When I ask people who knew me as an infant what my personality was like, they mention how easily and loudly I would cry. I think that growing up in foster care, I had to wail sometimes to get attention and so I developed my histrionic attention-seeking personality as a reaction.
Dr. Daniel Siegel writes: Later, while at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, [Mary] Ainsworth tested her ideas about attachment patterns by putting in 47 hours of painstaking observation with each mother-child pair in her study. She found that when caregivers promptly and effectively responded to young infants’ cries, the babies cried less by the end of the first year. The securely attached children had learned that their caregivers were reliable and therefore subtler expressions of their distress and needs would generate responses-they didn’t need to be crybabies to get the attention they sought. Infants who develop confidence in their caregivers are securely attached because their caregivers have proven to be reliable.
…Bowlby’s theory suggested that not only would these relationships provide the foundation for personality development, but they’d do so by affecting the child’s capacity for emotional regulation and the formation of mental representations of self and others. For example, a child who’s been rejected is likely to
interpret the behavior of others as rejecting and behave in ways that lead to further rejection, continuing the pattern. However, the theory also states that such behaviors are subject to change, especially given fundamental changes in relationship support. If others are supportive, despite off-putting behavior, a child’s worldview and behavior may change. Further, early experience isn’t erased, but retains its potential to impact later developmental
stages.
LUKE: Boy, does this speak to me. Growing up in foster care, I knew frequent rejection and so by my earliest memories, I had adopted behavior that would lead others to reject me. I’ve been able to moderate that behavior when connected to supportive friends, but when I isolate, I become increasingly weird and off-putting.
