Emotion Regulation: Effective Attachment Movements

Interactions with available attachment figures and the resulting sense of attachment security provides for the learning of constructive emotion regulation strategies concerning accessibility to and display of emotions (Mikulincer & Shaver, 2012). Mikulincer and Shaver (2012) provide the example that interactions with emotionally accessible and responsive others provide a context in which a child can learn that acknowledgment and display of emotions is an important step toward restoring emotional balance, and that it is useful and socially acceptable to express, explore, and to try and understand one’s feelings. In children with avoidant histories, the emotions that would have facilitated effective communication and exchange that would have developed from the above described context are defensively modified and cut off and so when experiencing distress children with an avoidant history may be unable to draw upon potentially supportive relationships as a result of being unable to
For them, “emotion regulation” can mean an amplification of emotions and an exaggeration of worries (Mikulincer & Shaver, 2012). Borderline personality disorder can be usefully seen as a disorder of regulation of affect in which, for example, minor threats to a tenuous attachment bond are experienced as devastating (Holmes, 2001). In disorganised attachment relationships, processes of regulation and the integration of behavioural and emotional states may have been disrupted by extremely harsh or chaotic caregiving contexts (Egeland & Carlson, 2004). In the context of inadequate caregiving or recurring trauma, the level of arousal and the need to separate or compartmentalise overwhelming affects and memories may result in the dissociative phenomena (Egeland & Carlson,