Family Attachment Theory

others when they have nowhere else to turn.
Attachment
According to Rothbaum, Rosen, Ujiie, and Uchida (2002), attachment and systems theories have similarities but remarkable differences: Attachment is between individual family relationships and systems affect the entire family, dyad attachments provide protection, care, and security, while the system of the family provides dynamics, structures, roles, communication patterns, boundaries and power differentials. Although attachment theory typically refers to a child-adult relationship and the systems theory focuses on family functioning, the latter is affected by attachment patterns within the family (Rothbaum et al., 2002). Individual attachment styles while growing up have led to reluctance

Our family has become more unique as each of us has gained new experiences and our individual qualities have come together as a whole. Factors that have affected our subsystems which have led to changes in the structure of our family system are alcoholism, mental health, negative communication styles and patterns, particular life cycle stages, significant losses, culture, and the boundaries of our individual relationships with one another. The alcoholism creates dysfunction in my family and has shaped boundaries with negative contact amongst the five of us (as cited by Nichols, 2014). Depression, obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD), and anxiety have affected each person in my family. Due to insecure/ambivalent attachment the emotions of when each of us left home were marked by anxiety and insecurity for both parent and child. My mother was unaccepting of my engagement to my late husband because she felt I should remain at home until school was finished and expected me to be “courted” in an old fashioned way, as well as have a Hispanic and Catholic wedding. Due to those expectations, we

It was a traumatic and unexpected loss that shook my family. The loss of my husband stopped me in my tracks, and it felt like I was from another planet learning to survive in an entirely new world. Of course I am still affected and triggered by my grief, but the journey has been bittersweet and transformational, to say the least. However, the time of transition I am basing this paper on is how my new relationship has affected my family and the ways in which we are making the transition from loss to renewal and what they once viewed and knew me as, to the person I am today. To understand the impact of the loss one would have to know that my late husband and I had known one another since sixth grade, married out of high school and for ten years prior to his death. We “grew up together” for some of our relationship and he became part of our family of origin, as did his nuclear family. Our relationship and his families with ours changed my family’s identity, as we joined the characteristics of two different families (Bennet, Wolin & McAvity, 1988). My late husband’s death disrupted the continuity of our family identity, and roles shifted to maintain a balance in the period of