Struggling with Abandonment and Attachment in Relational Psychotherapy

Attachment theory is often accused of being ‘too nice’. ‘Where's the anger, where's the hate?’ we are often asked by Kleinian colleagues, who tell us they ‘go in deeper and come up dirtier’.

In fact, attachment theory sets out to understand and treat the most intense, dangerous, and terrifying aspects of human experience and emotion - separation, loss, isolation, betrayal and abandonment. To a human infant, isolation, separation, or abandonment means death. Proximity to the attachment figure is the only form of security, the only hope for survival. The attachment system is our key to staying alive, a desperate and ruthless mechanism for maintaining proximity to those on whom our continued existence depends. Rage, violence, and despair are all sequelae to the threat or experience of, abandonment and loss in which either physical or emotional annihilation - the very existence of the self - is threatened. In On Lies, Secrets, and Silence, Adrienne Rich describes the experience of betrayal, emotional abandonment by the Other, as this:

For a while we are thrust back onto some bleak, jutting ledge, in a dark pierced by sheets of fire, swept by sheets of rain, in a world before kinship, or naming, or tenderness exist; we are brought close to formlessness.

Bowlby taught us that all children have to develop strategies to manage proximity and relating to the other. Whether secure or insecure, organized, or seemingly disorganized, what we witness in infants' relating to their attachment figures are all strategies for ensuring the continued existence of that relationship.

Felicity de Zulueta puts it this way: ‘what researchers have come to realize is just how much human beings matter to each other, so much so that psychological trauma has been defined as ‘the sudden cessation of human interaction’’. She tells us that ‘It is unfortunately through the experience of separation that we usually become aware of how much we matter to one another.’