In fact, the human species is one of nature’s most fragile. When a baby is born, she almost absolutely needs her mother to survive. A lion, fish or lizard was best prepared for independence.
This need, on the other hand? It’s not just about basic needs, like nutrition or heat. There is also a profound emotional need from the beginning of our lives: babies who are not cared for can get sick and even die.
- There is no doubt that we all have that need.
- As a species.
- We need each other; we languish and die without another human being.
However, there is a big difference between this instinctive bond that guarantees our survival and the neurotic addictions we develop as adults.
Feelings such as hatred and attachment have no legs, arms, or other limbs; and I have no courage or competence. How did you manage to make me your slave?
? Shantideva?
Paradoxically, we only achieve self-reliance when we experience total dependence.
“Attachment to our caregivers during childhood is the support of our emotional security. “
The mechanism is simple: if during your childhood you have someone to always turn to to protect yourself, you will develop a sense of trust in the world and in human beings, which will allow you to achieve independence in your adult life.
We all need a mother or someone to replace her when she was a child, but we don’t always have that number.
Often, the mother works away from home and has to leave her child in a day care center from an early age. Other times, she’s so busy with her own problems that she doesn’t want to be fully present when her baby needs it; or you have to take care of the other children, even if we only need them for ourselves.
Some women are so anxious about their role as mothers that they pass on all their insecurities to their children and protect them as if the world were a constant threat.
In such cases, children grow up feeling emotionally empty and are very anxious when faced with a new situation alone or when they have to make a decision.
And they secretly aspire to find a figure to replace the mother they didn’t have, or who lost at some point in their lives.
Therefore, we try to find a couple who give us everything, without expecting anything, we demand unconditional dedication and we are deeply frustrated at any sign of indifference or detachment, we live in fear of losing that person because we believe it can fill our interior. Vacuum.
Attachment to others is important and necessary throughout our lives, from cradle to grave, we need others to ensure our physical and emotional health, no matter if we are a successful investor in New York or a housewife in Bolivia. we need each other.
The problem arises when the need becomes anxiety. We believe that if we are left alone, we will once again be a helpless child, paralyzed by the dangers of the world.
To overcome this anxiety, people can use different strategies. One is to find someone who’s trying to keep this impossible promise: “I’ll always be there, I’ll never leave you alone. “
Another possibility is to choose the opposite: avoid at all costs create bonds of dependence with others, never feel abandoned.
We can also become suspicious and too demanding. We ask people for more than they can give. And we will forever deny his flaws, failures and limitations, if they do not serve us as if we were a small dictator, frustrated at not being able to control others as we wish.
In all these cases, suffering will be constant. We suffer to keep this benefactor who has “adopted” us, whether partner, boss, friend, etc.
We suffer from loneliness because we are not able to establish close bonds with others, we suffer because we cannot value other human beings as they are.
They say the fruits are the only ones that mature, humans can be 30 or 50 years old and retain the same fears they had as children.
It may be a good idea to think of those childhood gaps that lead us to neurotic attachments in the present.
It is possible that at some point in our adult life we may be able to renounce the impossible desire to find, once and for all, someone who behaves like the ideal mother we never had.