A Secure Base

Product Information

What strategies can be used to provide sensitive caregiving that develops secure close relationships? Social workers and child care professionals wanting to effectively promote attachment and resilience in foster care and adoption.

BUT, family ties and the knowledge that the secure base is still available in times of difficulty remain very important. For example, a caregiver who is playing with a child in a focused, child-led way may be doing so with sensitivity and acceptance as well as demonstrating availability and promoting co-operation. If everyone could only understand what the alternatives to stable attachment are, a lifetime of suffering, surely the world could be transformed! Understanding this can help us to challenge and overcome unhelpful or unhealthy attachment behaviours, to form healthier relationships with ourselves and others. Ellen Broomé welcomed Gillian Schofield and Mary Beek to talk about the new edition of their bestselling publications, The Secure Base Model and Promoting Attachment and Resilience.

Over time, the infant tends to become needy and angry, a ‘clingy', but distrustful and resistant child.

In later adolescence and adulthood, this pattern of minimising and apparently devaluing feelings and relationships is referred to as dismissing. The risk, then, is that feelings and behaviours might become fixed in destructive loops and the damage of the past will not be healed.Whilst a counsellor working in the classical client-centred approach may not feel the need for this blank to be filed, it's something I've found fascinating and which I intend to read into further. A more generalised expectation of adults as people who are likely to be there to help and protect also develops over time. We have chosen to represent this process in a circular model, the caregiving cycle, which shows the inter-connectedness of caregiver/child minds and behaviour, as well as their ongoing movement and change. A secure base is provided through a relationship with one or more sensitive and responsive attachment figures who meet the child's needs and to whom the child can turn as a safe haven, when upset or anxious. This process begins with the child's needs and behaviour and then focuses on what is going on in the mind of the caregiver.