On Attachment
We hear a lot about attachment and attachment styles right now. It’s interesting how therapeutic theories or frameworks get caught up in the cultural zeitgeist, but its always fragmented or a small piece of a much larger puzzle.
Is it useful for us as a culture to talk about attachment and attachment styles without most of us having a Masters in counseling or psychology? Sure, no question. But it also reminds me that self-esteem is built on a two-part system, which includes both feeling good and doing well. Martin Seligman dedicated a whole chapter of his book The Optimistic Child to pointing out that the self-esteem movement, which started in the 1990s, basically ignored the “doing well” component, to our collective detriment. Kids, like adults, see right through the smokescreen that is the empty puffery of telling them they are doing great without challenging them at all.
Lately, I have been spending a lot of time thinking about resistance. Why do people spend so much time resisting change? Why do we get mired in our own muck and refuse to abandon it? What is it about counterproductive patterns or habits that are so hard to break?
It seems pretty clear that it’s because we are attached to our patterns. If we’ve been through hell and back, we have a great deal of resistance to letting go of the behavior that helped us survive. Another way to frame it is that people with anxious attachment styles are attached to their anxious behavior. This is true for those with avoidant attachment styles, too. They are attached to their avoidance. Both approaches serve a purpose and once may have helped them manage or avoid harm.
In order to really heal and change, self-help and spiritual gurus, particularly from Eastern theologies, talk a lot about detaching from outcomes or non-attachment. This isn’t just about detaching from future fears or projections or non-attachment to people, places, or things, it’s also about detaching from the behaviors that are not serving us well. It’s about letting go of fleeing or fighting, it’s about releasing our “bad” behavior (I prefer the word “counterproductive”) or questionable choices, rather than justifying ourselves and sabotaging the BLEEP out of connections and opportunities.
How does faith play into all this, you might be asking? I’m not exactly sure at the moment (an alternate name for this blog could probably be Shooting from the Hip), but my best guess is that faith, real faith, should be considered our new attachment style. It’s no mistake that emphatic Christian preachers and blissed out Eastern spiritual gurus both advocate for making our relationship with God (or Good) the number one thing in our lives.
Easier said than done, but our attachment to counterproductive patterns is what makes it difficult. Wayne Dyer might argue that choosing faith can be easy, and it is merely our thoughts and choices that make it difficult. Ugh. How annoying is that?
The real question is what would happen if we got attached to God (or Good) instead?