What Is the Internal Working Model?
Definition
The internal working model is a set of implicit predictions, formed in the first caregiving relationship, about whether care will be available when it is needed, whether the full self can be expressed without consequence, and what the social world is likely to deliver in response to the self's signals. The model is not stored in the part of the brain accessible to reflection. It is stored in implicit memory, in the amygdala and the body, and it runs faster than the prefrontal cortex can intervene. This is why understanding alone does not change the pattern: the model is generating its prediction before the conscious mind has a chance to evaluate the situation.
Origins & Context
John Bowlby introduced the concept of the internal working model in his attachment trilogy (Attachment, 1969; Separation, 1973; Loss, 1980), drawing on systems theory and cognitive psychology. Mary Ainsworth's Strange Situation research showed that infants as young as twelve months have already developed organized strategies for managing the attachment relationship. Mary Main later developed the Adult Attachment Interview, which can measure the security of the working model in adults and reliably predict the attachment security of their children. The Life That Is Already Yours treats the working model as the mechanism the not-choosing loop runs on, and Main's identification of earned security as the empirical evidence that the model can be revised in adulthood.
The model updates through evidence, not through argument. The body is always learning. It is just slow.— Nikita Datar
How It Shows Up
The working model shows up as the body's response that arrives before the situation has been assessed. As the cooling you feel in a friendship at the smallest sign of distance, as if the original cooling were about to happen again. As the prediction, in advance of evidence, that the room will withdraw if the full self is expressed. The cognitive mind knows the current room is not the original room. The working model does not. The model updates through accumulated experience of the prediction being wrong — not through argument, not through insight, but through evidence that the body can register.
Nikita's Note
The most important thing I learned about the working model is that it is not who I am. It is what my nervous system concluded from the room I was first in. The conclusion was accurate to that room. It is not accurate to the current room. But the body cannot know this without evidence. The evidence is the experience of the full self being expressed and the predicted withdrawal not arriving. Each such experience updates the model slightly. Over time, the prediction revises. This is the slow mechanism through which everything actually changes.
From the work
The model updates through evidence, not through argument. The body is always learning. It is just slow.From The Life That Is Already Yours by Nikita DatarAbout this book
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