Understanding Relationship Violence from an Attachment Theory and Research Perspective

April 2nd, 2007 by Paul Renn

The evolutionary function of anger is the key to understanding aggression from an attachment theory perspective. Angry protest is an instinctive biological response to fear of separation from the preferred attachment figure whose physical presence and emotional availability afford the child safety, protection and psychobiological regulation, thereby promoting exploratory behaviour. The adaptive function of anger is to increase the intensity of the communication to the lost person with the set goal of achieving reunion.

When parents are unavailable or abusive, and there is no substitute attachment figure to turn to for emotional support, the child may defensively exclude attachment-related information from consciousness as a maladaptive means of suppressing affective states that threaten to overwhelm him or her. Defensive exclusion is seen as constituting the heart of psychopathology because attachment-related thoughts, feelings and behaviours associated with the traumatic situation cease to be experienced. Consequently the child’s cognitive-affective response to the loss or trauma becomes disconnected and the experience remains unprocessed.

In sum, the caregiving environment generally, and the infant-caregiver attachment relationship particularly, initiate the child along one of an array of potential developmental pathways. Disturbance of attachment is the outcome of a series of deviations that take the child increasingly further from adaptive functioning. Internal working models of early attachment relationships provide the templates for psychopathology in later life, which may include violent, destructive and self-destructive forms of behaviour. In attachment theory, the main purpose of defence is the regulation of emotions. The primary mechanisms for achieving this are distance regulation and the selective exclusion of traumatic experience.

Disorganized Attachment, Trauma and Violence

Violence falls into two broad types of behaviour: predatory or psychopathic violence, which is held to be planned and emotionless, and in which the perpetrator seeks out a victim with whom he has no attachment relationship; and defensive or affective violence, which arises in reaction to a perceived threat to one’s personal safety or sense of self, and which is preceded by heightened levels of emotional arousal. While I agree with this distinction, I argue that both types of violence involve the expression of unbearable states of mind which cannot be reflected upon or symbolised. Indeed, I view both categories of violent people as sharing a common history of disorganized attachment and severe unresolved trauma, with these factors being more extreme in the histories of predatory people than in the far more numerous cases involving affective violence. Findings confirm that the vast majority of violent assaults between adults occur within an existing attachment relationship and fall into the defensive or affective category. Further, research shows that the physical and sexual abuse of children takes place mainly within a domestic situation and is perpetrated by a member of the child’s family.

Attachment theory emphasises that anger serves to maintain vitally important relationships. Violence is thus understood as the distorted and exaggerated version of potentially functional attachment behaviour. Disorganized attachment is seen in terms of an unintegrated system of self-other representation. Although this parallel system is segregated from consciousness, it may suddenly become disinhibited by the stress of separation and loss. At such times, early, less conscious mental models of attachment tend to become dominant. In later life, separations and losses may activate confused, unstable working models imbued with dysregulated shame and rage deriving from childhood fear of abandonment and dread of loneliness. This may result in extreme behaviour, including violence. Violence may, therefore, often be explained by the perpetrator’s inability to tolerate the attachment figure leaving. This is confirmed by data showing that spousal homicide imbued with intense affective violence is most likely to occur immediately after the couple have physically separated.

Comparative studies of violent people reveal that many violent men present as model citizens whose early environments seem to have been relatively benign. In such cases, the violent act and the accompanying affective rage, appear to be sudden and inexplicable, arising in response to little or no provocation. Clinical experience shows that in such instances the violent individual’s psychological self has been violated in childhood in more subtle and covert ways than in those involving explicit trauma and abuse. The very ‘normality’ of the violent man constitutes an aspect of a complex, but rigid, defensive organisation forged in a caregiving-attachment system characterized by subtle developmental trauma that is cumulative in its effect.

In my clinical experience, the violent man has remained psychologically merged with his early attachment figures and, therefore, lacks the internal security to exist as a separate, autonomous self. This generates existential anxiety and conflict between fear of engulfment and fear of abandonment in his adult romantic relationships. For defensive reasons, good and bad aspects of the self are encapsulated in dissociated parts of the personality that are inaccessible to reflection and interactive regulation. Traumatic affective states imbued with fear, shame, rage and hate are dissociated because they are experienced as too terrifying to face. These states, together with ambivalent feelings of love and hate, are defensively excluded from consciousness and regulated either by avoidance of intimacy or by a compulsive, controlling form of caregiving.

As noted above, approach-avoidant conflict behaviours are an expression of non reflective, disorganized states of mind that oscillate between fear of engulfment and fear of abandonment. The individual is able to modulate normative levels of stress and emotional arousal and may attain considerable success in career and financial terms. However, when rejected and abandoned by his partner and separated from children of the created family, the person’s conscious coping strategies and unconscious defensive structure break down. This situation may be exacerbated by stressful factors, such as sexual jealousy, bereavement, redundancy and financial problems. Loss and abandonment activate a multiple, disorganised internal working model, together with implicitly encoded state-dependent traumatic memories and unregulated bio-chemical changes. These psychobiological states are experienced as posing an imminent threat to the self and fuel a maladaptive, incoherent response. This stressful situation may overwhelm the person and culminate in the enactment of a long suppressed, shame-driven explosive rage deriving from the original traumatizing attachment matrix in which the self was felt to be endangered.

In conclusion, I argue that adult affective violence is rooted in disorganized attachment linked to unresolved trauma and to a dissociated representational system characterised by dysregulated affect and pathological mourning. The violent male feels trapped and helpless in the traumatizing situation: fearing both abandonment and intimacy he lacks the freedom to act as an agentic self and the capacity to reflect on and organize traumatic experience. Thus, at the moment of violent assault his over-controlled attachment system and tenuous capacity for mentalization are overwhelmed by bio-chemical changes, negative affect and distorted perceptions deriving from his personal trauma.

Stalking or harassment may similarly be understood in terms of intense separation anxiety and attachment pathology, with the perpetrator following and seeking proximity to the real or fantasised attachment figure.

Violence and Gender

With regard to gender differences and violent behaviour, Home Office self-report findings show relatively similar levels of domestic violence for both men and women; the injuries inflicted on women by men, however, were far more serious, reflecting their greater physical strength. Some researchers found that the violent woman is more likely to harm either her own body or assault her child, contending that the woman perceives the child as an extension of herself, rather than as a separate individual. The source of the woman’s violence is located in early experiences of neglect and abuse, predominantly at the hands of her own parents. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it was found that mothers who had been abused in childhood, and who had been unable to develop the capacity for reflective function or mentalization, were more likely to become abusing parents themselves than were mothers who had not been abused.

Although the incidence of violence by women in the public domain is increasing, research shows that violent women, in particular, are not violent outside of their romantic relationships, in comparison to violent men. It is suggested that attachment insecurity underlies women’s use of violence, and that such insecurity arises in the private domain as the couple struggle to manage their respective attachment conflicts over discomfort with closeness and fear of abandonment. From an attachment theory perspective, the psychological mechanisms underlying violent and abusive behaviour are thought to be similar for both genders and, moreover, to occur in same-sex as well as heterosexual relationships. Indeed, findings which reveal relatively similar levels of domestic violence for both men and women, as noted above, suggest that such behaviour needs to be understood from within a relational context and to be informed by attachment theory and research. Specific socio-cultural factors may also need to be considered in understanding relationship violence in ethnic minority communities.

In respect of people who have developed a fearful attachment style, there is a desire for a close relationship but a countervailing fear of disapproval and rejection. This ambivalent internal conflict leads to inflexible behavioural strategies designed to avoid emotional intimacy which, in turn, create disappointment and tension within the couple relationship, thereby increasing the risk of relational violence.

Findings which show that in many relationships both partners exhibit violent behaviours do not, of course, exculpate the male perpetrator of responsibility for his violence. It needs to be kept firmly in mind that two women are killed each week in England and Wales by their intimate male partners. However, data appertaining to mutual violence and abuse in the romantic relationship have clear implications for treatment. While acknowledging feminist concerns about violent men, I argue that in instances in which the violent couple are committed to staying together and struggling to understand their violence it would be more appropriate and effective to work with them conjointly rather than solely with the man. Furthermore, clinical experience suggests that attachment issues also underlie violence in same-sex relationships and that conjoint work in which an attachment-based psychodynamic approach is applied may be equally appropriate and effective, following a comprehensive risk assessment.

With regard to the inability of many women to separate from physically abusive men, I would suggest that this often noted phenomenon may partly derive from the development of a traumatic attachment bond. This contention receives support from research showing that women with a history of abuse are at an increased risk of marrying an abusive partner. Based on clinical experience, I argue that the woman’s difficulty in separating from her violent spouse, as manifested by a contradictory pattern of approach and withdrawal attachment behaviour, may partly be seen in terms of a collapse of behavioural and attentional strategies deriving from a disorganized pattern of attachment with a caregiver who was the source both of alarm and the solution of the alarm. Thus, in addition to socially constructed gendered aspects of experience which militate against women feeling entitled to fulfil their needs and desires, the battering relationship may be viewed as providing a maladaptive vehicle for repetitive re-enactments. These consist of implicitly encoded unresolved traumatic attachment experiences involving repeated exposure to fear without solution. Indeed, an important motivational factor in the perpetuation of attachment is the desire to reproduce a familiar relationship pattern, however destructive, precisely because it is familiar. Couple work in such cases is strongly contraindicated.

Conclusion

In this brief paper I have presented an attachment theory and research perspective to understanding affective violence. In developing my argument, I have emphasised the links between trauma, pathological mourning, disorganized attachment, affect regulation, reflective functioning and interpersonal violence. I have proposed that vulnerability to stress derives, in large part, from cumulative trauma in early development within a disorganized caregiving-attachment family system. I have argued that fear and intense interpersonal stress overwhelms the individual’s conscious coping strategies and unconscious defensive structure, together with their capacity to reflect on and organize traumatic experience in situations involving abuse, separation and loss. In working with violent individuals and couples, the therapeutic model needs to recognize the importance of helping people to feel sufficiently safe to explore their traumatic affective states within an attachment relationship with the therapist with the goal of enhancing compromised capacities of affect regulation and reflective functioning.