Attachment Quote by Jeremy Holmes

““A person's attachment status is a fundamental determinant of their relationships, and this is reflected in the way they feel about themselves and others. Neurotic patterns can be seen as originating here because, where core attachments are problematic, they will have a powerful influence on the way someone sees the world and their behaviour. Where there is a secure core state, a person feels good about themselves and their capacity to be effective and pursue their projects. Where the core state is insecure, defensive strategies come into play.””

Jeremy Holmes

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Attachment Psychology Relationships

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“To feel attached is to feel safe and secure. By contrast, an insecurely attached person may have a mixture of feelings towards their attachment figure: intense love and dependency, fear of rejection, irritability and vigilance. One may theorise that their lack of security has aroused a simultaneous wish to be close and the angry determination to punish their attachment figure…

Jeremy Holmes

“Try to prise a limpet away from its rock and it will cling all the harder.”

Jeremy Holmes

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“A securely attached child will store an internal working model of a responsive, loving, reliable care-giver, and of a self that is worthy of love and attention and will bring these assumptions to bear on all other relationships. Conversely, an insecurely attached child may view the world as a dangerous place in which other people are to be treated with…

Jeremy Holmes

“The unconscious operation of the attachment system via internal working models probably plays an important part in the choice of marital partner and relationship patterns in marriage. Holmes (1993) has described a pattern of 'phobic-counterphobic' marriage in which an ambivalently attached person will be attracted to an avoidant 'counter-phobic' spouse in a system of mutual defence against separation anxiety.”

Jeremy Holmes

“So it is with grief where, if all goes well, can come a strengthening of the inner world, of memory and definition.”

Jeremy Holmes

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“Bowlby's conviction that attachment needs continue throughout life and are not outgrown has important implications for psychotherapy. It means that the therapist inevitably becomes an important attachment figure for the patient, and that this is not necessarily best seen as a 'regression' to infantile dependence (the developmental 'train' going into reverse), but rather the activation of attachment needs that have…

Jeremy Holmes

“In Separation (1973a), Bowlby puts forward a theory of agoraphobia based on the notion of anxious attachment. He sees agoraphobia, like school phobia, as an example of separation anxiety. He quotes evidence of the increased incidence of family discord in the childhoods of agoraphobics compared with controls, and suggests three possible patterns of interaction underlying the illness: role reversal between…

Jeremy Holmes

“John Donne's 'A Valediction: forbidding mourning' concerns a sea voyage, and uses the image of a circle as an antidote to the abyss of…

Jeremy Holmes

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“The patient brings with him into therapy all the failures and suspicions and losses he has experienced through his life. The defensive forms of insecure attachment - avoidance, ambivalence, disorganisation - will be brought into play in relation to the therapist. There will be a struggle between these habitual patterns and the skill of the therapist in providing a secure…

Jeremy Holmes

“Attachment exerted an invisible but powerful pull on the child, just as heavenly bodies are connected by gravitational forces. But unlike gravity, attachment makes…

Jeremy Holmes

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“The ambivalent strategy involves clinging to the care-giver, often with excessive submissiveness, or adopting a role-reversal in which the care-giver is cared for rather…

Jeremy Holmes

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“Bowlby uses the notion of faulty internal working models to describe different patterns of neurotic attachment. He sees the basic problem of 'anxious attachment"…

Jeremy Holmes

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Some persons are so inclined to mortify themselves that at every opportunity they have, they do so. What a beautiful practice this is, and…

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She might be without country, without nation, but inside her there was still a being that could exist and be free, that could simply…

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“Continue with whatever it is that you have been doing, except for attachment-abhorrence. If ‘we’ stay in our state of Pure Soul, attachment-abhorrence will…

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“Research on organised abuse emphasises the diversity of organised abuse cases, and the ways in which serious forms of child maltreatment cluster in the lives of children subject to organised victimisation (eg Bibby 1996b, Itziti 1997, Kelly and Regan 2000). Most attempts to examine organised abuse have been undertaken by therapists and social workers who have focused primarily on the…

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