If Your Parents Didn’t “Get You” You Might Have Been Missing This Ingredient To A Secure Attachment
Image: Mermaids | Orion Pictures
by The Candidly Team
There are 4 basic things we need as children to form a secure attachment to the people who raised us.
They sound suspiciously simple. They’ve even been boiled down by brilliant minds in mental health to just four words, none more than two syllables, and all starting with S.
But before we get to the four S’s, and the one in particular we’re here to talk about, let’s very quickly explain what we mean by a secure attachment.
When a child experiences a secure attachment, they see their caretaker as a safe and steady base from which they can venture out and explore the world. Creating this base means a parent must be emotionally attuned to the child enough of the time, meeting their needs, empathizing with their experiences, soothing their distress, and showing their ability to regulate their own emotional world.
Does the parent have to do every single one of these things perfectly all of the time for their child to feel secure? Not at all. According to attachment researcher Edward Tronick, even the best parents are only attuned to their children about 30 percent of the time. But a secure parent is present enough, consistent enough, and as author of Parenting From The Inside Out Dr. Daniel Siegel puts it, knows how to “repair the ruptures” when they occur between them and their kids.
When a child has a secure attachment, they grow up with a sense of inner security, they believe that relationships are generally safe, that they can rely on others, that their needs are of meaning, and that they can regulate their own emotions.
The 4 S’s of Secure Attachment
Siegel along with his co-author of The Power of Showing Up, Dr. Tina Bryson, often refer to the S’s of secure attachment as “four building blocks of a child’s healthy development.” They’re a way of measuring how well parents are showing up for their children based on if the child feels the following:
1) Safe: The child sees the parent as a source of safety - the place they go when things feel risky, scary, or uncertain. An insecure attachment can form when a parent doesn’t consistently attune to a child’s basic needs or even becomes a source of a child’s perceived lack of safety, stability, and comfort.
2) Soothed: When things inevitably go wrong in a child’s day-to-day life, the parent pays attention to the child’s emotions. They try to understand the mind of the child, empathize with their pain, and comfort them when they’re in distress. A parent who creates a lot of distress in the child, who fails to feel they can “handle” or attune to their emotions, or who doesn’t regulate their own emotions in a healthy way can contribute to the child’s sense of insecurity.
3) Seen: This is where we get to the piece of the puzzle that can be missing when for those who never feel understood by their parents. A parent who sees their child pays attention to the child’s emotions and actively strives to tune into their inner world (rather than simply defining them by their own ideas and labels). They don’t just respond to the child’s behavior; they seek to understand what’s driving that behavior.
4) Secure: When all of the above S’s are consistently felt by the child, they can form a sense of inner security that helps them in all aspects of their lives, enhances their sense of self, and helps positively shape their furture relationships.
Why is feeling SEEN so important?
Feeling seen isn’t just about having a parent who pats you on the head after you get an A or who acknowledges how much you like roller skating. Feeling seen by our parents means they show curiosity or a desire to understand the inner workings of our mind. When a parent shows interest in this way, it lays the groundwork that our wants and needs are important.
We can have a parent who always made sure we were fed, nursed our wounds, hugged us when we fell down, said “I love you” and meant it, but if that parent wasn’t able to mirror or tap into who we were and what we felt, we may have been missing a prime ingredient to our security.
This can obviously be exacerbated when we start being labeled by our parents in ways that show a lack of understanding or an overlooking of something deeper going on, e.g.
“She’s the complicated one. I have no clue what’s going on in her head.”
“She’s the actress around here - so dramatic about every little thing.”
“I swear she needs 3X the attention of the rest of my kids.”
“She’s the introvert in the family. I hardly have to do anything; she’s like a self-cleaning oven”
All of this can also be exacerbated by a parent who flips roles and requires the child to comfort, nurture, and care for the parent’s emotional needs, drilling in the idea that the child’s are less important and they need to take care of themselves.
When a child doesn’t feel seen, they can further miss out on another key ingredient to security - the feeling that their parents delighted in them, meaning they not only saw who they were but truly appreciated it in a way the child could feel.
What happens when we don’t have a secure attachment?
There are four patterns of childhood attachment and four patterns of adult attachment, all of which you can read more about HERE if you’re interested in what pattern you might have experienced and how that affects you in your life today, particularly in your adult relationships and/or your relationships with your own kids.
But one big takeaway is that having an insecure attachment pattern or failing to feel seen by our parents (either as kids or in our lives today) doesn’t have to define the patterns we live by as adults.
There are two things that can make a monumental difference and help bolster our inner security:
1) Create a coherent narrative of our experience: Attachment research has shown that it isn’t necessarily the events that happened to us or the attachment patterns we experienced in our childhood that determines the how stuck we will feel or how our lives and relationships will go. It’s the degree to which we’re able to make sense of those events and feel the full feelings around them. When we can tell a coherent story about what occurred, we can form more secure attachments with our partners and our kids, a process we wrote about in detail HERE.
2) Form a secure attachment in an adult relationship.
Research has shown we can form an earned secure attachment in our adult relationships by getting involved with a secure person who is able to tune into our emotions and desires and who also has a healthy sense of self, a curious and open outlook, and a consistent way of being where they don’t reinforce feelings of insecurity. In short, finding the people who make us feel seen, understood, and cared about - a family of choice that helps enhance our sense of security as adults.
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