Sublime

Studies show that securely attached children have enhanced emotional flexibility, social functioning, and cognitive abilities.15 They are better at initiating.

Usually, the child sets out on a journey to earn love from others. They become enormously eager to please and cannot say no. They are frequent targets of abuse by others because they’re so desperate for approval and have no one to report abuse to.

Women who generally denied their attachment needs

As you can imagine, a codependent therapist who needs to be needed could become entrapping and wounding rather than healing.

Before the groundbreaking work of Mary Ainsworth and John Bowlby, the founders of attachment theory in the fifties and sixties, psychologists had no appreciation of the importance of the bond between parent and child.

In 1944, Bowlby published the very first paper on family therapy, Forty-four Juvenile Thieves, in which he noted that “behind the mask of indifference is bottomless misery and behind apparent callousness, despair.” Bowlby’s young charges were frozen in the attitude “I will never be hurt again” and paralyzed in desperation and rage.