Healthy conflict resolution is essential to maintaining positive and constructive adult relationships. Individuals usually learn how to handle conflict in childhood. Children watch the way adults work through disagreements and model those patterns of behavior as they develop into adults and begin to form relationships with others. The bonds that children have with their caregivers also influence the way in which they address conflicts. People who have secure attachments with their parents and caregivers are often able to work through challenges with other people in respectful, affectionate, and loving ways. They are capable of recognizing when they need to ask for forgiveness and are willing to compromise to achieve a resolution that is mutually satisfying to all involved. Individuals who have insecure attachments, however, are often unable to handle situations as amicably. Insecure attachment can be expressed through avoidant or anxious behaviors. People who are avoidant in nature tend to withdraw and shut down when faced with conflict. Anxious individuals may demand attention, even negative attention, and use aggressive and hostile tactics to engage someone in a conflict dispute.
For children who have grown up witnessing dysfunctional conflict resolution strategies, having a secure attachment with others could help them avoid making the same mistakes of their parents. Rather than continuing the negative behaviors they have seen displayed by their own parents, these secure, self-reliant, and confident people may choose to use healthier mechanisms to maintain harmony in their adult relationships. Joyce A. Baptist of the School of Family Studies and Human Services at Kansas State University wanted to better understand how attachment style affected emotional processing learned in families of origin. She enlisted 203 young adults who had been raised in families with various emotional functioning styles for a study that evaluated how the adult children managed conflict.
Baptist found that the participants who had witnessed extreme disengagement in childhood were more likely to use aggressive and antagonistic disagreement strategies in adulthood. The most anxiously attached individuals in this group were the most apt to engage in hostile behaviors as their anxiety escalated. Those with minimally avoidant styles worked through disagreements in a more civil way. Baptist believes these results suggest that secure attachments can help protect individuals from dysfunctional and destructive conflict resolution patterns. These findings could impact how professionals assist people who have communication and compromise problems in their adult relationships. She added, “Considering the interrelations between emotional processing in families of origin and insecurities in attachment will allow therapists to better identify and treat the root of the destructive conflict behavior.”
Reference:
Baptist, J. A., Thompson, D. E., Norton, A. M., Hardy, N. R., Link, C. D. (2012). The effects of the intergenerational transmission of family emotional processes on conflict styles: The moderating role of attachment. American Journal of Family Therapy 40.1, 56-73.
Individuals who have avoidant attachment personalities struggle with intimacy and closeness. In romantic relationships, this type of personality can cause a partner to distance themselves from their loved one, and avoid physical closeness. “Because avoidantly-attached people feel most comfortable with distance and detachment from their partner, they may have less of the commitment-inspired inhibition that normally prevents people from showing interest in alternatives and from engaging in infidelity,” said C. Nathan DeWall of the Department of Psychology at the University of Kentucky. “Therefore, avoidant attachment may relate to a broad pattern of responses indicative of interest in alternatives and propensity to engage in infidelity, associations that should be mediated by a lack of commitment to one’s partner.” DeWall and his colleagues conducted a study to find out how avoidant attachment affected commitment in romantic relationships, and if the level of commitment would influence the desire to cheat. He said, “We focus on commitment because prior evidence suggests that commitment is the most direct mediator when predicting behaviors that relate to the persistence of one’s relationship and engagement of behaviors meant to strengthen one’s relationship, accounting for variance beyond relationship satisfaction and investment in one’s relationship.”
DeWall enlisted 42 college students in romantic relationships for his study. He conducted eight separate studies designed to evaluate both attachment style and commitment, and found that in all the studies, attachment style was directly linked to commitment and infidelity. “The first four studies showed that avoidant attachment was related to more positive attitudes toward cheating on a current relationship partner, having an attentional bias toward alternatives, and engaging in more infidelity,” said DeWall. “The final four studies showed that lower levels of commitment mediated the relationship between avoidant attachment and interest in alternatives and infidelity. He added, “Our findings suggest that chronic discomfort with closeness and intimacy, as indicated by relatively high levels of an avoidant attachment style, has direct consequences for how interested people are in alternatives to their relationship partner, their attitudes toward cheating on their partner, how committed they are, and hence how much they engage in infidelity.”
Reference:
DeWall, C. Nathan, Nathaniel M. Lambert, Erica B. Slotter, Richard S. Pond, Jr., Timothy Deckman, Eli J. Finkel, Laura B. Luchies, and Frank D. Finchman. “So Far Away From One’s Partner, Yet So Close to Romantic Alternatives: Avoidant Attachment, Interest in Alternatives, and Infidelity.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 101.6 (2011): 1302-316. Print.
Dyadic play therapy is a form of play therapy that allows parents who have themselves suffered trauma, the opportunity to address their own symptoms and attend to the strained attachment with their child. But very often, the parents are resistant to this form of treatment. “For adult survivors of childhood trauma, psychotherapy can be both necessary and highly threatening,” said Mirisse F. Foroughe and Robert T. Muller of York University. The researchers authored a paper that explains the obstacles and benefits to dyadic play therapy. “The conditions and processes of dyadic play therapy may be experienced as threatening to parents by triggering early memories of intra-familial trauma while challenging avoidant defenses. Yet these very processes may be helpful in facilitating therapeutic change.”
Parents with traumatic childhoods may see the tools used by their children in play therapy, such as toys and artwork, as triggers for their own pain and may experience overwhelming and frightening memories and emotions. “Dyadic play therapy, with its focus on parent-child attachment, tends to activate the attachment system, making the process of therapy especially challenging for those who are much more comfortable closing themselves off from painful relational experiences.” The authors advise clinicians to realize this and take the necessary steps to be prepared for varying reactions from parents.
Several components of play therapy can prevent progress for parents. “In contrast to individual psychotherapy, the dyadic condition also inherently places the parent in a position of vulnerability, in part because they are ‘under the spotlight’ as a parent but also because, with the child present, the parent cannot dismiss attachment-related issues as readily.” However, they added that the benefits of this type of therapy can be enormous, for both the child and the parent. They said, “The pattern of interactions between parent and child often brings the parent’s own trauma history to light, and, with the acceptance and support of the therapist through this process, the parent can then become an agent of change in the parent-child relationship.”
Reference:
Foroughe, M. F., & Muller, R. T. (2011, March 28). Dismissing (Avoidant) Attachment and Trauma in Dyadic Parent-Child Psychotherapy. Psychological Trauma: Theory, Research, Practice, and Policy. Advance online publication. doi: 10.1037/a0023061
During therapeutic play with children, therapists watch, listen, and interact during moments when a child may be giving voice to images, emotion, and story.
“Image” implies an object or person of attachment from the child’s past, “emotion” implies feelings from past relationships or that the child may be feeling in current relationships or in the moment, and “story” implies the coming together of a narrative that all children accumulate piece-by-piece over time.
As children work to make sense of their world, they often try on different ways to communicate meanings, experiences, and identity. Usually this work occurs in the context of ongoing parent-child relationships, through the form of brief questions and conversation, and meaningful experiences over years and years.
Sometimes a child’s context, when tumultuous, unpredictable, and even harmful, can deter such work and leave a child with only collected fragments of identity. Those fragments may be confusing and contradictory and may leave a child without the confidence that comes through securely attached relationships with caregivers.
Sandplay therapy and other forms of therapeutic play, both directive and nondirective, are tools in a process of nurturing more secure attachment bonds with caregivers and beginning a journey of co-construction of identity.
[fat_widget_child_counselor_right]Take, for instance, a child who, after experiencing chronic abuse or neglect, begins to settle into a supportive family who can provide consistency and nurturance. Oftentimes families are surprised when a child responds to all their outpourings of love and support through varying modes of ambivalence or avoidance. In these cases, it is not only the child, but also the adults who have a tremendous amount to gain from experiencing the child’s underlying anxiety in a therapeutic context, deriving new, more positive and safe experiences, and working together to develop a new approach and a new narrative to coincide with it.
As therapeutic play facilitates relationship-bonding and identity co-construction with caregivers, volatile survival-oriented behaviors often decrease. The words of Susan Johnson, a leading proponent of emotionally focused therapies, ring in my ears: “Emotion must replace emotion.”
A caring, creative, and collaborative approach assists such children and their families—and in the cases of adoption, their new families—in launching a journey of defragmentation, meaning-making, and identity formation that may have for years been delayed by a focus on more primal needs.
Over time, caregivers have opportunities to become more involved and less involved in the child’s play as it feels comfortable to them and to the child.
As children participate in sandplay therapy, I make a point to remain only peripherally engaged in their play, allowing them to take control of their play worlds with minimal interference. I often mirror the degree of participation of caregivers in the room. Over time, caregivers have opportunities to become more involved and less involved in the child’s play as it feels comfortable to them and to the child.
These new fragments of experience and exploration, in the safe presence and amidst dialogue from caregiver(s) and counselor, are building blocks in this co-construction of identity. Images, emotion, and story can emerge in unexpected ways and at unexpected times.
Much of the work of this co-construction is already occurring by this time in the context of a new, safe, and more predictable family home environment. The families supporting these children should be encouraged by signs that emotional and social development is roaring down the tracks once again, much due to the fuel of their care and affections.
Recommended Reading
Gil, E. and Sobol, B. (2000). “Engaging families in therapeutic play.” In C.E. Bailey (Ed.), Children in Therapy: Using the Family as a Resource. NY: W.W. Norton & Company.