KCA Blog:

Collective trauma, disorganised attachment

Kate Cairns, 9 June 2024

Accompanying image - Blog 'Collective trauma, disorganised attachment'This blog is in response to the article on BBC News "Toilet training and high anxiety - how schools are changing" https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/art...

We are living in an environment of profound social chaos and collective trauma in the UK. Years of so-called austerity, the disruption of Covid, and food and fuel poverty for many have been followed by the global issues of pandemic, climate change and wars in Europe and the middle east. The level of trauma in our communities is unprecedented in my long lifetime.

In this environment all families become vulnerable. When parents are traumatised, their children are faced with a potentially insoluble problem. Children have an evolutionary need to turn to their parents to settle them when they experience nervous system dysregulation (excessive stress). We are born to connect to other humans and mirror and match the state of their brain and nervous system, and it is this innate capacity for attunement that protects the developing brains of our young from the harm caused by unregulated stress. We are not born able to self-regulate, but we are born able to connect to adults who attune to us, take our stress into themselves, and then when they self-regulate we mirror and match and are kept safe. But if the adults are traumatised they are stuck in a fear state. Then when the child attunes to the adult what they experience is fear. Traumatised adults automatically and inescapably produce a fear response in their own children.

Classic attachment theory says that this produces in the child what is called a disorganised attachment style. When adults are emotionally available to their children and consistently enough able to provide the co-regulation that is needed, children develop a healthy secure attachment style which promotes optimal brain development for the child. If adults are characteristically emotionally unavailable, or are emotionally preoccupied and inconsistently available, children develop an anxious attachment style, which may be avoidant (emotionally closed down) or ambivalent (emotionally inconsistent), but it is at least a survival strategy that enables development. But when adults are stuck in a fear state, children cannot develop an established attachment style to enable their brain to develop a survival strategy. Instead they feel fear in the presence of their parents, however loving those parents may be. This is the worst case scenario for the mental health of our young.

The characteristic response in this country to recognising unmet attachment needs in children has been to provide parenting programmes, to enable or teach parents to provide the emotional availability and adequate consistency their children need. But this is simply not going to work when the problem is not emotionally unavailable or preoccupied and inconsistent parenting but the fact that the parents are traumatised. They don’t need to be taught what to do. They need to recover. And when parents recover, their children can recover too.

Collective trauma is not a mental health problem (although of course individuals experiencing it may develop mental health problems), collective trauma is a social problem, or, as Jack Saul puts it, collective trauma needs collective healing. Fortunately humans have evolved to recover from collective trauma – from natural disasters to the many disasters the human species has inflicted on itself, our collective lives across our whole long history have rarely been free from such events. Research on recovery points the way forward. Trauma is naturally self-healing, both in individuals and in communities, if the social conditions make recovery possible. KCA has been gathering understanding of this research, and sharing it with others, since 2011. This knowledge has proved transformative for us and for many. When we know how self-healing happens, we can make sure that it does. This has always been important. Now it is essential.

Some other recent blogs/podcasts

Social ties are the cheapest medicine we have.

Richard Holmes, 2 Sep 2024

In this blog, Rich reflects on collective trauma and the challenge of addressing the social conditions that cause collective trauma, as well as treating the symptoms experienced by an individual.

Take down the fences: why we need to demilitarise our community life

Kate Cairns, 10 Jul 2024

In this blog we the discuss how our social and emotional ties have been eroded and the long term impact of being disconnected. When we invest in social connection instead, we reap the benefits for generations to come - Social ties are the cheapest medicine we have.

A choice Issue

Barry Golten, 9 Jun 2024

In this Blog, Barry Golten shares his thoughts on the difference of making bad choices and struggling to self regulate.

See all our blogs and podcasts…