It Was A Great Relationship With My Mother
Sounds counter-intuitive, right? I can’t tell you how many times I’ve raised eyebrows with that provocative sounding statement in my psychotherapy office whilst sitting across from a new client. Jeremy (age 58), a sports writer, came in for treatment due to a low-grade depression that he couldn’t “shake off for years now.” Here’s the story of how his eyebrow raise occurred at this notion.
“My relationship with my mom when I was a kid? It was, she was, she was great with me. She was a great mother.”
“Ok. Help me understand that. Can you bring up a memory of your early childhood relationship with her being a great mother? Any example of that any time between the ages of five through twelve years old will work.”
“Um…uh…(5 seconds)…well she was just great, she used to cook these full-on meals for us. Dinner was always on the table right at six o’clock. On the button at 6 in fact…. (3 seconds) Mom used to get upset [laughs lightly] when anyone was late for dinner. This one time my dad was about a half-hour late. He plopped down at the table, served himself some mashed potatoes. Before he could even set a meatloaf slice onto his dinner plate, my mom snatched up his plate, went over to the sink and slammed it down without saying a word. [Huh]”
I went on to ask Jeremy for four more adjectives that describe his childhood relationship with his mother, each followed up by my request to provide a specific example from early childhood regarding each adjective. Jeremy produced the following, “wonderful, sweet, and happy.” He didn’t come up with another adjective, and remarked that that was already enough. Regarding his relationship with his father, he offered, “regular, good, and sports like stuff.” He couldn’t give me a fourth or fifth adjective regarding his relationship with his dad. I continued our intake meeting asking him the balance of questions from the Adult Attachment Interview (AAI)- (George, Kaplan, & Main, 1996).
As it turns out, Jeremy’s AAI responses were descriptive of an Insecure Dismissive attachment. His remembrance of early childhood with mother and father was at times, idealized and nonspecific, and at other times bore out contradictory examples compared to his overall positive impressions; we see this evidence above describing his “great relationship” with mother at the dinner table scene. He’s had to encode the meaning of clearly negative parental experiences in a way that made sense for him to get along in his family of origin and maintain a sense of safety and security throughout childhood.
Looking Beyond Face Value
It’s characteristic of Insecure Dismissive attached adults to idealize their childhood while at the same time downplaying the importance of close relationships because from an early age self-sufficiency was positively reinforced and dependency/vulnerability was not. These latter states are typically met with parental rejection in an Insecure Dismissive parent. Research bears out that there’s approximately a 75% concordance rate between parent and child attachment strategy (Bakermans-Kranenburg & van IJzendoorn, 2009). Presently, Jeremy does not place high value on close relationships, he is mostly detached from his feelings not finding any practical benefit in emotional literacy, and he rejects vulnerability as “weak.” Instead, he places a high premium on material achievement, self-sufficiency, and connections with others instrumentally through activities and to benefit his own purposes. This may sound like Jeremy is rather heartless, but he’s not. This way of being with himself and the world is an adaptation that worked up to a certain point.
“When was the first time in your life that you remember feeling really down, and nothing helped?” [I was taking a history of Jeremy’s symptom of depression and had already worked out with him some contributory factors.]
“My chocolate Lab died when I was 10 right in front of me. She was run over in the street out in front of our house.”
“Who was there with you? How did your parents handle it?”
“My dad was at work, so my mom took Springy to the vet. They put her down, and she never came home. That’s one of the only times my mom didn’t smack me for having tears. I guess she felt sorry for me cause she just told me to go to my room to cry.” [Not surprising, Jeremy had a string of memories into adulthood wherein loss and rejection affected his sense of safety and security in the world and which contributed to the development of his low-grade depression.]
It’s All In The Early Conditioning, And No One’s To Blame
In reflecting on what I learned about his early background, it appears that Jeremy was conditioned from very early on to back away from valuing and realizing his vulnerability and natural dependency needs. There was not enough parental modeling of making appropriate sense of negative experiences within his nuclear family home. He didn’t grow up in an atmosphere of being cherished for just being a kid, but instead had to “earn” his acceptance and accolades. This mixture of attachment experiences over the course of thousands of instances in his childhood developed into an Insecure Dismissing attachment strategy by the time Jeremy was a young adult.
“Hold on. [I softly smiled pointing up one lonely finger] I’m not blaming your parents here for your developing depression, Jeremy. Quite the contrary, so please hear me out.”
What I then said to Jeremy resonated. I explained how I saw it--that he was raised by his parents to survive and adapt well in today’s world, and to be a good person too. Which he is! I let Jeremy know everyone’s early life creates the default setting for how to be with themselves, how to be in the world and with others, and what to expect for themselves the future. It’s only when a person’s sense of safety and security are at issue that their default settings of how to handle life may fail them, and out of that challenge, symptoms can develop—like depression for instance.
And BTW-No One Is Immune To Mental Illness
If Jeremy had developed a Secure attachment strategy from his early childhood relationship experiences with his mom and dad, that would not have made him immune to developing a symptom like depression. While there is research showing greater emotional resiliency for those with a Secure attachment strategy (Mikulincer & Shaver, 2016), this is no magic bullet to protect against mental illness. Having greater emotional resiliency is like having large shock absorbers for adverse life experiences; the ride through life isn’t as bumpy and jarring over the long haul.
“I was raised to respect my parents, and I think they did a great job with me and my brother. I can’t get my head around thinking that they messed me up.”
“They didn’t. There’s no blame, not for them, not for you either. You’ve been depressed for a while now and you’ve gotten by without taking meds. I know it took a lot for you to come see me, and here I am asking you to go inside yourself to figure it out and find the answers. Your depression is real, and I’m gonna help you get better. We do, however, need to go against the way you were raised a little bit to retool some ways of relating to yourself and your life experiences, so your natural healing capacity can be unblocked. It will never be a requirement to think of how you were raised as bad, or that another way of being raised would have been better.” [That’s when Jeremy raised his rather bushy left eyebrow and leaned in toward me from my office’s blue pleather couch.]
Anyone who comes to therapy with mental health challenges will need to get themselves to the point of realizing and working through the origins of these challenges, reintegrate adverse life experiences from which they made dysfunctional meaning out of them, and put the past in a perspective that benefits who they intend to become. Everyone has an attachment strategy that was formed early on within the context of the nuclear family. Whether it be insecure or secure, it’s simply a way to understand a person’s characteristic ways of relating, and there’s nothing good or bad about it.
References
Bakermans-Kranenburg, M.J., & van IJzendoorn, M.H. (2009). The first 10,000 Adult Attachment Interviews: distributions of adult attachment representations in clinical and non-clinical groups. Attachment & Human Development, 11(3), 223-263.
George, C., Kaplan, N., & Main, M. (1996). Adult Attachment Interview. Unpublished manuscript, Department of Psychology, University of California, Berkeley (third edition).
Mikulincer, M. & Shaver, P.R. (2016). Adult attachment and emotion regulation (ch. 24, pp. 507-533), In J. Cassidy and P.R. Shaver (Eds.) Handbook of Attachment: Theory, Research, and Clinical Applications (3rd ed.). New York: Guilford.