ATTACHMENT AND ITS VIOLATIONS

2024 Author: Harry Day | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 15:43

Attachment, like any other need, is not an internal function of the body, but has to do with what happens on the border between the body and the environment. At first, attachment is a necessary condition for survival, later it becomes the main factor of development

Attachment takes my existence beyond the concept of an individual project and makes the other as important as myself. Because if a tree falls in the forest, no one hears it.

Attachment is actually synonymous with completeness. A person, like a sentence or a phrase, needs to be addressed to someone. When the message finds the addressee, the purpose of the appeal is thereby achieved. Good attachment is the feeling that everything that comes from me goes where it should be and nothing is lost. My existence is confirmed by the highest authority - another person. Therefore, the Other is the one who makes the assumption a statement.

Attachment is attractive because of the emotional availability of the Other. Rather, even that this accessibility is mutual. For example, in my presence the other makes no extra effort to pretend or impress. With me, he feels the same as when he looks in the mirror. My presence makes his life clearer. And the fact that I can so easily speak about someone else, meaning myself, only confirms the symmetry of these processes. I kind of find the validity of my need for attachment in the fact that it is characteristic not only for me.

Many things happen for the sake of establishing attachment, even if the person doing them believes otherwise. Attachment is a completely unique phenomenon that cannot be replaced by anything. One might even say, a universal attractor of any individual destiny. If we consider the first sentence in isolation from the second, then we can observe a phenomenon in which freedom from attachment is possible. But this is just a manifestation of what happens when the effect is separated from the cause. Attachment is sought even when its necessity is actively denied.

And now the most important thing. As you know, the Other confirms the reality of my being. The question arises - why do I need confirmation if I myself know well enough that I am? It seems to me that the point is that confirmation from the Other is not completely complementary. On the contrary, this confirmation is redundant, and this redundancy is meaningful. When you can find out more than you hope by asking a question. As if there is something in me that I cannot find without the help of another, and this something is a source of joy that cannot be bought with the currency of autism. Therefore, attachment is a tool for discovering this area hidden from my view. When I ask the question "what am I?", I will never answer it exhaustively without the addition "and what am I for you?"

Attachment does not lead to the achievement of wholeness in the sense of emotional fusion or physical inseparability. Attachment begins with a sense of autonomy and, paradoxically, it strengthens autonomy. Autonomy is not a symbol of lack of need and the pinnacle of counterdependence. Autonomy in this vein is honesty in accepting oneself. In attachment, I do not change radically, I do not become a person with different values and views, but on the contrary, I get the opportunity to continue to be who I am. Attachment perhaps makes us a little more free to need it.

Avoidance of this state arises from this significance of attachment as a space where the opportunity arises to face unique experiences that cannot be reproduced by individual effort. The need for attachment is either completely ignored or everything connected with it becomes compulsively controlled. In the latter case, the territory of individualism becomes overly guarded. And then attachment, formally present in the form of punctuated relationships, actually does not change anything. This attachment is similar to the real one, but there is no risk of being in an unfamiliar place, reaching the point where there are no landmarks, confronting that the other is taking the same risk and thereby showing the highest degree of trust in the one who is nearby.

As you know, the past is the enemy of thought. Not in the sense that any news is just a memory, but in the fact that the past makes the thought move along its usual trajectory. The past creates a center of gravity around which a route is laid in the present. We travel along the contour lines of meaning maps and call it freedom of choice. Sometimes it is necessary to make a lot of effort to look out of the trench of familiar looks. My point is that attachment allows you to do this more effectively.

Attachment changes the gravitational background and thus the rate of metabolic processes. If attachment allows you to stay on the platform of the present for a little longer than usual, then the train from the past can leave without waiting for the forgetful passenger. As I said before, attachment by itself does not change anything, it just helps to be even more yourself.

One of the most common types of violation of this process are situations in which people enter into relationships, but do not establish attachments. That is, they interact with each other from positions that do not imply mutual access to “neutral” territory. They continue to stamp on their borders, fearing to leave them. This keeps partners from having to improvise and take risks. Sometimes such interactions are not initially equal, and this is also done with only one purpose - to be inaccessible to another, to be invulnerable to his influence. The fear that keeps you from attachment is associated with the experience of the horror of absorption, because a frequent marker of relationships in this case is the loss of control over your life. In this place, in the fantasies of one of the partners, ideas arise about the loss of freedom, about subordination and the forced following the course of the other, which in some cases is fraught with even destruction of the personality.

This avoidant type of attachment is often accompanied by an inability to build relationships without merging with a partner. As if every time a person is faced with a choice - either a merger or a distance - and this choice does not provide for considering other options for solving. In this situation, you can get excellent support from your partner, but also be too dependent on his presence. Because the exit from the merger is experienced as a total rejection. As if Carlson, who lifted the Kid from the ground, flies away on his business and leaves the latter unsupported in the air.

A person who from an early age was forced to fight for his personal space, where his personality was formed, further expands the protected area to fantastic proportions. This forces him to defend himself where there was not the slightest hint of threat. Therefore, the distance that must be covered in order to be next to him is too great. But if this happens, he becomes defenseless, since the borders are taken far to the periphery and are no longer able to protect.

Attachment becomes impossible when there is an unconscious expectation that the request to establish it will be unfulfilled. Then it is impossible to ask for it, because according to the inner reality of the questioner, the answer will either not be given, or he will not be sincere, or he will not be able to hear it. In this case, the need for attachment is always recognized as too connected with pain and regret and therefore does not unfold further. The need for attachment, which is actualized in the presence of another, remains an autistic project, without going over the border of contact.

In this case, the need for attachment atrophies like any function that has not been used for a long time. One gets the impression that even in the presence of an object to which attachment can be directed, it stumbles upon the conviction that the interest of another person is an impossible or completely useless event. Despite the invitation, the meeting does not take place because the space “in between” is completely unexplored. The excitement of opportunity is replaced by a routine strategy of avoiding any disturbing involvement. As if the attempt to ask for emotional support once failed and since then you can enter into a relationship not to receive a bonus, but to avoid discomfort, when the object of attachment is perceived only as a carrier of the required qualities.

Affection often creates preoccupation with relationships, which makes the person extremely helpless in living autonomy. Sometimes, along with attachment, life itself seems to end, because in the absence of the former, any manifestations of vitality become too heavy a burden that you want to get rid of. A personality can only rely on what makes it alive when it walks the paths of its desires. But if such self-identification is possible only within the framework of ended attachment, this choice brings with it unhappiness and emptiness.

Affection is a meeting place that cannot be changed. Affection extends over more than one life. Attachment is a process in which it is impossible to fake it and go unnoticed in it. Because by agreeing to less sincerity, we betray not another, but ourselves. And this betrayal cannot be survived, because if successful, there will be no one to experience and nothing with anything.