attachment

“You’re so lucky.” These three simple words have been heard repeatedly by almost every adoptee. While adoption is often the best solution available to a challenging problem, these words fail to address the emotional difficulties adoptees may experience, including conscious and unconscious feelings of loss, shame, and abandonment. Without help from a mental health professional, these difficulties may impede healthy psychological development (Verrier, 1993).

Childhood experiences greatly influence our adult relationships, choices, and habits. Some experiences children face, though, are far more detrimental than others. Childhood sexual abuse (CSA) is an atrocity that causes a great deal of pain and suffering for adult survivors, and researchers have continued to study the long-term effects of CSA on adults.

We’re thirsty — and so we say, “I need a drink.” We’re hungry and we say, “I want something to eat.” But when it comes to our essential need for secure attachment, we’re tongue-tied about saying, “I’m feeling insecure and need reassurance.”

Think it’s only the little tykes who seek security by clinging to their tattered blanket, like sweet Linus from the Peanuts gang dragging his security blanket everywhere? Think it’s only kids who get deeply attached to something — or someone — and look to it for absolute comfort? Think again.

Remember the quiet ache the first time you left your little one with a babysitter, or at daycare, or at school that first day? It's as tough for parents to loosen the emotional umbilical cord as it is for our youngsters, but we do it because we know we must — so they can grow and develop in many important ways.

Much research has been devoted to discovering the components of a satisfying marital relationship. Typically, researchers measure marital quality by asking spouses to rate their global marital satisfaction, which is defined as “an attitude of greater or lesser favorability toward one’s own marital relationship” (Roach, Frazier & Bowden, 1981, p. 537).