lab at Johns Hopkins for their Strange Situation.

The way the baby responds in the Strange Situation is enough to discern how well the child uses the caregiver as a secure base, which leads to the classification of secure or insecure/avoidant or insecure/resistant. However, Mary’s work goes much deeper than that. Using the notes she gathered in the home, she ventured into WHY this attachment classification might have developed in the first year of life.

Enter the Maternal Caregiving and Interaction Scales. They are: (1) Sensitivity vs. Insensitivity to the Baby's Signals, (2) Cooperation vs. Interference With Baby's Ongoing Behavior, (3) Physical and Psychological Availability vs. Ignoring and Neglecting, and (4) Acceptance vs. Rejection of Baby's Needs.

Using the copious (understatement) notes Mary and her team gathered in the homes, they then used the MCIS to assess the mother’s behavior toward the child, and the child’s toward the mother.

For each of the four scales, mothers could “score” 1-9.

Scary, I know.

Mary then compared how each mother’s at-home score with her child’s Strange Situation classification to better understand the causes and conditions of attachment security. This is where Mary began to see delight on a scale of 1-9.

And sensitivity. Attunement. Self, other.

The inner-workings of love.

I have copied Mary’s words about these scales directly below. In upcoming blogs, I’ll begin to unpack them. And then I’ll start sharing how Mary sees the 9 point variations of each. Trust me, you’ll see yourself everywhere. 

Remember, this is not just about mothers and babies. Yes, relationships with different people of different ages change—parents and teens, lovers, married people—but I believe these scales can be adjusted to reveal a remarkable guide to how to love someone. 

Including yourself. 

So grab a glass of water, a bottle of wine, or whatever you like, and buckle up for this short journey into the science of attachment.

Scale 1: Sensitivity vs. Insensitivity to the Baby's Signals 

{Humor me. Try reading this replacing “mother” with yourself and baby with yourself as well. Consider your relationship with yourself as your prototype.}

This variable deals with the mother's ability to perceive and to interpret accurately the signals and communications implicit in her infant's behavior, and given this understanding, to respond to them appropriately and promptly. Thus, the mother's sensitivity has four essential components: (a) her awareness of the signals, (b) an accurate interpretation of them, (c) an appropriate response to them, and (d) a prompt response to them. Let us consider each of these in turn.

The mother's awareness of her baby's signals and communications has two aspects. The first is the same as the issue covered in the scale "accessibility versus ignoring and neglecting." In other words, the mother must be reasonably accessible to the baby's communications before she can be sensitive to them. Accessibility is a necessary condition for sensitive awareness. It is not a sufficient condition, however, for a mother can maintain the "baby" in her field of awareness without fulfilling the other condition for sensitive awareness. The second aspect of awareness may be described in terms of "thresholds." The most sensitive mother—the one with the lowest threshold—is alert to the baby's most subtle, minimal, understated cues. Mothers with higher thresholds seem to perceive only the most blatant and obvious communications, Mothers with the highest thresholds often seem oblivious, and are, in effect, highly inaccessible. This second aspect is very closely related to the question of interpretation of the baby's signals, or, usually the mother who is alert to minimal cues also interprets them correctly. This is not invariably the case, however. For example, some mothers are alert to the slightest mouth movements, and sometimes incorrectly interpret them as hunger—or they notice minimal tensions or restlessness and incorrectly interpret them as fatigue.

Scale 2: Cooperation vs. Interference With Baby's Ongoing Behavior

{Same here...imagine this referring to how you treat yourself!}

The central issue of this scale is the extent to which the mother's interventions or interactions break into, interrupt or cut cross the baby's ongoing activity rather than being geared in both timing and quality of the baby's state, mood, and current interests. The degree of interference may be assessed in accordance with two considerations: (a) the extent of actual physical interference with the baby's activity, and (b) the sheer frequency of interruptions.

Some mothers are highly interfering in an overwhelming physical sense. Such a mother snatches the baby up, moves him about, confines him, and, indeed, releases him with utter disregard for his activity-in-progress. When she restricts and restrains his movements, it tends to be by direct physical intervention or force. She may also try to use force in instances in which the baby's cooperation is required if the intervention is to be effective—for example, in feeding, in play, and (although this usually comes later) in toilet training. Other mothers, whose interference does not so conspicuously emphasize physical force, nevertheless must be considered highly interfering because they are "at" the baby most of the time—instructing, training, eliciting, directing, controlling.

Scale 3: Physical and Psychological Availability vs. Ignoring and Neglecting

{Here too…}

The central issue of this scale is the mother's accessibility to the baby, with emphasis upon her responsiveness to him. Although the essential component of psychological accessibility is that the mother be aware of the baby, she is not truly accessible unless she also actively acknowledges and responds to him.

A highly accessible mother has her baby in her field of perceptual awareness at all times so that he is within reach, at least, through distance receptors. She can divide her attention between the baby and other persons, things, and activities without losing awareness of the baby. She is never too preoccupied with her own thoughts and feelings or with her other activities and interactions to have him in the background of her awareness and to sense where he is and what he is doing. When he is in another room she is quick to perceive any sounds he may make, and she takes precautions not to have him so far away or so closed off that she cannot hear a sound as loud as a cry.

Scale 4: Acceptance vs. Rejection of the Baby's Needs

{And here…}

This scale deals with the balance between the mother's positive and negative feelings about her baby— about having a baby and about this particular one—and with the extent to which she has been able to integrate these conflicting feelings or to resolve the conflict. At the positive pole, there is love and acceptance over-riding frustrations, irritations, and limitations—or perhaps more accurately, encompassing and defusing the negative feelings. At the negative pole anger, resentment, hurt, or irritation conflict conspicuously with and limit positive feelings and result in more or less overt rejection of the baby. It is assumed that the arrival of a baby poses a potentially ambivalent situation—and that for all mothers there are positive and negative aspects. Among the negative aspects is the fact that the new baby impinges on and limits the mother's own autonomy and interferes with other activities that are important to her in one way or another. Furthermore, there are inevitable irritations and frustrations in interacting with this particular baby from day to day. Among the positive aspects is the undeniable appeal a baby makes to his mother—evoking tenderness, protectiveness, and other positive reactions.

It is assumed that there are positive and negative elements in all mother-infant relationships. We are concerned with how the mother, given her present life situation, has been able to balance them. It is assumed that at the desirable, accepting, positive end of this continuum negative components are not so much absent as somehow subsumed within the context of the positive relationship. It is also assumed that at the undesirable, rejecting, "negative" end of this continuum positive components are not so much lacking as they are not integrated with the negative, rejecting components so that there is an alternation between tenderness, nurturance, and delight on the one hand, and anger, resentment, irritation, hurt, and rejection on the other, without any adequate meshing of the two together. There is a good and lovable baby and a bad and infuriating baby, but the real baby as he actually exists is somehow lost between the two.

….

“The real baby.”

Yes, Mary.

Show us the way toward reality.

Where do you find yourself in these scales so far? Do you find the very notion of “judging” mothers in this way unkind? Unfair? Do tell!

Stay tuned for next week’s installment, wherein I’ll begin to share the 9 point scale of each.

Take care of yourself. The world will thank you. XXX