The Building Blocks of Attachment
In Part 1 of this series on attachment, we looked at the different types of attachment styles and how they manifested in relationships with others, ourselves, and to our environment. Today, we will explore the development of secure attachment by looking at key building blocks for healthy attachment in relationships: attunement, containment, and rupture and repair. Let’s dig a little deeper into understanding these three critical ingredients.
Attunement
To understand the concept of attunement, think of the phrase “in tune with.” Attunement is being aware of and responsive to the emotions and/or needs of another person. I also like to describe it almost as being a mirror to another person, in the sense that you can track with and reflect well the other person’s emotional state. Another way of describing it is learning another person’s rhythm and being in step with them, in the sense that you can tell when their steps change or their pacing is off. If a person becomes well-attuned to another, their ability to sense the other’s emotions and needs can almost be predictive—meaning, they know the person so well that they can anticipate their responses or needs. You can see this often with mother-child relationships, especially before the child is verbal, where the mother has grown so attuned to the child that she is able to tell what the child’s cries are asking for without any words.
Attunement is about having a person feel as though they are understood, seen, and felt by another person. Good attunement requires being able to read a person’s needs or emotions and stay present with that person even when it feels tough. As we consistently show up and validate a person’s needs, this attuning process grows the capacity for felt safety within relationships. As you provide attunement for a person, they will feel safe with you, and as a person does this for you, you will feel safer with them.
This piece is often where attunement breaks down in relationships—in simple ways, like when the listener is distracted with a device or a demanding job, or in more complex ways, when the listener becomes uncomfortable with the feelings of another and is no longer present in the conversation. Of course, this broken attunement happens to us all from time to time. We are only human! We all miss each other from time to time, get each other wrong, miscalculate where the other is at. A critical piece of this concept is that we do not need to be perfect at attuning to others. The goal is never to be perfect, but rather practicing “good enough” attunement. In other words, more often than not, do I have the sense that another person gets me, that they want to be with me in hard things?
Containment
To help understand the concept of containment, think of a container: a defined space that can safely hold and accommodate its contents. As it relates to attachment, containment refers to the relational ability to “hold” whatever the other person needs held emotionally and to create a sense of safety in the relational space. As an illustration, think about a parent engaging with a toddler who is starting to experience big, intense emotions. Typically, toddlers become overwhelmed by what they are feeling and have a hard time regulating themselves. This can often be a frightening or overwhelming experience for them, to have such big energy taking over such a small body! When a parent steps in with a regulated and calm demeanor, acknowledges and identifies the emotion, and helps the child begin to regulate, what they are offering is containment. The parent helps hold the emotion while the child can safely begin to soothe. These early experiences of containment are key in building secure attachments: a child can consistently depend on an adult to help create a safe relational space for self-regulation. It is important that there be a distinction between helping hold emotional experiences and becoming overwhelmed by them as the person holding the space. A boundary helps both people involved know where their emotions and experiences end, and the other’s begins.
I sometimes like to describe it this way, as illustrations can be helpful. The parent is wrangling this giant, chaotic black mass of emotion that the toddler is figuratively throwing at them (or, if you have a toddler, often literally). The parent who is using their words to name and explain the emotion or the need is “taming” the emotion—akin to drawing a silhouette around it to transform this big black mass into something more manageable, a smaller black shape with boundaries. As the parent is trying to communicate with the child, the parent is then figuratively “giving back” to the child the emotion in its newer, more manageable “container.” The container is much easier for the child to physically hold and examine and isn’t as scary as a large, all-encompassing, uncontrolled monster.
Where this can breakdown is if the parent has a hard time remaining present and regulated and is unable to consider the child’s feelings as separate from their own feelings. Perhaps the child’s anger reminds them of their parent’s anger, and instead of remaining present with the child, they withdraw internally, or get frustrated with the child, because they are afraid and want the child to stop being angry. In this situation, the child learns the opposite of containment—now, not only are they afraid their emotion is going to overwhelm them, but also they have experienced their emotion as equally overwhelming to their parent, who is now “emotionally” abandoning them. This interaction has confirmed that emotions really are scary black monsters that move people away from them, leaving them alone, and the child must avoid this at all costs.
Of course, as with attunement, we can never be perfect at this! From time to time, we will get overwhelmed by others’ emotions. That is being human. The aim is always “good enough”—to, more often than not, try to be present with another and hold what they are feeling, and to ask for the same from others.
Rupture and Repair
This brings us to the final building block of attachment—rupture and repair. As I mentioned in the previous two sections, sometimes we get stuff wrong in relationships. We miss seeing that our spouse is crabby when they come home from work. We don’t see that our kid is struggling with a friend at school. We get overwhelmed by our friend’s emotions and react critically instead of with empathy and good boundaries. Our own exhaustion keeps us from being present when our kid is trying to engage with us after dinner. We are human!
Thankfully, this last piece of attachment is what helps us during these times that our humanity shows up. What is rupture and what is repair? Rupture is a breakdown in our connection with another person. It’s a roadblock that pops up in the highway of communication, trust, and intimacy with someone we care about. Rupture includes almost anything that disrupts a relational connection, and it often looks like a conflict of some sort. Repair is a process about how we navigate the new distance between us and close the gap, to once again be in step with each other and feel on safe, steady ground. It goes farther than just taking an apologetic stance. It dives deeper into naming what has happened, owning our role in what happened, seeing how it impacted each person (which includes listening to the other person’s version of the event), considering together how the rupture was co-created, and exploring a way forward in the relationship.
People are often afraid of conflict in relationships, and understandably if they never experienced good repair! They learned that conflict leads to distance, and there weren’t really attempts to repair and be in step again. Of course, in those instances, they would want to avoid conflict at all costs, if it leaves them feeling alone and ashamed. However, good repair can help us to fear conflict less, and encourages us to show more of ourselves in relationships, trusting the other person will be there. Good repair is so good, and I would argue, is the most important ingredient to the formation of trust in relationships. If we fight, if we have a conflict, can we trust each other to move towards each other again? Can we trust each other to stay when it’s tough?
Now that we have reviewed these three crucial building blocks of healthy attachment—attunement, containment, rupture and repair—hopefully, you have a more concrete idea of how a safe and secure relationship is formed and maintained. This knowledge can equip you to more deeply examine how others care for you, as well as how you care for others.
If you would like to pursue your attachment and how to implement repair into your relationships we are here for you.