Strange Situation | Saltman, Bethany

Lange Beschreibung
A full-scale investigation of the controversial and often misunderstood science of attachment theory, inspired by the author s own experience as a parent and daughter.

A profound and beautiful work . . . searingly honest, brazenly fresh, and startlingly rich. Andrew Solomon, author of The Noonday Demon

When professional researcher and writer Bethany Saltman gave birth to her daughter, Azalea, she loved her deeply but felt as if something was missing. Looking back at her lonely childhood, dangerous teenage years, and love-addicted early adulthood, Saltman thought maybe she was broken.
 
Then she discovered the science of attachment, the field of psychology that explores the question of why from an evolutionary point of view love exists between parents and children. Saltman went on a ten-year journey visiting labs, archives, and training sessions, while learning the meaning of delight from Mary Ainsworth, one of psychology s most important but unsung researchers, who died in 1999.
 
Saltman went deep into the history and findings from Ainsworth s famous laboratory procedure, the Strange Situation, which, like an X-ray, is still used today by scientists around the world to catch a glimpse of the internal workings of attachment. In this simple twenty-minute procedure, a baby and a caregiver enter an ordinary room with two chairs and some toys. During a series of comings and goings, a trained observer studies the minutiae of the pair s back-and-forth with each other.
 
Through the science of attachment, what Saltman discovered was a radical departure from everything she thought she knew about love and about her own family, her story, and herself. She was far from broken she saw that love is too powerful to ever break.

Strange Situation is a scientific, lyrical, life-affirming exploration of love. Not only will readers be taken on an emotional ride through one mother s reckoning with her own past and her family s future, but they will also be given the tools with which to better understand their own life histories and their relationships today.

Praise for Strange Situation

A fascinating deep dive into attachment theory . . . Carefully researched and with copious endnotes, this is an excellent resource for anyone interested in child development. Publishers Weekly
 
Honest and complex . . . A thoughtful engagement with a topic that affects all parents. Kirkus Reviews

Rezensierung
[An] absorbing and edifying corrective . . . Saltman tells two separate stories here: One is her personal journey as a mother, the other the story of the science of attachment. But the narratives are also deeply intertwined. The Washington Post
 
This is a unique and thoughtful book part memoir, part social science, part biography of [Mary] Ainsworth and part self-help. Readers who are battling their own demons as parents may feel grateful for Ms. Saltman s unsparing account of herself. The Wall Street Journal

Strange Situation is a book that will change you. Surrender to this seductive, searching, genius hybrid of social science and memoir and you will never hug someone, laugh, or hear a child cry the same way again. Wednesday Martin, New York Times bestselling author of Primates of Park Avenue and Untrue
 
Strange Situation is a beautiful exploration of what makes us human our relationships. By artfully weaving together her own experiences as a mother, daughter, and wife with the science of attachment and the fascinating life history of one of its founders, Mary Ainsworth, Saltman helps us to see ourselves and our relationships with those we love in an entirely new way. Lori Gottlieb, New York Times bestselling author of Maybe You Should Talk to Someone
 
Brilliant, brutally honest, and ultimately redemptive, Bethany Saltman s powerful and meticulous new book, Strange Situation, made me see my own childhood and my own parenting in a fascinating new light. This book flooded me with emotions and questions, but unfolded like an epic drama. I couldn t put it down. Amy Chua, New York Times bestselling author of Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother and Political Tribes: Group Instinct and the Fate of Nations

A beautifully written account of the courage, luminosity, and sheer audacity of loving someone. Sharon Salzberg, author of Lovingkindness and Real Love
 
An exceptional achievement . . . This extraordinary book is a must-read for anyone interested in childhood and those who have spent their lives studying it. Professor Peter Fonagy, OBE, Chief Executive, Anna Freud National Centre for Children and Families

Bethany Saltman plunders her autobiography for insights about attachment and brilliantly connects them to the work of Mary Ainsworth and other thinkers in the field. By personalizing the story of attachment in relation to both her family of origin and the one she created, Saltman creates a compelling narrative arc that turns up insight after insight. This book about attachment is the story of how we learn love, both early in our lives and later on. Andrew Solomon, National Book Award winning author of The Noonday Demon and Far from the Tree

[A] fascinating mix of memoir and the history of a major revolution in the scientific theory of the relationships we form in our first year of life. Booklist (starred review)

Buchausschnitt
Chapter One

In 2005, I lay in bed beneath the Christmas lights in the loft of our little house in the Catskills, The Baby Book propped against my giant round belly. This encyclopedic volume by Dr. William Sears and his wife, Martha, a nurse, is the seminal guide to what they call attachment parenting, the controversial approach to raising kids that encourages mothers to breastfeed, co-­sleep, wear their babies in a sling, and engage in what they call the Seven Baby B s of Attachment Parenting, all designed in response to an infant s innate need to be close. That made good sense to me, though I knew that many people felt some resistance to this method, especially the fact that it seemed to ask an awful lot of parents and particularly women.

I, however, welcomed the Searses invitation to wholehearted ­though some said over-­the-­top ­parenting and their insistence that when a hungry or an upset baby cries, he cries to be fed or comforted, not to control. And they made it sound so simple: All parents, especially mothers, have a built-­in intuitive system with which they listen and respond to the cues of their baby. What would it be like to listen to my baby s cries? I wondered. Would I sink into this magic realm of knowing what to do? I had heard so many stories about colicky babies and tantruming toddlers and parents losing their shit. And I had seen that mom in the grocery store, the one who ignored her crying child. I thought, Just pick the kid up! How hard can it be?

While Dr. Sears says that attachment is an intuitive system, the technical term is a set goal behavioral system, and, as I have come to understand, we all have it, not especially mothers. Caregiving, attachment, sexuality, affiliation, fear ­these are called set-­goal behavioral systems. We are all equipped with these whole body/mind organizations that kick in when needed to work tirelessly until they reach their goal. When we lose track of our child in Target, there will never come a moment when we say, Oh well, now that my kid s disappeared I get to sleep in on the weekends, and give up the search. Likewise, there will never come a time when our lost child settles in among the school supplies or wanders off with a stranger, never looking back. Attachment works like fear, which, once ignited, never stops until the threat is gone, or like a state of sexual arousal, which won t rest just because we want it to.

When Azalea was seven years old, she and Thayer were riding the chairlift up a mountain at our local ski area. Lost in a daydream, Azalea missed the spot where she and Thayer had planned to get off, leaving her on the lift without her dad, who had skied off the chair, only to discover with a start that Azalea was not right behind him. Realizing that she was alone and her beloved father was gone, rather than wait until she got back to the bottom of the mountain, the next safe place to get off, Azalea jumped! Falling ten feet through the air, luckily she landed safely on her skis. That s the kind of commitment attachment inspires. That s the kind of danger love incites.

Once we get riled up, like Azalea alone on the chairlift, the only thing that slows the caregiving and attachment systems primordial effort is reaching its set goal ­of togetherness, of safety, of intimate connection, of what researchers so tenderly call felt security. And when that goal isn t reached, we keep searching for it. Forever.

Felt security. It s not up to anyone but us to say when we get there.

Lying pregnant in the winter sun with our cats, the snowy mountain outside our bedroom window, I didn t know any of that. It just felt good to imagine devoting myself to the needs of my unb