Assessing Adult Attachment by Patricia McKinsey Crittenden

Author:Patricia McKinsey Crittenden
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2011-05-04T16:00:00+00:00

Experience/History

As children, speakers classified as C5 often experienced lack of comfort and support in the context of an inexplicit feeling of threat. Their families were often characterized by secrets or unclear, but potentially dangerous, incidents or conditions (e.g., marital conflict, alcoholism, parental mental illness, hidden marital infidelity). Attachment figures tried often to protect the children from these conditions by being silent, but the effect was to distress children without giving substance to the distress. When, in addition, the parents involved the children in parental conflicts, the outcome was often an intense struggle without clarity regarding the focus of the struggle. The parents themselves often appeared to be in opposition as aggressor and victim in the marriage; the children tended to side with and idealize the victimized parent without seeing that parent’s complicity in the family problems. This left children feeling psychologically and physically vulnerable in ways that were often more harmful than the threatened danger. Thus, there is a general failure of the events of the history to match in intensity the behavior of the speaker. Under these conditions of ambiguous threat and uncertain comfort, apparent safety and comfort carried risk of deception and danger. As children, C5 speakers often displayed agitation, hyperactivity, sleep disorders, conduct or disciplinary problems, and so forth (i.e., the problems associated with C3–4). By school age, most (future) C5 speakers themselves used false cognition to trick others about their aggressive intentions. As struggles with parents intensified, children became stubbornly unwilling to admit vulnerability or responsibility. Nevertheless, most report being the repeated victims of parents’ or peers’ harassment, persecution, or ostracism (e.g., name-calling, taunting). Frequently this included bullying behavior in which feelings of weakness were transformed into feelings of strength by comparison with the fear and submission of the victim.

In adolescence, their covertly aggressive acts could have long-term and dangerous consequences. For example, some C5 adolescents participated in gang violence, used violence in dating relationships, became pregnant out of wedlock (especially when their parents would be horrified and socially shunned), or refused evidence of parental affection and concern (e.g., not accepting food in some cases of anorexia). Peers often were perplexed by the combination of aggressive and protective/charming characteristics of C5 adolescents.

Many C5 adults jealously and obsessively protect (idealized) love relationships using a strategy of deception; when their partners protest, their fears of infidelity (i.e., victimization) are activated and some seek revenge, thus, becoming themselves sources of danger to their partners.

C5 adults can be powerfully attractive leaders, lovers, and spouses; can rally almost fanatical support for social causes; and may have the disregard for personal danger that is an essential component of heroism. The strategy can be intellectually seductive such that it easily deceives both others and the individuals using the strategy. As Elie Wiesel (1960) noted, “I have one request: may I never use my reason against truth.” C5 speakers, and those using higher numbered Type C strategies, often do this without awareness.

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