Characteristics of Resilient Individuals

II. SECURE ATTACHMENT AND BASIC TRUST

The emergence of this [the attachment] system is clearly
a critical foundation for competence in our species;
therefore, fostering strong and healthy relationships between
children and their care givers is a key strategy for intervention.

Since the pioneering work of Dr. John Bowlby (1969) and Dr. Mary Ainsworth (1969), the importance of "a competent mother-infant pair" has become abundantly apparent. Masten and Coatsworth (1998) note that this attachment system is "so basic and universal that lack of behavior associated with attachment usually occurs where there is something fundamentally wrong with the organism or the environment, with high risk for adaptive failure." Initially, the infant was seen as a passive recipient in this system, but researchers have identified differences among infants in their innate competence at eliciting caretakers’ help for their physical needs and for regulating their emotional reactions and behavior. If all goes well, the competent pair provide the infant with a secure base of operations from which to explore the world.

The quality of one’s early attachment has been shown to predict later functioning in several arenas. Fonagy and his colleagues (1994) cite other researchers who have found that children deemed to be securely attached at age two later score higher than insecurely attached children on measures of social behavior (Skolnick, 1986; Urban, Carlsson, Egeland, and Sroufe, 1991), affect regulation (Erickson, Sroufe, and Egeland, 1985), endurance in challenging task situations (Grossman et al., 1993), orientation to social resources (Wartner, Grossman, Frommer-Bombik, and Suess, 1995?), and cognitive resourcefulness (Matas, Arend, and Sroufe, 1997; Grossman and Grossman, 1991; Suess, Grossman, and Sroufe, 1992). Fonagy’s group concludes that "there is thus a prima facie case that resilient children are securely attached children; i.e. that secure attachment is part of the mediating process where resilience is observed" (1994, 235).

In his classic 1950 essay, "The Eight Ages of Man," Dr. Erik Erikson speaks of the importance of what he called Basic Trust. He writes as follows:

The infant’s first social achievement," he wrote, "is his willingness to let the mother out of sight without undue anxiety or rage, because she has become an inner certainty as well as an outer predictability. Such consistency, continuity, and sameness of experience provide a rudimentary sense of ego identity which depends, I think, on the recognition that there is an inner population of remembered and anticipated sensations and images which are firmly correlated with the outer population of familiar and predictable things and people.
(Erikson, 1963, p.247)

In essence, Erikson is talking about our internal working models of self and others which are formed initially in our interactions with early care givers but which may be modified as we develop and have interactions with other significant people. This means that children develop cognitive and affective expectations about how early care givers, and later people in general, are likely to behave toward them. Securely attached children "demonstrate an expectation of an empathic response,"while insecurely attached children tend to be anxious, fearful, or clingy and to see the world and other people as threatening (Fonagy et al., 1994, 235).

Fonagy’s group is especially interested in whether and/or how a parent might transmit his or her internal working model of relationships to the child. Using the Adult Attachment Interview and other measures, they found that "it is possible to identify before the birth of a child, on the basis of the parents’ quality of attachment, the nature of the relationship they are likely to develop with their child during the first 18 months of life." They found overwhelmingly that those parents who showed secure adult attachment tended to have securely attached children, while those with insecure adult attachment tended to have insecurely attached children.

Fonagy’s group also wanted to determine whether secure attachment is actually a part, or only a correlate, of resilience processes. To do this , they had to demonstrate "that the transmission of infant security is care giver-specific, not the artefact of constitutional factors, temperament, assortative mating or the spreading of security from one care giver to the other." They reanalyzed their data and found no evidence that the security or lack thereof of either parent affected the relationship with the other parent. They concluded that "each parent ‘transmits’ their internal working model independently of the actions of the other," and that "the child develops and maintains distinguishable sets of mental representations of relationship expectations with each of his or her primary care givers." They acknowledge that they "do not yet know if, how, and when such separate internal working models are combined to determine the child’s general stance towards attachment relationships." They go on to note that this "insulation of the internal working models of young children allows for the creation of a secure internal working model alongside one or more highly insecure ones." This may be what happens with resilient maltreated children, and "why the presence of even a relatively remote, but stable and responsive figure in the child’s early life can be a protective factor, foster a secure internal working model of relations, and contribute to the child’s resilience to hardship" (Fonagy, et al., 1994, 240).

Fonagy’s group acknowledges that the risk of transmitting abuse across generations is at least 30% (i.e., three times the risk of intergenerational transmission of schizophrenia). They are interested, however, in the 70% of resilient parents -- those mistreated children who grow up to become parents who show secure attachment patterns and do not abuse their children. They investigated this issue via a critical component of the internal working model of relationships -- what they call the reflective-self function. This involves the ability to reflect upon the mental states of oneself and others, and the awareness of mental states in the organization, development and maintenance of attachment relationships. People who score high in reflective-self function have the capacity to think of their own and other’s actions in terms of mental states; they hold "a coherent mental representation of the psychological world of their own care givers, and of themselves as adults, and earlier as children." Those low in the trait are "unwilling or unable to reflect on their intentions or those of others." This construct is similar to what ego psychologists call "psychological mindedness,"which is usually operationalized as "self-awareness," and to what William James called the ability "to think of ourselves as thinkers" (Fonagy, et al., 1994, pp. 241-242).

What the researchers found was that, among the mothers from deprived backgrounds, all ten of those with high reflective-self function had securely attached children, whereas only one of the 17 of the low reflective-self function group did so. Especially important was the former mothers’ awareness of the qualitative differences between the mental functioning of children and adults. The researchers speculate that "reflective-self function may enhance the likelihood of planning effectively, successfully eliciting partner support and making good use of previous child care experience."

The reflective-self function is especially important to the study of resilience because it is a prerequisite to the development of other elements of resilience including the ability to see different perspectives, the capacity to plan, creativity, and a sense of humor. Moreover, the capacity helps account for psychological plasticity, the ability to change one’s inner world. In the words of Fonagy and his colleagues: "The opportunity of reflection upon intention allows for the modification of unhelpful internal working models of relationships through encounters with new significant figures; it equips the individual with ballast, a self-righting capacity" (p. 250).

Other writers have approached the issue of our "internal models" a bit differently. Drs. Steven and Sybil Wolin have written extensively about what they call the Seven Resiliencies – Insight, Independence, Relationships, Initiative, Creativity, Humor, and Morality. Their discussion of the development of Insight adds greatly to our understanding of the development over time of internal models of self and others. They see the early signs of insight in children’s being able to sense the affective quality of life around them. As the child develops intellectually and emotionally, he seeks answers to the question, "What’s going on here?" and sensing evolves into knowing. He can gather information and give a name to what he sees. (Wolin and Wolin, 1994, pp 67-76).

The development of formal operational thinking in adolescence allows knowing to evolve into understanding, "a reflective frame of mind [which] results from spending your childhood examining evidence, sorting out the truth, and protesting illusions.... Resilient adults do not take people, themselves, or life at face value. Striving always to understand, resilient survivors process their experience, look for meaning hidden beneath the surface of events, and confront themselves honestly" (Wolin and Wolin, 1994, pp. 80-81).

As understanding evolves into insight, people develop "the mental habit of asking searching questions and giving honest answers.... In adulthood, the psychological awareness of resilient survivors ripens into a penetrating understanding of themselves and other people." This capacity enables people to understand problematic aspects of their past and "take deliberate measures to ensure that life for them will be different and better...." (Wolin and Wolin, 1994, pp. 80-83).

In closing this section, we should note that the unanticipated downside of the enthusiasm for attachment theory is that, among some, it fostered a kind of "infant determinism," the notion that, if all did not go well between mother and infant early on, the child was doomed forever. Abundant evidence exists now, however, that the caretaker does not have to be the biological mother, and that some early attachment problems may be corrected by an adequately facilitating environment. Be that as it may, few would disagree with Emmy Werner’s assertion that "a stable competent person needs to be around at the beginning of your life" (1996).