The dynamic-maturational model of attachment and adaptation (DMM) is a biopsychosocial model describing the effect attachment relationships can have on human development and functioning. It is especially focused on the effects of relationships between children and parents and between reproductive couples. It developed initially from attachment theory as developed by John Bowlby and Mary Ainsworth, and incorporated many other theories into a comprehensive model of adaptation to life's many dangers. The DMM was initially created by developmental psychologist Patricia McKinsey Crittenden and her colleagues including David DiLalla, Angelika Claussen, Andrea Landini, Steve Farnfield, and Susan Spieker.
A main tenet of the DMM is that exposure to danger drives neural development and adaptation to promote survival. Danger includes relationship danger. In DMM-attachment theory, when a person needs protection or comfort from danger from a person with whom they have a protective relationship, the nature of the relationship generates relation-specific self-protective strategies. These are patterns of behavior which include the underlying neural processing. The DMM protective strategies describe aspects of the parent–child relationship, romantic relationships, and to a degree, relationships between patients/clients and long-term helping professionals.
History Out of the development of attachment theory, British psychiatrist John Bowlby coalesced a coherent theory and is generally credited with creating the foundation for modern attachment theory. Mary Ainsworth, an American-Canadian psychologist, started working with Bowlby in 1950. Ainsworth completed her doctoral thesis in 1940 under William Blatz, who had developed security theory, a precursor to attachment theory. Blatz believed the core nature of the relationship between a (to use his colloquial terms) mother and child involved the development of a trusted and secure relationship to function as a safe base for a child's need to explore. This set an initial foundation for the developing theory of attachment as involving a two-pattern model, security vs insecurity, centered on safety and play.
However, throughout the 1950s, both Ainsworth and Bowlby began developing a three-pattern model centered on danger and survival. In the 1960s, Ainsworth developed the first scientific method to assess attachment, called the strange situation. The results of her assessments confirmed a three-pattern model. Staying with a secure vs insecure framework, Ainsworth identified one secure pattern and two completely different insecure patterns. She labeled these with the letters A, B, C, with B representing the secure pattern.
Ainsworth's graduate students, including Mary Main and Patricia "Pat" Crittenden, made important developments to attachment science and theory. Both Main and Crittenden realized that the criteria Ainsworth was using did not allow for the attachment classification of a significant number of children. In the 1970s Main initially described most of this group as being disorganized, unable to organize an attachment strategy to help them meet their attachment system needs for safety. Main and Solomon later redefined disorganized attachment. Decades of research were dedicated to exploring the concept of disorganized attachment, but ultimately the concept proved almost completely unhelpful.
Crittenden studied under Ainsworth in the 1980s, ten years after Main. Because Crittenden initially focused on danger and saw the attachment system as promoting survival, she rejected the idea that a significant portion of children could fail to organize an attachment strategy to survive. Thus, she looked for other explanations about the apparent shortcomings in Ainsworth's initial model. As she did, she expanded the A, B, C patterns of attachment, and with the help of Andrea Landini they organized the patterns into what eventually became the DMM.
She also started her work after John Bowlby wrote the third book in his Attachment and Loss trilogy in 1980, Loss: Sadness and Depression. In Chapter 4 of that book, Bowlby outlined his view that attachment was intimately connected with information processing and the defensive exclusion of information to survive psychological danger. He argued that common psychological defense mechanisms were actually efforts to keep certain types of unwanted information out of one's mind during experiences and while considering issues and making decisions. Crittenden centered her work on how humans develop self-protective strategies and patterns of information processing in the context of danger.
In a sense, Crittenden began where Bowlby and Ainsworth left off. While moving away from some of the older concepts such as secure vs insecure and internal working models, she kept and refined the three-pattern model. The DMM continues to evolve and Fonagy describes it as ″the most clinically sophisticated model that attachment theory has to offer at the present time.″
DMM-attachment
Basic definition of DMM-attachment Attachment describes a system which involves a person's need to be protected from danger, and comforted especially after exposure to danger, and a relationship with an attachment figure who can provide protection from danger and comfort. As a system centered on survival, it also involves a person's need to increase reproductive opportunities and protect progeny.
Particularly when the attachment system involves a caregiver and child, the relational interactions associated with attachment needs shapes neural development and emotional and biological regulation processes in children. Thus, a child's relational environment, and parenting environment, has lifelong impacts.
An attachment figure for children may be one or both parents or other close caregiver, and for adults a romantic partner. An attachment figure is someone to whom a person is most likely to turn to under stress. That person may be a stronger, wiser, and trusted (even if not always safe or protective) person. An attachment-influencing relationship has the qualities of being affectively charged and involving the regulation or dysregulation of emotions. It also involves protecting a person from being forced to handle something outside their developmental ability (their zone of proximal development). An optimal attachment figure is sensitively attuned and responsive to the person's communications and needs and encourages curiosity and the exploration of new information.
Helping professionals, clergy, lawyers, probation officers, teachers, club leaders, friends and other people may function as an auxiliary attachment figure, or transitional attachment figure (TAF), to help people get through a difficult experience.
Danger can be objective (deep water, cliff edges, snakes) or subjective and relevant to only particular attachment patterns. For people who tend to use self-protective A-strategies, danger can include aggressive or dismissive parental responses, not doing the right thing, doing the wrong thing, expressing feelings especially if negative, relying on others to meet needs, and being in conflict. For people who tend to use self-protective C-strategies, danger can include an inconsistent or lack of parental response, not expressing and satisfying feelings especially if negative, following someone else's rules which don't satisfy feelings, compromising, relying on the self to meet needs, and not being in conflict or a struggle.
DMM contributions to the development of attachment theory Crittenden and colleagues have advanced attachment knowledge in numerous ways. Crittenden and Landini describe many of these in their 2011 book Assessing Adult Attachment: A Dynamic-Maturational Approach to Discourse Analysis.
Focus on danger: The DMM focus on danger, rather than safety, orients an understanding of the attachment system in a way that is practical and useful for understanding response to threat and conflict. Bowlby focused on danger, but other subsequent models changed the focus to safety. The DMM focus on danger is consistent with other biopsychosocial models, such as the polyvagal theory which describes opposing nervous system features which activate in contexts of safety or danger.
Clarification of terminology: The DMM avoids older attachment terms such as secure vs insecure, attachment categories and measures, attachment disorders, disorganized attachment, internal working models, and top level terms such as avoidant and ambivalent. It uses terms such as pathways of development instead of developmental trajectories.
Development of lifespan attachment assessments: Crittenden and colleagues developed a comprehensive lifespan set of attachment assessments (described below), and enhanced existing assessments. Since theory leads scientific inquiry, and scientific findings add to theory, DMM assessments contributed to more detailed theory.
Maturational and changeable: DMM-attachment recognizes that humans are able to utilize more and more sophisticated self-protective attachment strategies as they age. Hence, attachment patterns can become increasingly complex with age. Infants begin with instinctive strategies such as smiling and reaching, and through behavioral learning develop an increasing array of ways to gain protection from danger from their caregivers. Thought and communication patterns are eventually added to a person's available strategies. People can change their primary strategy, add additional strategies, and reorganize from an A-C strategy to a B strategy.
Strategies: Strategies are the ways people get their needs met. Self-protective strategies are not diagnoses or mental health disorders. The strategies may be quite functional in certain types of relationships, and dysfunctional in other relationships if not adjusted. Selecting a specific response in a specific situation is not necessarily dictated by a strategy preference, it is situation and context driven, which Crittenden describes as a dispositional representation (DR). Crittenden expanded and more finely defined attachment strategies (or patterns), as noted below.
Detailed strategies: The DMM described known behaviors with more specificity, identified new attachment behaviors, and new attachment patterns.
Compulsive compliance was first identified in 1988, and was added into the DMM patterns as A4 in 1992. It describes a child's adaptation to a harsh or controlling parent by learning to inhibit behavior disagreeable to the parent and compulsively engaging in behaviors which please the parent, but may be boring or harmful to the child. (FPA) describes the use of inappropriate positive affect when negative affect would be more appropriate. An example is overbright smiling or laughing in the context of present danger or while experiencing pain. Victoria Climbié is considered a good case example. At age eight she was murdered by caregiver abuse and neglect. Her physical scars and other signs of abuse were seen by multiple professionals and agencies, including doctors, nurses, social workers, and clergy, who all failed to recognize the extreme danger she was in. At the same time, she was described by a number of people as happy, friendly, "twirling up and down the ward", "had the most beautiful smile that lit up the room", and "you could beat her and she wouldn't cry... she could take the beatings and pain like anything." In the ABC+D model, this behavior is theorized as a marker of disorganized attachment. Shame is identified by adult attachment interviews (below) conducted with the DMM method as a particularly sensitive emotion in A-patterns. Shame is defined as having an intrapersonal quality involving the fear of failing to meet an external standard, often too high a standard, set by others, along with self-blame and over-attribution of responsibility.