Opening remarks for the 5^th AFTA Research Conference.
Attachment: A Perspective for Couples and Family Therapy.

At the beginning of this new millennium, a science of close relationships is evolving that allows us to begin to describe and predict the ongoing processes in distressed and non-distressed family relationships. This kind of research can help us to focus our interventions — to hit the right target. Recent research suggests, for example, that the fostering of emotional engagement and soothing responses in a couple's relationship may be even more crucial in relationship repair than fostering conflict resolution.

Descriptions of the phenomena we wish to change, correlations, metaphors and a plethora of change techniques are, however, not enough. We have to be able to coherently explain and give meaning to the patterns that are emerging in descriptive research. In general, there is more and more recognition of the need for a comprehensive, integrative theory of close relationships to guide our research efforts and approaches to intervention. This need becomes more urgent, it seems to me, as therapists are required more and more to create change in brief, efficient formats, prove the effectiveness of their interventions and effectively address the multiple mental health problems, such as clinical depression, that go along with distress in families. We need to know the topography of close relationships if we are to chart direct routes to change and to know which changes really make a difference to the essential quality of family life. Ideally, such a theory of relationships should be compatible with other valued frameworks in our field, such as systems theory and feminist perspectives (and I believe attachment theory is compatible with these valued frameworks).

This conference explores whether Attachment Theory, as first formulated by John Bowlby, perhaps the very first family therapist (he published his book, Forty-Four Juvenile Thieves: Their Character and Home Life in 1944), offers us such a theory of relationships.

There is now a large body of evidence that links secure attachment to a host of core individual and relationship variables. Secure attachment involves a relationship characterized by interactions where people are accessible and responsive to each other and so offer each other a protective safe haven and a secure base from which to learn and grow. Secure attachment is related to intimacy, trust, interdependence and the quality of caregiving and to individual variables such as the ability to meta-communicate, resilience level and adjustment to stress. In general, secure connectedness with key others appears to offer us the most powerful way to tame fear and anxiety, to construct a coherent, positive, integrated sense of self and to stand and face the dragons we all face in life— and which none of us can truly face alone. But most importantly, the area of attachment theory is not only rich in research findings, it is also eminently practical, offering couple and family therapists a map to the territory where they spend every clinical hour — the mysterious territory of love and belonging.

As an attachment theorist/clinician/researcher, I would like to offer a few statements for you to muse on, laugh at or violently disagree with, and so share my sense of how revolutionary this theory is.

Enmeshment is at best a confusing concept meshing intense caring and coerciveness and at worst a fabrication. In fact, the more connected I am to my loved ones, the more fully I can be myself.

Self-sufficiency is a lie. The only self-sufficient human being is a dead human being. There is nothing wrong with depending on others.

Robertson Davis, a famous Canadian author pointed out that orgasm is just a muscle spasm. Sex can be recreational but mostly adult sexuality is about being touched, held, and desired. It is about being attached.

Culture is important but there are key aspects of being human that are just that — human, that is belonging to the species and cutting across cultures and attachment is the prime example.

Gay relationships are not essentially different from heterosexual relationships. They are about the need for attachment.

Violence in close relationships is best seen as attachment distress — coercion sparked by attachment panic.

We may improve relationships in couples therapy in many ways and by many means, but we will never achieve stable recovery from marital distress and defeat the problem of relapse until we actively create bonding events in therapy. Such events are the only true antidote to negative cycles such as criticize/attack — withdraw/defend.

I hope I have piqued your interest. If you are more of a visual person, perhaps I can give you an image — an image that captures the essence of attachment theory for me.

In the old Anglo Saxon stories, Life is about standing in a dark, narrow passage while a dragon comes to find you. There is no escape — as Hemingway said, the world will break everyone. For the people who painted this image of life, the only point was how well you fought. For the people we see in therapy, I would like to suggest to you that there is another key question, that is, whether or not they fight alone. The distress in family relationships is, from the point of view of attachment theory, most often a desperate attempt to get the ones you love to stand beside you in the dark, and so make the fight worth fighting and the terror of the dragon less debilitating. It may look like the fight is about concrete issues — money, sex — but it is really always about whether I can count on you to stand beside me in the dark.

To take a less metaphorical stance, reality is always more prickly and awkward than our definitions of it. Many of the analyses offered here in the next few days may be erroneous, but as Frank Fincham has remarked, "this is less consequential than the clarity of such analyses, for science is advanced more by error than by confusion." I wish you an absorbing and stimulating conference — full of many new moments of clarity and a few fascinating errors.

A subjective summary of the conference:

What did I learn, what do I remember ?

Well, I remember that the conference opened with a talk from Dr Stephen Suomi on uptight, laid back and jumpy monkeys. He explained to us how patterns of interactions in attachment relationships has profound effects on behavior, the regulation of affect and on biological processes, even those that are highly heritable, and these effects can last a life time and be passed on to the next generation. Highly reactive monkeys with inherited low serotonin levels could be aggressive and be unlikely to survive because of their lack of social skills and risky behaviors, or, if given to super mums, could be precocious and able to survive very well.

From Cindy Hazan I learned something about the secret of mate selection. She suggested that it is not about strategically passing on your genes by selecting older, resource rich men if you are female, or nubile fertile women if you are male, but about accessibility. We fall in love with those who are accessible to us. Propinquity finds us a potential mate and then the cuddle hormones released during infatuation and sexual orgasm render contact with them euphoric. At some point the relationship then moves from arousing to comforting and we become attached. Men and women and parents and kids then, in all cultures, go through set sequences of separation distress and grief if separated from attachment figures. The sexes here are more alike than different, or as Cindy put it, men are from North Dakota and women are from South Dakota.

Roger Kobak painted attachment in systemic interactional terms rather than as being primarily about inner working models and personality traits. He linked secure attachment in adolescents to co-operative conversation and the ability to reflect on one's self and take another's perspective. After this, everyone, feeling secure, reflected on the lovely autumn colors, blue sky and quaint streets of Niagara on the Lake and took a break before listening to me talk about how attachment offers a map for couples relationships and helps the therapist intervene incisively. I suggested that attachment theory paralleled research such as Gottman's by emphasizing the importance of soothing interactions and emotional engagement and that the research on emotionally focused couples therapy, where 70 to 73% of couples recover from distress in ten or so sessions, argues for the strength of interventions that focus on the bonding process. I talked some about a new concept of attachment injuries, where one partner does not respond to another's urgent need, and how such events then hold a relationship hostage.

After fabulous food and a wander round the beautiful hotel with aristocratic libraries and huge vases of fresh roses everywhere, we all went off to see the play, She Loves Me. The music and great acting seemed to fill everyone with cuddle hormones and a sense of the timelessness of the story of boy meets girl, etc.

One of the highlights of the next day was when we learned to wait, watch and wonder about infants and how their mothers can attune to them with Nancy Cohen. Marlene Moretti then confirmed my suspicion that adolescents need to construct their emerging sense of self with their parents not by detaching from their parents. She also told us that very aggressive adolescents tended to be anxious and preoccupied about attachment. Pam Alexander focused us on the disorganized attachment strategies of trauma survivors and how they need connection with others but are also very wary of closeness. Sexual contact is then often most difficult with those they are close to. I then listened to my colleague, Valerie Whiffen, talk about post-partum depression and put it in the context of attachment interactions with one's partner, and how having a child kindles one's own attachment needs and sensitivities. The best predictor of women's depression remaining stable for six months was their partner's avoidance of closeness. Men also get depressed when children are born, perhaps because they feel excluded and rejected by the bond between mother and child. I grasped once again the power that social interactions have to structure our inner world and cue and maintain responses like depression.

Then, before another completely degenerate meal, many good jokes and comradeship (as someone said, "this is just like camp, only with lots of scotch") we all had the great treat of listening to a panel give us their brief thoughts on a range of fascinating topics. Jonathon Mohr pointed out that the stigma associated with gay relationships makes the creation of secure attachment difficult and that this in turn fosters a negative gay identity. Bob Marvin talked of the difficulties of custody battles and their impact on children's attachment and how the chaos of disorganized attachment where children don't know whether to dissociated and numb out, cling to or avoid their parents is worse than simple insecurity. Karen Wampler then helped us grasp some of the ways attachment theory needs to expand in order to fit the family therapy context. She suggested that there had to be less focus on the dyad and that the theory had to be meshed with a sensitivity to culture and gender. She stressed the need to move from a focus on typologies of attachment classifications to interactional processes. Cleve Shields then talked to us about being able to code the stories of our elders and see attachment patterns in them.

On the final morning, Virginia Goldner spun a wonderful web that put violence in close relationships in the context of gender and attachment. She showed us how gender positions men and women in the attachment dance and often blocks mutuality and responsiveness. She emphasized the power of insecure attachment, the entitlement and coercion associated with masculinity, and shaming and emasculation in childhood to foster men's violent responses to their partners. She stressed the panic of separation as a cue for men's violence with their partners and the frustration of the need to be needed, recognized and valued as a pathway to victimization for women. The last presentation by Vivian Carlson focused on culture and contrasted cultures that focus on independence and individualism with those that focus on interdependence and belonging. Using examples from her research on Puerto Rican and Anglo-American mothers, Carlson showed us that "good" mothering can look different in different cultures and that a secure attachment is best fostered by parenting practices that are designed to produce the traits that are valued in a particular culture. So using lots of physical control in a culture that promotes obedience and proper demeanor reflects loving attentive mothering and seems to be experienced this way by children, whereas in our culture this may be seen as coercive and foster avoidant attachment in children.

A few AFTA members then offered their reflections to us so we could begin our journey home with some ways to reflect on the richness of the conference. They pointed out that attachment was not a new idea. John Byng-Hall masterfully linked systems theory to attachment theory and family script theory. Our own Lyman Wynne's sophisticated model of epigenetic development in relationships described the progression from attachment to intimacy in very useful ways for researchers and clinicians. Others commented that attachment theory holds potential for integrating the biological, the social and the psychological. Contextual variables such as race, class, gender, and ethnicity need to be included and the theory needs to be more clearly applied to larger systems variations. They stressed that the conference challenged us to expand our thinking and attune to our clients' needs for affiliation while recognizing that attachment is but one element, albeit a crucial element, in people's lives. I could not then resist stressing that this theory supports the collaborative stance in therapy in that it promotes the need for therapy sessions to be a safe haven and a secure base where clients and therapists are safe enough to learn and grow.

Just to offer a final thought, Gary Schwartz, in the book Love and Survival (by Dean Ornish, 1998) says, "Psychologists use the terms bonding, attachment and affinity and so do biologists and physicists. They refer to the essence of what enables a system to be a system, which is to remain connected by a mutually attractive force. . . . Love is the fundamental attractive process."

Finally, much appreciation goes to the participation of the program committee in many activities, including as moderators of the sessions at this stimulating conference.

Susan Johnson is Professor of Psychology and Psychiatry at the University of Ottawa and Director of the Ottawa Couple and Family Institute. Johnson is best known for her research on emotionally focused couples therapy and her writings on attachment and emotion and her clinical presentations on couples therapy.