- The last session of the theory of attachment focuses on shyness and defensive detachment
- Shyness is often seen as a disorder and lacks understanding in society
- Defensive detachment is a phenomena that has been overlooked in attachment theory
- It is important to understand these phenomena to make sense of children's behavior
- Attachment is developed in stages and is the context for raising children
- Attachment is polarized, with both pursuit of proximity and resistance to proximity
- Shyness and defensive detachment involve resistance to proximity for different reasons
- Shyness is often misdiagnosed as reactive attachment disorder
- Understanding these phenomena is crucial, especially in the educational system
- The brain starts resisting contact and closeness with strangers around 5-6 months of age
- This resistance is meant to protect existing attachments
- Introducing new attachments through existing attachments can help prevent shyness and stranger protest.

- It is important to introduce new attachments for children through existing attachments to avoid shyness and stranger protest
- Society does not understand the importance of this and often interacts with children in a way that is not conducive to healthy attachment
- Shyness is a relationship attribute, not a personality attribute, and is meant to protect existing attachments
- Before the onset of stranger protest, children are open to forming new attachments, but after, they are most receptive to forming new attachments through existing working attachments
- Shyness decreases with increasing individuation and is tempered by integrative functioning
- Shyness can have negative effects on intelligence and overall functioning outside of working attachments
- The school system has moved outside of a child's village of attachment, which is a major issue in education today

- The effectiveness of education depends on getting back inside the child's village of attachment
- Children have a natural magnet of attachment energy that polarizes when they can't be close to both parents simultaneously
- This polarization can lead to resistance towards one parent and pursuit of proximity with the other
- Competing attachments, such as with peers or siblings, can also cause polarization of attachment energy
- Children may have fantasy attachments with real or imagined people, which are just as real to them
- In cases of divorce or stepfamilies, the child may resist the custodial parent and pursue proximity with the non-custodial parent
- It is important to enter through the existing attachment and be perceived as non-competitive in order to establish a connection
- Shyness can manifest as difficulty with eye contact and limited speech, particularly with those to whom the child is not attached
- Selective mutism in school is often a result of shyness and can be addressed by establishing an attachment with the mother and then transitioning to attachments with others.

- Shyness is not a disorder, but a reserved nature towards those we are attached to
- Attachments can be polarized, leading to difficulty with threesomes and resistance to being touched by those not attached
- Negative energy of attachment used to be thrown outside the village, but now it is organized in cliques, gangs, and within families
- Negative energy of attachment is escalating in schools and social media, leading to chaos and polarization
- Defensive detachment is a resistance to proximity due to vulnerability and fear of separation
- Example of Victoria shows how defensive detachment can lead to self-harm and destructive behavior
- Understanding the nature of shyness and defensive detachment can help in dealing with children who exhibit these behaviors

- Defensive detachment is a defense mechanism often seen in autistic children
- It involves resisting contact and closeness, avoiding eye contact, and displaying behavior problems
- It can be triggered by separations, hospitalizations, split parenting, and daycare/school
- Parents may try to control or teach into this defense, which worsens the situation
- Anticipation of rejection, disapproval, or loss can also trigger defensive detachment
- The author shares personal experiences of defensive detachment in his own life
- Defensive detachment can be fleeting or get stuck, and can be triggered by becoming attached to someone
- The challenge is to not take it personally and to hold on to the relationship.

- Defensive detachment is a reaction to facing more separation than one can bear
- It can manifest in various ways, such as directed towards specific people or outcomes
- It can become a signature trait and lead to reactive attachment disorder
- It can interfere with forming new attachments and is a major cause of breakdown in caretaking relationships
- The behavior resulting from defensive detachment is highly alienating and can lead to destructive actions
- It is important to understand and diffuse defensive detachment by reducing separation and promoting connection.

- Relationships are supposed to be forever, even after death
- The main challenge in attachment is how to be close when apart
- The goal is to change the scenario from separation to connection
- Next session will focus on attachment and maturation

- The last session of the theory of attachment discusses shyness and defensive detachment.
- Shyness is often misunderstood in society and can be misdiagnosed as reactive attachment disorder.
- Defensive detachment is a phenomenon that has been overlooked in attachment theory.
- Understanding shyness and defensive detachment is crucial, especially in the educational system.
- Shyness involves resistance to proximity to protect existing attachments.
- Introducing new attachments through existing attachments can help prevent shyness and stranger protest.
- Shyness decreases with increasing individuation and is tempered by integrative functioning.
- The school system being outside of a child's village of attachment is a major issue in education.
- Children may have fantasy attachments with real or imagined people.
- Defensive detachment is a resistance to proximity due to vulnerability and fear of separation.
- It can be triggered by separations, hospitalizations, split parenting, and daycare/school.
- Understanding the nature of shyness and defensive detachment can help in dealing with these behaviors.
- Defensive detachment can interfere with forming new attachments and is a major cause of breakdown in caretaking relationships.

This is our last session on the theory of attachment.

And there's 2 phenomena that I want to talk about.

Shyness, which there's not very much about at all theoretically on this.

In fact, 1 of the concerns in presenting this is that it's increasingly being thought of as a disorder, as something wrong with a child, with an adult.

And in our gregarious society, we don't seem to have much insight about this and being perceived as a social anxiety disorder.

This is actually a phenomena which laid the foundations of modern attachment theory in the 1950s and 1960s, Bowlby's contribution, and somehow it has got lost in all of the presentation and I'd like to bring it back to the fore.

It sometimes is pathologized as reactive attachment disorder but without any understanding of what it is about.

So hopefully I can in this brief session together cover both of these, make sense of them from the inside out.

Certainly we cannot understand the landscape of children.

We cannot make sense of children without some understanding of these.

Some of you will understand this absolutely intuitively, but again there's very little material on this and so I will try to speak to your head and hopefully you can find your hearts with this material.

From here we will shift to attachment and maturation, which actually is a theoretical aspect too, so perhaps this is the second last session on the theory of attachment.

So we were looking at the 3 keys to unlocking the mystery of attachment.

The first 1 is that attachment, the capacity for relationship, is developed in stages.

I don't have these filled in so that you can remember, right?

The first is the unfolding of the potential of relationship that it requires development to.

The second is that attachment is the context for raising children.

It is what empowers the adults responsible, and it's about the hierarchical nature of attachment.

And then this thirdly, thirdly has to do with the polarization of attachment.

Now, Bowlby did not have the advantage of coming at this material from chemistry and physics, natural science.

When 1 comes at this material, when 1 actually comes from a much broader view of looking at attachment in terms of atoms, of elements, of the universe, it is obvious that for every force there's an equal and opposite force.

It is obvious that attachment is polarized.

Einstein theorized this, he said there's no possible way of making sense of the shape of the universe without there being such a thing as anti-gravity.

And so it took years and years for this to be established, but now we know it to be true.

And this is yet to enter into the consciousness of those who are familiar with attachment theory that is equally and opposite true, that for every pursuit of proximity, there's an equal and opposite resistance to proximity.

Once that consciousness would be would come there it would explain many of the problem behaviors that we see in children and that's what I hope to do in this short session.

So I have here just an illustration, and hopefully many of you will have had this experience somewhere in high school, where you had a science lab, took a magnet, put wax paper on top of it and iron filings and lo and behold the filings organized themselves into a pattern and your teacher was able to explain that magnetism is polarized energy and just like on the Earth, the North Pole and the South Pole, sometimes you can have reversals and we're expecting a reversal somewhere soon in terms of the Earth, North and South Pole.

Apparently, if history has anything to do with this, it is coming soon.

This reversal, the amygdala actually has the ability to reverse this energy.

We'll look at again 2 phenomena, both that have resistance to proximity at their core.

So this is the polarization of energy, so the magnet attraction, the pursuit of proximity or attraction is at 1 end, repulsion or the resistance to proximity is at the other end.

And so again for every pursuit that there is equal and opposite resistance.

And so the phenomena we want to take a look at, 2 of these that are based upon this basic attribute of attachment, again, is shyness, and the second is defensive detachment.

Both involve resistance to proximity, but for different reasons.

In fact, I've seen many children actually diagnosed with reactive attachment disorder in which defensive detachment was not the operational principle, shyness was.

And so these can be very, very confused, but they're very important to understand, especially shyness in the educational system.

If we understood this, we'd approach it much, much different than we do now.

And So the overlay here, again I'm using the magnetism slide just as an overlay, so that attachment is polarized to pursue the attraction on 1 hand, repulsion on the other hand, for any, basically that when a child is in the attachment field there will be an automatic movement to resist and to draw forth.

This explains all kind of phenomena, racism, nationalism, tribalization, clans, cliques.

This natural polarization, teams, sports, and so on, it's at the bottom of that.

Well, if I could take you to the beginning with this, it seems to me that during the...

It seems rather to attachment theorists that during the first 5 months of attachment, attachments are fairly open so to speak and for very good reason because there was a lot of maternal, there was a lot of deaths of mothers in the process of birth, the children had to reattach and so on and so on.

And so you didn't want to have the child too stuck on the first attachment because it would interfere with being able to establish a context in which to be raised.

And so it appears that for the first 5 months, you can approach an infant, pick up an infant, and there's no resistance to proximity.

And so they're pretty open in their attachments, but something interesting happens.

In the fifth or the sixth month usually, and it comes almost overnight in many babies, you're holding the baby, somewhere along the way you're holding the baby there, somebody comes up to talk to you and all of a sudden you've got polarized energy happening in your child.

Your child moves away, all of a sudden resisting contact and closeness with the person who is interacting with you and pushes into you and we call it stranger protest that is the first indication and again it first of all should show itself about 5 or 6 months of age the general idea of this is is that what is happening here what is happening is the brain is in a sense saying, we've already got a working attachment, thank you very much, we've already got the attachments we need, now we need to go for depth in those attachments, now we need to resist any attachment that would compete with our working attachments.

So the essential nature, and this develops into stranger protest is exactly the same dynamic as shyness, it does not feel right to look at, smile at, or interact with, talk to, those to whom 1 is not attached, and the purpose of this is to preserve existing attachments.

So its reason is to be able to protect the attachments that are already there for the child.

And so there's a resistance to contact and closeness.

Now from this point it becomes very important that any new attachment for a child is introduced through existing attachments so that we don't get this shyness, this stranger protest, this problem occurring with a child.

We don't honor that in our society at all.

I sometimes ask, I have the opportunity when I present this, especially when I present directly on shyness, to parent audiences, I often have parents who are, especially those who are still nursing their babies in the audience, and I ask for, to demonstrate, I ask, is there somebody with a child 6, 7 months of age with high stranger protest that I can demonstrate you know this particular dynamic.

Now I don't start off here demonstrating the stranger protest.

You get this very charged kind of interaction that is there for the child.

But what I do is, and often the mother or the father will say to me, well you won't get my child.

The purpose of this is basically to get the child into my arms, representing that I would be able to take care of the child.

Well the thing is it's very easy to do actually, it's not hard at all to do, but there's a secret to it, is you don't actually start with the child, because once this dynamic happens, if society was in sync with natural design, all new attachments would be formed through existing attachments.

And so the idea is, and our society knows nothing about it.

I mean, if any of you that have had babies or young children and everybody's looking directly at the child, smiling at them, goo-gooing at them and so on, and the child is sticking out their tongue and being rude and all of these things, and then we feel our children are antisocial and it has nothing to do with this, it's just not the way you're ever supposed to relate to children.

And so basically the illustration is that I ask, usually it's the mother, I don't look the child in the eyes at all.

I show no recognition of the child whatsoever.

I look the mother in the eyes and later on we'll talk about collecting.

You collect the eyes, the smile and the nod and so we pretend for about 2 minutes that we're attached, busy nodding and smiling and looking at each other.

And so, if you have 2 very shy parents, you'll have a very shy child.

But no matter how shy you are, you're never shy inside your attachments.

And that's the key to this, is that people have thought that it was a personality attribute, you see.

It's not a personality attribute, it's a relationship attribute.

The shyest person comes alive inside their attachments.

In the example, so after about 2 minutes of this interaction, I then look at the six-month-old, the seven-month-old, make eye contact, smile, and then it is much more likely that a smile begets a smile.

And the ultimate test, of course, is to put your finger in the palm of their hand, because this is an attachment reflex, 1 of about 35 attachment reflexes in a test.

If the baby is not attached, they'll hyper-extend their hand and move away.

If the attachment instincts are engaged, the child will close in on your finger, and the next step is to invite dependents, and then the child puts their arms up and you can get the child in your arms, but only through existing attachments.

This little information would revolutionize the foster system, adoption, would revolutionize how we do school.

The biggest problem was I was wonderfully attached to Mrs.

Ackerberg, but what did she neglect to do?

She did not introduce me to my grade 2 teacher.

If she would only put her friend around her, she probably didn't like her, but if she would have even just pretended, put her arm around her and said, you know, you'll like her, I like her, I would have liked her out of loyalty.

And so attachments are meant to beget attachments.

Once the stranger protest and shyness begins, it's telling us that the child is protecting existing attachments.

If we understood this, we'd get down to the business of protecting existing attachments as well.

That's always the first entry, and then we would seek to enter in through the existing attachments.

Well, I'll flesh this out, but this is the idea.

The best word for shyness, shyness is so misinterpreted in so many languages, but actually the best word in English is reserved.

I only have eyes for those I'm attached to.

I only have my smiles for those I'm attached to.

I only feel like talking to those whom I'm attached.

And that's exactly, and that is not only normal, it is healthy.

It's an instinctive resistance to proximity in order to protect existing working attachments.

Before the onset to review, before the onset of stranger protest, the child is relatively open to forming new attachments.

So in certain traditional societies, certainly in certain societies in Africa and in Celtic in Celtic traditions the child The all those that are going to be involved in the child's Upbringing raising all those of the clan they pass the baby around in certain African cultures They all bring they give the baby their own name.

They give a taste of the foods that they eat, so they open the palate, all during the first 5 months of age.

In our society, it's when the mother is most likely secluded.

And so we wonder why so many of our children are not open to forming adult attachments, because before, what happened is we don't have a tradition in our society to be able to open up the attachments during the first 5 months of age to those to whom will be involved in the raising of children.

After that we must be introduced or we have to take care of that some way ourselves.

That would be if we were in sync with what is meant to happen.

So after the onset of shyness the child is most receptive to forming new attachments through existing working attachments.

So that's the idea of introductions and matchmaking.

We'll go into this I believe in session 18 of matchmaking.

We'll go to the practice that follows the theory here.

Shyness decreases with increasing individuation and is tempered by integrative functioning.

Once a child has emergent energy, once there is a sense of separateness, and once the child has mixed feelings, this will take care of what are sometimes perceived as the crippling aspects of shyness.

And there are crippling aspects of shyness.

When we first of all did in the 1960s and 70s tests on intelligence, we found that when shy children had an examiner who they were not attached to, it could bring down their IQ by about 21 points.

Some of us don't have that much to start off with, you know?

The point is, is that shyness is meant to keep us in our working attachments where we can function.

Outside of that, it dumbs us down because we're not meant to do this here.

Those of you that are teachers here know that when you've been able to get on the inside of a very shy child, I mean to actually get the child attaches to you, wow!

All of a sudden their giftedness comes out if they're gifted and all kinds of things and their ideas and so on why because now you're in their village of attachment that's where they are meant to function same child but but but children are are meant to function inside the context of their attachments.

We need to somehow get inside the village.

The school used to be, 100 years ago, in most of our countries that my material is being presented, the school was inside the child's village of attachment.

There were cultures, customs, there were traditions that used to attach children to their teachers before they ever got there.

In the last 50 years, the schools have drifted outside of a child's village of attachment.

So now, children are not automatically attached and that puts the school outside.

1 of the big issues Today, if we're going to make a difference in terms of the effectiveness of education, is how do we get back inside the child's village of attachment.

And that has a lot to do with the shyness.

Resistance to proximity increases with perceived incompatibility of attachment.

So the idea is that children have this polarization, this natural magnet that they walk around with.

So attachment energy is polarized, right?

And if they can't be close to 2 at the same time, and that depends of course how they're attached, but if they can't be close to both at the same time, the attachment energy polarizes.

So if they're attached through being with, but mommy and daddy are no longer with each other that means the child will resist 1 of the parents to pursue proximity with the other this has been misinterpreted as parent alienation syndrome it has nothing to do with the other other parent it has simply to do with the polarization of attachment energy.

It's the same way, if we can't be with both our, if we can't hold close both our wife and our ex-wife at the same time, then it polarizes, and suddenly the 1 we love becomes the wicked witch of the north.

That doesn't make any logical sense, but this is all part of the polarization of attachment energy.

Now if a child is incapable of mixed feelings, that is, they cannot say, part of me feels this way and part of me feels that way they Also cannot function out of 2 attachments at the same time.

So this is very interesting So you get a four-year-old who right now is Attachment a magnet a pursuit of proximity goes to daddy.

Daddy kiss me good night, daddy read me a story, daddy put me to bed, mommy sucks.

Fortunately, Usually preschoolers are very fickle, it will come around to mommy.

Many mommies and daddies get their feelings hurt.

This kid can't function out of 2 attachments at the same time.

That's why it happens when you pick up your child from daycare or preschool or from your mother-in-law or whatever it is.

When you pick up there, that's the polarization of attachment energy.

It has nothing to do with your child not liking you or this.

It has to do with they can't function out of 2 attachments at the same time.

And if a child is attached through loyalty, but mom and dad disagree with each other, then a child can't take both their sides at the same time, and the child will resist proximity with 1 to pursue proximity with the other.

And you could see over and over again, if the child can't hold the parent and the teacher close and in many of our society today parents and teachers are drifting apart.

They are No longer, it used to be when they were in the same village, the parent and the teacher were always perceived as on the same side of the magnet.

The parent never dissed the teacher, and the teacher never dissed the parent.

Because as soon as the child can't hold you both in the same place, it's going to polarize.

And that polarization of energy, either the child loses a teacher or loses the parent.

Just like when parents divorce, if the child can't hold both close at the same time, we're going to have problems.

And this has to do with shyness, with competing attachments.

So competing attachments may be an attachment to one's pet, or to one's sibling, or to one's peers.

That's 1 of the main competing attachments.

It used to be that children could attach to their peers and their parents simultaneously because they both use the same language, they walk the same, they talk the same.

But after the Second World War we have the first origins of a children's culture and now when you attach to them you can't hold your peers close at the same time as your parents or for the most part and when you can't they become competing attachments that's part of the problem if you can't hold both your friends and your parents close at the same time the healthy adolescent will yearn the healthy adolescent will yearn to be able to hold both clothes at the same time and that's when you know attachments are healthy when they're not competing wanting friends to like parents and parents to like fair friends to have them all at the birthday party, whatever it is, and that's a non-competing attachment.

Maybe a fantasy attachment with real or imagined person.

Fantasy attachments are as real to the mind as any other.

The child may have a fantasy attachment with a biological mother the child has never met.

That fantasy attachment is real and we do best by entering through the existing attachment because If we don't enter through the existing attachment, to hold onto that, we must be resisted.

And it's the only way in because it's a working attachment with them.

In children of divorce, the protected attachment is often the parent least accessible.

The more inaccessible the parent, this often happens, the more the child is pursuing proximity, the intense pursuit.

In that case, the child is pursuing proximity with a non-custodial parent, making them absolutely resistant to contact and closeness with a custodial parent.

The 1 that is on the day-to-day in charge is resisted and if they're resisted there is no context in which to raise them so again what needs to happen is somehow and I've consulted with so many parents on this Somehow you have to go in through the attachment that the child is pursuing and be perceived as not being competitive.

That the child can hold on to both, can hold both close at the same time.

Otherwise, otherwise you are in a losing battle.

You've actually gotta figure out how to do this, and you've gotta do it often without your spouse's or ex-spouse's cooperation, because sometimes you're in this alone.

You're going to have to do it unrequited.

In stepchildren, foster children, and adopted children, the protected attachment is typically a biological parent.

And so again, you've got to go in through this, even if, even if, maybe the court has said, you know, access to this parent is not allowed, yet it is the working attachment of the child.

It means that unless you can find good things to say, oh, you look a lot like your dad, I'm sure that you are very significant, unless you can work the attachment and say nice things to, you won't be able to piggyback on that and get in through the same side of the magnet.

Signs of shyness, difficulty getting good eye contact with those not attached to.

Now sometimes the shyness is completely camouflaged by defendedness, a flight from vulnerability.

When we think of the late Princess Diana, and that she was our shy guy, and she demonstrated exactly that shyness, the head slightly to the side, the eyes and so on, it was very becoming in her, of course.

And when there's a high flight from vulnerability, it doesn't represent itself in that way at all.

And this is with most of the kids I worked with in prison.

It didn't feel right to look at those to whom they were not attached.

So they either steeled their eyes or looked away because It doesn't feel right to look at.

It doesn't feel right to smile at those to whom you're not attached.

So smiles were very hard to get until somebody came that they were attached to and the smiles were incredible.

And it's just 1 word answers, it just doesn't get anywhere.

Because it doesn't feel right to talk to those to whom 1 is not attached.

And so there is this, the whole phenomena of elective or selective mutism of children not talking to anybody in school has been escalating in recent decades and again I've dealt with scores of these cases in every case I said well who does a child talk to only their mother they say well she's attached to her mother it only feels right when you're very shy to talk to whom you're attached is she attached to anybody at school no well that's the problem it's not a speech disorder it's not any kind of disorder it's simply shyness well what do you do about it well the challenge is is that you go in through the mother and so some teacher has to make an attachment with the mother to be seen as an attachment with her and and then when the child can move to attach to whoever's attached to the mother and The child will begin talking.

It's not that hard, but it is not an issue of it is simply that is that we're not, many of us are very shy and it doesn't feel right to talk to those to whom are not attached.

A resistance to being touched by those not attached to, Attachments tend to be highly polarized and the child has difficulty with threesomes.

And shyness most often occurs in concert with other signs of the negative polarity of attachment.

I'm not going to go over it in detail, but I just want to show you it.

And what I did in this is I tried to polarize attachment.

I tried to polarize that for every pursuit of proximity, there is an equal and opposite resistance of proximity.

And you can see, at the top I have, seeks to be with and shies away from.

Now we go, making contact, resisting contact, endearing, alienating, looking up to, looking down upon.

You can go to imitate and emulate, mock and mimic, possess, disown, loyalty, oppose and betray.

The thing about this dark energy of attachment is It used to be organized to be thrown outside the village.

That's how in traditional times it was organized.

The problem with today's children is when they become peer-oriented, it tightly organized itself in little cliques, little clans, little tribes, little gangs, and it gets thrown out to the siblings, thrown out to the parents, thrown out to the teachers.

And so now we have chaos in our universe of attachment.

Now in school, the negative energy of attachment is actually escalating.

Many people think it's because children have not been taught manners.

For every pursuit of proximity, there's an equal and opposite resistance.

It used to be thrown outside the village.

Now it is tearing us apart within our working groups, within our schools, even families, as children become peer-oriented, and the dark energy goes to mom and dad.

We used to organize this energy around sports teams.

So you'd love 1 sports team or your school team and then you absolutely hated, there was 1 to hate.

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Intensive I - session 14