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I see that there are a lot of people who find their way over to this blog in a search to understand avoidant-dismissive insecure attachment.  One of the search combinations that came through on my admin page yesterday was asking the question, “Who are avoidant-dismissive people likely to be attracted to?”  Many people are landing through their Google searches on this post:

*Attachment Simplified – Organized Insecure Attachment – Avoidant-Dismissive

I have not followed off on any detour to examine the nitty-gritty of the ‘upper level’ insecure attachment disorders.  I believe a lot of information has already been accumulated by others regarding them, while very little has been written about the ‘lower level’ insecure attachment disorder of ‘disorganized-disoriented’.  This ‘lower level’ (versus the ‘upper level’ one) is often presented in the neuroscientific and infant developmental research simply as a being a severely ‘disabling’ consequence of infant maltreatment and neglect that results in the most severe ‘pathological’ outcomes in body-brain and mind.

Because my writing is primarily about what my life has been like as a survivor of severe abuse, maltreatment and trauma from birth until I ‘escaped’ home at age 18, I make no claims about being an expert at anything else.  I can, however, write somewhat competently about the dismissive-avoidant insecure attachment disorder from my own experience because I believe that is what my father has, and I believe that is what the man I am not with, but have been in love with these past ten years has.

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If you do an Amazon.com book search for Daniel J. Siegel, and a Google search for Mindsight, you will find yourself standing at a gateway through which you can enter and learn more about how early caregiver attachment patterns transmit to an infant through direct face-to-face interactions than I can ever describe.

His book, Parenting From the Inside Out is probably the simplest place to start your way into this informative world of human infant development.

The simplest way to think about ALL of the insecure attachment patterns-disorders is to realize that a human being has been biologically programmed to require very specific interactions with its earliest caregivers so that it can form the best body-nervous system-brain possible.  The exact patterns that are ‘down loaded’ into an infant’s developing body-brain through its earliest human interactions will be, in turn, built into the very fabric and fiber of an infant.

When a parent, particularly the mother, did not receive what she (they) needed to form the best body-brain possible, that lack-of-best information will simply be communicated to the infant — and that information comes tumbling down the generations through infant-caregiver interactions — UNLESS something interferes.

That SOMETHING is actually some person, somewhere, who DOES interact with an infant in a safe and secure attachment way so that those neuro-biological of ‘goodness’ can build themselves into the infant — usually right along with the ‘badness’ patterns.

I do not believe that avoidant-dismissive attachment comes DIRECTLY from abuse itself, even though if we are fine tuning how we look at what all humans NEED to build the best body-brain possible and DO NOT get in one degree or another, we ARE talking about abuse.

In the case of dismissive-avoidant insecure attachment the actions/nonactions that create these patterns in infants comes most often from a hypo or less-than-responsive early caregiver — which is in my thinking a form of neglect of primary infant attachment needs (depressed mothers are often in this category).  D-A attachment is then most closely related to a non-response pattern rather than to a hyper overly response pattern which seems more typical of the ‘lower order’ insecure attachment systems of preoccupied and disorganized-disoriented.

In all insecure attachment relationships there is something within the caregiver that is interfering with the ability to recognize an infant IN THE PRESENT MOMENT — something all infants desperately need from their caregivers.

An infant, in the critical time periods of its body-nervous system-brain does not have the ability to put itself on PAUSE so it can wait for those moments when its caregiver is PRESENT TO IT AND APPROPRIATE in its responses to the infant.

Of course, readers of this blog already know that anything written by the developmental neuroscientist Dr. Allan Schore, such as Affect Dysregulation and Disorders of the Self/Affect Regulation and the Repair of the Self (two-volume set), contain vital specifics about the processes that build a human being BEST versus those that do not.  Hard reading, I assure you.  (You can search this blog for Schore and come up with a lot of info, as well.)

SOOOO — about avoidant-dismissive or dismissive-avoidant insecure attachment.  The basis of this pattern is that body-based emotion-driven information that an infant has no choice but to communicate to its earliest caregivers ALL OF THE TIME is only selectively paid attention to by the caregiver.

Add to this that the caregiver response is not consistent.  Sometimes the caregiver might notice the infant expressing a need through an emotion, yet later the caregiver doesn’t respond to the same infant emotion in any predictable way.  On and Off.  Sometimes yes, sometimes no.  The caregiver (as with all insecurely attached adults) is (often unconsciously with this insecure attachment pattern) simple not paying attention to the infant in real time because the caregiver has interference within their own insecurely built body-nervous system-brain.

(Pass it on, folks!  Do a Google search for ‘mother attachment predict’ — fascinating reading!)  Researchers can assess a mother’s attachment before the birth of her offspring and often exactly predict the attachment patterns of her children — throughout a lifetime!

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Our family only very recently stumbled upon an extremely important piece of information about my father.  My daughters are accumulating intergenerational documents to ‘prove’ their relationship to my father’s mother so that they can join the Daughters of the American Revolution as my father’s mother did.

In scouring the family paperwork collections for these documents, my daughters received my father’s birth certificate from their uncle.  It states on there that my father had a dead sibling (born alive four, living three at the time of my father’s birth in 1926).

Nobody in my family EVER mentioned that my grandparents lost a baby.  What we did hear repeatedly during our childhoods is that my father was not a wanted child, that his mother wanted nothing to do with him, that his older sister was assigned his care, that she begrudged this burden and let my father know this.

Years later my father told me his mother was depressed and very seldom responded to anyone.  She seldom left her home, had no friends, and was sad sad sad.  What happened during the life of my paternal grandmother?  I don’t know, but I DO not know that she was 32 when my father was born and his father was 37, and that somewhere there was a dead child.  This grief factor is one of the very first places I would look to discover what prior circumstance contributed to a lack of care and love for a later baby.  BINGO!

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All attachment patterns have roots in the same human processes.  They determine how we respond to two things:  One – our own emotions in our body and Two – our connection patterns with our self and others.  Both of these functions are built into the right brain hemisphere during the first year of life.

Human development is designed to be RESPONSIVE to signals received by the infant AND the infant adapts its development according to the signals it receives.  True, genetic material in the infant is involved.  In my father’s case, he was no doubt born with the potential to develop his (later forming) left brain in amazing ways.  He became a civil engineer, read nonfiction voraciously his entire life, had a ‘photographic memory’ and never forgot while he was well anything he ever learned.

Yet my father was also built through his earliest caregiver interactions to be the perfect match to my insanely abusive mother.

My father was on the COOL end of the emotional spectrum.  My mother was on the HOT volcanic end.  I believe dismissive-avoidant insecure attachment patterns can VERY EASILY gravitate to HOT emotionally dysregulated people, and the severely troubled (most often disorganized-disoriented and the preoccupied insecurely attached) people because of the emotional vacuum that exists within their own body.

The reverse makes these attraction patterns likely, as well.  The dismissive-avoidant pattern is a HYPO emotional regulatory pattern.  When the brain of a true dismissive-avoidant is watched in action during studies about emotion, these people are not remotely aware they experience many emotions AT ALL.  Yet at the same time researchers can watch their brain receive emotional information at the same time their brain consumes vast amounts of energy screening the emotional information from conscious awareness.

In other words, just as happened to them from birth, the emotion is THERE but not responded to — this time, as older humans, not even responded to by the person who is having them.

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The dismissive-avoidant attachment system-disorder is, I believe, the most common one.  It is also one that in our culture is least likely to be recognized because these people ‘get along’ better than do ‘owners’ of the more severe insecure patterns.

Experts suggest that the ‘other’ more severe insecurely attached adults are attracted to the dismissive-avoidant ones because they instinctively recognize that these people WILL NEVER OVERWHELM THEM EMOTIONALLY.  My mother knew that about my father the instant she met him, I have no doubt.

My father responded to my mother’s ‘warmth’ and vivacious charm.  (Very unfortunately.)

Experts also suggest that the flaws in these insecurely attached relationships often come to light when and if the more severely insecurely attached person, who is far more likely to experience serious enough life consequences that force them to seek help, do so and begin to heal and change.  At this point the rigidity of the dismissive-avoidant partner can drive their partner even more ‘crazy’!

It is important to understand that the dismissive-avoidant person is NOT AWARE of emotions that they are, in fact, experiencing.  Their brain-nervous system was designed by their nonresponsive earliest caregivers to screen out — not pay attention to — and to eventually deny the existence of body-based emotions.  These people simply do not access information based on their emotions — and in turn, do not access information about anyone else’s emotions EITHER.

Their early caregivers left emotional response out of the baby-building equation, and now so do their offspring.

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I will also add that I believe the commonly recognized insecure attachment patterns, as they go ‘down’ in terms of the safety and security they represent, add into one another.  My extremely emotionally dysregulated mother ALSO dismissed other people’s emotions.  She COULD not see them because her entire universe was built on her projections from inside herself out onto others.

I also believe that nearly ALL of the time insecurely attached people seek one another out.  IF my father had ‘moved up the ladder’ of attachment instead of down, and IF he had bound himself to someone of the ‘upper’ 50% of our population that DID have a safe and secure attachment system-pattern built into them, he COULD most likely have healed enough to change his primary responses to others.

In other words, he could have LEARNED and been TAUGHT how to better recognize situations that contained emotions — both for himself and for others.  My father was a naive 23 when he met my overwhelming mother.  True, while nobody had ever helped him to recognize emotions, he was still young enough that I believe some changes for the better COULD have happened if he had done ‘upwardly mobile’ instead of the reverse.

Partners from birth on, as members of a social species, are always involved in regulating emotion and physiological states through human interactions.  We can learn enough about the basic attachment patterns so that we can recognize (1) what they are, (2) where they most likely came from and how, and (3) how to gently change their expression (the basic hardwiring inside an infant’s body-brain prior to the age of one will NEVER change in some basic physiological ways).

We do not, in my opinion, live in a culture that values the body-based TRUTH of reality that emotions  contain.  Our body and its emotional signals are first filtered through the right social-emotional (earliest forming) brain hemisphere.  Depending on the kind of benevolent or malevolent experiences an infant has with its earliest caregivers, a human being is supposed to develop a brain that can quickly and smoothly pass right brain information over to the left brain for processing and integration.

When this happens BEST, language can be assigned to experience.  What happens in a dismissive-avoidant CULTURE is that talking about emotions, and the very real and true experience of people who DO live in a body is NOT encouraged.  We can end up with a literal language such as my father was a master of at the same time we ignore and dismiss the vast truth of our lives.  My father’s condition enabled him to enable my mother in such a way that he NEVER protected his children, especially me from my mother’s insanity and abuse — if he ever really SAW it at all.

He was also set up to endure his wife’s abuse of him.  I don’t believe he had either a platform or the language to even THINK about the emotional hell he, his wife and all of his children were in.  If one has never felt heat, cannot physiologically become aware of its presence, burning to death in a house fire is far more likely than it would be for someone who had built a body that could receive and process ALL information the body accumulated.

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I believe that in ALL cases how an infant is responded to birth to age one by its earliest caregivers matters THE MOST.  The trajectory for all an infant’s future development on all levels is set by the age of one.  The foundation is built.

In our current culture I expect that the ranks of the truly securely attached is dropping from 50%, and as this happens the ranks of ALL the insecurely attached is swelling.  Because MOST caregivers certainly do not directly abuse infants, it will be the ranks of the dismissive-avoidant insecurely attached that is going to swell the most — and the fastest.

I say this because there is NO JOB a human will ever do that is more demanding that taking care of an infant prior to the age of one CORRECTLY.  Busy, stressed, working parents who rely on day care providers to meet the most vital needs of their babies are often selling their infant’s short without ever thinking about it.

IGNORANCE IS NOT BLISS!

Taking care of the basic physiological needs for warmth, changing, feeding of infants is NOT ENOUGH to guarantee that an infant will remain in the top 50% of the safely and securely attached emotional regulation category.  Infants are HIGH NEED beings who REQUIRE appropriate touch, face-to-face responses, who require human vocal interactions, who require that their caregivers pay the RIGHT KIND OF ATTENTION to their responses instant-to-instant.

All early caregiver interactions are designing and putting into place the patterns within the brain’s circuitry that the infant will rely on for the rest of its life to process information about its SELF and the condition of the world it has been born into.

I want to add here something I consider extremely relevant and important.  Infants are physiologically designed to respond FIRST to their mother, SECOND to the next most caring human in their universe which certainly CAN be their father, next, to ALL most caring humans (relatives and day care providers who respond with absolute love and focused appropriate attention to the infant), AT THE SAME TIME infants are also biologically programmed to respond to happy, loving CHILDREN.

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I believe ALL insecure attachment systems-patterns happen because earliest caregivers MISSED THE INFANT’S CUES.

Infants are ALWAYS sending out perfect cues.  Their outgoing signals are NEVER off target.  It is the responses that an infant receives to its cues that determine the degree of safe and secure attachment in the world the infant is building into its body-nervous system-brain-mind-self.

Nature intends that modulation of an infant’s needs begins in earnest at the same time the infant can extend its range of activity into the physical world at an increasing distance from its caregiver.  Before the age of one what an infant is asking for — it ACTUALLY needs.

Just because what an infant younger than age one’s needs are more than its caregivers WANT to respond to does not in any way indicate that there is something ‘spoiled’ or ‘wrong’ with the infant.  That kind of thinking, in my opinion, is some of the downright STUPIDEST human thought ever invented!

Most unfortunately I suspect that in today’s world we are losing sight of this fact at the same time we are both dismissing the vital importance of caring for infants AS THEY NEED TO BE CARED FOR and avoiding the WORK ourselves that bringing humans into the world ACTUALLY requires.

Every single signal, every single cue an infant prior to the age of one sends out needs to be responded to consciously by its caregivers.  Every act of NOT responding to an infant has to be a conscious choice.  All actions toward an infant affect its rapid growth and development.  No action toward an infant is without consequence.

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When his parents choose to let my grandson cry without taking any other action they are choosing at those times to consciously moderate the intensity and duration of the emotions he is experiencing.  They are ‘building’ strength into his emotional and nervous system response-abilities according to what they KNOW he can safely and securely tolerate (he is 8 months old).  Challenges from the environment by themselves do not harm infants.  Dismissing and avoiding the reality of the infant’s needs and its responses to those challenges, however, can certainly cause harm to the infant’s development.

Reality today dictates that many mothers and parents cannot financially afford NOT to utilize day care.  If we really knew what we were doing as a nation we would create day care situations for infants that guaranteed that the needs of those infants were met.  We are living at a time and in a world today that often detours early caregivers away from the innate biological programming that is very real, and has naturally made sure that mothers both knew how to take the best care of their babies and DID it.

Babies like my father and mother were fell through the cracks.  Their needs were not met — and either nobody noticed or nobody cared.  Both inevitably ended up with serious insecure attachments within their body-brain to their own self, to the world, and to other people.  Babies that are not cared for the BEST way possible experience trauma — and insecure attachment systems-patterns built into infants is how intergenerational trauma gets passed down through the ages.

Plain and simple.

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