Delightful

I babble about attachment here all the time. I always wonder if it makes sense to anyone that hasn't been through adoption/adoption therapy or struggled to attach to a child. Most of you are parents, so I will guess you understand attachment on an intuitive level. You certainly have seen your child light up when he sees you and fall apart when you leave the room at some stage in their development. The physical manifestations of secure attachment, you know.

I have read so much about attachment and bonding, attachment theory and attachment therapy over the last four years. I know a lot, relatively speaking, about unattached children and forming attachments with children after infancy. In my mind, attachment is the formal word for the building blocks of love, trust and security that we give our children by responding to their needs.

I had a chance to hear Dr. Kent Hoffman speak on attachment theory as a part of a training course for a volunteer program. Dr Hoffman is an attachment specialist who practices right here in our town. He runs a program designed to help at risk mothers form secure bonds with their babies.

Dr. Hoffman approached attachment from a different angle. He spoke about the types of attachment infants form with their biological (or original) caregivers, in order to make us understand that the young women he sees grew up in homes with a very poor attachment model. They have formed mostly disorganized attachments, which result, not necessarily from abusive caregivers, but from chaotic caregivers. Alcoholics and drug addicts often form disorganized attachments with their children. They aren't there fully, they don't meet all of their babies needs. They don't interact with their babies the way the baby craves. A severely depressed mom can form a disorganized attachment with her child.

A baby that forms a secure attachment to his parents learns, usually in the first six months of life, to view the world a certain way. He learns that life is fundamentally good and people are trustworthy. He expects his needs to be met. He learns that good things usually follow bad things and he can weather the bad. He learns that the world is inherently orderly and he can rely on people to help him.

A baby that forms a disorganized attachment lives in a different, far scarier world. She considers life fundamentally bad and uncertain and finds people untrustworthy. She expects that her needs will not be met. She learns that bad things keep happening for no reason in a random and chaotic pattern. She learns that the world is inherently chaotic and that she can not rely on anyone to help her. She may even learn that she can not rely on herself. She may learn that she can rely on only herself.

As teens and even adults, these people can't think ahead. They have no concept of a future that is different from their difficult today. They don't expect others to do what they say they will do. They expect relationships to be unpredictable and temporary and they expect to be hurt by the people that they need.

You see the difference? You see where in our society the second type of people often end up? Why some people can't seem to hold a job? Follow through? Take help that is offered? Even when it seems so obvious that it is right there.

Dr. Hoffman said a few things that will stick with me. I mean really stick with me. I wake up each morning thinking about how to incorporate these lessons into my life. I take a deep breath and remind myself to keep these things in mind for this new day.

Each person walks around with more pain than you imagine. I don't take this to mean that we are all doomed to suffering or eternal unhappiness, but just the fact of it rings true. We all have our sorrows. We all have our griefs. We are all struggling in some respect, somehow. We might be happy, functional, balanced. We might be depressed. We might be right where we need to be. We still all have our hidden pain.

We all want to be held by someone bigger, stronger, wiser and kinder than we are. It's right again, don't you think? I think we are all searching for this to a certain extent. Dr. Hoffman called this need the need to be in a held environment. I think you could say it's the universal human need to be safe, to feel secure and to feel loved. It's the "father-figure" many women yearn for, the "mentor" we all seek, the ultimate definition of god. As it pertains to raising children, I am quite certain I have "bigger and stronger" down. I need to keep working on the "wiser and kinder" aspect of the thing.

Every person yearns to be delighted in. This is my favorite. Every person yearns to be delighted in. I don't have "god" moments and "aha" moments are so Oprah-esque, but I got a chill. I knew I needed to hear this and live it. Every person yearns to be delighted in.

It's true for me. I instantly recognized exactly why I love this blog. People share my delight here, they delight in me and with me and I can reciprocate, visiting their thoughts delighting in and with them. It's also why we love certain friends. Don't you have a friend like that, a friend who delights in you? I'm lucky enough to have a few. Think about how it makes you feel. I've also had that friend who only wants to be delighted in and has little to offer me in return. Not so fun.

Mothers naturally delight in their babies in the first months of life. Look at this picture of me and Nate. (Artistic credit to the amazing Nick Follger.)

Can you see it? Can you see the basis of self-esteem? The idea that he is worth something? The security that comes from being in a held environment? We all give this to our babies, usually it comes by instinct, so naturally that you don't even notice.

The thing is, it's easy with a baby. Nature sets it up to be easy. The tininess. The helplessness. The smiles. The coos. The urge to protect and nurture. It gets harder in my limited experience. I have days when I absolutely know that I have not delighted in my four-year-olds. They are so far from delightful I might venture to use the word demonic. They are trying, whiny and disrespectful. I am exhausted, angry, exasperated. Some days, it's hard to find any delight.

They still need it. I know it because it clicked inside of me that on the days that go the worst, this is what is missing and I am the catalyst for change. The knowledge clicked that someone showing delight in me can turn my day, my mood, my path around.

I'm trying to let my children see me delight in them, to focus on showing them deliberately how they delight me. Oh, hell yes, I know, I still have dark days. I forget. I get off track. I'm still able to view the entire world and everything in it through my sarcastic lens. But somehow this idea of delighting in others has stuck in my brain, jived with all my hard won attachment knowledge, settled in to stay. I'm glad. I think, to go all biblical on you, that delight begats delight. It's one of those things that pays you back in orders of magnitude over what you give and pays others forward in a boundless stream of energy.

How delightful is that?

Help me? How do you show your children, especially your older out of infancy and toddler stage children that you find them delightful? How do you remember to find them delightful, you know, on the hard days?

(In case anyone was to mistake me for an expert on pretty much anything: I'm not. This whole post is my brain's interpretation of my adoption attachment research melded with my thoughts on the presentation of a true expert. Also, if you are thinking, wow, Stacey, that's weird. I don't have any issues showing my kids how delightful they are. They are always delightful and my delight beams from my eye sockets and my ears and other orifices of my body. Fabulous. I'm happy for you. I mean that. Just lie to me in the comments, Pollyanna, because the truth will make me all insecure and depressed and I am trying really hard for delighted here ;-)

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