When Your Past Shows Up in Your Parenting

Yes.

So let's go there, because I think most moms have heard the phrase attachment, right? Because they give birth, and hopefully if everything has gone well in the birth, they put the baby on your chest, and there's supposed to be this bonding period, you know, where we're supposed to attach.

But some of us grew up with very wounding mothers, mothers who maybe had their own attachment issues and were unable to attach, or fathers who were emotionally distant, and so we have attachment wounds.

What are some of those attachment wounds, Summer?

Yeah.

We'll talk about that in a second.

I just wanna say that secure attachment comes through thousands of interactions between the caregiver and the child in which that a cry and response is met, in which someone's eyes of delight are on them, warmth of tone of voice, um-

Yeah

... warmth of arms and touch.

So thousands of interactions, and it comes through sensory, uh, experience, sensory encounters of kindness, like I said, of a cry and response.

So that's how secure attachment is built.

And then when that does not happen at least 60% of the time ...

So there's-- I just wanna give a lot of grace for the fact that we are human, and sometimes we just can't get there fast enough, or sometimes we don't recognize the tone of the cry.

Uh, and so there is a sense that you can even have a secure attachment if only 60% of those cries are responded to, uh, in a way that is, um[lips smack] immediate and helpful and tuned in, someone tuned in to that cry.

Mm-hmm.

Uh, so I just wanna give lots of grace.

And that attachment can still happen even as an adult.

My mom was super good at saying, "Mom, this summer I want to be there for you.

And it's okay if you need to share hard stories with me.

I'm welc- I welcome those hard stories." And so our attachment has actually built over the time period that I was an adult, and gosh, I can feel that with my daughter as well.

I'm so grateful.

But, um, so when we don't experience a secure attachment, we can have one of three other types of insecure attachments.

One is, uh, insecure anxious, the other is insecure avoidant, and the other is insecure disorganized.

And the first one, anxious, has to do with the fear of abandonment, that no one's coming, that, that we have to somehow keep that person in the room, that we have to keep their eyes on us.

So there's an insecurity.