Beyond Human Relationships: 4 Things That May Give You the Safety You're Looking For

Introduction

The pandemic may have been one trigger. So may the pull of a capitalist world that leans toward the individual. And we cannot look away from how political change across the Arab world presses on our social lives. Whatever the cause, it is hard to miss that the world today inclines heavily toward isolation rather than social engagement. Researchers have noted a rise in the number of people living alone, and a marked avoidance of social closeness.

These shifts worry researchers, because people without solid social ties lose an important source of support in times of distress. Close social relationships play a real part in protecting mental health. And yet, despite that concern, it seems people are able to draw on more than one source.

According to attachment theory, we form a distinct bond with certain people because of the safety they give us. And since this develops innately, theorists long assumed that only other human beings could meet our need for safety.

Recently, though, newer research has questioned how true that assumption is, showing that humans are not the only ones able to offer safety. Places, pets, even social media platforms can meet this need, particularly under imminent threat, or in circumstances where reaching other people is difficult. Here, "non-human figures" take on the role of the attachment figure in the relationship.

What Attachment Is, and How We Understand It

John Bowlby, to whom we owe the foundations of attachment theory as we know it today, proposed in his work on human relationships that the search for supportive bonds with others is innate. He traced this to the infant's total dependence on parents, or other caregivers, at the beginning of life, and to the need for an "other" in order to develop and survive. Through our development, then, we come under selective pressures to seek safety in close relationships, and to look for its sources in moments of distress. Attachment theorists therefore suggest that we are motivated throughout life to build and hold on to a sense of safety in our close and significant relationships. The people we are bound to in adulthood, such as friends and partners, come to occupy the role of the attachment figure, much as caregivers did in childhood.

According to attachment theory, close relationships offer two forms of safety: the "safe haven" and the "secure base". The safe haven lies in the attachment figure's readiness to help when a person's wellbeing or survival is under threat. When a child stumbles and falls, they turn instinctively to their caregiver for care. The secure base is the child's felt confidence that the caregiver can be turned to when physical or emotional support is needed. It is a refuge that stays available whether or not it is needed right now.

The safe haven and the secure base work in concert. The safe haven offers protection and defense in moments of distress and immediate danger: illness, for instance, or facing assault, or psychological crisis, pushes a person toward closeness with the attachment figure who can give immediate safety. The secure base operates in calmer moments, physical and emotional, providing the solid ground for personal growth, for opening up and exploring, carried by the reassurance that support is there if it is needed.

Our need for safety grows, changes, and takes new shapes at different stages of life, and the single central attachment figure widens into a network of close, significant relationships able to meet that need. Theorists also hold that the inner psychological processes bound up with attachment reach far into our personal relationships, including initial attraction and the way we go about resolving difficulties with one another.

Attachment in relationships takes different forms, and each of them shapes and carves how a person behaves and functions within a relationship. But that account on its own can overlook the more complicated dynamics of attachment in a modern world inclined toward individualism generally, and in the Arab world in particular, where people are living through shifts and a reworking of what the self and relationships mean, and through the consequences of those dynamics for everyday social life.

The Non-Human Attachment Figure

For any party in a relationship to take on the role of attachment figure, it must essentially meet four criteria that set the relationship apart from an ordinary, friendly bond:

1. Providing a safe haven
2. A secure base
3. Maintaining closeness when a person needs it
4. Separation producing distress, longing, and a wish for closeness.

Classical attachment research examined these criteria in our relationships with human figures. But more recent research urges us to widen what we mean by an attachment figure, since we may draw psychological safety from our non-human bonds: with God, with social media, with our pets, with places, and with our material belongings.

The idea may seem strange at first. But the inner attachment system evolved to meet our need for safety in distress, beginning with the earliest bond to parents (or childhood caregivers), and then widening to take in significant people such as friends and romantic partners. So why should the circle stop at human figures, when in our hardest hours we do turn to non-human ones that can provide the safety we need, in its various forms and by its various criteria, in situations where the usual figures cannot?

When Human Relationships Fall Short, Safety Has Other Sources

The Divine

In societies where religion and faith hold a large cultural and spiritual place, some people turn to prayer and to the religious practices that bring them nearer to God. Attachment researchers see this wish for nearness, and the search for safety through such practices, as serving a person much as human attachment figures do. Research suggests that God's inner presence can meet all four criteria of safety, particularly where someone needs to compensate for the absence of solid attachment relationships with others. Researchers working within attachment theory hold that a believer's relationship with God is itself an attachment relationship, though the divine occupies a particular place in the hierarchy of attachment figures because it is held as sacred. Faith gives a person a singular sense of closeness to God, of being answered in need and in asking, and a complete trust that they will not be left alone.

Our Best Friend

Studies looking at the distinct relationship between people and their pets (dogs in particular) have found that pets too can meet our need for safety, even though they do not rank above human relationships in the hierarchy of attachment figures. This confirms that our sources of safety widen when human relationships cannot supply it.

In a 2008 study, Kurdek turned to the particular relationship between dogs and their owners: in the United States alone, more than 60 million dogs live in their owners' homes as members of the family. Kurdek looked for the features of an attachment relationship in the bond between a dog and its owner, and found dogs to be an exceptional source of the safety people need.

Coming "Home"

People also lean on certain places, the home among them, to replenish their reserves of psychological safety and recover a sense of security. You could even say that a degree of secure attachment shows itself in whatever makes certain people feel "at home," or in the trust and support they draw from an entire culture. Some might ask whether the home counts as a site of attachment only because it gathers us with the people who can offer safety when we need it. Some research has shown that places on their own can give a sense of safety, through our own experiences in them, regardless of whether other people are present. Researchers have found no evidence of cases where attachment to a place outranks a human relationship, but they read the turn to home as an attachment figure as a response to the need for solitude.

The Safety We Own

Just as a child needs a favorite blanket in order to settle, adults may turn to their material belongings, inert and unchanging, to recover a sense of safety in the face of distress. A child's first experience of control is over inanimate things: a favorite toy, a blanket they refuse to sleep without. Through these objects the child develops psychological capacities that rest heavily on external control. Safety is buried in the object's stillness. Material things give us a feeling of control precisely because they are steady and unsurprising, and that steadiness offers emotional stability and a secure base. Seeking safety in our belongings is not a strategy that belongs to children alone; adults use it too, which is part of why we reach for our phones in moments of distress, especially when the support we hoped for from human relationships is not there.

Human relationships are complex and simple at once. What is certain, so far, is that they remain surprising and call for deeper study and research, especially given what they are passing through amid the political and social changes we are witnessing. What is also certain is that safety is the first engine of both change and relationship. Safety is also what moves us to act, to innovate, and to create opportunities at every level.

References:

Bretherton, I., & Munholland, K. A. (2008). Internal working models in attachment relationships: Elaborating a central construct in attachment theory.

Counted, V. (2016). God as an attachment figure: A case study of the God attachment language and God concepts of anxiously attached Christian youths in South Africa. Journal of Spirituality in Mental Health, 18(4), 316-346.

Keefer, L. A., Landau, M. J., & Sullivan, D. (2014). Non-human support: Broadening the scope of attachment theory. Social and Personality Psychology Compass, 8(9), 524-535.

Kurdek, L. A. (2008). Pet dogs as attachment figures. Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, 25(2), 247-266.

Rockett, B., & Carr, S. (2014). Animals and attachment theory. Society & Animals, 22(4), 415-433.

Originally published on Sasa Post in 2022