The Day That Einstein Feared Has Arrived
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Post #3 in an ongoing series As we said last week, 50% of Americans have some Attachment Disorder. How can there be so little information on it available to parents, teachers, pediatricians, people who care for children? What about us blindsided adults who walk around with it and never even know? What is being done on any scale to alert the public that this issue, one of the largest causes of emotional and physical illness in the US, even exists? |
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Far more attention goes to after-the-fact damage control like heart-smart butter or the hottest new RX drug to raise revenue for stock dividends. In the wake of his son Matthew's suicide, Pastor Rick Warren, head of Saddleback Church, one of the nation's largest, said in a July 26 statement: "America’s mental health system is irreparably broken." The system, he said, “failed Matthew with misdiagnosis and wrong treatments his entire life...America’s mental health system needs far more than repair. It needs to be reinvented and revolutionized.” 6a |
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| Yes, Pastor Warren was addressing mental illness per se. The government NIMH estimates about 6% of the population is technically “mentally ill,” and the rest of us attachment-challenged, say 50% minus 6%, are just the "worried well." 6b Matthew, his dad said, was mis-diagnosed as having bi-polar disorder when he actually had Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) and major depression (MDD). But get this: in 2007, a teen boy diagnosed bi-polar, whose parents didn't want to put him on the horror drug lithium, was cured without drugs by neuroscientist and Attachment Theory specialist Dr. Dan Siegel, MD at UCLA. Siegel used a rigorous program of mindfulness meditation that actually grew the boy's missing brain fibers until his brain worked.7 Could this have helped Matthew Warren? Why wasn't it tried? Dr. Siegel doesn't like to pill patients, so he won't let the drug companies that run the American Psychiatric Association control his research. |
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So the drug companies, source of the vast bulk of research billions worldwide, don't fund Dr. Siegel and his brilliant network of Attachment-focused neuroscientists and clinicians. So they're mavericks, and the Warrens never heard of them, with UCLA only an hour drive from their home. As Siegel speaks of his client, he says, “It’s nice, I’m in my office now looking over to the chair where he would always sit...” Dr. Siegel is attached to that boy, he's emotionally touched, and that is not a problem. That is the solution to treating any emotional or mental illness. Me? I'm sure that attachment work can cure not only us 50% “worried well,” but lots of the NIMH's 6%. That's probably in some book by the “UCLA neuro-shrinks” as I fondly call them, but it's not for me to prove. So Widespread It's Just Sociology Attachment Disorder is not mental illness per se. A professor told me this week that what I'm writing about is, technically, sociology. You said it! It's us “worried well” that worries me – exactly because it's so widespread that it's a “sociological phenomenon” like, say, surfing. Plus, there's the sheer enormity of the emotional pain that so many of us "worried well" each feel, in secret, with no clue where to go for help. So the pain gets worse and worse as we trudge on, trying to perform, without knowing there is something nasty accumulating over the decades, under the crust (dissociation freeze) around our hearts. Even if it never makes for visible mental cracks, the continuous cortisol stream over decades eats away at internal body parts, causing stress-induced digestive, vascular, and other diseases which are very well documented by trauma experts, as I'll show in future posts. Attachment Theory is not new, it just gets too little air time; British psychiatrist John Bowlby developed it in the 1950s.8 In 1978 Bowlby's American co-worker Mary Ainsworth showed that the way an infant behaves with strangers when its mother leaves, shows the quality of mothering it's getting -- and predicts its emotional traits for life. Ainsworth wrote that about 70% of children are “securely attached” to mom.9 In 1994, Ainsworth's student Mary Main and her students created the Adult Attachment Interview (AAI). This interview can be done with anyone old enough to converse, and shows (with 80%+ accuracy!) how securely attached they got as kids. It also remarkably predicts what kinds of relations they have as adults with co-workers, dates, and mates.10 From the AAI, Dr. Main then concluded that only 55% of Americans are actually securely attached, and Dr. Ainsworth agreed. Already a shocker as a low number. Now: take the radical changes since 1994 in how humans relate, after the rise of cell phones, texting, the internet and its electronic “social” networking. There's nothing social about it. "Well-developed human beings can self-regulate their emotional state by being with other humans,” a top neuroscientist said recently, “But what about people who regulate their emotional state with objects?...We're in a world now being literally pushed on us, by people who are challenged in their own social and emotional regulation, and we're calling this 'social networking.' We're using computers, we're texting -- we're stripping the human interaction from all interactions...We're allowing the world to be organized upon the principles of individuals who have difficulty regulating emotionally in the presence of other human beings.”11a Three highly-degreed specialists, who have seen a large volume of patients over almost 20 years' clinical experience since 1994, have confided their concern to me in person this year, that with people spending so much more time online, texting, on the phone, and so on, rather than face to face, we're lucky if we've got 40% who are well-attached these days. “I fear the day that technology will surpass our human interaction,” warned Albert Einstein. That day is now. |
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So about 50% of Americans are securely attached. That leaves the other half of us in some degree of attachment disorder. Believe me, I don't want it to be such a high number. I'd like to remarry – and the idea of having to ditch 50% of the frogs, before even a kiss, is annoying. So which 50% are you in? Don't think, focus only on your physical sensations as you read this list: • Unusual birth stress for mother and/or infant • Exposure to extreme heat or cold, especially in children and babies • Childhood surgery or other major illness terrifying to a child • Childhood neglect, left alone for prolonged periods, abandonment • Childhood emotional, physical, or sexual threats or abuse • Sudden loud noises now or at any time If you're in my 50%, you may feel discomfort or constriction in the chest, gut or elsewhere, however minor. This can be the re-activation of stress experienced in some childhood event which never made it to our conscious memory banks. Not everyone grows agitated reading this list. “It's very important to understand that nervousness, anxiousness, or almost any response you might have, has to do with the activation of the energy you experienced during the original overwhelming event,” writes trauma expert Dr. Peter Levine. “When you are threatened, your body instinctively generates a lot of energy to help you defend yourself... the unused energy aroused when you are threatened can get frozen into your body and cause problems and symptoms years later.”11b Wondering why your therapist, or your several failed therapists (I had two) haven't helped? You may not be the problem. Attachment Theory, which shows how Attachment Disorder works, was hardly taught during college training until after 2000. A new Norton Textbook Series is just being published now.11c Many therapists today don't diagnosis attachment disorder well or are at sea as to how to treat it. Why don't all professionals use the AAI? What are they thinking? No wonder three psychiatrists-turned-neuroscientists felt compelled to publish “A General Theory of Love” in 2000, a book whose bottom line, buried in the last chapters, is a warning that their profession is failing.11d This is from the Forward of Kathy's forthcoming book DON'T TRY THIS AT HOME: The Silent Epidemic of Attachment Disorder - How I accidentally regressed myself back to infancy and healed it all. Watch for the continuing series of excerpts from the rest of her book every Friday, in which she explores her journey of recovery and shares the people and tools that have helped her along the way. Series Table of Contents Footnotes 6a. http://saddleback.com/blogs/newsandviews/news--views-72613/ , July 26, 2013 6b. “[T]he main illness is concentrated in a much smaller proportion, about 6%... who suffer from a serious mental illness.” 7. Siegel, Daniel J., MD, “The Developing Mind,” National Institute for the Clinical Application of Behavioral Medicine (NICABM) Webinar, April 6, 2011, www.nicabm.com 8. Bowlby, John, “The Nature of a Child's Tie to His Mother,” British Psychoanalytical Society, London, 1958; “Attachment and Loss,” New York, Basic Books, 1969 9. Ainsworth, Mary D.S., Blehar, M.C., et al, “Patterns of attachment: A psychological study of the Strange Situation,” Erlbaum, Hillsdale, NJ, 1978 10. George, C., Kaplan, N., Main, Mary, “An Adult Attachment Interview,” Unpublished MS, University of California at Berkeley, 1994 11a. Porges, Stephen, “Polyvagal Theory,” NICABM Webinar, June 20, 2012, www.nicabm.com 11b. Levine, Dr. Peter A., op.cit “Healing Trauma: A Pioneering Program for Restoring the Wisdom of Your Body,” 'Sounds True, Inc.,' Boulder CO, 2005; ISBN 1-159179-247-9 11c. Norton Textbook Series on Interpersonal Neurobiology, featuring: Siegel, Daniel J., MD et. al, “The Healing Power of Emotion: Affective Neuroscience, Development & Clinical Practice,” November 2009; 368 pages Schore, Allan N., “Affect Regulation and the Origin of the Self,” Norton textbook May 2003; first edition 1994; 432 pages 11d. Lewis, Thomas MD; Amini, Fari MD; Lannon, Richard MD; “A General Theory of Love”, Random House, 2000. http://www.paulagordon.com/shows/lannon/ |
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