BECOMING ATTACHED TO ATTACHMENT THEORY 3

Using AT in constructing hypotheses for clients also helps shorten therapy time. When clients are in jail, therapists usually do not have much time to affect therapy before inmates are transferred to another prison or released to go home. Therefore, an expedited form of psychodynamics, focusing on AT, can help therapists working with criminals devise significant treatments and interventions to help quickly alleviate some of their clients’ symptoms and ameliorate some of their issues.

AT is a natural outgrowth of psychodynamic theory. Some clients in jail will have the time to engage in the longer therapy that psychodynamic therapy recommends (16 weeks). My practicum used mainly brief and solution focused therapies that took much less time due to the obstacle of therapists only seeing clients for a few sessions. Yet an ever-present awareness of the important of attachments in clients’ lives still serves to put pieces of the puzzles together quickly when used along with these briefer therapies.

Therapists need to understand transference issues and repetition of client patterns to break their criminal cycle. This understanding can be supported by viewing client issues from an AT perspective. However, even within AT, controversy and debate on how much time it takes to develop disorders due to poor attachment, if and to what extent attachment styles can be changed still exists. 

To help therapists understand how AT can be used, they can begin by envisioning attachment styles on a continuum, and offering a logical and reasonable explanation of how different influences in clients’ lives can create different degrees of dysfunctional attachments. Using this continuum concept offers hope for reasonable change in clients. In turn, hope helps avoid therapist cynicism and burnout.

I try to keep an attachment continuum in mind when treating the women in jail. Most are antisocial but they do not all have Antisocial Personality Disorder. When conceiving their issues on a continuum with knowledge of the severity of their attachment disturbances, I can target more easily and quickly the types of interventions that may be most helpful for each individual client.

Bowlby (1988) also believed firmly that mothers have an enormous and crucial impact on the health of their children’s future attachments. Although the role of the mother vs. the father, the timing of absence from their children, the age of vulnerability to attachment damage is still hotly debated, most theorists ultimately agree that basic attachments need to be protected in order to create healthy adults. When treating the women in jail, I need to know if they have children to help them minimize attachment issues with their children. In this way, I hope to make small steps in moderating the cycle of criminality and mental illness in their families.

Even though therapists may not want to use or are limited in using psychodynamic or psychoanalytic therapy, the basis of both these theories can always positively influence therapists’ decisions for treatment, regardless of which modality they use, regardless of the length of treatment.

Because attachment theory naturally evolves into cognitive behavioral theories (Bowlby, 1988), the transition from perceiving clients’ issues from poor early relationships to implementing cognitive treatment to challenge faulty thinking has been found to be optimal when working with criminals. Rather than trying to do therapy with one hand tied behind the back, therapists can perceive of clients’ issues as an outgrowth mainly of attachment issues, more quickly understanding the foundation of their dysfunctions.

Conclusion

Bowlby (1988) strongly believed that anxious attachment issues affect everyone, not only clients. This certainly seems to be true when realizing that anxious attachments, whether ambivalent or avoidant, tend to help create criminal mentalities and therefore, negatively affect society in general. Karen (1998) believes that without understanding and valuing attachment issues, therapists will hamper the effect of their therapeutic relationships. Therefore, another way AT can be useful is to use transference of client attachments onto therapists to expedite progress in therapy.

However, different in technique and theory, “psychoanalysis” and “psychodynamics” are theories that both begin with the same premise: that people’s characters and lives are formed by their early relationships and experiences and that unconscious drives or motives create transference in clients’ relationships. AT takes the above theories and focuses it in such a way that makes a psychoanalytic/psychodynamic perspective useful, efficient, and productive for both clients and therapists.

Not only does the concept and awareness of AT help me in therapy with my clients, but it also is commensurate with my own personality. I have always considered myself introspective and analytical, with a desire to probe deeply into the family histories of others and myself to understand relationships and behavioral patterns. The compliments (and complaints!) of others in my life regarding my penchant for digging for psychological answers also act as testaments to these aspects of my character. I believe strongly that using a therapeutic approach that suits therapists’ temperaments and talents supports successful outcomes in therapy.

SEE POSTS:  BECOMING ATTACHED TO ATTACHMENT THEORY 1 and 2