‘If I commit to you, I betray my parents’: some negative consequences of the intergenerational cycle of insecure attachment for young adult romantic relationships

Abstract

Parents' insecure attachment style can result in a propensity to unconsciously triangulate their children into helping them manage their own attachment problems. This paves the way for abusive behaviour against which children may defend themselves through idealization and defensive exclusion so hampering their development as autonomous beings and predisposing them towards an avoidant patterning of attachment. When these children face leaving home, physically and emotionally, and committing to a romantic relationship, this patterning may create problems. Using extracts from a therapy session with a pre-marital couple to illustrate the affective background in the couple's families-of-origin, we discuss potential consequences of parents' insecure attachment for a child's self-perception and relationships when leaving the parental home. We also describe an affect-focused intervention to help break the intergenerational cycle of insecure attachment.

Keywords:

• adult romantic attachment
• insecure attachment
• intergenerational transmission of attachment
• internal working model
• pre-marital couple

Notes

1. For the sake of convenience we refer to the child as ‘he’ and the care-giver as ‘she’. The roles are, of course, reversible.