John Bowlby

So the empowerment consciousness is something that's, it's hard.

I mean, again, you also get into the concept of co-regulation, which is a very, it's such an important concept because it is, I mean, co-regulation is exactly what Bowlby and everyone else wrote about attachment, about that infant, like how, why, how we are with infants and how that sets the groundwork for everything that's going to come and how we even walk into a room and co-regulate.

It's very difficult for people who've been in a distorted sick, twisted house of mirrors that have been, especially if they have more than one of these narcissistic relationships in their lives, because a narcissistic relationship by definition is a disempowered relationship.

So I'm going to ask you about two more things and make one more point.

I realized that I wanted to go to the very beginning, like how do we start our relational imprint, you know? And attachment theory was really beautiful for that.

And I loved John Bowlby's perspective that it's biological.

We come with it as part of our biology, just like you have thirst and hunger and all these other things that are natural to us.

Attachment and connection is actually biologically connected.

So the really cool thing about the origins of attachment was it really grew out of work with human infants and with non-human animals, mainly primates.

So John Bowlby and Mary Ainsworth, two of the pioneers of human attachment, they were really informed also by the work of Harry Harlow, who worked with non-human primates.

And what they saw is that both humans and many non-human animals are born with sets of behaviors that help to promote their survival.

So if you think about a human infant or even a monkey or something like that, they're born altricial, meaning they're completely helpless and dependent on a caregiver to provide food.

So it's not just one thing, it's many, many pathways coming together.

Now in the 1950s, a psychiatrist named John Bowlby and a psychologist named Mary Ainsworth laid out a developmental model called attachment theory.

This model focused on our earliest relationships, typically with parents or other early primary caregivers.

they showed that a child needs a solid secure consistent relationship with just one solid safe secure and available adult caregiver to set the foundation for normal development that adult becomes a sort of base camp for the child and if the child is at all stressed Where do they want to be? They want to be near their safe base.

You may have learned about it in school.

But suffice it to say, a child, all children, need a consistent, safe person in their lives to develop a healthy sense of self and a healthy psychological development.

Bowlby and Ainsworth and other researchers subsequent to them described different attachment styles, including a secure attachment, anxious attachment, and avoidant attachment.

Since then, others have also added what's called a disorganized attachment style.