Unlocking the Emotional Brain: Eliminating Symptoms at Their Roots Using Memory Reconsolidation

by Bruce Ecker

The insecure-avoidant type of attachment develops with a mother who is consistently rejecting. The infant learns to expect a rebuff in response to any direct emotional expression of distress or need or any direct physical approach for contact. That learning identifies and models the problem with which the infant is confronted. The infant then also learns that his or her own distress is kept to a minimum by not seeking to communicate or connect, not feeling the need to connect or have attention (accomplished by dissociation or dis-integration of feelings), and actively avoiding direct interactional contact when the mother seeks it. That learning identifies a solution to the problem. The infant has intelligently formed the implicit knowledge that to feel the need for contact or to seek contact is to suffer rejection, aloneness, fear, and helplessness. The solution of avoiding both feelings and contact is an adaptive strategy because in this way the infant has and feels control over keeping his or her own emotional state more or less unperturbed and out of those torments. Thus the learned emotional schema defines both a problem and the solution for that problem—which, as we saw in Chapters 3 and 4, is the structure of emotional schemas retrieved by adults in psychotherapy. In adults, this attachment style is often termed dismissive because in this category people downplay the impact or importance of relational events, have few memories of childhood, and typically give brief r...