ARTICLES

Formation of Resilience

Healing Trauma with Healthy Attachment and Bonding  

By Rev. Barbara Lane, MA, OMC 

Humans are born with an innate need to feel valued and loved. Though undefinable, love is primary to successful mental, spiritual and physical growth and development.  

The loving interactions between newborns and primary caretakers set the stage for all future development. As such, it is essential to understand just how important the attachment and bonding process is, especially if we’re to help children who have not experienced adequate loving interactions.

At birth, newborns instinctively root to find nourishment. In optimal situations, this initiates a reciprocal behavior from the primary caretaker who, when capable, responds in loving and nurturing ways. When consistently repeated, this cycle allows the infant to attach to the caretaker providing security. This births the ability to trust; a sense developed in the infant that their needs will be met.

Bonding, though similar, involves the caretakers’ thoughts, feelings and behaviors surrounding their experience of love and joy while nurturing the newborn. 

If all goes well, the positive reciprocal relationship of attachment and bonding is established and the infant and caretaker are on a trajectory toward healthy development.

But not all infant/caretaker experiences follow this cycle. Birth defects, illnesses, abandonments, removal from the home or an inability of the primary caretaker to respond warmly and lovingly often intrudes upon what nature intended. 

What happens, then, to the infant’s development? 

According to attachment theory, when life events interrupt the healthy progression of attachment and bonding, the infant can still attach but the quality of the attachment will be harmed, resulting in insecurity that can manifest in several negative ways across the lifespan.

Attachment theory is as complex as human behavior, but a cursory understanding is helpful when reflecting on how to help children and adults heal from trauma. 

It sheds light on why we behave as we do, why we are attracted to certain relationships and the health of those relationships, our level of confidence, our resilience factor, our happiness factor and our ability to have faith, both in the self and in something transcendent.

Attachment theory presents important considerations when intervening with abused and neglected children. How children adjust to foster care, adoptions or other family separations and formations is highly dependent upon the quality of attachment and bonding achieved before trauma. 

Developing a sense of security during infancy results in higher levels of resilience, enhancing the ability to form future healthy attachments.

What Can Be Done? 

Can intervention be successful at various stages of the lifespan? I believe the answer is yes because attachment disorders result from unmet needs, and with the right interventions and the right amount of warmth and caring, unmet needs can be met. 

A child residing within a loving and nurturing resource family can begin, sometimes for the first time, to have their unmet needs addressed. Initially, physical development can be enhanced by way of proper nutrition, physical activity, medical interventions, comfort, clothing and quality interactions through play. 

The consistency and  structure of these necessities made available to a child provides safety at the physical level and can lead to the development of trust: a belief that needs will be met.

For optimal mental health, an abused and neglected child will need an overabundance of understanding, care, and intervention. Mental health counseling in addition to attachment and bonding interventions that help the child see their foster parents, counselors, teachers, and physicians as safe bases for them to consistently return to for comfort can further open the door for a child to learn to trust.

Because of the temporary nature of foster care, meeting these goals is incredibly difficult, yet when emotional and physical needs are met, a child will begin looking outward, beyond the caretaker. 

Paradoxically (dependency paradox), the greater the healthy dependency a child forms on a loving caretaker, the more independent and self-assured they become. The more resilience they develop.

Becoming a Safe Base for an Attachment-Disordered Child 

The answer is found in the very first sentence of this article. Humans are born with an innate need to feel valued and loved. If we are to help traumatized children, or adults for that matter, we must extend ourselves in a loving, caring, and nurturing way.

The late psychotherapist, M. Scott Peck said it best as he referred to his views regarding the therapeutic process in his book 'The Road Less Traveled': "If the psychotherapist cannot genuinely love a patient, genuine healing will not occur. No matter how well-credentialed and trained a psychotherapist may be, if they cannot extend themselves through love to their patients, the results of their psychotherapeutic practice will be generally unsuccessful. Conversely, a totally uncredentialled and minimally trained lay therapist who exercises a great capacity to love will achieve psychotherapeutic results that equal those of the very best psychiatrists."  

I propose loving interactions are essential to the healing of traumatized children in foster care. 

These interactions promote the future development of physical, emotional, spiritual and mental well-being. 

This form of love, however, is difficult to define or research. As such, it requires another act: a leap of faith in the ability to love for the sake of loving; to open oneself to this true source within.

Relying on Faith

If we are to heal trauma and help children in crisis, we must take that leap of faith and interact from a place of love; a sacred place found within. 

We must have faith in the child and ourselves. Interactions structured to the child’s needs that are filled with compassion and love (the essence of faith) have the propensity to build resilience and heal trauma. 

But where does the ability to extend oneself with a great capacity to love come from? 

Here is where I take the liberty to express my understanding, as a minister, regarding what it means to have faith to extend the healing power of love. 

Faith is often found through religion — its practices and beliefs — but faith can also be found in other ways. It can be found within one’s self rather than outside of the self. 

It is a connection to one’s inner essence, the source of resilience as well as strength. Faith promotes love for the sake of loving. Loving only for the sake of extending love can form an attachment and bonding process that provides an avenue for a child to connect to their inner essence. 

This is loving from faith — seeing beyond the trauma and recognizing the soul.

Loving from faith is sourced from one’s inner self — powerful beyond words. 

Guiding others from this source involves the reciprocal interaction of spirit to spirit, soul to soul — a trust in the human essence within the self and the other — a faith-filled attachment and bonding. 

Such loving and soulful interactions teach children to have faith in themselves. They gain the confidence to trust their inner strength and guidance and, from that source within, they hope for and believe in a greater good, a higher purpose, and a higher source of power.

The same healing can occur with adults. As shared in my memoir "Broken Water," I have had my own experience of child abuse, abandonment, hunger and loss. 

During my adulthood, I was blessed with therapists willing to risk the act of loving from faith. While I am only one of all too many who have experienced trauma during childhood, I can attest to the power found in the ability my therapists had to extend themselves to me in this way. 

And, from those attachments and bonds, I have found the faith to extend myself to others. 

"Although the world is full of suffering, it is also full of the overcoming of it"

— Helen Keller •

Barbara Lane is a ministerial counselor and the author of the memoir, "Broken Water."