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Africa
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Interventions for adopted children and their parents
Published in Panos Vostanis, Helping Children and Young People Who Experience Trauma, 2021
For children with persistent or more severe difficulties, usually of emotional dysregulation, psychodynamic psychotherapy can tackle both adoption-specific and general issues. It can thus help them achieve a sense of continuity or coherent narrative of previously fragmented experiences. The answers on why it was them who were ostracised by one family to be chosen by another, or whether their bloodline continues to matter (even more so in cases of inter-racial or intercountry adoption), will have to come equally from within and from important adults. So does reconciling the grateful part for being saved, with the resentment of being abandoned and maltreated. This can take longer, can be harsh to work through, but is ultimately the stronger protector for the future, in contrast with latent, unresolved and contrasting emotions. The more children develop their own internal working model of attachment, in conjunction with their positive new experiences, the less they will need to ‘control’ their environment by reproducing behaviours that somehow served them in the past but were symptomatic of insecure attachment relationships.
Redressing Social Injustice
Published in Audrey Di Maria, Exploring Ethical Dilemmas in Art Therapy, 2019
In South Africa, the hardcore psychosocial reality is that there is a deficit of parental figures in a parentless nation with minimal mental health resources and limitless mental health needs. Lefika’s response has been to focus upon building the parental, adult ego function in society by training community workers to provide an internalized model of healthy relationships. Fonagy and Higgitt (2007) comment, “it is the internal working model of attachment relationships that predicts mortality rather than the physical presence of supportive individuals” (p. 19). We see our role as one of enhancing, supplementing, and supporting the parents who are struggling, not replacing them.
Sleep and attachment disorders in children
Published in S.R. Pandi-Perumal, Meera Narasimhan, Milton Kramer, Sleep and Psychosomatic Medicine, 2017
Attachment disorders are caused by an infant’s early experiences of repeated separation and multiple traumas. Such disorders commonly evolve from traumatic events such as physical, sexual, or emotional violence and severe deprivation, often perpetrated by attachment figures. In addition, if an attachment figure is sometimes a source of emotional availability and protection for the child and at other times a source of violence and anxiety, it will be difficult for the child to organize these disparate experiences into a coherent internal working model of attachment.19, 20
Child and Adult Attachment Styles among Individuals Who Have Committed Filicide: The Case for Examining Attachment by Gender
Published in International Journal of Forensic Mental Health, 2020
L. Eriksson, U. Arnautovska, S. McPhedran, P. Mazerolle, R. Wortley
Bowlby (1973) and Ainsworth (1989) argued that these early attachment patterns become internalized working models of the self and others and, thus, shape a person’s close relationships (e.g., those with partners and own children) later in life. Importantly, Bowlby (1973) highlighted that a person’s internal working model of attachment tends to be transmitted across generations. For example, securely attached individuals who develop emotional stability, independence and high tolerance for intimacy usually have securely attached parents who display similar interpersonal and caregiving capacities. Insecure attachment styles tend to develop in the context of specific and adverse relational circumstances (Ainsworth, 1979). According to Bowlby (1973), attachment patterns play a key role in “the inheritance of mental health”, which should be considered equally important to “genetic inheritance” (p. 323). Given the transmission of a person’s predominant attachment style from childhood into adulthood, it may, therefore, be postulated that early insecure attachment styles (such as anxious-ambivalent and anxious-avoidant), which tend to develop in the context of specific, often negative life circumstances, may have a profound impact on a person’s way of relating with and behavior toward other people, including infants and children, as adults.