By Michael Hooper
In Widen the Window, Elizabeth Stanley says early life experiences, especially with our parents and other important caregivers, powerfully reverberate throughout our lives, especially in how we interact with other people and cope with and recover from stress.
In Chapter 6, the author says attachment styles are developed based on our relationships with our parents and primary caregivers from childhood.
She says empirical studies suggests that about 3/4 of adults keep the same attachment style throughout their lives.
Attachment styles
She describes attachment styles as communication patterns, and relational strategies which get encoded in our brains as implicit and procedural memory. Our attachment style affects how much physical closeness and contact we have with others, our social engagement with other people and groups. She defines four attachment styles.
There are avoidant adults who tend to operate with a narrow window, who cope by avoiding contact. Their mother tended to dislike contact with her babies.
Insecure, anxious child gets this way through a mother, who interacts with them unpredictably and inconsistently responding to her own emotional needs and moods first not her babies needs
Anxiously attached adults tend to prefer intense and enmeshed relationships. They tend to find isolation stressful, and they fear abandonment and seek excessive reassurance.
Infants will develop an insecure disorganized style of attachment when their parents are some combination of neglectful, abusive, depressed, or traumatized themselves.
The predominant disorganized relational strategy is, “I need contact but I can’t let my guard down.”
Childhood adversity
In Chapter 7, the author says a man she dated when she served in the Army called her a trauma magnet. This makes me wonder why she attracts so much hardship and pain?
She says individuals who experience trauma and adversity in childhood often endure additional traumatic events later in their lives. It appears certain people develop lifelong patterns of trauma and despair.
In her chapter on childhood adversity she says empirical research shows that early life chronic stress leads to structural changes in the developing brain. Children with early life, chronic stress, are likely to develop larger and hyperactive amygdala the survival brain region, and they are more likely to develop a smaller, prefrontal cortex, the thinking brain region.
There are clear, neurobiological reasons why someone from a "challenging" upbringing is more likely to have difficulty making good decisions, controlling impulses, regulating emotions, developing supportive relationships, and recovering from stress.
Stanley says we can rewire our thinking, we can experiment with new internal and external tools to access a wider range of adaptive responses during stress. We can learn to interrupt the survival brains, default programming, and the coping habits we adopted in childhood.
The author, Yiyun Li recently wrote in the New Yorker about feeling anguish over the suicide of his son Vincent at age 16. He says anguish comes to us from the Latin, Angustia means narrowness, lack of space, narrow passage, limitations, confinement, imprisonment, and pettiness.
Can we say narrow window, Stanley's go-to metaphor!
I have a friend of mine, who is a fellow artist. He’s very talented, but he’s always in a state of self analysis, he says his life is meaningless and worthless. He’s always making these statements on FB about his insecurities. I call them fishing expeditions, to lure someone in who is going to provide him assurance that his life is OK and worth living, that he is a talented artist and so forth. I fell for this trap a few times, but I gave up…..I tried to help him but he goes back to self loathing. It’s like he’s on a loop.
In the song, Candy Says, by the Velvet Underground, she sings, “Maybe when I'm older, what do you think I'd see If I could walk away from me?"
If you figure out how to rise above self loathing; get off the loop, and it seems the world opens up to you.
I recently read a book by Chloe Cooper Jones, I met her at the Kansas Book Festival, she wrote a book, called Easy Beauty, and in there she talks about how her generation of people are so self-absorbed, and that we need to go through a period of un-selfing in order to get away from all this self absorption.
I like to transcend all of this self-absorption by studying the world of ideas, and how these ideas might be used to change or improve society. I like to study art and ask myself how can I paint a better picture. How does a musician capture the purity of a song?
Lately my wife Heather and I have been singing along to old songs by the Carpenters, is there a more sweeter sounding voice than Karen Carpenter?
In church, my friends Mike Cox and Gordon Haight and I sing together. My voice is not that great, but together with these men, we sound like Crosby Stills and Nash and Young.
David Bowie says you can be a hero for just one day.
One day, Heather and I took our two children and a foreign exchange student Momo Yamaguchi of Japan to a Native American drum event near Holton. We listened to these elders pounding the drum and chanting and singing and howling. We heard the awakening of their souls, the sound of sorrows. A sublime dimension.
The tiny window that I created around my anguish seems to have disappeared and now I’m looking for ways to connect with music, and art, poetry, laughter and love, a highway to transcendence.
I would say, my attachment style is moderately outgoing, with a curiosity about people, and a willingness to share a friendly smile, and a kind word, to perhaps, engage with a soul. I like working by myself but I enjoy the camaraderie of working with others toward a larger goal.
I remember, Jude Highberger, who used to attend meetings with this group. He and I had a discussion about attachment styles.
He said, “I carry every one I ever met with me.”
Wow, What an example for us to follow.
Shock trauma
In chapter 8, she says shock trauma is in another way for the Window to narrow. Shock trauma is when the body feels an acute or unexpected event that has a major effect on the mind-body system. During shock trauma we experience too much stress, and emotional intensity, thereby overwhelming our window of tolerance. These events could be like a hurricane, or a tornado or a fire or a divorce or a childhood death or something major. She suggests that we should take some time to make a list of experiences of shock trauma throughout our life. Write down all these shocking and earth-shattering events that tore up your heart. Once the list is complete take some time to think about it evaluate what happened and perhaps what could you have done differently and how we might act today.
Elizabeth Stanley is trying to be scientist and therapist in her book. I'm not sure she is succeeding at either endeavor. She is at the center of all these issues because she has been through these trauma events, with real-life combat experience, which seems to deepen the depressive nature of the content of this book.
At the end of chapter 6, the author encourages you to reflect in writing about your own attachment styles both as a child, and as an adult, and that as a part of this exercise, you should speak with your parents, your siblings, or other people who knew you as an infant and a child. Is this really appropriate? Is there any lasting value in this technique?
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