There’s a powerful pull that’s stronger than the gravitational force that keeps the moon spinning around the earth and the earth revolving around the sun. Known as attachment process, it’s the biological super-glue that bonds people, society, mothers and babies, and families together. It’s also a close relative to a process called neuroplasticity, which is the brain’s ability to change and grow neurons through kind and nurturing experiences.

These growth patterns and changes can be seen through imaging techniques. Psychotherapy speaks of mirror neurons in the pre-frontal cortex of the brain lighting up and reflecting synchronously between traumatised client and therapist to build up a solid relationship as the basis for permanent positive brain changes. Buddhists talk about feelings of loving/kindness as a collective experience. Corporate team building exercises are designed to invoke tight-knit feelings of community between employees. Shared experiences produce shared memories that bind two people or a group of people together. But the biggest prize for attachment process and neuroplasticity belongs to pregnant women who can form a bond with their babies even before they are conceived.

George Lucas knew all about attachment process. The force in Star Wars is based on the psychic connections which organise and propel human relationships towards loving harmony and unification. But not all mothers feel that indecipherable, indescribable, intensely superheated affinity towards their babies in that special manner society expects them to.

A long, long time ago in a research laboratory far, far away, attachment theorist and psychologist John Bowlby and psychologist Mary Ainsworth conducted separation and reunion experiments, called “The Strange Situation” with mothers and babies, in order to study the mystical, magical, magnetic duct tape that binds the genetic universe together.

Under laboratory conditions a mother and her baby (around 12-18 months) were placed in a room with a one-way mirror. A stranger would then enter and the mother would leave for a short period of time. When the mother returned, her baby’s reaction to her absence and the presence of the stranger was studied, noted and recorded.

Approximately 60% of babies cried in a distressed fashion but settled quickly and easily upon return of their mothers. This was normal and called secure attachment style. About 20% showed remarkably little outward anxiety and upon their mothers’ return didn’t seem that interested in reconnecting. This became known as avoidant insecure attachment style. The other 20% got anxious and distressed upon separation, and became angry and jubilant when reunited, both approaching and avoiding contact. This contradictory response became known as anxious ambivalent attachment style.

Many years ago, when my family was camping down South in Denmark, Western Australia, my three children were old enough to have separate tents. In the middle of the night my son woke up, raced into our tent, launched himself at me and wrapped his arms and legs around my body in a distressed and anxious manner. Shaken to the bone, I asked him what on earth had happened.
“I had a nightmare,” he whimpered.
“What was it about?” I asked, pretty anxious and distressed myself.
“YOU!” he cried.

If Jean Liedloff, American writer and author of the book “The Continuum Concept” read the above passage she would possibly call me a bad mother with anxious ambivalent attachment style parenting. Jean lived for two and a half years in the deep South American jungle with Stone Age Indians and their extended families and has observed just exactly how the Indians got parenting and attachment processes completely right and how we, Western society, have got it all completely wrong. Jean explains how we should make our lives more “child-centred” and says babies should never be put down, that mothers should “wear” their babies till two years of age, breastfeed on demand, have baby sleep in parent’s bed and respond immediately to His or Her Royal Highness’s immediate demands.

I agree whole-heartedly with her concept, but I live in technologically driven suburbia, surrounded not by huge, leafy green trees and thatched huts in a hunter-gatherer lifestyle, but by indifferent bosses, housework demands and huge societal pressures on my ability to be a good mother and immediately develop the visceral sensation between myself and my newborn baby.

But bonding didn’t happen just because I gave birth. When my first-born child arrived I’d already loved her deeply for nine months but was so bewildered when the birth process separated us into two entities, I went into a state of suspended shock and could not connect and identify this pink, squalling baby with what I used to carry inside me. Meanwhile the rush of instant attachment to someone he’d help create had knocked my husband stupid with a fierce, loving connection the second she was born. But it was three weeks before I felt that brain connection.

Attachment process is very simple when it works. It’s not dumbing down motherhood when Mother and baby spends an inordinate amount of time gazing at one another, smiling and laughing together and making cooing, gooing, gaga noises. These simple acts bounce back and forth and literally “grow a brain” within the baby.

Sometimes though, mothers of newborns are overwrought with responsibility, have no partner or family support or are post-natally-depressed and the attachment process fails. But these ruptures can be repaired with professional help and over time with lots of understanding, patience, consistency and continuity, those important qualities needed to bind mother and child together can be overhauled and healed.

Love literally makes the world go round.

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    Last reviewed: 16 Jun 2009