We are on an eternal quest for conflict resolution in the attachment experience. We seek to achieve a balance between the urge, which is aggression, and the feeling, which is anxiety, in order to restore a sense of safety. Our struggle to achieve balance creates conflict. The resolution of that conflict brings us into balance.

In our struggle to move from conflict into balance, it is obvious that the conflict process includes the capacity for violent solutions on one hand, and on the other, the capacity for giving up entirely on the possibility of attachment. (The work of Spitz in the early forties, the work by Bowlby, and many theories since, have borne this out.)