Secure Base, or Why This Attachment Therapist Doesn’t Care About Your Attachment Style, Part II

you can learn to be your own inner caring parent, and be your own secure base!

I posted a few weeks ago that I don’t care about whether my clients are anxiously or avoidantly attached, because your attachment style isn’t as important to me as where you’re at with secure base. Secure base is an incredibly important aspect of attachment theory that, unfortunately, isn’t as popular as attachment style.

Today we’ll take a look at why secure base matters, whether we’re discussing your relationship with self or with others. Before exploring the concept of secure base, let's talk about attachment and love first.

Attachment Is a Drive, and There is No Parental Instinct

You may be surprised to learn the attachment drive is both inborn and one-directional, from the child to the parent only. Parents do not have an attachment drive for their children. People often talk about “maternal instinct” or “paternal instinct.” Alas, there is no such thing. An instinct is a behavior that all members of a species engage in without being taught. Humans have no such behaviors. If parents had an instinct to take care of their children, we would have no child abuse or neglect.

Because there is no parental instinct, we can know the way parents engage with their child is a decision. The way parents engage with their child is a product of what they learned from their family of origin, and what they’ve learned from society. In other words, love is a learned skill. (If you want to learn more about the science behind this, check out A General Theory of Love.)

What This Means for You if You Have a Parent with Narcissistic Traits

When parents have the skill to love, they see, hear, and care about their child. Because they see and hear their child as the unique individual they are, they meet their child’s unique needs, whether that means the child needs more independence, more closeness, or more patience than other children. And because they care about their child, they meet their child’s needs as quickly as they can, as often as they can, and in a way that conveys caring.

When this happens, the parent is the child’s secure base, and a secure attachment forms between parent and child.  Parents who are skilled at love give their children positive other-esteem and other-concept, which forms the foundation of positive self-esteem and self-concept. As adults, these children have a secure attachment style—they like themselves, and they see others in a positive light.

If parents lack the skill to love, children blame themselves. While self-blame is a common and effective survival strategy in childhood, which made it useful when you were a child, self-blame for someone else’s behavior makes thriving difficult.

In terms of attachment style, that self-blame will be evinced as an anxious style, in which the child doesn’t see themselves as lovable, but sees others optimistically; an avoidant style, in which they maintain an inflated positive view of self, but fear abandonment by others; or a disorganized style, in which they don’t see themselves as lovable and are fearful of being abandoned in relationships. It’s hard to thrive if your attachment style is insecure!

Seeing love as a skill, and seeing attachment as a one-directional drive from child to parent, is often challenging for adult children of abusive or neglectful parents to understand. It’s easy to mistake the attachment drive for love. And it can be scary acknowledging that your parent isn't very skilled at love. Plus, blaming yourself for your parent's behavior gives you hope--the hope that if you change, and become more lovable, finally, your parent will love you.

Unfortunately, blaming yourself for someone else's behavior takes you all the way out of your circle of control. And when you blame yourself for a behavior the other person isn't skilled enough to make, you're outside your circle of influence, too. When people feel like they have no control or influence, they generally feel powerless. That's the fast track to anxiety and depression!

It makes more sense to stay in your own circle of control. That means accepting that the way you feel about your parents is influenced by your attachment drive. The way your parents feel about you is a product of their personality and life experiences. If your parent isn't skilled at love, it's not because you're unlovable. It's because they're not skilled at love.

How Secure is Your Base?

This brings us to secure base in adulthood, that key piece of attachment theory all too often ignored. As we’ve explored, in the parent-child relationship, secure base describes the ability of the parent to see, hear, and respond to their child. A parent who is able to identify and meet their child’s needs creates a relationship in which the child feels secure, because the child knows their needs will be met. So, the child develops a secure attachment style.

In contrast, a parent who struggles to identify and/or meet their child’s needs is an insecure base. The child doesn’t know if their needs will be seen, heard, and met. The way the parent fails to meet the child’s needs then influences the child’s attachment style.

How a parent meets a child’s needs profoundly influences how children learn to meet their own needs. From the beginning of the parent-child relationship, the parent’s role is to regulate the child. This begins immediately—infants need their parent nearby to help them regulate their breathing and heart rate, in addition to making sure they are fed, clean and dry, and feel safe and secure.

In an ideal parent-child relationship, the parent self-regulates, and is calm, confident, compassionate, and connected when the child feels dysregulated. Co-regulation is the process of the parent self-regulating when the child is dysregulated, until the child is calm again. Over time, the experience of co-regulation teaches the child how to self-regulate.

That self-regulation is the foundation of every aspect of your daily life, from how you talk to and treat yourself, to how you engage in relationships with others. That's because how you self-regulate--how secure your inner base is--will influence your self-esteem.

Why Secure Base Matters to Self-Esteem, and What You Can Do

You may have already guessed why secure base is so important to self-esteem. After all, secure base is the way a parent talks to and treats a child, which forms the foundation of how a child will talk to and treat themselves as an adult. So, to me, secure base is considerably more important than attachment style. Attachment style tells me how you’re likely to engage with others, but doesn’t give me the information I need about where you’re at with self-esteem and self-care.

As we’ve discussed before, self-esteem begins with self-care—that is, the hands-on, daily practice of how you treat and talk to yourself. It includes how you meet your needs for sleep, healthy eating, hydration, and physical activity. And it affects your ability to meet your needs for creativity, connection, spirituality, and self-improvement.

This is because self-esteem so profoundly affects how you talk to yourself. If you grew up with parents who spoke to you calmly and compassionately, it will be easy for you to set limits calmly and compassionately with yourself when you want to do something that won’t benefit you. It’ll be easy for you to calmly and compassionately motivate yourself when you don’t want to do something that will benefit you.

If your parents weren’t calm and compassionate with you, chances are good you’re not calm and compassionate with yourself. Many people find themselves alternating between being harsh and being wildly indulgent. Some people prefer to be harsh on themselves almost all of the time. Others allow themselves to do what they want, when they want, because it's what they want to do.

Either way, if you’re insecurely attached, the challenge becomes learning to be a caring parent to yourself, so you are your own secure base most of the time. Because humans are social animals, you’ll still need connection with others, but you’ll be able to be calm, compassionate, and connected to yourself most of the time as you go throughout your day. And when you get dysregulated, you'll be better able to re-regulate yourself more often.

Those skills aren't accomplished by identifying whether you’re anxious or avoidant or disorganized. You learn to be a caring parent to yourself by noticing how you talk to yourself, and how you treat yourself. You'll need to explore and heal the memories of how you learned to talk to yourself harshly or indulgently. And you'll need to learn new ways of speaking to and treating yourself compassionately. In that way, you become your own secure base.

Secure base also affects how we behave in relationships with others, and we’ll take a look at that aspect of secure base in an upcoming post. That said, secure base with others is built on the foundation of secure base with self. If you’re struggling to create a secure base within you, I encourage you to consider working with an attachment therapist who can help you get in touch with your inner caring parent, and support you as you learn to be calm and compassionate with yourself. You deserve to thrive!

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