As Cassidy (1999) describes, the infant is like a heat-seeking missile, looking for an attachment figure that is sufficiently near, available, and responsive. Once activated, only physical attachment with the attachment figure will terminate the attachment behavioral system. The distress produced by the stimulus directs and motivates infants to seek out soothing physical contact with the attachment figure. First, alarm of any kind, stemming from an internal (such as physical pain) or external source (such as a loss of contact with a caregiver), will activate what Bowlby called the вЂвЂattachment behavioral system.вЂ™вЂ™ Bowlby believed that this system was one of four behavioral systems that are innate and evolutionarily function to ensure survival of the species. According to the theory, attachment is governed by a number of important principles. In his observations of infants separated from their mothers and fathers during hospitalizations, he saw the dire effects of separation distress on the emotional state of the child. In his landmark trilogy Attachment and Loss, the British psychiatrist John Bowlby (1969, 1973, 1980) posited a theory of development that contradicted the prevailing psychoanalytic theories of the time and proved to be a revolutionary way of understanding the nature of the attachment bonds between infants and their caregivers (Bretherton 1992). Developing the Therapeutic Alliance with BatterersДЄffect Regulation in the Treatment of Perpetrators

While this research paper will focus primarily on male perpetrators, many of the principles of attachment theory and neurobiology presented here can be applied to women perpetrators (Babcock, Miller, and Siard 2003 Leisring, Dowd, and Rosenbaum 2003) and victims (Henderson, Bartholomew, and Dutton 1997 Morgan and Shaver 1999). The purpose of this research paper is to propose an expansion of the common conceptualization of domestic violence from a primarily behavioral-social/political perspective to a model that considers recent findings in developmental and social psychology as well as neuropsychology. What is most disturbing is that this stagnancy continues despite research suggesting that the current intervention models are having only a moderate effect on treatment outcome (Babcock, Green, and Robie 2004). One outcome of having legislated a particular form of intervention is that there has been a stagnancy in the field, resulting in minimal innovation and change over the last decades of the twentieth century. Many states have mandated the Duluth Model into the law, even though numerous evaluations of this model have found that program participation had no impact on recidivism (Davis, Taylor, and Maxwell 1998 Feder and Forde 1999 Levesque 1998 Shepard 1987, 1992). Although some scholars and practitioners are attempting to challenge these traditional ways of approaching perpetrator treatment (see, e.g., Dutton and Nichols 2005), domestic violence intervention has experienced little change in recent decades. The reason for this is that state laws that have been advocated by activists generally mandate the type of interventions providers must include in their programs, and these requirements usually are based on the feminist reeducation model, such as that offered by the Domestic Abuse Intervention Project, which has come to be known as the Duluth Model. Other models, such as those of family systems and psychodynamics (Dutton and Sonkin 2003), have been described but are less common in practice. Most programs consist of either cognitive-behavioral therapy (e.g., Dutton 1998 Sonkin 2003), feminist-based reeducation (Pense and Paymar 1993), or a combination of the two. Over the past thirty years since the 1970s, the treatment of choice for perpetrators of domestic violence has not evolved much.

Attachment issues