198. Attachment Theory & Offender Behavior PART 1

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folks join and it was kind of cool. We did more John Benay after documentary debriefs, so it's really nice to get on there and chat every once in a while. So again, as we've said before, just because we are slowing down, you know, professionally, some things have changed. I am now on a state board for hostage and crisis negotiations for the next two years. We have to ebb and flow with our bandwidth.

and this is one of them. And I'm so unbelievably grateful for the experience of the last seven and a half years that I had working in tandem with law enforcement. It's been just an eye opener, and you know, I've really I've been able to put my foot into a world and get some some real respect and really achieve some accomplishments that I never had even dreamed of a decade ago, which was really great.

if not majorly, over a regular forty hour week. Oh yes, oh yes, So let me just jump into a recap of last episode.

and forth as there was back in the day. So I think that This was like a really great grounding little footnote to put in and sort of reorient our listeners to it. And then we also were able to add our live show from the Berkshire's Podcast Festival and our most recent episode on the intersection of the Delphi murder trial along with the topic of digital ethics and our profession. I know, it sounds like a wild combination, right.

We got a lot of responses from that episode that will probably end up generating a shrink wrap stream to address many of the questions. Again, please join us over on Patreon for more of that discussion if you haven't had a chance to listen to it, highly highly recommend it.

I tried to control my soapbox, but it's another example of when someone just goes off the rail and our profession something that really Doctor Shiloh and I just at this point we have to contain our rage and just like roll our eyes that these things happen, right.

primary caregiver. The quality of this attachment has been shown over the years to profoundly influence the child's emotional wellbeing and psychological resilience, which goes on to affect major parts of the individual life as an adult, really in all areas of interpersonal relationships and their view of themselves.

of people. We as clinicians would not be able to do our work without unbelievably directed and intense research into particular areas of our field, and this is absolutely one of those times. John Bolby was a psychodynamic researcher that was trained under Melanie Klein and he specialized in child psychiatry, with training at the Tavistock Clinic in London during the

nineteen thirties where he worked with children and families. Now, Bulby was able to merge empirical observations with psychoanalytic theory, and that was something that was very new at the time, like taking this kind of amorphous talk therapy theories and ideas and concepts and actually do some real research with it, okay, And he led to this idea of what's now called

attachment theory. He asserted that attachment behaviors like crying or clinging in infants and young children are biologically programmed into humans and animals to keep infants safe. So he proposed three different attachment styles.

You'll find a link in our show notes. We'll also put in links with actual footage of some of these experiments taking place. So the Strange Situation is one of those really seminal masters and doctoral level psychology lectures that kind of levels you up in terms of understanding human behavior. If you don't have time today, let me briefly break down what was found. So imagine being a baby.

sort of suspicious stranger suddenly shows up. And remember you're a baby. Your caregiver then leaves, and you're like, wait, where are you going? And then just as you're kind of huffing and squirming and fully considering a total meltdown, your caregiver parent returns acting calm collected, like nothing happened. And this situation is carefully repeated with a number of slight differences. So one time the caregiver is in like directly in the line of sight of the baby as

they leave. Another time they kind of slip out of the room when the baby's distracted. Sometimes there are more distractions than others. Sometimes a stranger is seen entering the room, and then other times they just slip in again with the baby completely unaware. So this test is the ultimate like who is your safe person and how are you going to react? A little bit of a challenge for those babies, and it measures how they handle caregiver separation,

the reunion and the general awkwardness of stranger danger. So from these experiments, all of which were viewed and filmed through two way mirrors, the three then what came to be four attachment styles emerged. Some babies were seen to be cool throughout the various scenarios, which we now call

securely attached. Some babies clearly gave their caregivers the cold shoulder, which is known as avoidant, and others go full dramatic meltdown, which is called ambivalent, although it doesn't really sound ambivalent at all.

into the caregiving environment and resulting attachment style. But beyond infants, the variants of the strange situation have been developed to study attachment disorder in older children and even in individuals with disabilities. So we have come to know that follow ups with participants in Ainsworth's studies have shown that early attachment styles can influence adult relationship patterns, mental health, and even parenting styles.

multicultural issues. And I mean when I say multiculture, I'm also talking about sort of the concentric circles of our family culture, our neighborhood culture, our church culture, all of these things coming to bear. We now have a better understanding that's helping us change our perspective on attachment theory. But anyway, getting back to the one on one lesson, as you were saying, Ainsworth's research inspired both Mary Mayne and ju the Solomon to dig even further.

all mental health clinicians. As I said earlier, I don't know of any programs that don't have right on hand the black and white videos of Harlowe's heartbreaking experiments with the monkeys, and you can find them as.

material that provided no food. What the experiment found was that the baby monkeys would cling to the warmth of a familiar caregiver over that of the cold metal when despite the danger of starving to death. And that's also what was found as these baby monkeys actually starved themselves to death because they would not want to leave the warmth of the cuddly mother that was warm and felt inviting and welcome, right right.

often quickly returns to baseline emotional expression. Right, so what you would sort of expect given the situation and is able to regulate now. Insecure avoidant attachment presents differently. In this style, the child minimizes reliance on the caregiver due to the child's perception or belief of the possibility of rejection or emotional unavailability from the caregiver. The baby avoids or ignores the caregiver and shows little emotional response upon

their return, basically indicating that the caregiver can't be relied on. So, like, why am I going to even bother? And Then these individuals as teens and then adults often struggle with intimacy and may appear emotionally distant.

they also can exhibit difficulty trusting others in relationships. Finally, disorganized attachment is observed in the strained situation when the child displays erratic or confused behaviors like freezing, approaching, or withdrawing from the caregiver. And what research has found is that these children exhibit contradictory behaviors, often stemming from their

history of trauma or abuse at this early age. And the terrible factor here is that the caregiver is person see by the child to simultaneously be a source of comfort and fear. The longitudinal studies show that these individuals are likely to struggle as children and adults with emotional regulation, ideas of self worth, and then solid or healthy interpersonal relationships. So look, folks, if you're self diagnosing while listening to this,

please just stop. I mean it's normal. All of us that go into this field are warned not to over diagnose ourselves. It's kind of like, you know, it's just like a step we all go through, right, but lay yourself off the hook for a bit and just kind of take it as a chance to learn about this wacky theory.

I mean, there's just way too many factors involved, including the child's level of innate resilience, the child's exposure to higher levels of support from individuals outside the immediate and intimate family dynamic. But it is pretty clear that disruptions in these early attachments can lead to attachment disorders in

the most challenging of cases. And with the immense body of literature that includes legitimate research as well as the more lurid portrayals in true crime, we can have a more insightful observation of the backgrounds of certain criminals and serial killers, and hence the reason we're talking about it today. So for fans of true crime, the following abbreviated list will likely hold no surprises, but that makes it a bit easier to look at the factors that we've been discussing.

Just as a quick disclaimer here, I want to say we have kind of intermingled and not not interchangeably. But you've probably heard us say both styles and diagnoses. So far, attachment styles are not diagnoses, so there are actually no attachment disorders that formally apply to adults. However, the styles and behaviors exhibited in adulthood can be a result of childhood diagnoses that we are going to cover later in

this episode. So just as we move forward, especially with these examples, I just want people to know that these aren't diagnoses. That again, you know, we don't slap labels or diagnoses on folks. We haven't evaluated ourselves.

her own mental health issues, including severe depression. Dahmer's father, a research chemist, was often not in the home, and apparently the birth of a younger brother, who was perceived to be the favorite, only increased family tensions. His parents' eventual divorce, leading to feelings of abandonment and isolation, were likely catalysts for existing attachment issues and Dahmer's underlying nascent psychopathy. That is also something to remember as we talk about

these examples. Attachment styles are not the only thing at play here, but they certainly played an important part of the development of the drives that drove these criminals. The research can be conflicting, with some writers talking about the relative normalcy within Dahmer's upbringing while also commenting that one of his childhood toys was a bucket of animal bones, bleached and dried by both Dahmer and his father as

a hobby. Dahmer shared in later interviews that his atrocities against his victims were attempts to keep them from leaving, and that is a drive that would parallel with an insecure, ambivalent, or resistant attachment style. Unstable early attachments may have contributed to his later inability to form healthy relationships and his

subsequent choices in participating in his specific type of criminal behavior. Again, there was a lot of other stuff at play, but I think it's very interesting to put this particular lens on these criminals and see how that played a part in the development of their crime style.

But there's some interesting underlying tones there. It's like the push and pull of like I hate you, I don't want you to leave me, this back and forth ambivalence, like it is ambivalence because it's back and forth so much in terms of what we see when people don't want to end relationships, even if it's toxic, and pulling

people back into relationships for the fear of abandonment. It's just really interesting for us, someone who works with couples at this point, to look at these really extreme examples, but then think about, like, how do I see that just play out in the therapy room?

personality disorder. And this is again one of those examples where there's just like this fascinating and holographic three D then diagram of different mental health diagnoses and attachment styles or attachment disorders. It all kind of comes together in very interesting ways. But you can't necessarily say that correlation.

the media. She committed her crimes within a brief time frame under circumstances that she claimed were acts of self defense against violent clients during her time working as a sex worker, so the media's framing of Warnos as a serial killer largely relied on gendered stereotypes and sensational narratives simply painting her as a monstrous anomaly rather than acknowledging

the complexities of her abusive background and situational contexts. This oversimplification ignored really key distinctions that separate serial killing from reactive or situational violence. I will say, I think this over simplification is made about a lot of serial killers, men included, So this entire episode is probably more about

not doing that moving forward more than anything. So in regard to attachment, Warno's experienced extreme instability in her early life, including her father's incarceration, abandonment by her mother, and left being raised by her grandparents, where she even further suffered sexual abuse, and frequent attempts to fend for herself in the woods behind the grandparents' home, where she would flee

for safety. The disorganized attachment style seems to be prevalent here, as it is typically associated with a history of severe neglect, abuse, or inconsistent caregiving. Disorganized attachment arises when a caregiver is both a source of comfort and fear. So call that from when we were talking about that earlier, so you can see how the reported abuse that she suffered at the hands of these now supposed caregivers her grandparents likely

created this paradoxical dynamic. This really led to profound relational difficulties and an inability to trust others. She was reported to have exhibited intense emotional outbursts, impulsivity, and difficulty forming stable relationships. Disorganized attachment often presents individuals with a marked inability to regulate their emotions due to the unresolved trauma.

I think it's fair to assert that Warnos's relationships were tumultuous and marked by mistrust, possibly the fear of abandonment and erratic behavior of people in her life and then sort of manifesting in her as well. This pattern often stems from disorganized attachment, where individuals yearn for connection but

really fear closeness due to those early experiences. However, or also, Warnos may have also exhibited traits of insecure ambivalent attachment, particularly in her intense need for love and validation that was paired with that fear of rejection. However, the severity in her early trauma and the abusive nature of her caregivers more strongly suggests disorganize attachment style. Disorganized attachment likely played a role in Warnos's psychological instability and violent actions.

I think we can say that her difficulty trusting others, coupled with a deep fear of being or abandon could have contributed to her extreme reactions to the threats that she perceived in dangerous situations and then resulted in her taking the lives of these men.

in El Paso, Texas. He was the youngest of five children to mixing immigrants. His father, a former Juarez police officer, was prone to violent outbursts, frequently subjecting his children to physical abuse. It is known and confirmed that Ramirez suffered multiple head injuries at a young age, one of which

resulted in a diagnosis of temporal lobe epilepsy. Now by the age of ten, he was exposed to the use of drugs and began his own path of experimentation, much too young to understand the ramifications, marking the start of a lifelong struggle with substance abuse. Ramirez gravitated to a pivotal influence during his formative years that at first appeared to be a stable influence, and that was his cousin, Miguel Mike Ramirez, and Mike was a decorated Vietnam War veteran.

Mike fascinated the young Richard Ramirez with inappropriate and lordly gruesome tales of torture and violence that Mike claimed to have inflicted upon Vietnamese women, often accompanied by photographic evidence

of those atrocities. It's believed that this exposure to violence and sexually oriented material at such a young age, in tandem with chronic drug use and likely with temporal lobe epilepsy, had a major impact on desensitizing Ramireds towards cruelty again, all while under the influence and care of what he believed to be the one stable relationship that he had. And when Richard was thirteen years old, he witnessed Mike

fatally shoot his wife during a domestic dispute. This event clearly had at lasting impact on the child's development, further cementing a fascination with violence. Following the incident, Richard's behavior grew increasingly erratic. He withdrew from his family, delved deep for into substance of use, and developed an interest in the occult and allegedly into Satanism, leading to sort of a perspective on an attachment style as disorganized based on the expression of violence.

The context of the time is necessary, as this type of familial deceit was not well terribly uncommon, but definitely not discussed and generally shrouded in a lot of shame. His behaviors grew more erratic through his toddler years, with his aunt sharing years later an incident where she woke up to find three year old Ted standing by the bed, smiling at her and the multiple knives that he had

surrounded her with. Bundy later indicated that he had harbored resentment towards his mother and grandparents for concealing the truth. As a teenager, Bundy had significant challenges in social interactions, describing himself as unable to understand in our personal relationships, although the media has portrayed him as this charming inseduct of man. And I think that's really interesting, being unable

to understand in our personal relationships. Like it's such a clinical, stark way of describing it, but I think says a lot.

and contradictory behaviors in relationships. Again, we're going to posit that that points to a disorganized attachment style for this man.

treats that he got from the local restaurants. Born in nineteen thirty six in then rural Blacksburg, Virginia, Lucas is reported to have experienced a childhood that was challenged by abuse, neglect, and trauma. He was raised by his abusive mother, Viola Lucas,

and his largely incapacitated father, Anderson Lucas. He endured relentless physical and emotional harm at the hands of his mother, Viola frequently subjected him to brutal beatings, including one incident where he struck him with a wooden plank, causing a traumatic brain injury that resulted in a three day coma. Viola is reported to also have forced Henry to witness her engaging in sex work while his father, a double amputee and full blown chronic alcoholic, was unable to provide

any kind of protection or emotional support. Neglect was pervasive. For instance, Lucas lost an eye due to an untreated injury inflicted by his brother. Lucas's upbringing likely led to a disorganized attachment style, which again is by a simultaneous need and fear of caregivers. This attachment style typically arise in the environments where caregivers are sources of both comfort

and threat. And I would also say in wrapping up this little section about examples that disorganized attachment styles or ambivalent attachment styles do not mean that you're going to grow up to be a criminal. It's just a factor that is apparently common in some of the most prolific killers that we've seen. So again, correlation is not causation.

We're just pointing out some very interesting factors about upbringing and how some of these events may have been the lit match that is thrown on the pile of gasoline soaklogs.

great boundary with this relationship. You saw this relationship as toxic and you removed yourself from that, and that is really good. Now that's a possibility. The other possibility is that this is a person that really can't tolerate any kind of conflict in a relationship and they immediately shut down and they leave the relationship. I myself have been that person and learning sort of tolerance distress tolerance skills has been a big challenge for me. So the boundary

thing worked for me for years. It's like, yep, you're a piece of crap. I'm done, and now I have a much more i would say, balanced and nuanced view of relationships that's probably more healthy.

but it's not the be all explanation of everything. And if we kind of talked in the middle of all of these venn diagrams that we have built on top of each other for seven years, you wouldn't be able to I wouldn't be able to understand any of it. It would just so it's it's very intentional to take these topics, look backwards and then always always say, but

this isn't everything right, There's so many other factors. So with that, there's still plenty of research and theoretical support for inspecting where these intersections of insecure attachment styles and

childhood trauma overlap. When we're looking backwards at a serial killer's life, abuse and neglect in early childhood are common themes in the backgrounds of many serial killers, and many serial killers have histories of severe childhood trauma, which again can shape personality and then contribute to the development of mental health issues and ways in which they view other people.

And then sort of separately from that theory is how attachment theory is conceptualized in criminology, where the research indicates the insecure attachment styles, often resulting from early abuse or neglect,

are prevalent among criminal offenders. Individuals with anxious, ambivalent, or anxious avoidant attachment styles may struggle with emotional regulation, impulse control, and empathy, all factors that we absolutely look at when we're trying to look at recidivism of criminal behavior or maybe what led up to that first time of them engaging in criminal behavior.

determine criminal behavior just on their own. We need to continually think about a combination of genetics, environment, and the other psychological factors that typically influence such outcomes.

at this point. But what we're going to do is we're going to drop part two, which is another full hour, tomorrow, so again it'll just download regularly like you always get your episodes. That then we'll be digging down further into specific attachment styles that actually do turn into attachment disorders.