Irrational Attachment
This is from last week. I didn’t think it was a Screed when I sent it, but it’s good writing and I want to give you the feels. It’s also a callback to the early days, when this channel was mostly things I wrote to a specific “you” and only later decided to share.
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It’s easy for people from our neighborhood to feel like the thing they need to be secure is some sort of proof that the good relationships they have now will last forever unchanged. Which is some ways is very reasonable, and not a lot different than the way that people from other places build their security.
But there are some drawbacks to that approach. For one, it means you can’t really feel secure until you’re (almost) dead. For another, it means that at least one of you has to prioritize the relationship over (almost) everything else in your life, which is a big ask.
Happily there are other options. At least in my understanding, what humans brains actually need for that security isn’t (an impossible) proof of safety. The thing other 2-year-olds got wasn’t a rational understanding of the way they would be safe. In fact this feeling comes from a time when they didn’t have words, didn’t manage their relationships, and that they cannot recall as adults. It’s older and more fundamental than all of that – it’s a feeling, and that feeling imagines a super-human who can tell exactly what you need and is capable of giving it to you 100% of the time.
Obviously real humans can’t live up to that. It wasn’t true when other people formed that feeling in the first year or two of their lives. They were just lucky enough to be as dumb as an infant when they learned this feeling, and they got enough good experiences from that limited perspective to build that feeling into their tiny soul. You have a harder path to build that same thing, but it’s not impossible, and you are already doing things to make it happen.
We do need examples of that sort of safety to be able to build the right feeling. Lots of examples over years from (ideally several) people who understand us well enough to often give us what we need. That’s a thing you can hope for from normal relationships. That’s a thing you’ll get more of as you continue the work you’re already doing to be better at relationships, at family, at romance, at friends. So you’re 100% doing the right things to make it better.
But no matter how your brain screams that you need friends and romantic partners to provide a life-long stable base of support and love, no matter how close you get to achieving that, it won’t quite work. Even if all of the people you are close to stayed that close until you died, even if you managed to match all of your lives to the same path, it still wouldn’t quite feel safe. It still wouldn’t be the super-human that 2-year-olds imagine their caretakers to be.
Luckily there are other paths to that feeling, tools that can help you build it internally instead of getting it from someone else. The details of that are complicated and beyond the scope of this rant (and to be clear not a thing I have yet mastered myself), but I do believe they exist and are within your (and my) power to wield. Right now you’re focusing on building relationships – on improving skills – that can give you examples of support and love, and you should keep doing that. When it’s time, you can build on those examples and use other tools to internalize those them.
One of the things infants use to build this feeling is someone who is irrationally attached to them. Not someone in a balanced relationship, not someone who is good at mutual care and support, but someone who answers their endless need, their unregulated emotion, their irrational reactions with more love and more support. As adults it’s hard to find someone to do a similar thing, even if we love them a lot and are perfect in our interactions with them. Even if we are the best dogs sitting still when asked and always following at just the right distance, never baking or jumping or running away. Even if we are careful to modulate our needs and emotions and reactions to minimize our impact. It’s just too much to demand of our friends and partners – it’s not healthy or even really possible to be social peers and involved in an unbalanced relationship.
I am irrationally attached to you. I know that doesn’t provide instant healing, or make up for all the bad examples and pain in your life, or magically reprogram your brain to feel safe. I know I’ll never live up to the feeling of an Ideal Parent that your brain needs to be secure. But I will stand here and do my best to pretend, for as long as you need, and I will try to help you find the other tools and people you need along the way.
I love you a bunch M. More than is rational, but not more than you deserve.
ZiB
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Sent from a phone.
