I have been researching RAD—Reactive Attachment Disorder—for the purposes of a current writing project. RAD is a psycho-physiological disorder that can occur when the child, in its first 3 years of life, experiences early separation from the primary caregiver, or repeated losses or changes of the primary caregiver, or is abused, neglected or abandoned.
It can show itself in many way, either as an inhibited disorder (kid doesn't relate to anyone, very antisocial, never seeks comfort, or help, or support etc) OR the opposite way (kid is overly familiar and amazingly sweet and charming with strangers, but at home, is exceptionally abusive and in facts hates the person who is now the primary caregiver, no matter how loving that person is.)
Both conditions are as a result of failure to develop TRUST in the first year of life and both come from the fact that basically, the kid's heart as been broken. They can't accept love because they have learnt that when you reach out for love, you don't get it or it hurts or you get it and then it gets taken away again, so they build huge defensive walls around their hearts and protect themselves against all attempts by anyone to really love them.
I won’t go into the therapy and prognosis here; suffice it to say that the road is heart-breakingly long and often ends in failure anyway.
Anyway. The point of this post is that today I was reading an article on RAD and the use of neurofeedback
and came across these two snippets:
“Attachment is the fundamental drive in human beings. It is a drive that brings aggression and sexuality to its defense and to its enhancement, and it is the precursor to human love. It is gained through the delicate interplay of vocal tone and facial expression, through body to body communication, through the dyadic system of care that develops when the mother attunes to her baby.”
It occurred to me that this is also basically what happens when we make friends, build relationships, and fall in love. We want to build a connection to the other person and we use all the tools at our disposal to grow that attachment: along with verbal communication, we use eye contact, body language, mirroring, tonal inflection and so much more. Remember being best friends with someone at school who really ‘got you’? Remember flirting? Remember falling in love?
Then, this:
“I am reminded of a film I saw in graduate school titled "Ben". In it, for purposes of the experiment, an emotionally attuned mother agrees not to respond to the smile of her well bonded six month old son. When he smiled, she made no expression. He looked momentarily bewildered and smiled again. She still did not respond. His face clouded and he began to look agitated but he tried again. This time when his mother failed to smile in return he looked alarmed and anxious and began to cry. His mother, who has been valiantly cooperative with the researchers up to that point, could stand it no longer. She picked him up and comforted him, holding and rocking him, cooing and mirroring his facial expressions. His equilibrium was rapidly restored. This entire interaction, as I recall, unfolded in less than two minutes.
Imagine, then, what it must be like for the child of a depressed or addicted or narcissistically absent mother who cannot provide this attunement and emotional repair. This child, too, will attempt to engage her mother; it is her nature. These attempts to recruit the mother could go on intermittently for weeks, months or even years. I am suggesting that, as was true for Ben, each failure heightens negative affect. The child experiences increasing levels of distress that, without predictable maternal intervention escalate into disorganizing anxiety until, finally, the baby gives up, affectively “burning out” and collapsing into a state of deep despair. Her initial distress becomes fear that mounts into terror and then implodes into nothingness, a state beyond hopelessness, a state of no other and no self, a state too diffuse, too cellular, too absolute and too horrifying to any longer be recognized as fear.”
Is it stretching a point to see this as a picture of what happens to those of us who have spent years trying (and failing) to attach to God? We attempt to engage him and he seems not to respond …each failure heightens the negative affect … leading to increasing levels of distress (existential anxiety) … finally, we burn out and give up, collapsing into a state of deep despair and fear….
Attachment fails. So we get vitriolic and yell at God, screaming out our hate and fear and disappointment, driven by the need to generate a reaction, any reaction at all. When still nothing happens, we retreat into intellectualism. We find a thousand ways to ‘prove’ that God doesn’t exist, that its all self-deception, that religion is just a conditioned societal response and as we evolve further, as we mature, we can let go of that need to be attached to something greater than ourselves… we can manage without God’s love which has proved, over and over again, to be illusory and disappointing.
Finally, we put up walls of disillusionment, skepticism, cynicism and despair. We protect ourselves against hope. We grow cold and hard and we sneer and smirk when people say things like ‘The Lord told me …” and “If it’s God’s will, then …”
It would seem that attachment to God has failed. But these days I'm thinking that just maybe the way forward isn't to stay mired in my failure to find God, nor is it to retreat into atheism or cyncism. Maybe, for now, all I need to do is to keep seeking a new paradigm of who 'God' is. Maybe all these years I've been looking in all the wrong places for the wrong God. Because underneath all my disappointment and pain, I can't seem to shake the sense that somewhere, somehow ... God IS.
