Behavioural genetics research has also highlighted how certain genetic factors influence development in indirect ways. For example, particular genotypes make individuals better or worse at dealing with environmental stress, which in turn relates to their mental health. Other genotypes act via environmental circumstances such as parenting – the child’s genetically specified characteristics may trigger maltreatment in the parent. Resilience in this case is characterised not as adapting to difficult circumstances, but as having the predisposition that enables these circumstances to be avoided in the first place. Research in epigenetics has emphasised the importance of the regulation of gene activity over the underlying makeup of the genotype – if environmental circumstances mean that the gene is never expressed, risks associated with particular genotypes will be irrelevant to the individual’s development. Under these conditions, the environment itself conveys resilience.

Within every person, there exists the weight and opportunity of a hero’s journey. I believe this, and have seen it validated thousands of times in my forty-five years of clinical experience. Many of our life’s decisions are fueled by our ability to hold (or not hold) ourselves to this wholly unique vision of who we each strive to be. Attachment bonds are the first and most important of all relationships. These are first created through interactions with our primary caregivers, usually parents. This first relationship helps define our capacity for attachment and sets the tone for all of our future relationships.

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Author of the bestselling Waking the Tiger: Healing Trauma, In an Unspoken Voice: How the Body Releases Trauma and Restores Goodness, and Trauma and Memory: Brain and Body in a Search for the Living Past: A Practical Guide for Understanding and Working with Traumatic Memory INTRODUCTION But while the incidence of disorganisation in children who have been maltreated is clearly elevated, the inescapable fact is that the majority of these children are not classified as disorganised. And what about the 15 per cent of children growing up in seemingly optimal conditions who are classified as insecure-disorganised? Some children are resilient against non-optimal experiences with their parents, whereas others do not form an organised pattern of attachment despite being exposed to no obvious risk. In fact, in regular middle-class families, insecure-disorganised attachment is just as common as insecure-avoidant attachment and more common than insecure-resistant attachment. It therefore shouldn’t be treated as abnormal and a marker of parental maltreatment.

My older children (now 20 and 16, but 13 and 9 respectively when I discovered the above), had until then been raised traditionally, based on the advice of my mother and grandmother. They had their own beds, slept in separate rooms, were left to cry for short periods (sleep training), were exclusively breastfed for only a short time, and were put in childcare early on to allow me to work and study.From our earliest years, we develop an attachment style that follows us through life, replaying in our daily emotional landscape, our relationships, and how we feel about ourselves. And in the wake of a traumatic event - such as a car accident, severe illness, loss of a loved one, or experience of abuse - that attachment style can deeply influence what happens next. Before we go on, I want to be clear about what I mean when I say the word trauma. Without getting too technical, trauma is what results from experiencing an event over which you have little control; sometimes—as in the case with major accidents—you don’t even have time to brace yourself for the impact. These events overwhelm your ability to function normally, and this can make you lose trust in your feelings, thoughts, and even your body. In this way, trauma is a form of tremendous fear, loss of control, and profound helplessness.

Strangely enough (and in-spite of that passion!) I was a late-comer to this field, having already half raised two of my children before first coming across the work of the early attachment theorists: Mary Ainsworth and John Bowlby. Attachment psychology is a psychological theory that seeks to explain the patterns of human relationships, particularly the emotional bond between infants and their caregivers.

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When trauma robs us of our physical self through dissociation or loss of boundaries, how do we become embodied and safely connected again?

Verhage, M.L., Schuengel, C., Madigan, S., Fearon, R.M., Oosterman, M., Cassiba, R., Bakermans-Kranenburg, M.J., van IJzendoorn, M.H. (2016). Narrowing the transmission gap: A systhesis of three decades of research on intergenerational transmission of attachment. Psychological Bulletin 142 (4), 337-366. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/bul0000038 In The Power of Attachment, Dr. Diane Poole Heller, a pioneer in attachment theory and trauma resolution, shows how overwhelming experiences can disrupt our most important connections-- with the parts of ourselves within, with the physical world around us, and with others. In her rather scathing review of ‘ The predictive power of attachment’ (January 2017) Elizabeth Meins takes aim at misguided opinions about attachment that circulate in the policy arena. Certainly, policy makers, in an attempt to secure public money that children, families, and schools badly need, tend to exaggerate claims about the critical importance of early experience. The public discourse however should be sharply differentiated from the scientific discourse. Here we focus on Meins’s critique of attachment research. We list some of her comments about the evidence and show that they are largely mistaken. The attachment literature also provides a nice example of the factor I feel is underrated: resilience. In his 1992 Emmanuel Miller Memorial Lecture, Peter Fonagy succinctly defined resilience as ‘normal development under difficult conditions’. A great deal of research has focused on resilience in response to child maltreatment. Van IJzendoorn and colleagues’ meta-analysis reported that 48 per cent of children who were identified as having been maltreated were classified as insecure-disorganised, compared with 15 per cent of children from regular middle-class families. These findings are generally interpreted as abusive parenting causing children to form a disorganised attachment relationship. Since it is true that all of us have some complication with healthy attachment, I am thrilled to be introducing you to this book. I have been fortunate in knowing its author, Dr. Heller, for several decades. Diane was one of my brightest students, and someone whom I continue to admire and cherish greatly. Her qualities of warmth, energy, caring, and insight have benefited thousands of her clients and students over the years. Her gifts and wisdom are ever-present throughout The Power of Attachment, a book that will provide you with an accessible yet exemplary framework for identifying your own unique, sometimes complex attachment struggles, delivered with Diane’s wit and breezy, unpretentious tone. The included exercises will certainly help you rediscover your true, embodied self, and will guide you to renegotiate your own obstacles to connections with others.In The Power of Attachment, Dr. Diane Poole Heller, a pioneer in attachment theory and trauma resolution, shows how overwhelming experiences can disrupt our most important connections - with the parts of ourselves within, with the physical world around us, and with others. Rietveld, C.A. et al. (2014). Replicability and Robustness of Genome- Wide-Association Studies for Behavioral Traits. Psychological Science, 25, 1975-1986. DOI: 10.1177/0956797614545132 How traumatic events can break our vital connections—and how to restore love, wholeness, and resiliency in your life