Page 33 - Advanced Biblical Counseling Student Textbook

Familiarity
Contact is one key to attachment. Another is familiarity. In many animals, attachments based on
familiarity likewise form during a critical period-an optimal period when certain events must take place
to facilitate proper development. For goslings, ducklings, or chicks, that period falls in the hours shortly
after hatching, when the first moving object they see is normally their mother. From then on, the young
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fowl follow her, and her alone.

Researcher Konrad Lorenz explored this rigid attachment process.
Imprinting is the process by which certain animals form attachments
during critical period very early in life. Critical period is the optimal
period shortly after birth when an organism’s exposure to certain
stimuli or experiences produces proper development. He wondered:
What would ducklings do if he was the first moving creature they
observed? What they did was follow him around: Everywhere that
Konrad went, the ducks were sure to go. Further tests revealed that
although baby birds imprint best to their own species, they also will
imprint to a variety of moving objects – an animal of another species, a
box on wheels, a bouncing ball. And once formed, this attachment is
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difficult to reverse.

Children – unlike ducklings – do not imprint. However, they do become
attached to what they’ve known. Mere exposure to people and things
fosters fondness. Children like to reread the same books, re-watch the
same movies, reenact family traditions. They prefer to eat familiar
foods, live in the same familiar neighborhood, attend school with the
same old friends. Familiarity is a safety signal. Familiarity breeds
content Basic trust is a sense that the world is predictable and
trustworthy. This is formed in infancy by appropriate experiences with caregivers.
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Deprivation of Attachment
“Do parental neglect, family disruption, or day care affect children’s attachments? If secure attachment
nurtures social competence, what happens when circumstances prevent a child from forming
attachments? In all of psychology, there is no sadder research literature. Babies reared in institutions
without the stimulation and attention of a regular caregiver, or locked away at home under conditions
of abuse or extreme neglect, are often withdrawn, frightened, even speechless. Those abandoned in
Romanian orphanages during the 1980s looked “frighteningly like (the Harlows’) monkeys”. If
institutionalized more than 8 months, they often bore lasting emotional scars.”
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“In humans, the unloved sometimes become the unloving. Most abusive parents – and many
condemned murderers – report having been neglected or battered as children. But does this mean that
today’s victim is predictably tomorrow’s victimizer? No. Though most abusers were indeed abused, most
abused children do not later become violent criminals or abusive parents.

44 Ibid.
45 Ibid.
46 Ibid.
47 Myers, p. 78, 2012.

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