Everything we do is about getting our attachment needs met. Most of our strategies are automatic or done with automaticity because that is what has been successful for us in the past. We filter out the stuff we don’t think works, and we do the stuff that we think works, but our automatic responses limit our outcomes, and we have to settle for what we can get. We often settle in our daily living: a young person stays up all night on their computer and can’t get up for school. They met their attachment needs last night but they are unable to meet their attachment needs today.

When we parent, we attempt to guide our children through this process.

Human brains are organized and structured to do things repetitively, and all of our biorhythms are established by evolutionary principles over thousands and thousands of years. Much of what we do is below the level of consciousness, below the level of decision-making. So we find ourselves with processes that lead in a certain direction, and we talk and think about, and sometimes want to change them, but when push comes to shove, when we’re stressed, when we can’t get our cognition to work because we’re anxious or upset or traumatized – we fall back on established principles that have organized our decision-making. We act in a way that is habitual, though it appears to us to be free will. Perhaps we find ourselves going in the direction that we’d rather not go.

Trying to bring our actions from an automatic response into the decision-making realm is a difficult process.

We may recognize our habitual behaviour, but because of the automaticity of our thinking process we often cycle around in a big circle.

In a similar vein, we might assume our children are acting in some way on purpose, or as a result of a deficit, when in actuality they are stuck in a pattern of automaticity, and the behaviour has become a habit.