Motivation

I started noticing that something was wrong during my first year after grad school. No, it wasn't the fact that I had graduated from a master's in social work program and was now working as a child and adolescent therapist and did not know what the hell I was doing. That is something they  at least prepared me for a little in school. No, this latent unease was was harder to pin point. But it did have something to do with a foundational element of my education. 

One of the theoretical pillars of my practice is what is known as attachment theory. I hesitate a little, because on mom blogs in the popular culture, this term can be used to describe a set of often strange practices and ideas which are loosely based on the academic theory. I'm referring to the academic theory which broadly focuses on how human beings develop in the context of relationships, especially in infancy and especially with primary care-givers. One of the hallmarks of the theory is the notion of attunement or the ability to read and respond to the emotional needs of another. 

Attunement is one of the most powerful mechanisms for encouraging healthy development. A child has a need and cries. The caregiver is able to understand that need and respond accordingly. The child, no longer in distress is able to explore their little world and learn. Over time, they learn to trust others, that when they need help, other people can be a source of comfort. When a caregivers attunement is comprised, it can have life long consequences for the child. 

My unease had to do with attunement. In school, we studied the ways in which a parents ability t to respond to their child's needs may be comprised. Depression, stress. resource insecurity, anxiety  can all focus a parents attention more on their own immediate needs in a way that makes it more difficult to be present for the child. But these are all common experiences typically not enough to significantly impact the relationship. However, substance use, can have profound impacts on a parents ability to respond. Especially on the more severe end of the spectrum, where ones brain has essentially become hi-jacked in a way that place that use above everything else. 

I began to see more and more children crying, essentially cuing their parents, and no response. This was not the kind of 'planned ignoring' that parents practice when they suspect their child has become a little too deft at pulling on their heart strings. No, this was the kind of no response you would more often see in drug use. But these caregivers did not appear to be on drugs. Instead they were on their phones. 

It would take me years of observing this to really understand what I was seeing, but once I did it became unmistakable. Parental, especially maternal instinct is one of the most powerful aspects of being human. Its a system that will cause a parent to give their own life some cases. To see it so easily hi-jacked is not only difficult to witness, but raises serious questions about the unseen consequences of our technology. If it can do this to us, what else is it doing?