Securely attached to the *world*

An interview with Dr. Gena Gorlin, psychologist and founder coach, on reframing attachment research

Attachment theory has a chokehold on modern parents . . . or, at least, that appears to be the case if we judge by the frequent parenting debates online, which often devolve into claims of a parent causing permanent psychological damage if they sleep train or send their baby to daycare . . . or if we peruse many of the recent bestselling parenting books, all claiming to offer strategies grounded in the most up to date attachment research.

It’s common to hear parents express guilt for failing to live up to the expert-recommended strategies found in these books or those promoted by parenting experts on Instagram, whether by being too “inconsistent”, handling a tantrum poorly, or lapsing into the bad habit of offering empty praise by saying, “Good job, sweetie!”

Dr. Gena Gorlin, a licensed psychologist, founder coach, and mother of two, argues that there is a major flaw in the way attachment research is commonly interpreted. And, if we re-frame the research, we can better support our child’s development without losing our minds after every mistake. I’m excited to share my conversation with Gena, here:

Dr. Gena Gorlin, a licensed psychologist, founder coach, and author of a forthcoming book on the psychology of ambition

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The origins of attachment theory

Samantha: To start, could you share some of the background of attachment theory? Could you describe, for example, the research done by Mary Ainsworth and what psychologists concluded based on it?

Gena: To preface this, I am not myself an attachment researcher. So while I’m not a layman regarding the body of literature, I’m also not a specialist. I’m commenting on this from somewhat of a removed distance, but also as someone with more than a passing interest.

The origin of the attachment literature as an empirical discipline is, as you mentioned, with Mary Ainsworth.

I mean, we can go back even farther, to Bowlby, to Harlow and his monkeys. You probably know that there were studies primarily with non-human animals prior to Ainsworth that established certain patterns where, famously, the baby monkeys would prefer the soft cloth monkey over the milk bottle, if they had to pick. Or there was the research that discovered imprinting as a phenomenon, where we saw that geese and other birds would follow whoever they first see.

Those were the studies that then paved the way for Mary Ainsworth to make an empirical study in humans.

Mary Ainsworth’s experiment was called “the strange situation” and it featured toddlers along with their primary caregivers (almost always their moms at the time). Basically, she devised an experimental paradigm that allowed her and her colleagues to observe different patterns of response when toddlers were briefly separated from their mom.

At the outset, the kid is usually playing and exploring the toys in the lab with their mom. A stranger comes in the room, and then the mom leaves while the stranger remains with the child. The crucial moment in the experiment, or at least the most widely studied, is when mom returns after being gone: the reunion.

Ainsworth found a reliable set of patterns in which toddlers differed in their reunion response. And she managed to create a reliable coding system that her research assistants could also use, and everybody could consistently classify the toddler the same way by watching the same video.

For the majority of toddlers, when mom leaves, they’re upset, they cry. Then, when mom returns, they’re relieved, they greet her, they’re happy, and they go back to playing with the toys. Those children are what Ainsworth came to call the “securely attached” toddlers.

Some toddlers, however, would cry and get upset when mom leaves, but then they would stay upset and inconsolable when mom returns. They’re angry with mom but also clinging to mom. They’re no longer interested in the toys, and they just can’t seem to calm down. And those children are what would be called “preoccupied” or “anxiously attached” toddlers.

And then there’s another type of response, where the toddler just doesn’t even seem to notice that mom left. These toddlers didn’t take much notice of either the departure or the return of their mom. And notably for me, though not emphasized as much in most of the rehashings of the paradigm, this type of toddler also doesn’t show as much interest in the toys, period. They’re kind of fiddling with them a little, maybe poking at them, but they’re not actively, intensively exploring. And those children have been classified as “avoidantly attached” children.

There have been other categories added that happen at a lower incident rate, but are correlated with various psychopathology pathways, like “disorganized attached” and so on. But these three—secure, anxious, and avoidant—are the main categories.

At the time, Ainsworth found that there was a correlation between which category a child gets placed in, and the parent’s self-reported and observed parenting style. So, the extent to which parents are “responsive” to the child and notice what the child needs, versus the extent to which they’re kind of cold and dismissive of the child, or overly domineering and helicopter-ish, for example, consistently predicted whether a child showed a secure or insecure attachment pattern in the “strange situation.”

And then over the years, what really, I think, put this field of research on the map in a bigger way, was the longitudinal finding that the attachment style these kids demonstrated at age one and a half to two, predicted how likely they are to get divorced, their self esteem in high school, their academic performance, their longevity, their BMI—just a whole slew of outcome variables that researchers care about because they’re related in some way to wellbeing, both in relationships and more generally.

The conventional interpretation

Samantha: So, I went back and watched some of the clips of the strange experiment on YouTube in preparation for this. At the end, they have a little voiceover takeaway which, to me at least, sounds really serious and really ominous.

The researcher summarizes the findings by saying something like, “We theorize that the parents of these insecure children must have been inconsistent in their responses to the the child earlier in the child’s life”, and I feel like he really lingers on the word “inconsistent” you know, to emphasize the parent’s guilt for how their inconsistency caused these children to develop an insecure attachment.

It might just be pregnancy hormones, but when I heard that I could just feel my stomach drop, you know? Like, how in the world do I help my child have a secure attachment with me? And what if I screw it up? And if I screw up when my daughter is 1 or 2, can I fix it later? Or have I screwed it up for life?

Gena: Yeah, I mean, as a mom who knows about the findings and who even has a unique perspective on them, this has not been absent from my day-to-day neurotic worries and over-analysis of my parenting. I absolutely sometimes feel like I’ve damaged my child because I was, for example, on my phone when he or she was trying to get my attention, etc. I’m by no means immune!

But my overarching perspective does offer a corrective to these neurotic worries, at least when I manage to keep it in view.

Samantha: So, as someone who spends a lot of time immersed in online parenting culture, my sense is that we’re not alone in struggling with feelings like this sometimes. My sense is that the view permeating a lot of parenting discussions is that one of the most important goals, if not the most important goal of parenting is to help a child have a secure relationship with you, and that this should be the perspective through which you judge yourself and make all kinds of parenting decisions.

Is this basically the interpretation of attachment researchers in the field too?

Gena: Among psychologists who study and subscribe to attachment theory, or at least are adjacent to it, the overarching view is that:

1. Attachment styles are internal working models based on the relationships we have with our primary caregivers while growing up

2. These styles are malleable but hard to change; they don’t change by default and they tend to persist through time

3. These styles then shape everything important about how we respond to the world, to other people, and to ourselves, as well as how we think about ourselves, and even how we relate to our own children, to our spouses, etc.

and

4. All of this is because our internal working model that we have for our relationships with other human beings is the most important foundation for our personality.

So, I think the findings of attachment research are genuinely interesting and cool, and I think there’s a lot to learn from them. But that last premise especially is where I depart from the conventional interpretation. Or, another way to put it: that’s the major fault line between traditional attachment theory and my take on it.

Rethinking attachment

Samantha: Yeah, let’s dive into where you diverge from traditional attachment theory then. In your Substack piece, “Rethinking attachment”, you put the contrast this way:

contra the explicit aims of attachment-based parenting, my primary goal is not to get [my children] securely attached to me; it’s to get them in direct, joyful and capable contact with their world, whilst making myself as peripheral and unintrusive a player in that relationship as possible.

Gena: So, I think the problem is that the traditional interpretation of attachment styles bakes in a lot of theoretical baggage from various traditions that assume our relationships and our view of ourselves in relationships are the hard rock foundation for our psychology and for how we deal with the world.

And that’s where I disagree.

As adults, assuming healthy development, we are in a direct relationship with the world, and it’s that relationship which then sets a foundation for all our relationships with other human beings.

That’s a very different state of affairs than the one that a baby is born into. Developmentally, there’s a major existential difference between life, the universe, and everything when you’re 2, and life, the universe, and everything when you’re 18.

In the first case, you, in fact, are completely dependent on your adults. Your life is at their mercy—factually, journalistically. Like, if they decide to starve you, you will starve. If they decide to put you in Sunday school, you’re gonna go to Sunday School, even if it’s kicking and screaming, right? They, in fact, are your world. Or rather, they are your conduit to the world. They’re the mediator between you and the world, because you aren’t yet able, nor free, to independently engage with the world, except through the intermediary of your parents.

So, you’re forming a mental model of life, the universe, and everything . . . in a context that’s very different from the one you’re trying to develop into.

And this is part of the challenge, and also part of the confusion with traditional attachment theory and how it’s applied. It assumes, in effect, this infantilized model of human nature. It extends the infant state of affairs into adulthood, instead of thinking about the ultimate destination—adulthood—and then looking at what the infant is currently learning and projecting and how that’s going to set them up for the future.

As adults, we are no longer dependent, literally, on other people. We are not dependent on anyone for our survival, for our agency, for what we build in the world. So, I think attachment theory infantilizes adults to the extent that it views us as still needing that comfort object, or as still needing that conduit to reality. If the model hasn’t made a conceptual shift to recognize, “Hey, we don’t need relationships in that way any more,” then that model is false. And that’s really the core pivot.

So, as parents, when we realize that the destination is adulthood, then the ideal case scenario for our children as adults is that they’re not thinking about how to please us, or whether we’re going to stick around or not. As they’re going about their decisions, they are joyfully, confidently in contact with the world. They know that they can pursue their goals within it; they know they can solve problems; and yes, that they can find love and they can experience deep intimacy.

Once we re-orient toward adulthood as the target, then we become less of a protagonist—or antagonist, for that matter—in our kids’ developmental story. Montessori has also largely inspired my approach to this, which is to think of myself as a scaffold. Right now I am a crutch of sorts for my kids’ agency. There’s just a lot they can’t do yet, and so I can be this fill-in, an extended arm for them almost.

The example which was very salient for me when I was writing that original post about attachment was when I would just draw at Alice, my daughter’s, command. At the time, she would instruct me, “Mommy, draw a lake, okay? Now, draw Moana. Now, draw a boat.” And I would just do it at her command so that she could realize her vision and get what she needed out of that expressive exercise.

Since writing that post, I’ve also thought a lot more about how my relationship with her also sets a foundation. Because I think it does in an important way. I don’t think that I’m literally trying to just become obsolete or that it doesn’t matter whether I love her. Of course it matters!

I think one of the crucial roles we play as parents, which attachment theory is partly picking up on, but then also kind of over-generalizing from, is that through our love we model for our children what it’s like to be a value, to matter, and for their needs to matter, before they can conceptualize their own value and have that self-awareness and self-representational ability.

On being a scaffold

Samantha: The idea of making yourself peripheral to your child’s relationship with the world and acting as a scaffold definitely reminds me of Montessori. She has that famous quote you’ll often see pop up online which goes:¹

What is the greatest height of a Montessori teacher’s success? To be able to say: “Now the children work as if I did not exist,” She has become nothing and the children have become all.

Could you expand a bit on this idea of being a scaffold for your child’s experience with the world rather than dominating their experience?

Gena: So, Montessori is a part of my inspiration, but what I’m primarily drawing on is my own experience of the psychology of an insecurely attached adult, which I have been historically and still have some residue of.

In that psychology, there’s a preoccupation with things like, “Am I okay by these people?” Or, “Are these people upset with me?” Or, “If they leave, am I gonna be alone forever?” Or feeling shaky and concerned in this neurotic way with the other figures in our life, where people start to really play this outsized metaphysical role, and it really starts to feel like our security, our self-esteem, our sense of competence and efficacy in the world does hang on their approval—on them being around, on them not abandoning us.

So, as I’m working backwards, I’m asking: “Well, how did I learn that?” And, “What would it have taken for me to not learn that, or for me to learn something different?”

And I realized that to the extent that, in fact, I experienced my parents as active, fiat-driven intermediaries between me and my life, between me and the world, then I learned that those intermediaries mattered a lot. I learned that they’re important to check with, to get permission from, to not upset, and also that if I screw that up then I lose access. I literally don’t get a ride to practice, I get my violin taken away, I get punished, whatever it might be.

So through thinking back to my own childhood, such as it was, I could see what the developmental trajectory looks like that makes us anxious about our relationships, rather than viewing them as this wonderful dimension of our life that we get to build and enjoy, but where they don’t play this cosmic or catastrophic role.

And so from working backwards, I realized that the less my daughter’s experience of the world can depend on my say-so and can depend on my arbitrary fiat, then the more she can experience a more realistic analog of the adult life I’m preparing her for.

Samantha: Do you have any examples where you see yourself as stepping back from that fiat role to become that scaffold?

Gena: One obvious implication is to make as much of the world accessible directly through the child’s own agency as possible—which is Montessori’s great insight. So if my daughter had some vision of preparing a muffin for herself, but stupidly, we left the plates where she couldn’t reach, we would help her reach the shelf and then re-arrange things so she could do it independently in the future.

But a major arena in which this dynamic has played out with me and Alice, who’s my now six-year-old, is piano and ballet, basically any of the extracurriculars that she’s dabbled in that involve practice and discipline and consistently going to classes.

I bring up this example, and it’s salient to me, because of how I have felt myself slipping into the less healthy modes in this realm. If you and your readers are familiar with my triad of drill-sergeant, Zen guru, and builder, I find that the drill-sergeant is a great metaphor for the kind of parenting that is overly intrusive in terms of creating this intermediary, or “introject,” as it’s called elsewhere in psychology.

And so the question is: how do we leave our child to directly engage with the world? How do we be seamless conduits to the world instead of a drill-sergeant introject?

And when it came to ballet and piano, I have found myself very naturally wanting to lecture, to nag, to, in effect, impose my vision of her ends on her. And I’ll tell myself, “Well, she seems to like it so much when she’s doing it, and she’s said many times that she loves it, and that she wants to be a ballerina when she grows up.”

So I have adopted this goal, supposedly on her behalf, but really it’s a goal that means more to me in a certain way. And so then it triggers my anxiety when I see her “failing” at it or not taking it seriously, and then the temptation is to try and nag her into it, or to bribe her. And I tell myself, you know, I’m just trying to help her see the consequences.

But this is the subtle and important difference: when I’m doing that, deep down in my heart of hearts I have to ask: is my goal here to help her make the choice she wants to make, to help her see reality for what it is? Or is my goal to get her to the outcome that I would like, or to get her to make the choice I want her to make?

It’s really subtle, but what I try to do when I nail this, or at least when I’m acting in alignment with my own values and perspective, is that I lay out the facts in a form that she can understand.

The goal is to really be able to embody that no specific behavior this child could exhibit, or fail to exhibit, will ever be more important than this child’s agency. In other words, I will not make this child a means to my ends. This child is an end in herself. My job is to nurture her capacity to be the best at fulfilling her own ends and to live her own fullest, happiest life on her own terms.

Sometimes that means trying to paint a picture of what the facts are going to be on the ground, sometimes it’s getting out of the way, sometimes it’s saying, “You know what, let’s just not take ballet lessons for a while, because I don’t actually think you’re that into it. And that’s okay, no big! And, you know, it does cost some money, and right now, I don’t think we’re really getting our money’s worth. But hey, let me know if at some point you really want to practice a bunch and we’ll revisit. But I love you either way.”

On the challenges, ruptures, and repairs

Samantha: That kind of self-honesty is really inspiring, and I really love this idea of acting as a seamless conduit to the world for your child.

But it strikes me that it can be pretty psychologically challenging to adopt that role and be ok with stepping back. For a lot of parents, and people generally, it’s nice to feel needed, to feel like you can do things for your child, to feel helpful and valuable.

What do you think adopting the role of scaffold requires of a parent, psychologically?

Gena: Look, I think there’s a good reason why secure attachment in parents predicts secure attachment in children. I think it’s much easier to really strike up that stance where we are detaching ourselves from the particular outcomes, and we are serving as conduits, rather than active intermediaries or tyrants, if we’re not still trying to reassure ourselves that we’re lovable. So, parenting is a great inducement to repair any residual self esteem issues that one might have because now this child’s happiness depends on it.

One of the major things I want to say here is I screw up a million times. I don’t know any parent who doesn’t screw up a million times. Even my husband Matt, who’s like Mr. Perfect Parent. He’s someone I look up to as a parent, as annoying as it is to admit. But even he screws up all the time, and he will say so, and it’s fine. And the reason it’s fine is because we apologize and we own it, and we talk about it.

As an example, Matt has this way of barking at the kids sometimes when they do something that just feels irrational or dangerous or whatever. It doesn’t reflect anything deep about his parenting approach. And we’ve seen and reflected on it together that for, like, two hours after the fact, Alice would act insecure. And now, it’s more like 10 minutes.

But the reason that it isn’t an enduring thing is because consistently, reliably, he then goes back and apologizes, and he says, “I’m sorry I overreacted. I shouldn’t have yelled. Here’s where I was coming from. Do you see what was kind of frustrating about this at the time? But also the yelling was excessive, and I still love you.”

Making those corrections I think counts for way more in the long run than being immaculate as an invisible scaffold, or whichever metaphor we pick.

There’s separate research in psychology on ruptures and repairs. It’s one of the research findings that I like to cite all the time, because it’s such a useful reminder. In therapy dyads, but also I’m pretty sure it’s been replicated in dorm mates, married couples, etc., the relationships which had early ruptures and then repairs, meaning there was a conflict and they worked through it, are more enduring relationships. Those dyads report more intimacy, closeness, resilience, etc. etc. than ones who just never had the conflict.

So, this is part of the lesson of the revised attachment model that we’re looking at here. Human beings are not fragile. They are resilient, and they learn and they update, and they have agency and free will, and they can gain perspective on things that might have seemed really threatening or inexplicable at first, and those are really good muscles to train and to flex.

Samantha: As you say in your piece about re-interpreting the findings of attachment research:

Instead of worrying about whether my kids have a secure enough relationship with me, I'm instead focused on curating their relationship with the world: a world filled with chosen delights they can pursue by their own thoughtful efforts, but not through tantrums or coercion; where their actions have real, discernible consequences; where knowledge gives them power; where there are no artificial limits on what they can envision and build.

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Gena Gorlin is a clinical psychologist, founder coach, and author of a forthcoming book on the psychology of ambition. You can find Gena on Substack as Dr. Gena Gorlin and on Twitter as @Gena_I_Gorlin.

To read more about her re-framing of attachment theory from the conventional view which she calls the Generalized-Caregiver-Model, to her view which she calls the Generalized-World-Model, check out her piece Rethinking Attachment.

1. Montessori, Maria. The Absorbent Mind (Unabridged Start Publishing LLC) (p. 232). Start Publishing LLC. Kindle Edition.