Character Formation Layers: Childhood
What Attachment type are you?
Chapter 4 of The Laws of Human Nature by Robert Greene is titled “Determine the Strength of People’s Character”, and it’s all about people’s characters, how they form, and how they can be changed. Here’s roughly how this chapter describes character:
If we are honest with ourselves, we must admit there is some truth to the concept of fate. We are prone to repeat the same decisions and methods of dealing with problems. There is a pattern to our life, particularly visible in our mistakes and failures. But there is a different way of looking at this concept: it is not spirits or goals that control us but rather our character.
This whole chapter was insightful, but one section in particular that talks about how our character forms struck me and I wanted to reflect on that. Greene talks about how our character is made up from 3 primary layers that are stacked on top of each other:
- The first layer being our genetics and biology—which “predisposes us toward certain moods and preferences”
- The second layer being from our earliest years and “from the particular type of attachment we formed with our mother and caregivers”
- The third layer being from “our habits and experiences as we get older”
The second layer what what I found most compelling, and it describes the patterns of attachment between mothers and children that John Bowlby, a British psychologist, came up with:
- Free/autonomous
- Dismissing
- Enmeshed-ambivalent
- Disorganized
I’m going to go over each of those based on quotes from the book, and in reading I encourage you to think about your experience and whether you feel fitting to any one of these 4 basic schemas.
Basic Schemas of Attachment Types
Free/Autonomous
The free/autonomous stamp comes from mothers who give their children freedom to discover themselves and are continually sensitive to their needs but also protect them.
Dismissing
Dismissing mothers are often distant, even sometimes hostile and rejecting. Such children are stamped with a feeling of abandonment and the idea that they must continually fend for themselves. … Children of the dismissing parent will tend to avoid any kind of negative emotional situation and to wall themselves off from feelings of dependency. They might find it harder to commit to a relationship or will unconsciously push people away.
Enmeshed-ambivalent
The enmeshed-ambivalent mothers are not consistent with their attention—sometimes suffocating and over-involved, other times retreating because of their own problems or anxieties. They can make their children feel as if they have to take care of the person who should be taking care of them. … The children of the enmeshed variety will experience a great deal of anxiety in relationships and will feel man conflicting emotions. They will always be ambivalent toward people, and this will get noticeable pattern in their life in which they pursue people and then unconsciously retreat.
Disorganized
Disorganized mothers send highly conflicting signals to their children, reflecting their own inner chaos and perhaps early emotional traumas. Nothing their children do is right, and such children can develop powerful emotional problems.
Thoughts: What attachment type are you the most?
In the book, Greene mentions how there might be a 4th layer as well in which someone tries to counteract their character (because they feel compelled to not be that person), and that can make things really confusing in determining exactly who someone is. In addition, people can experience different forms of the above 4 schemas all at once, and that can make it difficult to pick one exactly. Finally, it’s clear that these descriptions can never fit someone perfectly or can exactly define who someone is: there clearly is many more people and experiences involved in the upbringing of a child that just the mother.
With that said, I can easily imagine that for most people, one of the descriptions above resonates, and I wonder which?
I think it’s something worth thinking about because it may help illuminate why you have a propensity to a particular kind of behavior even where there’s “no reason” for you to act that way. If you want further reading, I found the following article on PositivePsychology.com great: What is Attachment Theory? Bowlby’s 4 Stages Explained.
