Attachment Theory and the Self Protective Transformation of Meaning

Chapter 2 offers an account of attachment theory as self-protective meaning-making. It presents a ‘toolkit’ of key ideas clinicians can use to understand parent-child relationships. Attachment theory describes how human beings protect themselves from threat and danger in relationships. Patterns of attachment are self-protective strategies for staying safe and eliciting nurture and support. These strategies offer different pathways of interpreting information about safety and danger that confer advantages in particular conditions. Individuals using the three main patterns of attachment variously interpret their experience based upon their own internal arousal-based warning system, an externally derived conception of what leads to danger and safety, or they integrate both. Tracking what is attended to and excluded in the interpretative process, as well as the rigidity or freedom involved in considering alternative interpretations of experience, has rich clinical potential. This approach can illuminate both the defensive processes involved, and the social and systemic context and conditions eliciting them. The MotC offers a systematic way to examine how we speak and think about our experiences. Stories told are not taken at face value, but instead we evaluate how we tell them, the meaning we give them, and why.