Dysregulated Motherhood: Exploring the Risk Features in a Mother’s Caregiving Representations

ABSTRACT

In the case of a mother with dysregulating attachment experiences and current enrolment in a parent-infant psychotherapy process, we explored which insecure, hostile/helpless, and prementalizing risk features were similar in her attachment and caregiving representations; which risk features were specific to her caregiving representations; and how these theory-defined features overlapped in detecting caregiving risks. Risk features in the attachment representations were assessed from the adult attachment interview and risk features in the caregiving representations from written psychotherapy notes. We found similar insecure (preoccupied and disorganized), prementalizing and hostile/helpless instances from both the attachment and the caregiving representations. However, confusion between self and child, greater variance in lapses into prementalizing, and specific and concrete fears and helplessness were unique to the caregiving representations. Hostile/helpless instances were found in tandem with almost all insecure and prementalizing instances, indicating this conceptualization captured risks in the caregiving representations most comprehensively. Fearful and helpless caregiving representations occurred somewhat independently from other risk conceptualizations, suggesting they need to be identified as independent phenomena. The results imply that detecting specific manifestations of intergenerational risks from caregiving representations is possible.

Acknowledgments

We are most grateful to the mother whose inner world we were allowed to study and share with others.

Disclosurement statement

The authors declare no conflicts of interest.

Notes

1. For clarity,we use the terms ”Insecure” (corresponding with ”Non-Balanced”), ”Preoccupied” (corresponding with ”Distorted”), and ”Disorganized” (corresponding with ”Disrupted”) of the Insecure features of both the attachment and the caregiving representations.

2. The term “Disorganized” rather than “Unresolved/Disorganized” is used, because coding in the caregiving representations was not limited to specific experiences that would remain unresolved.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by grants for the first author from the Finnish National Doctoral Programme of psychology, the Finnish Brain Federation, the Emil Aaltonen Federation and the Faculty of Social Sciences of the University of Tampere.