Making New Attachments

Margaret K. Keiley

I returned a few weeks ago from the AFTA Clinical Research Conference on "Attachment: A Perspective for Couple and Family Therapy." In terms of content, seldom have I attended a research conference that was as pertinent to my own work as was this one. In addition, I found myself making connections — old and new — with other researchers who have interests, questions, experiences, or reservations about attachment similar to mine.

I attended this conference because the thread that runs through my research and clinical work is that of affect regulation and attachment. In my clinical work, I have noticed that many of the difficulties for which individuals, couples, and families came to therapy seemed to involve irregularities and dysregulation of the affective and attachment systems. Clients seem to start using addictive substance or engaging in processes (drinking, gambling, among others) as a means of regulating affect and/or connection with others and/or themselves (Keiley, in press). As the cycle of addiction continues, they experience increased disconnections with significant others and more negative affect brought about by their continued use of the addictive substances or process. In turn, they manage these increases by further increases in the use of these addictive substance or process (Tomkins, 1963). And so the cycle continues. In my work with families, similar cycles of escalating, uncontrolled negative affect and disconnection with significant others seem to exist in the development of externalizing and internalizing disorders (Magai, 1999; Patterson, 1982). For example, in response to parents' aversive intrusions into relatively trivial noncompliant behavior, children often counterattack in a less trivial manner and the parents then respond with further escalations of demanding behavior; a coercive cycle ensues (Dishion, Patterson, & Kavanagh, 1992). These cycles carry over to the child's relationships with peers and teachers, often resulting in school failure and associations with deviant peers — a further escalation of disconnection and negative affect.

From my clinical experiences with families and individuals trying to manage behaviors such as these, I have created a research program to investigate the affective and attachment mechanisms through which these behaviors emerge and to evaluate intervention programs designed to change the developmental trajectories of these behaviors. Currently, I have been investigating the development of externalizing, internalizing, and addictive behaviors of children, adolescents, and adults in various contexts and exploring the affective and attachment factors that influence that development. I also lead a team of students and faculty who have developed and implemented an 8-week family intervention program based on an affect regulation and attachment framework that we have tested with groups of parents and incarcerated adolescents. The 6-step program is designed to help family members regulate their feelings successfully, thereby allowing them to reconnect with each other and problem solve more effectively. In addition, since my work as a family therapist and as a trainer of family therapists focuses on the connections that exist among supervisors, therapists, and clients and how affect is regulated within these systems, I am investigating how attention to these affective and attachment processes affects changes that occur in therapy.

Out of these research and clinical contexts, I attended the most recent AFTA Research Conference on attachment. While at the conference, I was thrilled to be in the company of other clinicians and researchers interested in attachment and affect regulation in contexts similar to mine. Having an opportunity to hear well-known attachment researchers present their work was gratifying, but having the chance to interact with them in the informal context of sharing meals and engaging in other activities was particularly helpful in making more lasting connections and finding areas of common concern. In addition, I had the opportunity to deepen my relationships with people whom I already knew. Just walking from the hotel to the theater to see, of all things, She Loves Me

, was an occasion to enjoy these new and re-newed attachments. What fun!

During the conference, I was relieved to find out that these clinicians and researchers were wrestling with some of the same problems with which I was wrestling. I was also excited to hear that some of them had found solutions to these dilemmas that they were willing to share with me. I discovered I was not alone in advocating an interdisciplinary focus for the future of family research. Not only did many of the presenters come from fields other than family therapy but many of the family therapists I encountered also held the view that we, as family researchers, need to attend to information gathered from other disciplines. When the pioneers of our field were developing family therapy as a separate discipline, they appeared to be intent on differentiating family therapy from other disciplines, such as clinical psychology. Since then, we have often insisted that our systemic view of individuals, families, and the world was not only unique, but also better than the perspectives taken by other clinicians and researchers. At times, we have ignored the research findings of developmental and family studies that might have been useful for our clients. Certainly, the dreaded developmental psychopathologists were condemned as disrespectful and pathologizing. At the AFTA conference, I was pleased to see that, as the field moves through its adolescence to its adulthood, we are now able to include all of the disciplines that might have something productive for us to think about as we work with and study the functional and dysfunctional patterns within families.

Another dilemma with which I have struggled is that of the measurement of attachment and affect regulation across the lifespan. During this conference, I was introduced to several new ideas about how these measurement dilemmas might be explored and, perhaps, resolved. During my graduate education, I took several courses in research methods and design, in which we evaluated numerous studies and became aware of the problems involved in the measurement of most constructs. I learned that the reliability and validity of measurement instruments was of paramount importance. After that class, I began to wonder whether quantitative analysis of family processes was of any value at all, if most of the measures that we use are of doubtful reliability or validity. Maybe the only legitimate analysis is a qualitative one. I still have not resolved that dilemma, but at this conference, I met others who were asking this same question and working to develop measures that might be reliable and valid in assessing attachment (and affect regulation).

One of the reservations about attachment theory to which I have clung for many years is a political one. Hidden within the attachment framework, although not always well hidden, has been an assumption that to insure that infants develop a secure attachment, mothers must stay home and care for them. Being a feminist, this perspective has been untenable for me. I was pleased to find other conference attendees who had encountered this same dilemma, survived to tell the tale, and were now on the road to integrating ideas about attachment into their clinical work and research programs. I felt as though, as a family researcher and clinician, I had found a secure base from which to explore further the meaning and usefulness of attachment theory. In fact, this conference was not only one of the most relevant ones that I have attended in the recent past, but it was also one of the most supportive. My experience at this conference has encouraged me to do what I can to insure that other conferences that I attend become secure bases from which I can engage in reflective conversations with fellow researchers and develop my skills as a researcher and clinician.

References

Dishion, T.J., Patterson, G.R., & Kavanagh, K.A. (1992). An experimental test of the coercion model. In J. McCord & R. Trembley (Eds.), The interaction of theory and practice: Experimental studies of interventions (pp. 253-282). NY: Guilford Press.

Keiley, M.K. (in press). Affect regulation and attachment-focused treatment of a husband with obsessive-compulsive disorder and his wife. Journal of Couple and Relationship Therapy

Magai, C. (1999). Affect, imagery, and attachment: Working models of interpersonal affect and the socialization of emotion. In J. Cassidy & P.R. Shaver (Eds.), Handbook of attachment: Theory, research, and clinical applications (pp. 787-802). NY: Guilford Press.

Patterson, G. (1982). Coercive family process: A social learning approach, Vol. 3. Eugene, OR: Castalia Press.

Tomkins, S. (1963). Affect, imagery, consciousness (volume 1). NY: Springer.

Margaret K. Keiley, Ed.D. is Assistant Professor, Marriage and Family Therapy Program, Department of Child Development and Family Studies, Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN 47907