Christian counseling and Attachment Disorders
Attachment disorders be the path to Personality disorders later on in life. By Personality Disorder we mean: psychopath, avoidant personality, borderline personality and narcissistic personality. These can all be best understood as based on the foundation of an attachment disorder.
On the one hand, positive attachment Experience in early childhood leads to healthy relationships with peers and adults, healthy curiosity and learning and healthy self-confidence and self-esteem. Positive attachment forms the core of healthy personalities.
On the other hand, Attachment disorders and negative attachment experiences in early childhood, form the deepest foundation of the personality disorders. Weak and broken attachment is at the core of the person with a personality disorder.
This conclusion is based on the fallowing observations:
1. It is the common factor among personality disorders.
2. It always leads to weak emotional intelligence at the empathic level.
3. It will be associated with lack of empathy.
4. It is associated with weak or poor bonding in adult relationships. It will result in an ‘orphan spirit’ which finds it easy to detach from a love relationship and move on.
5. It is associated with an ‘hole in the bucket’ when it comes to receiving love and nurture. The person feels like they are not loved. Their parents or spouse feels like they are an empty bucket.
6. It weakens the ability to have self-control of emotions which is demonstrated most dramatically in the Borderline personality.
7. It results in the inability to develop a mature conscience, for the mature conscience requires empathy at its heart.
8. It results in social behaviour that is emotionally immature for their age. They are much younger emotionally than their age.
9. The person may always feel distant from others as if a glass wall of separation was in place.
10. It results in a feeling of emptiness inside - a sense that something is missing.
Written by George Hartwell M.Sc. a Christian counsellor and registered psychotherapist with a masters in clinical psychology and 40 years experience.
Sessions with George bring people to healing experiences in a loving safe environment. His reliable and innovative methods provide a compassionate focus on people's feelings, a wise understanding of their issues and psychological and faith-based solutions for change.
Phone (416) 939-0544 to set uo an initial session/consult. Phone, Zoom, FaceTime only.
My fee schedule is $150 per hour. Payment is by bank transfer or PayPal transfer.
There is a money-back guarantee. If, in the first session, you decide this is not a good fit for you, we will stop the session and cancel any payment due. I want this to work for you and for me.
On the one hand, positive attachment Experience in early childhood leads to healthy relationships with peers and adults, healthy curiosity and learning and healthy self-confidence and self-esteem. Positive attachment forms the core of healthy personalities.
On the other hand, Attachment disorders and negative attachment experiences in early childhood, form the deepest foundation of the personality disorders. Weak and broken attachment is at the core of the person with a personality disorder.
This conclusion is based on the fallowing observations:
1. It is the common factor among personality disorders.
2. It always leads to weak emotional intelligence at the empathic level.
3. It will be associated with lack of empathy.
4. It is associated with weak or poor bonding in adult relationships. It will result in an ‘orphan spirit’ which finds it easy to detach from a love relationship and move on.
5. It is associated with an ‘hole in the bucket’ when it comes to receiving love and nurture. The person feels like they are not loved. Their parents or spouse feels like they are an empty bucket.
6. It weakens the ability to have self-control of emotions which is demonstrated most dramatically in the Borderline personality.
7. It results in the inability to develop a mature conscience, for the mature conscience requires empathy at its heart.
8. It results in social behaviour that is emotionally immature for their age. They are much younger emotionally than their age.
9. The person may always feel distant from others as if a glass wall of separation was in place.
10. It results in a feeling of emptiness inside - a sense that something is missing.
Written by George Hartwell M.Sc. a Christian counsellor and registered psychotherapist with a masters in clinical psychology and 40 years experience.
Sessions with George bring people to healing experiences in a loving safe environment. His reliable and innovative methods provide a compassionate focus on people's feelings, a wise understanding of their issues and psychological and faith-based solutions for change.
Phone (416) 939-0544 to set uo an initial session/consult. Phone, Zoom, FaceTime only.
My fee schedule is $150 per hour. Payment is by bank transfer or PayPal transfer.
There is a money-back guarantee. If, in the first session, you decide this is not a good fit for you, we will stop the session and cancel any payment due. I want this to work for you and for me.
Attachment Disorders and Psychopath: How does one become a psychopath?
As a therapist, my focus is on personality variables based on a person's upbringing. In order to answer as a Christian therapist I need to add another term into our understanding of the person, or, in fact, I will use three terms: the Rational Brain - conscious verbal intellect, the Emotional Brain meaning the source of our decisions based on past social-emotional experience and the human spirit which I call the Intuitive Brain.
Few people understand the role of the human spirit, however, doing so is essential for understanding the Psychopath. The human spirit makes us human and without it functioning we are more like an animal.
The human spirit needs to be nurtured in order to function. It can only be nurtured through consistent love received through consistent trust channels called, in Psychological research, bonding or attachment. More than half of us have damaged bonding and, as a result, a crippled ability to love and bond with others.
Psychopaths and likely Borderlines have the most extreme wounding in the area of bonding and attachment and, therefore, an almost absent ability to love and bond with others. Some do not ‘feel’ others as real. They do not ‘feel’ love.
Their ability to receive love is broken. Their ability to hold on to the love they receive is broken. Their ability to trust in the love they receive is broken. Broken just means that in the critical early years a consistent loving connection with Mother (or father) was not available or was broken by absences. This can be for many reasons: baby isolated in hospital, mother is in deep grief or depression, mother lost a child earlier, and so on.
Therefore, their human spirit has not been nurtured and has not grown and will not be nurtured and will not mature. Without nurture, they are left in a deep emotional immaturity. Spiritually - in their emotional core - they are like infants.
The less loving, nurturing human contact from mother, father, family, and village, the less healthy attachment, the less love retained, the less emotional growth of the emotional core (human spirit) the less there is adult empathy.
Without empathy there is an absence of compassion - the basis for adult morality. This means that there is more risk of evil, cruel behaviour without any sign of conscience. But it does mean that they have the feelings of a small infant.
Psychopaths are very immature children (emotionally) with little or no adult conscience (which is rooted in empathy) because they are incapable of it. Their rational brain can be brilliant which makes them very dangerous when linked to no empathy or mature conscience.
This is my humble attempt to explain psychopathy within this model of personality. Let me know if you have any questions. In this view bonding is the core area lacking in the childhood of the psychopath.
Dealing with bonding and attachment issues runs deeper than dealing with core beliefs. It is true that the heart locks into decisions, which are very difficult to undo. This is what is referred to psychologically as core beliefs. It once seemed that once these core beliefs of been formed there was nothing that can be done to undo them. We now know that is not true. We are understanding more and more about how to change core beliefs. EMDR is effective in the treatment of PTSD and that means core beliefs formed in the trauma are being erased.