Searching for smiles
From the moment we’re born, psychiatrist Curt Thompson says, we’re “looking for someone looking for us.” In other words, we need to know we’re loved. The search that began at the moment of birth lasts our entire lives.
As infants, we’re searching intently because we’re smart and wise. We’ve never seen the statistics on infant mortality, but we know instinctively how dangerous the hours before and after birth are. We’re on the knife edge of survival.
We’re looking for a sign showing us we’re not alone. That sign, theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar wrote, is as simple as it is beautiful: a caregiver’s smile.
From the earliest moments of our lives, we’re doing everything our little bodies can do to get those smiles. Within just days, we learn when to make a fuss, when to keep quiet, how to ask, and how to receive. We’re brilliant at it. Because we have to be.
Psychologist John Bowlby, the founder of attachment theory, observed that each one of us will learn those lessons differently, because we’re all looking for a different smile. Two of Bowlby’s successors, Mary Ainsworth and Mary Main, believed that, depending on our situations, we fall into one of four attachment styles as kids:
Some of us found the smiles came easily and predictably. We settle into the clear blue sky of what’s called secure attachment.
Some of us found the smiles rarely came, if at all. We learned to live without them under the cloudy sky of avoidant attachment.
Some of us found the smiles could come, but we never knew when. We became anxious and uncertain in the fog of ambivalent attachment.
Some of us found the smiles came mixed with pain, fear, or foreboding. Longing for love but also fearing it, we learned to live with the dark, stormy skies of disorganized attachment.
As we grow up, we never quite leave those lessons behind. No matter how old we get, we’re always looking for other smiles on other faces. Our assumptions about what we need to do to get those similes shape how we think about ourselves and relate to others.
Sometimes those strategies serve us. Other times, they don’t. And when they don’t, we often need help to change those patterns of relating.
Yet, even as we may struggle under a cloudy sky, even as we may feel we are not or cannot be loved as we want, even as our strategies for getting love may lead us astray, we must always remember something vital:
We have always wanted to be loved. From the very beginning.
And that longing for love is strong. And brilliant. And good.
What if you stepped into that brilliance?
Coaching can help. Book your free Discovery Session here.
