Parenting - The importance of attachment and understanding our own

Securely attaching to a caregiver is at the heart of feeling emotionally safe and secure in the world. We are all regularly exposed to situations, events and/or people that are challenging, threatening, overwhelming and/or exacerbate our anxiety. As children, we rely on our attachment systems to regulate us and stabilise us at times when we are not yet emotionally equipped to regulate ourselves. As such, a kind, thoughtful, wise, and emotionally regulated parent is of the utmost importance for any child to be emotionally and psychologically equipped to confront challenges that they face and to develop a healthy emotional capacity throughout one’s life.

As parents, we are all seeking for our children to confront the challenges that they face in life (e.g., forming friendships, attending school, participating in extra-curricular activities such as sport) in a resilient, constructive and thoughtful manner. Yet, it is difficult to ascertain what are the most effective strategies to assist a child to do so. Over the last century, it has become clearer across the neuropsychological, evolutionary psychology and clinical psychological literature that a secure attachment system (particularly within the parent/primary caregiver-child relationship) forms the foundation of a child’s capacity to resiliently and confidently confront the challenges that they have to face in day to day life.

Yet, many of us have our own pain, emotional devastation, loss and challenges that stem from our own challenges that we had to face in our childhood. In other words, it is hard to provide the emotionally secure foundations for our children, if we did not experience this ourselves. This can, in turn, lead to frustrations and internalised criticisms in that the parents we are seeking to be are not who we feel that we are in day to day life. As a way to work through this, engaging in psychotherapy via workshops, group psychotherapy and individual psychotherapy can assist people to make sense of their history in their family of origin, and become the values oriented, emotionally regulated parents who we feel that we need to be for our children.

Overall, in relation to parent’s providing a secure basis for attachment with your children, it is not what happened within your family of origin which is of the utmost importance, but rather, how you reflect on what happened. 

At Treat Yourself Well Balmain, we provide valuable individual and group-based psychotherapy programmes to assist you to reflect on what happened within your own family of origin, which will assist you to develop safe and secure attachments with your children.