Attachment 4: Compulsive caretaking

If you have already read Attachment 1: The power of attachment styles in relationships, this article further talks specifically about a lesser discussed attachment style termed ‘compulsive caregiving’. 

Compulsive caregivers deny their own needs and focus on the needs of others. They find themselves as adults continually caring for, and rescuing others around them.

As children, their parents were not able to meet their needs, but rather, relied on the child to look after theirs. This does not necessarily mean in a physical sense, but in an emotional sense. Looking after the parent emotionally is a way for the child to maintain a connection - it is safer for them to do this than not. Children, for evolutionary reasons, fear abandonment above all else, and so they modify and adapt themselves to their parents in order to feel safe. Caregiver children develop a heightened sense of attunement with their parents in order to do this and be able to look after them emotionally. They develop an inherent, unconscious way of scanning to know what to do, and what is safe if the parent is volatile or unresponsive: What mood is the parent in? If I do this, what will the reaction be? Is the mood of the parent safe? How can I move the parent out of the mood they are in? Caregiver children learn (unconsciously, without realising it) to monitor the parent and then act in ways it feels the parent needs or wants. They are caregiving emotionally to the adults around them, and so learn to not express their own needs, but to serve others, which then becomes their definition of love.

As adults, on the surface, they seem comfortable, even happy in this role. However, underneath, unconsciously, this role of suppressing their own needs over those of others can leave them feeling empty, lonely, angry, and simply ignored and unseen.

Further reading

Patterns of Relating: An Adult Attachment, Malcolm L. West, Adrienne E. Sheldon-Keller

The Emotionally Absent Mother, Jasmine Lee Cori