Many parents feel an ongoing sense of drowning in a sea of unmanageable behaviors, frustrations related to child management, and their own ineffective styles of creating and maintaining satisfying relationships. Many of these parents are the faithful followers of a family culture and dynamic that is personally unsatisfying and has ill-prepared them for the day to day demands of operating in a family of their own. The primary difficulty is that they have grown to maturity is a family system that has dysregulated, interfered with or interrupted their social, emotional, psychological and sometimes physical development. The impact of this disruption often generates predictable family patterns of interaction that lead to insufficient or insecure attachments between parent and child as well as between child and others.

Attachment is about the degree that one feels emotionally connected to others, and the predictable nature of that connection. Attachment allows each of us to have those in our lives that we know we can count on, if we are stranded they will come rescue us, or when we are upset they will come to our aid. When attachment is inconsistent or poor the predictable nature of the emotional connection is vague and ill-formed. This appreciably reduces trust and the calm expectation of support that human beings rely on to feel a part of a community or family.

Where exactly does attachment falter in many that struggle with it throughout their lives? When family members experience dysregulated interactions with each other, then the person to person attunement is non-existent, weak, or inconsistent. Attunement is more about the ability to read others, noticing and reacting to the nuances of the individual. This is like being able to step into the rhythm of someone else’s dance and pick up the dance steps you need to successfully perform within the social exchange or interaction. Learning to recognize and correctly predict the interactions (dance) of others would subsume that there is an existent consistency in behavioral and emotional environment.

Attunement and attachment are two areas of concern when dealing with family dynamics which that will interrupt a child’s success at forming a meaningful and satisfying emotional bond with family members. When failing to satisfactorily form meaningful and gratifying emotional bond it is easy to pathologize these families as being dysfunctional. Much has been and will continue to be written about the dysfunctional family. However, a recognition of the dysfunction frequently carries and unfortunate element of judgment about parents and caregivers.

Families that struggle with the quality of attachment, sometimes labeled as insecure attachment consistently fail to develop, employ consistently, and propagate the strategies to build and maintain relationships that are meaningful and satisfying. This is not an intentional instruction given by the parent to the child, but a passive schooling delivered to the child as he or she matures within the family dynamic.

Families that possess attachment problems have difficulty connecting to each other and those outside of their family rather equally, which is also related to having ineffective strategies to manage emotional intensity. This can result in a lack of trust and eroded self-worth for many if not all family members. Many times there exists and underlying flavor of disappointment, fear of being alone, fear of letting others get close, and a tremendous need to control through coercive tactics. Families become the vehicle of multigenerational transmission of traumagenic family structure which inadequately trains models or employs effective attachment and attunement strategies. Essentially the primary training ground for these strategies are missing effective strategies, and the poor quality attachments get moved down from generation to generation, and may well be related to many societal issues and challenges face in the world today.

Helping families develop effective strategies can be accomplished in a number of settings, marital or family therapy, support groups, parent education programs that focus on relationship enhancement, and through participation in a faith community. This is by no means an exhaustive list of possibilities, but they do represent a common and usually available avenue to remold the attachment and attunement patterns found in traumagenic families.

An article may have limited ability to offer much of substance in the way of help and support, but below a few suggestions are offered to reduce the impact of traumagenic families on the attachment and attunement process of families that may struggle with this issue.

Attunement and Attachment can be improved through working to accomplishing the following:

•  Parents learning to recognize and regulate their own emotions

• Model increasingly effective self regulation and reinforce family member attempts to self-regulate their emotions.

• Parents develop ability to tolerate emotional intensity without reacting negatively to family members.

• Model increasingly effective ability to tolerate emotional intensity without reacting and reinforce attempts made by other family members to tolerate emotional intensity

• Develop consistent, loving delivered and enforced boundaries around require performance in the family.

• Protect and invest time to have pleasant activities that are based on communication such as playing games inside and outside of the house, doing work together, make time to talk and share ideas and experiences.

• Caregivers need to model a pattern of how they manage their own mistakes and initiate repair.

• Develop and maintain predictable routines and schedules.