Thursday Therapeutic Thought - Avoidant Attachment Style

We've covered Secure and Ambivalent attachment styles here and here. So now we're on week three, and the attachment style up for today's Thought is Avoidant Attachment.

We'll return to our Strange Situation in which an infant is left alone in a room with a stranger after the parent leaves. When the parent returns, the infant tends to avoid them altogether. If it's been a long period of absence, the avoidance becomes especially pronounced. They might not outright reject attention from a parent, but they don't seek it out (as most children would immediately seek comfort or contact from their parent after being left alone with a stranger). Children with this attachment amazingly show no preference between their parent and a complete stranger.

As adults, these children tend to have difficulty with intimacy and close relationships. They don't necessarily invest much emotion into relationships and experience little distress when a relationship comes to a conclusion. There has been a lot of research done on all the attachment styles, and it seems this style has the least to recommend it. Adults with this style are more accepting and likely to engage in casual sex (Feeney, Noller and Patty, 1993). They also fail to support partners during stressful times and have an inability to share feelings, thoughts and emotions with their partners (which in turn leads to relationships ending, as you can imagine).

Here's another breakdown, courtesy of About.com:


So now we'll move on to the self and other dimensions. People with Avoidant Attachment style have a positive self and negative other dimensions. In other words, they believe that they are worthy of love and are capable of getting the love and support they need, but that other people are either unwilling or incapable of loving them, untrustworthy, and unreliable when it comes to meeting their needs. They struggle with emotional connection, disclosure of private thoughts and feelings and nonsexual touch. They'd rather rely on themselves to meet their needs because they can't trust others to do so.

Contrary to the other attachment styles so far, this one is separated into three different types, and I'll list characteristics of each in bullets under each one. (All the following information was gleaned from the Attachments book by Clinton and Sibcy.)

1) Narcissist or Inflated Self (p. 68)

• seeks excessive praise from others
• tends to be arrogant or condescending and portrays inflated sense of self-worth
• fantasizes about fame, fortune and power
• very sensitive to criticism and can respond with intense anger
• takes an "I'm-first-and-everyone-else-comes-later" attitude
• manipulates others to achieve his or her own ends
• envies others' success
• associated with "special" people and engages in a lot of name-dropping
• shows poor empathy for others
• is externally focused, with a "you-are-what-you-have" attitude

2) Exiled or Disconnected Self (pp. 69-70)

• extremely introverted and cut off from other people
• looks inward to a world of fantasy to find pleasure and comfort
• appears cold, distant and aloof to others
• robed in self-sufficiency; any dependence on others for emotional support provokes anxiety, which leads to profound feelings of vulnerability
• prefers inwardness and fantasy over emotional connection
• little drive for external pleasures and derives little, if any, enjoyment from interacting with people
• experience few intense emotions about anything, an emotional desert (but they like it this way, calm, cool and mellow)
• doesn't seek acceptance and doesn't mind criticism
• has little empathy for others
• can't identify and label own emotional experience
• under the surface is an inner longing for connectedness

3) The Compulsive Perfectionist (p. 71)

• pays excessive attention to detail, order and organization
• controls others, frequently using guilt
• demands that self and others submit to rigid, moralistic rules with lots of dos and don'ts
• has difficulty sharing; viewed as stingy with time, money and resources
• is uncomfortable with emotions, very constricted
• is uncomfortable with physical touch
• has difficulty displaying affection toward others
• tends to procrastinate because of such high standards for performance
• is reluctant to delegate tasks because others are viewed as incompetent
  

Really, this attachment style is a goldmind for character development. Many of the characters we probably already love fit into one of the three types mentioned above. The flaws make for easy internal struggles, as well. None of the characteristics Clinton and Sibcy are insurmountable. Each attachment style has hope for change. So emply that in your novels!

Treatment Tuesday - Plot Helps

This week’s character assessment comes from Kacey. She’s writing a YA novel about two friends, Eric and Lane.*

Eric is a 17-year-old who lives with his aunt’s family because seven years ago, he and his mother were attacked by a meth-addicted intruder in their L.A. apartment. His mother didn’t survive the attack.

Eric’s story begins with him and his friends driving at night when his friend hits a man on a bicycle. They stop to see if the man is okay but flee the scene when he starts to regain consciousness. This triggers Eric to remember how he felt after his attack, lying alone, injured, waiting for someone to find him.

* Names have been changed to protect the fictional.

Kasey wants to know several things:

1. Would it make sense for Eric to blame himself for not being able to help his mother in some way and prevent her death? Or would he be more inclined to blame her for the attack somehow (i.e., she should have kept the windows locked so the intruder couldn't get in)?
2. Would the attack affect how he feels about women in general?
3. Would it make sense for him to blame his friend Lane for leaving the man in the street even though Eric was there, too? Would he be more likely to blame himself?
4. After years of therapy, after everything seemed to be going okay, would it make sense for his PTSD to be triggered?
5. Eventually, after Eric and Lane go their separate ways, Eric chooses to turn in Lane to the police. If Eric is experiencing PTSD, would this require too much cognitive functioning to do? Or would someone else need to prompt him to do this?
   

These are some great questions, and very specific, which helps me narrow my psychological focus.

Since Eric lost his mother in such a traumatic accident, it is not at all unrealistic to think that he had post-traumatic reactions to the attack. Your suggestion of putting him through a few years of therapy would also be realistic, as 10-year-olds who are victim to an attack should get counseling, even more so if they lose a parent.

As far as your first question, a young child almost always would blame him or herself for the death. But since Eric is 17, almost of age to be counted as an adult, this rule isn’t as hard and fast. Your decision would need to factor in Eric’s personality. Does he usually blame others, even for his own mistakes? Or does he typically shoulder all responsibility, even when it’s not his due?

Because an adolescent doesn’t have the problem solving and interpretive skills that an adult has, that leads me to think the twist about blaming his mom might make for a more gripping plot rather than the old tried-but-true self-blame. Ultimately your call, of course.

As for your second question, I tried to see how the connection would be made between women in general and his mother, who was the victim of the meth addict’s attack. Maybe you are asking if he would assume all women are helpless or weak? All women would eventually endanger him in some way? Feel free to email me with additional info, as I’m afraid I don’t really have an answer for this one.

Your third question can piggyback off the first. If Eric is going to blame his mother for the attack, then it makes sense that he might blame Lane for leaving the hit-and-run scene, as well. However, a lot would ride on how the scene played out. Did Lane make Eric leave the scene? Had Eric wanted to stay and try to offer help, as he remembered his own attack situation? Had Eric felt a familiar sense of dread at the helplessness of his previous situation and wanted to get out of dodge? How you write that particular scene will play a large role in how his guilt or anger comes to the fore later.

And for the last question, it would absolutely be feasible for PTSD symptoms to return after a period of latency where everything seemed fine. Trauma is a funny thing, and people react differently to it. I’m actually just finishing a book about a woman with PTSD who goes symptom-free for over a year and thinks its okay to get back into her former job. But, of course, she encounters a situation that provokes a panic attack associated with a flashback. Totally within reason.

You mentioned that Lane is going to experiment with meth, which you want to feel like a gigantic betrayal, since Eric’s mother’s murderer was a meth-addict. Then you mentioned, “especially coupled with the fact that Lane left a man [run over on his bicycle] in the street at the beginning of the story.” I’m not seeing how the second factor is a betrayal in the traditional sense. Granted, the meth experimentation is understandable. Lane would surely know how this would really tear Eric up. But I just didn’t see the connection with leaving the man in the streets…UNLESS you have written that scene in such a way that Lane forces Eric to leave the man against Eric’s will (see earlier comment above about this crucial scene) or you have some plot twist about the guy on the bike being the meth addict and if they had stopped, they might could have seen the intruder and Eric’s mom’s murdered brought to justice. Hmm…just a thought, though. ☺

Hopefully this has helped with some of these questions. As with any of my assessments, please feel free to email with further questions.

This service is for fictional characters only, so any resemblance to real life examples is entirely coincidental. Any other fictional character assessment questions can be directed to charactertherapist@hotmail.com.

Under Attack

Picture by lordog

Hello, all. I'm writing from my husband's computer because my computer crashed. If any of you have Macs, you know how completely unlikely this is. Yet, mine crashed SO HARD that the great recovery softwear the company puts out was unable to fix it. So, being under warranty, I brought it to the Genius Bar at one of the Apple stores and they said they would fix it. To "fix" it, they will replace my hard drive. Granted, they will replace it with a bigger and faster one, but the old hard drive has all three of my books on it. In their entirety, in various stages of editing and repair. I was told that likely they will hand me this old hard drive (instead of confiscating it, as they usually do) and that if I'm lucky, I can take it to a data recovery company and retrieve my documents.

Of course I've cried and cried about this. I've cried that I was so stupid as to erase the documents off my jump drive when I bought this new Mac and transferred them from the old one (that I'm on now). But I DID delete the files. So they only copy was on my new Mac. STUPID. I've cried at all the hours and days and weeks and months and years put into these books (even if they aren't publishable YET, they are a PART OF ME).

Ever since the move, I really have been under attack. My crit buddy/prayer partner told me this morning in an email that she felt Satan was doing this. And I have to agree. Since the move, both my daughter and I have been sick. She even had to go to the ER last week for violent throwing up. Of course, I'm still job hunting and have some very good leads, but have yet to hear anything.

I'm calling out for prayer. Prayer for my family. Prayer for my old hard drive and hopefully retreivable documents that I've poured my life into. Prayer for the adjustment we are all still undergoing in a new town, new climate, new culture, new church (although all revisited for me, since this is my hometown....it's still NEW again). I'll be posting when I can...but for now, there are more important things to attend to.

Like spiritual warfare.

So I'll see you on the other side. Thanks in advance for your prayers!

Thursday Therapeutic Thought - Ambivalent Attachment

[Feel free to wish me a HAPPY ANNIVERSARY today! 4 years. I know I'll be enjoying myself with a night out on the town, now that I've got the grands close by to babysit!]

So, now that we've covered Secure Attachment in my last Thursday Therapeutic Thought post here, we move on to the second type of attachment style, which is Ambivalent Attachment style.

We discussed the "Strange Situation" in last Thursday's post. An ambivalently attached infant goes beyond usual stranger anxiety to be extremely suspicious of strangers. They display considerably distress when separated from from their parent or caregiver but aren't really comforted by the return of their parent into the room where they were with the stranger. In some cases, the children might passively reject the parent and refuse the comfort offered, or they may display open aggression toward the parent.

Cassidy and Berlin (1994) indicate that only about 7-15% of infants in the USA display this type of attachment style. It's usually linked to lack of maternal availability in the life of the child, and teachers often describe this type of child as clingy and over-dependent.

As adults, these infants might be reluctant to become close to others and develop insecurity about their partner returning their feelings. You can imagine that this leads to multiple breakups due to lack of trust and the maybe-erroneous conclusion that the partner is cold and distant.

Here's the breakdown, thanks to About.com:


To recap from last week about the self and other dimensions, here's an excerpt:

"Our core beliefs revolve around two concepts: our thoughts about ourselves (self dimension) and our thoughts about others (other dimension). Each dimension centers around two questions.

For the self dimension, the questions are:

1) Am I worthy of being loved?
2) Am I competent to get the love I need?

For the other dimension, the questions are:

1) Are others reliable and trustworthy?
2) Are others accessible and willing to respond to me when I need them to be?"

Ambivalently attached people have a negative self dimension (they feel unworthy of love and unable to get the love they need without being angry and clingy) and a skewed positive other dimension (they feel others are capable of meeting their needs but might not do so b/c of their flaws and that others are trustworthy and reliable but might abandon them because of my worthlessness).

According to Clinton and Sibcy in Attachments: Why You Love, Feel and Act The Way You Do, a person with ambivalent attachment has some strong core beliefs of being/feeling incompetent, struggling to handle things on their own, needing a strong protector to care/do things for them (. 83). As a result of these internal beliefs, there are some pretty desctructive behaviors and feelings associated with Ambivalent Attachment:

• low self confidence
• fear of making decisions/looking to others to make major ones for them
• rarely expressing diagreemtn with others
• frequently seeking assurance, nurturance and support
• obsessed with the fear of being left alone
• feelings helpless when left alone
• desperately seeking new relationships when others end
• frequently subordinating themselves to others
• perpetually seeking advice
• often working below their ability
• accepting unpleasant tasks to please others
• having tendency to express distress through medically unexplainable physical symptoms rather than emotional pain
  

But people with Ambivalent attachment also have a powerful way of making others feel good about themselves. They feel and experience life with intense emotion, love and laughter. They should be cautious about not developing a dependent relationship with their children, but work to foster independence in their children.

Are any of your characters suffering from this type of attachment style? In counseling, it often manifests as dependent personality disorder, which is pervasive dependence on other people. But the roots are usually found in childhood.

Stay tuned for next week when we discuss the Avoidant Attachment style. Till then!

Treatment Tuesday - Dissociative Amnesia

This week’s assessment is courtesy of Debra, the winner of the Seekerville give-away from May 5th (obviously I’m running behind a bit b/c of my move cross-country).

Debra’s heroine, Gretchen*, lives in Glasgow, Scotland, in 1837. She was involved in a violent incident as a child in which she defended and saved her grandmother by killing a man with a pitchfork. She is taken away from her grandmother and put in an institution. Later she is raised as a companion to a young, wealthy woman. Gretchen is intelligent, feisty, bold, and very untrusting. She doesn’t want to remember her past.

The book starts with her acting like a madwoman. She has been in another attack and had to fight for her life to get away (although the reader isn’t privy to this). Local police find her running in the streets out of her head, so they bring her to an asylum, unconscious. When she stirs, she lashes out at people before passing out again. After a rough dream, she wakes up in the morning with no memory whatsoever.

Debra is concerned about portraying Gretchen realistically. Even while she has no memory of her past, is it possible for her to have the presence of mind to find the hero attractive? To have her personality still come through?

* Names have been changed to protect the fictional.

Great questions, Debra! Hopefully I can shed some light for you.

You mentioned that you had done some online research into post-traumatic stress disorder, which I did a post on here. However, the type of amnesia you have described above is unlikely to be the result of PTSD, as usually that type is more pin-pointed toward the traumatic event (which does fit your scenario), but not towards her entire life (which doesn’t fit).

Photo by Jill Greenseth

The best diagnosis for Gretchen is Dissociative Amnesia. The main feature of this amnesia is an “inability to recall important personal information, usually of a traumatic or stressful nature, that is too extensive to be explained by normal forgetfulness” (DSMIV-TR, p. 520). This is reversible, which is important, because Gretchen will remember her past by the end of the book. Dissociative amnesia is most likely reported as a gap or series of gaps in recall for aspects of an individual’s life history.

Less commonly, an individual has a florid episode with sudden onset (which is what Gretchen has). Of the five types of amnesia associated with dissociation, the type of amnesia she has is generalized, which is a failure to recall a person’s entire life. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM) therapists use actually says that people with this “rare disorder usually present to the police, emergency rooms, or to general hospital consultation-liaison services” (DSMIV-TR, p. 520). So kudos for you, since you already have this happening in your book.

So, about whether her personality would still shine through…the DSM didn’t have a lot to say about that, which can be a good thing, as it leaves the door open to however you want to portray it. I look at it as more compartmentalized. She’s lost her past, not everything that makes her who she is. You mentioned in the sample chapters I read (due to Debra’s winning the Seekerville contest) that Gretchen wanted prayer when she was feeling anxious. This remembering of an aspect of her life is possible. Her personality could still shine through, too, as long as you are conscious to give her some new aspects to it (i.e., she’s bound to be anxious about not remembering, depressed, even, and may even regress in her maturity level due to this).

A few other common symptoms people reported who have this disorder are trance states, providing approximate inaccurate answers to questions (like 2 + 2 = 5), aggressive impulses (which you’ve already shown), self-mutilation, and suicidal impulses/acts (perhaps from desperation? being overwhelmed? Anything could go here.).

Two other symptoms require a bit more explanation, which I’ll do so in case you want to include these in your manuscript. The first is analgesia, which is the ability to feel pain while still conscious. The second is depersonalization, which is a feeling of detachment or estrangement from one’s self, like the person is living in a dream or movie (i.e., being an outside observer of their own mental process, body or body parts).

One thing that might be of help for Gretchen’s backstory is that people who have already had one episode of amnesia are predisposed to having amnesia for subsequent traumatic circumstances. So, if after killing the guy with a pitchfork she disclose that she had amnesia following that event, it makes the case that much stronger for her having the dissociative amnesia after the second attack. Also, keep the recall of her dissociated memories gradual, as that’s more realistic than WHAM! “Oh, now I remember everything!” (Although that can happen.)

So here's a bit more for you to work with as you're revising what promises to be a great novel! I enjoyed reading what you sent so much.

This service is for fictional characters only, so any resemblance to real life examples is entirely coincidental. Any other fictional character assessment questions can be directed to charactertherapist@hotmail.com.

Contest Feedback Epiphany #1

Picture by betta design

Now that things have somewhat settled down after the move - though a long way from being "normal," - I took the time to really read my Genesis and TBL feedback. Besides of the usual confusion about how the same entry can be judged by different people and receive marks as high as a 93 and as low as a 54, I decided to just ignore the scores.

What I wanted to look for are those little gold nuggets of wisdom someone further along the road to publication dropped for me in the margin of my paper or in an overall impression. The result of this type of analysis was amazing!

So of course I want to share. However, not all my epiphanies will benefit YOU, since this was manuscript-specific, but perhaps it can apply to your own stuff.

My first epiphany sort of piggybacks off a post I wrote here about genre. Since I started my manuscript as a women's fiction (actually, chick lit - to use a waning industry term) and it morphed into a romantic suspense, I realized that my hero really is a bit underdeveloped as far as his goals, motivation and conflict. (Yes, reading Debra Dixon's GMC book right now....really good stuff. Highly recommend it.)

The reason for this underdevelopment is simple: I was writing a story centered just on the heroine's journey. In a lot of women's lit, the hero fits into the heroine's GMC (usually). Not the other way around. So my poor Joshua didn't really have a specific goal, or motivation. His conflict was brought about by his involvement with the heroine, but nothing intrisic for HIM.

Let me tell you...this has opened the doors as far as figuring out how to better layer this particular manuscript. The possibilities are endless. (Katie...just wait until I lay this on you!)

So...here's my first epiphany. Any other genre but women's fiction (and even sometimes women's fiction) needs to have separate GMCs for the main characters! And if you're smirking at the screen right now, I'm sorry for not being as astute as I should have been to already have understood this! (But I never said my epiphanies weren't utterly basic in concept, either.) :)

Prayer Updates!

Thank you to everyone who commented on my previous post asking for prayer. God is so good to answer!

My daughter is basically back to her old self today! She slept well through the night and her congestion didn't sound as bad this morning. She's once again animated and has her previous color. I think she's doing so much better....thanks for the prayers, gang.

As for my interview, I feel it went very well! It lasted for a long time...which is a great sign. When I know something, I'll let you know. I felt the prayers, though, and was very calm, confident and collected during the interview!!

So thanks so much for your support! Isn't the body of Christ amazing?