Attachment learnings operate in the same manner as other emotional learnings: constructed and learned in the past, they generate responses in the present. Thus, attachment schemas are disconfirmed, dissolved and replaced by new learning in the same way as other emotional schemas are: through the creation of juxtaposition experiences in which a vividly felt, contradictory knowledge is brought into awareness alongside a reactivated experience of the target attachment schema— that is, through the therapeutic reconsolidation process described and illustrated in Chapters 2, 3, and 4.
The makeup of the contradictory knowledge is the critical, operational clinical issue here. What does it need to consist of and how is it to be created when the target constructs are attachment learnings? These are the questions that concern us in the rest of this chapter.
According to attachment advocates starting with Bowlby, therapy
for attachment problems has to consist of new learning experiences of what originally was missing, namely positive experiences of secure attachment, with the therapist now being the attachment figure (e.g., Bowlby, 1988). The logic of this reparative attachment or reparenting approach appears to be that it is necessary to build up the preferred, healthier condition of the client in the very manner that would have created secure attachment in the first place. The fact that a client’s insecure attachment schema was formed in childhood within a dyadic relationship is taken to mean that only a dyadic relationship of the secure attachment type can now, in adulthood, create new learning that revises the original learning of insecure attachment; and that, although the original learning took place in infancy and childhood, new attachment learning can occur effectively in adulthood.
Within the Emotional Coherence Framework, we re-examine those assumptions and ask these key questions: What determines whether dyadic reparative attachment can succeed with a given client in creating transformational change? What criteria can therapists use to rule in or rule out reparative attachment in a given clinical situation?
Answers to those questions are provided by the logic inherent in the therapeutic reconsolidation process—that is, the logic of the process through which implicit schemas are dissolved. Those key questions need to be addressed in a schema-specific manner. A therapy client may have some emotional schemas that are possible to dissolve through reparative attachment and some that are not. The following decision path clarifies whether reparative attachment is suitable for a given retrieved schema.
1. Does the schema consist of learnings formed in an attachment relationship? See if schema was in effect in early family (as was done with Raoul). If yes, go to Question 2; if no, reparative attachment work is unsuitable.
2. Does the core problem defined in the schema consist of terms of attachment? This too is clearly apparent from the content of a fully retrieved schema. If yes, go to Question 3;
if no, reparative attachment work is unsuitable.
3. Are the specific terms of attachment in the schema disconfirmable by any feasible client–therapist interactions? If yes, reparative attachment is suitable; if no, reparative attachment is unsuitable.
Use of the above decision-making process is illustrated in case examples below. We have found from long experience of using the therapeutic reconsolidation process that a client’s new experience of secure attachment with a therapist can indeed dissolve an existing insecure attachment schema—if the new experience both contradicts and occurs in juxtaposition with an experience of the existing, insecure expectations (terms of attachment). Importantly, the client’s experience of secure attachment with the therapist does not in itself guarantee that such a juxtaposition experience is occurring. In other words, the client’s insecure attachment schema can remain intact and insulated from the in-session enjoyment of secure attachment unless the therapist prompts the activation of both at once for an actual juxtaposition experience. That insulation occurs, for example, when attempts at such juxtaposition experiences encounter resistance because strong emotional distress accompanies the conscious contrast between being regarded as worthy of empathy from the therapist but not so regarded by one’s own parents. Clients can transiently feel and welcome the therapist’s empathy while blocking the distressing juxtaposition experience that would induce liberating change. It is only when the juxtaposition experience occurs that transformation of the attachment schema takes place.
What the Emotional Coherence Framework contributes most significantly and expansively to the conventional approach to attachment work, we believe, is the recognition that the contradictory experience needed for dissolving a problematic attachment schema is not limited to experiences of secure attachment with the therapist.
This recognition follows from the actual content of clients’ retrieved schemas of insecure attachment, not from theoretical considerations.
The actual content allows for disconfirmation by experiences other than experiences of the therapist’s empathetic, validating
understanding. Therefore, the range of options for transformational new learning is far wider than reparenting and reparative attachment methods. This opens up a large field of clinical methods for transforming attachment patterns. Having such an expanded palette of concrete options puts therapists in the strongest position to facilitate decisively effective work.
The relatively recent development of phenomenological clinical methods for retrieving emotional implicit schemas accurately, thoroughly and promptly (Ecker & Hulley, 1996, 2000a, 2011) makes it possible to know the content of a symptom-generating schema in detail in nearly all cases. This allows therapists to determine whether or not the schema consists of attachment learnings (as illustrated by the case vignette of Raoul above) and whether or not a schema that does consist of attachment learnings can or cannot possibly be disconfirmed by experiences of secure attachment with a therapist. If not, then other methods must be used for creating or finding contradictory knowledge to incorporate in a juxtaposition experience.
However, in the existing body of literature on attachment work there is no recognition of the need for such triaging, to our knowledge; the pervasive assumption appears to be that any attachment learning can be revised therapeutically through positive experiences in relationship with the therapist.