An introductory definition of attachment from the DMM perspective, and why it is relevant to legal (and other relational) professionals.
An ICCI whitepaper. Mark Baumann, © 2017-2025
Attachment is often described as simply involving a child who seeks safety from a parent, and a parent who provides safety and who supports a child’s exploration. It is also described as a unique relationship between any two people who rely on each other for safety, such as spouses. The latter definition applies to clients and professionals whose role is to protect them.
Attachment describes a neurobiological system which is sensitive to social interactions. The system is a survival system. Activation of the system generates behaviors, thoughts and neural processing like memory function, information processing, and decision making. In the context of litigation, attachment plays out in often obvious manners. Understanding the effect on neural processing has profound importance for lawyers.
Attachment history and the ABC model
Attachment theory and science were initially developed by John Bowlby and Mary Ainsworth in the 1940’s, 1950’s and 1960’s. Ainsworth developed the first, and still an excellent, scientific method for assessing attachment patterns. It’s called the Strange Situation Procedure. Other researchers later developed additional assessment methods, such as the Adult Attachment Interview.
Over decades of use, all the attachment assessments consistently identify just three primary attachment patterns. Ainsworth was the first to describe them and she originally identified them as the A, B and C patterns.
Since the 1960’s, three primary models of attachment developed from the Bowlby-Ainsworth foundation. Each model has assigned a variety to top level terms to supplement or replace the ABC designators, so the terms can get a little confusing. We’ll stick primarily with ABC in this article.
[Please note, some models have proposed a fourth attachment pattern. The evidence for a fourth pattern is marginal. The stories about those are another topic, and there is some information in this article.]
Attachment in childhood and the ABC patterns
The attachment system for children becomes significant around 7 months of age and goes through several early stages. As the attachment system blooms and develops, the child’s brain is also experiencing life’s greatest period of growth. Thus, the development of the attachment system and development of neural structures grow together and influence each other in profound ways.
Cognitive and affective information sources
It may seem odd there are only three primary self-protective strategy patterns for how infants can “survive their parents.” The reason is that there are only a few ways humans usually get information about the world they live in and use that information to predict danger.
One way is emotional information, which is the C-pattern. “When I feel X, then Y is going to happen. As it has in the past.”
Another is cognitive information, or temporally sequenced information based on experience. This is the A-pattern. “If X happens, then Y will happen, as it has in the past.”
For some children, it’s safter to rely more on emotional or cognitive sources of information. In the B-pattern, children are safe enough to potentially utilize both sources of information.
If it still seems too simplistic to think there could only be three patterns, don’t worry because there are many sub-patterns and some people can blend A and C patterns. For those who delve deeper, it quickly gets complex and overwhelming. But for legal professionals, the finer details in the sub-patterns aren’t as important as understanding the three big broad patterns and the most salient details on the impact to information processing. Learning a couple of specific sub-patterns is not too hard, and can be rather handy, but we are getting ahead of ourselves.
Prevalence
About half any population of children or adults bias their information processing to rely to some degree on just one of these two information sources.
Research studies suggest that for people seeking substantial help from mental health professionals the prevalence rate of people utilizing A or C self-protective strategies is very high. In our experience, in family law, criminal and other legal areas, the prevalence rate is equally high.
It may be true that most people seeking legal help understand their situation with biased information processing.
The Dynamic Maturational Model
Of all the significant attachment models, only one offers both a strong scientific foundation and comprehensive, detailed, and published descriptions of self-protective attachment strategies. It’s the Dynamic Maturational Model of Attachment and Adaptation (DMM), initially developed by Dr. Patricia Crittenden. The DMM is the newest model and was developed in the 1990s and initially published in 2000.
The DMM emphasizes two of Bowlby’s ideas developed at the end of his career: a focus on information processing, and on danger rather than safety as the ball to keep your eye on. Thus, a working definition of attachment is:
Attachment involves a person’s (child or adult) need to be protected from danger, and comforted especially after exposure to danger, and a relationship with a person who can provide both. The attachment system promotes information processing and self-protective strategies in a manner which tends to be cognitively (A) or affectively (C) biased, or a less biased blend of both (B).
Three key attachment-related issues
Attachment figures and transitional attachment figures, danger, and comfort are three important attachment concepts.
Attachment figures and transitional attachment figures (AF and TAF)
Usually, parents are attachment figures for their children, although there are many other options in some cases. Romantic partners are usually attachment figures to each other. There are levels of attachment figures, like primary, secondary, and tertiary. A grandparent, uncle or aunt, or a sibling can fill the need at any of those levels.
In some situations, people need a temporary, or transitional attachment figure. A teacher, coach, religious figure can all serve as a TAF. Mental health counselors often serve as a TAF.
Lawyers do too.
Look back at the DMM definition of attachment. Does that describe what you do for your clients, protect them from danger?
Ideal qualities of an AF/TAF include providing protection and comfort and establishing a safe and trusted relationship where the client is comfortable confronting uncomfortable thoughts.
Social and relational danger
Danger is a key issue to think about. It involves an array of things, including objective dangers like starvation, rejection, and assault. It also involves subjective perceptions of social and relational danger.
For example, when facing danger, for some people being alone is dangerous (C) and for others it is safe (A).
For some, struggling and fighting over an issue is safe (C) while for others it is a danger (A).
A list of objective, subjective, and age-salient dangers is in the article DMM Danger list at the Conflict Science Institute site.
People involved in litigation almost always face danger in the form of one or more potential significant losses. At the same time, those who hire lawyers lack effective strategies to manage the fear, danger and potential/actual loss.
Because people are exposed to danger in litigation, their attachment strategies tend to drive their approach to the case. That approach is usually biased to rely more heavily, or exclusively, on one information source, and to defensively exclude information from the other source. This can create impediments to seeing the true nature and solutions to the problem.
Comfort
Providing comfort, especially after exposure to an alarming danger, is also a key component of an attachment relationship. This is true for TAFs. For professionals, it’s useful to think a bit about how to appropriately provide comfort. Hopefully, the inappropriate ways are obvious.
Many lawyers naturally provide comfort. They take steps to reassure their clients, make sure their clients understand the legal issues and their advice, take time to prepare the client for a worst-case outcome, and give an unexpected and occasional small reduction on a billing charge or don’t charge for certain things.
Giving extra thought to what the client may need or appreciate in the moment and taking a small and unexpected step can be a kindness, and a comfort. This could be a short text message:
“I forgot to ask, how is your [person, animal] doing after the [relevant incident]?”
Going above and beyond what the client expects can be a comfort.
“I decided to look at my notes again, and I realized that there’s an unusual and potentially interesting issue we hadn’t thought of or talked about…”
Addressing a big-ticket attachment need is usually a frightful experience for clients, and a little comfort can help.
“I know you don’t want to think about, let alone talk about, all the bad things that happened, but I need to make sure I understand them so we’ll have a better chance of getting the protection order issued. I’m going to ask you some detailed questions, and it may take an hour or so. Once we’re done, we’ll have all the information we need, and we probably won’t have to come back to the topic ever again.”
Identifying a hidden need or a previously unseen pattern of conduct and offering to talk about it and searching for ways to meet the need may be a kindness no one else has offered. That pattern might involve some form of control the client has been subject to yet not fully aware of it. (DMM attachment adds a significant layer of understanding in domestic violence cases.)
Establishing a safe and trusted relationship before you explore the client’s sensitive attachment needs, the heart of being a transitional attachment figure, is a key element in offering protection and comfort.
How does attachment impact information processing and decision making?
Essentially, it affects many domains of human conduct in unique and usually somewhat predictable ways.
Perhaps most relevant for lawyers, it impacts how people engage when threat, conflict and danger are present. For people surviving life with A-pattern self-protective strategies, they tend to be conflict avoidant. They tend to compromise too easily because conflict can be subjectively dangerous.
For people surviving life with C-strategies, they tend to be conflict pursuing. Compromise for them may be unsafe and it’s avoided. Peace can be subjectively dangerous.
In the Adult Attachment Interview, dozens of domains of conduct and thinking processes are assessed to help identify an attachment pattern. For legal and helping professionals, we think looking for information in 5-10 domains is sufficient to improve client counseling and to help optimize client decision making.
Here is a more detailed article on information processing.
Attachment resources for further reading
There is a lot of information, and misinformation, in print. At our sister site, the Conflict Science Institute, there is a good bit of information about attachment and the DMM. There is a DMM Wiki holding over 60 DMM-related articles. Here is a longer and more detailed article on DMM attachment for lawyers.
Conflict Science Institute offers an attachment CLE series, small group and in-house training.
Louise Atkin, a British psychiatrist, wrote a lovely DMM introductory article, Why attachment matters.
The Wikipedia article on Attachment theory is a mess and hard to get through. The DMM article on Wikipedia is coherent and comprehensive. It lists many additional resources.
For anyone who wants to jump into a deep dive, there are two books to consider. Assessing adult attachment: A dynamic-maturational approach to discourse analysis may be best for lawyers, although it is technical manual. Raising Parents: attachment, representation, and treatment offers a more narrative-based approach.