- The session discusses the importance of understanding attachment in the context of human potential and maturation.
- The speaker emphasizes the need for words and a collective consciousness to fully comprehend attachment.
- Attachment is described as the science of relationship and is seen as a broad and significant concept.
- The speaker mentions various influential figures and theories related to attachment, including Bowlby, neuroscientists, and particle physicists.
- The limbic system and brain chemistry of attachment, particularly oxytocin, are also discussed.
- The session highlights the need to understand the big picture of attachment, beyond just baby bonding and co-sleeping.

- The video discusses various researchers and theories related to attachment, such as Lorenz's imprinting and Harlow's monkey lab.
- Stephen Suomi's research on the effects of separation on rhesus monkeys is mentioned as demonstrating the impact of separation.
- Object relations theory and identity formation are briefly mentioned as being related to attachment.
- Sidney Girard's rediscovery of psychological intimacy as the basis of marriage is discussed, with attachment not being mentioned in his work.
- Werner's orthogenetic principle is mentioned as showing the movement towards togetherness and separateness in nature.
- Otto Rank's fear of separation is highlighted as being impactful.
- Tokyo Doi's work on adult attachment behavior in Japanese culture is mentioned as being intuitive and influential.
- The scientific definition of attachment is explained as a drive for proximity and the preservation of nearness.
- The importance of attachment in various fields, such as physics and chemistry, is discussed.
- Understanding attachment is emphasized as crucial for understanding children and their development.

- Attachment behavior is essential for all living beings, including plants, animals, and humans
- Humans need attachment for survival, surpassing even physical hunger
- Attachment is necessary for proper digestion and overall well-being
- Attachment instincts in babies serve feeding and nursing needs
- Attention is driven by attachment needs, and children will only attend to things related to their attachment needs
- Facing separation is the biggest threat to humans, as contact and connection are our primary needs
- Separation, whether experienced or anticipated, evokes strong emotions and impacts brain development and behavior
- The impact of separation is the focus of level 2 in the model, which will be further explained in the next half hour.

- The limbic system evokes three emotions: seeking, intensified pursuit; alarm; and frustration.
- Feigning separation with a child can evoke intense pursuit for proximity.
- Intense emotions cannot be felt all at once, and emotions cycle.
- Separation can lead to alarm, obsessive behavior, and aggression.
- Pursuit, alarm, and frustration are meant to fix a problem, but defenses can be evoked if separation becomes unbearable.
- Flight from vulnerability leads to emotional numbing and changes in pursuit, alarm, and frustration.
- Pursuit can take the form of preoccupation with attachment, depersonalized pursuits, collecting and hoarding behavior, and extreme imitation and conforming behavior.
- The more separation faced, the more desperate the pursuit becomes.
- Understanding the impact of separation is crucial for intervention, as putting children into more separation can worsen the issue.
- Defensive reattaching can occur with peers, pets, belongings, and groups.

- Gang formation is high in Canada, particularly among children facing separation from their families and ethnic origins
- Separation causes frustration and can lead to aggression
- Separation is the most common futility encountered and the most likely experience to evoke defenses against vulnerability
- Aggression problems should not be addressed with more separation, as it only worsens the issue
- Separation is the primary source of alarm and anxiety in children
- Alarm consists of perceptions of what's wrong, feelings of alarm, impulses to caution, and physiological and chemical responses
- Dysfunctional alarm systems can lead to anxiety-based, agitation-based, and adrenaline-based problems
- Attention deficit disorder can be misdiagnosed when it is actually a result of facing too much separation
- Extreme behaviors, such as self-harm, can be a result of the flight from vulnerability
- Different levels of alarm problems have different signs and symptoms

- Children who are dependent and rely on others are vulnerable to getting hurt
- When children face more separation than they can handle, they develop defensive dominance and alpha instincts to control and be in charge
- Children today face more separation than ever before due to smaller nuclear families and lack of extended family support
- The increase in separation leads to problems such as stuckness, alarm issues, aggression, drug involvement, suicide ideation, bullying, and boredom
- The solution is to reduce the separation that children face and find ways to make a difference in their lives
- The impact of facing separation can be seen in signs such as intensified pursuit, alarm problems, frustration problems, flight from vulnerability, defensive reattachment, and defensive dominance
- Understanding these signs can help address the root cause of the child's issues and reduce their separation anxiety.

- Importance of understanding attachment in human potential and maturation
- Need for words and collective consciousness to comprehend attachment
- Attachment as the science of relationship
- Mention of influential figures and theories related to attachment
- Discussion of limbic system and brain chemistry of attachment
- Importance of understanding the big picture of attachment
- Mention of various researchers and theories related to attachment
- Impact of separation on rhesus monkeys and humans
- Brief mention of object relations theory and identity formation
- Sidney Girard's work on psychological intimacy in marriage
- Werner's orthogenetic principle showing movement towards togetherness and separateness
- Otto Rank's fear of separation
- Tokyo Doi's work on adult attachment behavior in Japanese culture
- Scientific definition of attachment as a drive for proximity and preservation of nearness
- Importance of attachment in various fields
- Crucial for understanding children and their development
- Attachment behavior essential for all living beings
- Humans need attachment for survival and overall well-being
- Attachment instincts in babies serve feeding and nursing needs
- Attention driven by attachment needs
- Separation as the biggest threat to humans
- Impact of separation on brain development and behavior
- Emotions evoked by separation: seeking, alarm, and frustration
- Cycle of emotions and impact of separation on pursuit, alarm, and frustration
- Defensive responses to separation
- Importance of understanding impact of separation for intervention
- Defensive reattaching and gang formation in response to separation
- Separation as a source of frustration and aggression
- Separation as the primary source of alarm and anxiety in children
- Dysfunctional alarm systems and misdiagnosis of attention deficit disorder
- Extreme behaviors as a result of flight from vulnerability
- Different signs and symptoms of alarm problems
- Vulnerability of dependent children
- Increase in separation leading to various problems
- Solution: reduce separation and make a difference in children's lives
- Signs of facing separation and how to address them.

We're going to put the base on the triangle now.

We're going to put the foundation material to this.

I often get asked, well, why don't you start with attachment?

The reason for this is we needed a context in which to look at attachment.

If you just take attachment theory per se, it's like talking about the roots of a tree.

You need to look at the roots in the context of what the ultimate yearning is to bear fruit.

And so when you have this in the context, you have vulnerability in context, now we're ready to be able to look at this and it has some meaning.

Meaning is not just attachment for attachment's sake, but how the story, how it fits into this unfolding of human potential.

So where we've been, the maturation process again, walking all the way around this, adaptive, emergent, and integrative.

The vulnerability, walking around the defense, emotional perceptual attachment, defense is the interface between maturation and vulnerability, and now attachment.

Attachment is truly the elephant in the room, truly the monstrous in a sense, the huge, the huge dynamic.

It is so close to us that we have no words.

Culture has supported this construct in traditional cultures, in their rituals, in their customs, but we don't have words for these.

And so when we get educated, we don't get educated in these things because it requires words to have consciousness and consciousness to be able to talk.

And so 1 of the biggest challenges is to be able to provide words for this.

And my book, which is now translated in 15 languages, In every language, we struggle with finding the words.

We have to repurpose some words to be able to serve this purpose.

And again, some are very intuitive, but intuition is knowledge without words.

And if we're going to inform policy and practice, if we're going to inform this, we have to have words.

We have to come to a collective consciousness.

So my role in this is to provide the words for what should feel as if it's very intuitive for you.

Good science should always resonate with inner intuition.

It should simply be providing the understanding that responds to inner intuition.

So attachment is all about relationship, and we must remember that.

Attachment is a non-intuitive word, and I'll get to this in a minute, but really attachment is the science of relationship.

And so not only do we need a context in which to understand the unfolding of human potential, maturation, and vulnerability, and to see attachment in context, but relationship becomes a context for this whole unfolding.

I'll start with going over some of the inspirational sources for this, just to give a picture of how big attachment is.

There are so many dots to be joined, so many pieces of the puzzle to be joined.

And 1 of the problem is, is we didn't have an organizing construct, a word for it.

Bowlby is often seen to be the father of attachment theory, and this is a misnomer.

He's not the father of attachment theory.

There's many, many theories of attachment, Theories of attachment that have never used the word attachment.

There are theories of the need for togetherness.

There were theories of the social nature of human beings.

Einstein was an attachment theorist, studying attachments between particles and in the universe.

The problem is that we didn't have a word.

And Bowlby is the 1 that coined the word, or at least repurposed the word, attachment to be able to bring the whole science together so that we could study this.

His first idea for the word for this was the Bowlby effect.

According to his son, I spent some time with Sir Richard in Frankfurt presenting at an international conference on attachment and we got to converse because I was very interested.

Well, how did your dad come up with this?

And he said, well I remember it very clearly.

He came home from working at the hospital with these children that I talked to you about, you know, studying the effects of what happened when there was more separation than the children could bear and defensive detachment.

And he was all excited about finding a word for this huge theory.

And Harlow had been using, with his monkeys, had been calling it contact comfort.

And Conrad Lorenz, studying birds, had been calling it imprinting.

So he said, well, I'm going to call it the Bowlby effect.

Bowlby was not impressed, thought he should be calling it love and not messing around with something so big, and so he ended up calling it attachment.

But I thought it was kind of an interesting story, you know, about the story of this.

But John Bowlby figures very, very clearly in this and he also attempted to create a theory that was researchable and so that it could spawn the research on the impact of separation and so on and so he's made a huge contribution 1 of the greatest contributors to this.

The limbic system of course is what orchestrates attachment, the emotional brain, the more we understand about this the clearer it becomes.

Neuroscientists are discovering the actual emotions, the primary emotions, but often they're not informed by attachment theory.

And I just give you an example of a brilliant neuroscientist, Pang Sepp, who's trying to delineate all the basic emotions in the limbic system.

And so he calls 1 of the most primary ones seeking, but he doesn't say what we're seeking.

And because he doesn't fully understand the attachment and the pursuit.

As soon as you see this, it becomes self-evident.

Is what we're seeking for is the answer to the invitation to exist in somebody's presence.

What we're seeking for is contact and closeness, love and belonging.

Again, it's an example of many of the neuroscientists who are working in esoteric areas, little bits but have no picture, no big picture in which to fit their particular discoveries in.

The brain chemistry of attachment and of course oxytocin is getting a lot of publicity these days as the attachment chemical and I talk about it in terms of also adolescence and sexuality.

Sexuality is of course all about attachment and in how we're finding out that oxytocin is like superglue.

We make love and we're meant to become attached, it becomes very clear when we study what happens in the brain and so on of how that works.

Particle attachment, of course, even quarks, the smallest particle known to humans, completely invisible, And the attachment is so important to quarks is that when they lose contact with each other, they literally lose their color.

The only way they can be defined is through color.

It is so amazing, the smallest particles.

In recent years, 2 particle physicists won the Nobel Prize for studying attachment behavior in quarks.

This is a huge, it is a meta-theory about the nature of the universe, about the togetherness, the force of togetherness.

And so That's why when some, I get quite frustrated when some people are stuck in a reductionistic view of attachment, making it equivalent to baby bonding and to co-sleeping and to things like this.

And they don't know anything about the big picture and you need to know the big picture here to be able to understand what the issue is.

Of course forces of fusion, gravity and magnetism are all physical forces of togetherness.

Newton, as I say, and Einstein were attachment theorists.

Lorenz's imprinting I mentioned, Harlow's monkeys, Stephen Suomi, you don't have to know these names of course, but if you took some science in university or intro psychology.

Some of these names will be familiar with you.

For Harlow's monkeys, his monkey lab has now been continued by Stephen Suomi, whose research I also refer to in Hold On To Your Kids, my book, a tremendous amount of research he is doing, phenomenal research on the effects of separation on rhesus monkeys, of social isolation, and it just demonstrates beyond a shadow of a doubt the impact of separation.

And we're going to review that in this session, the impact of separation on children, and that this has the most profound impact of anything in our life.

Object relations theory, again, is an example.

But other object relations theories, Fairbairn and others, have been quite esoteric, cline in their language.

And So they're all theories of attachment.

So to be able to master them, sometimes you have to master the language.

But I would highly recommend Winnicott, a most wonderful, intuitive individual who applied attachment theory to parenting, much as a person influenced by him, Brazelton, did as a pediatrician, now retired in the United States, but where Attachment is key for them.

This is, again, the name doesn't have to be, you don't have to know the name, but attachment as a means of forming identity.

Sidney Girard in the 1960s rediscovered, it's only a male can do, rediscover things that are so obvious to everybody else, rediscovered psychological intimacy as being the basis and the ultimate of marriage.

And it transformed his marriage and he wrote about it and in a number of books, The Transparent Self, Man Disclosing Himself to Man, and so on and so on, and a number of things, and it was all about intimacy, and yet the word attachment is not mentioned once.

And that's why I want to express that these are the blind sages of attachment who didn't know that this was part of a much larger construct, but were able to reveal 1 aspect of it, of the intimacy.

Likewise, Werner's orthogenetic principle in terms of the first movement and in all of nature is towards, is togetherness.

And it's wonderful when you see it, the symmetry.

The first movement is always towards togetherness to the degree that it's successful.

This fusion, this togetherness, there is separateness and differentiation to the degree that that is successful.

There is integration of the separate parts, togetherness without loss of separateness.

So you have this beautiful symmetry of togetherness and separateness, and then finally separateness without the loss of togetherness, togetherness without the loss of separateness.

And you look at the unfolding, even of the cell, and of biology, of everything unfolds in this way.

Otto Rank, with the fear of ultimate separation being the biggest thing, the fear of separation being the most impactful again.

Tokyo Doi, I mentioned Tokyo Doi and I'll mention him also in session 13.

When I went to Japan, I wanted so much to get an audience with him.

He was old by that time and had retired, and I wasn't able to gain the audience.

I so much wanted to pay tribute to him as I had in Frankfurt to John Bowlby through his son Richard, but has been so inspirational in my own understanding of attachment.

He did this book through word study alone on the adult attachment behavior of adults in Japanese culture.

Again, he never knew about Bowlby, he never knew about the other attachment theories.

It's just a wonderful intuitive dissemination of this dynamic in the Japanese culture.

And the issue again is, if I can illustrate here, the issue here is that a word was needed.

And so how do you bring all of these things together?

And how you bring them together, basically, Bowlby only caught a tiny glimpse of how big this thing was and he wanted to join Harlow studies with with Conrad Lorenz's and study with birds and so on and And he oh he didn't have a sense of how huge this was, but the word has allowed us to expand to all theories of togetherness on every aspect, physical, biological, chemical, and so on, and to understand the forces of attachment.

And so the scientific definition of attachment, there's no controversy with this actually, it's very very simple.

2 of Bowlby's students basically came up with this definition and it's been accepted.

And so I repeat it here, the essence of attachment is that drive, and a drive is a family, when we think of it as humans, is a family of emotions, impulses, instincts, so it's a drive, that which moves us.

So that drive moves us, or relationship characterized by that drive, and the drive is for the pursuit of proximity, and proximity is Latin, meaning niness, N-I-G-H, niness, and so niness, nearness, nearness of any kind, of any form, across all venues, emotional, physical, psychological, and so a nyness of any kind, and so the pursuit of nyness or the preservation of nyness.

And it actually does really good, this definition, and covers a whole gamut of attachment.

You begin to understand it and can flesh it out.

And that's my job for you in these next 6 sessions is to flesh out the story of attachment.

And again, it seems a little bit ridiculous to take 6 sessions to talk about such a huge dynamic, the big elephant in the room without language.

But again, there is an advantage to trying to get to the essence of something, to put attachment in a nutshell, especially when we have already given it a context, to so that we can see the ultimate purpose of attachment should serve the unfolding of human potential.

Once we do that, we put it into a nutshell and we see its perspective, it can unfold some of its secrets.

It can give us a sense of what it's for, what it's about, and so that's what I'm going to attempt to do.

Again, just very briefly, to get a sense of how big this phenomenon of attachment is, again the basic sciences, sciences, physics for instance, it's about attachment between particles.

It's the greatest force that particles get stuck on each other, this is what creates matter.

Atoms, molecules, electrons, everything gets stuck on each other.

So this becomes the first principle of togetherness, this fusion in physics.

The particles, again as I say, atoms, molecules, matter, solar system, galaxy, universe.

The earth to the sun creates a solar system, galaxies.

We couldn't explain the universe without it.

It is absolutely an essential part of our understanding.

And so without attachment there is, we cannot make sense of anything, only with attachment.

If we do not understand attachment, if we do not see them as through the lens of attachment, if we do not see them through the lens of the most important and profound dynamic across the universe that affects every single atom and molecule, If we don't see them as creatures of attachment, we miss the most important aspect of trying to make sense of what they're all about.

Once you see them in terms of attachment, they again, just like the universe, the mysteries start revealing themselves.

In chemistry, that's my undergraduate background, is chemistry.

My background is in natural sciences and in chemistry little did I know that I was studying about the attachments between elements that create compounds.

Every single element has their valences and they also have their preferences for partners and they're very much like us.

Some of them marry for life, some of them trade partners at the drop of a hat, some of them love to do twosomes and threesomes, and so they compounds are what create all matter.

And so little did I know that I was preparing, I was studying the attachment behavior of elements and I would be moving to study the attachment behavior of humans.

And so now it's about the chemistry between children and parents, between students and teachers and so on, just at a new level.

Biology, biology, every, any part, any part of the body that is disconnected from the main part of the body is going to die.

Any part of the plant that's disconnected from the roots is going to die.

The body can't be too attached to each other.

The plant can't be too attached to the earth.

The answer, it can be too superficially attached, and so on.

We'll look at these things, but attachment is absolutely essential.

In biology, the neurons attach to each other through the axons and dendrites in the neurotransmitters, and that attachment is everything, and when?

Even in our brain, when the feelings are not right, the axons and the dendrites actually curl up.

And you can actually see that in the recessed monkeys.

You can actually see it in the mice, in the social isolation experiments.

It's actually at the level of the neurons of what is happening there.

And so again, I mentioned plants, which attach to their roots, animals, of course, and especially we're interested in those with a limbic system where their attachment behavior is orchestrated by emotion and in humans.

Animals, we can make pets out of those who attach to other species and if they can do to intra-species attachment, that means that they can attach to us.

That allows us to domesticate them, allows us to take care of them.

We can't really take care of those that don't attach other than in more peripheral kinds of ways, like reptiles and so on.

But basically our pets are creatures that are capable of cross-species attachments.

We actually know more intuitively about pet attachments than we do about human attachments.

We know how important it is that the horse attaches to the trainer, that the dog is attached to the master.

We know how important that is, and yet as soon as it's children, we think that teachers are infinitely, we can substitute 1 teacher for another, 1 parent for another.

We would never try to do this with animals unless we were able to properly get the attachments going.

And so, again, we're much more intuitive 1 step removed.

Well, attachment, basically, contact and connection is our preeminent need.

It surpasses even physical hunger and the hierarchy of needs.

We now understand from the studies, the Romanian orphanages, the Korean orphanages, in the Korean orphanages where there was an 80% mortality rate, the orphans were taken care of, their physical needs, their cleanliness needs, their hygiene needs, but there was no contact, no closeness, and they didn't understand why 80% died.

Is there, is that you even, you need the contact and closeness for even your stomach to digest things.

You know, in Provence they knew that well.

That's why they have this rule about not eating with anybody you're not attached to, because you'll have tummy aches.

You see, they understand that attachment is required for even the digestive system to work well.

And there's nothing like an argument with a loved 1 to be able to give you indigestion.

And it's, Harlow and Freud had this argument.

And Harlow said, no, no, attachment is much more important than physical hunger.

And Freud said, no, physical hunger is the most important.

And so Harlow did a test and he put his little baby monkeys under stress and they went for contact comfort every time.

That was far more important than the bottle, than the food, far more important than those things.

In fact, the baby is born with about 35 instincts to attach and many of them serve getting fed.

The latching and so on, all of these do it.

And so if a child's attachment instincts are not operating properly, there's going to be feeding problems, nursing problems, and digestive problems, and all of those kinds of things.

Even we know that, for instance, we used to think that after you feed a baby you could put them down.

And now we know that that was 1 of our biggest mistakes.

That's what actually causes colic, is that after you feed a nurse a baby, you have to hold them because their digestive system only works properly when there is the contact comfort and so on.

We're finding that attachment is absolutely essential.

This is another important thing to understand, is that attachment is neutral.

We have incredible mechanism of attachment that needs its own maturation, and I talk about that in my course on attention, on attention problems of how it needs to go through its own maturation process.

But what we don't understand and what isn't well understood is attachment serves a hierarchy of needs.

And so whatever your needs, if you're really hungry you see all things to do with food.

And if you're really status conscious you see all things that have to do with status.

And so hunger serves and attachment is the top of the priority.

And so when a child has attachment needs, he sees the world in the context of those attachment needs.

If you are teaching something that is not related to those attachment needs, he won't see it, he won't hear it, he won't attend to it.

Because like a dog, we attend to those that we're attached to, and we attend about the attachment things.

And so many of the attachment problems are simply attachment problems.

If children were attached to those who were teaching them, they would attend.

If they were attached to the constructs that they were being taught, they would attend.

And then the remaining of our session today, actually, is going to go to another thought, and another basic construct, is that if contact and connection is our preeminent need, then facing separation is actually our preeminent threat.

And all the new material that's coming through with the neuroscientists of the effects in mice of social isolation, Stephen Suomi's work with the rhesus monkeys of facing separation brings it to a neurological level.

We can actually see the effects in terms of the brain, the brain development, the resulting impact on behavior, on personality, and so on.

Of course these are not humans and so we don't, we can't tell the story here about the unfolding of human potential, but we can certainly make some inferences.

And so facing separation is our preeminent threat.

Since contact and connection is our preeminent need, it logically flows from that, that facing separation is our preeminent threat.

And the evidence is coming in thick and fast that this is exactly what is.

That the separation can be experienced or simply anticipated.

I use the word facing because even if the child thinks that something, that mummy might die, it has impact.

Even it thinks that daddy doesn't like me, It has the same impact as if it was real.

And so facing separation as humans is facing separation, not simply the experience of separation.

And it evokes very strong primary emotions.

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Intensive I - session 10