Home as attachment haven

Home should be a place where everyone experiences safety, security, acceptance, nurture, comfort, care, love, and respect. Emotionally healthy people are relationally healthy toward others. Hurt people hurt people and loved people love people. It starts in the home. Home should be the healthiest emotional environment we have; the place where we are most loved, respected, honored, celebrated, and protected. Home is to be a refueling station; a retreat center; a MASH unit where we receive repair after being beat up by the world, infused with renewed strength and confidence to be sent out for the next round. Parents, of course, can’t expect to always receive these from children; it is the place of children to receive them from adults, such that they can supply the same to their own children, in time. That leaves the adults in the house to unselfishly provide for each other safety, security, acceptance, nurture, comfort, care, love, and respect. This ensures a healthy supply for both parents to drawn upon as they dispense such other-centered attachment needs to their children.

Some adults enter parenthood with attachment wounds—deficits from childhood in these areas. It is harder for them to give what they did not receive. They reach into their experiential “bag” and it’s relatively empty of these experiences. In fact, the opposites might have been the norm. Mom or dad (or both) might've been physically gone for emotionally absent, due to work or educational demands, deployment, distractions, ill health, or mental illness. Or, abuse of a physical or emotional nature may have been normative. Whatever the case, the hardwiring of childhood safety, security, love, and nurture were only loosely wired, if at all. Many of these disadvantaged parents do their best to give their children what they themselves were not given. In doing so, they guess at what is normal. They model their behavior on someone other than their parents. They reach into someone else's experiential bag and emulate what they find. This is the best that can be done, short of reparative experiences of safety, security, acceptance, nurture, comfort, care, love, and respect, post-childhood.

Parents with attachment wounds should not criticize themselves, nor be criticized. Rather, need to give themselves grace, and be patiently shown it by others, along with reparative attachment experiences by those fortunate enough to have received them. Attachment–disadvantaged must resolve to not repeat the negative patterns they experienced from their parents and caregivers, but to recognize what they lacked, and learn what they and their children need. Attachment wounds become a motivator to investigate how to provide it better than our own parents provided. Reparative experiences can be provided by an other-centered spouse with a healthier childhood attachment history. Reparative experiences can also be provided by God, the perfect Parent, who fully accepts us in our sin, loves us unconditionally, nurtures us constantly, and provides an eternal safe place of secure belonging. In the arms of this Father, many have been "born again,” with a new "childhood" in relation to a perfect Parent. As God faithfully provides every attachment need, they come to find a wealth of experiences from which to draw as they love, protect, respect and nurture their own children, and others.