Attachment theory, minus the jargon

You were not born like this.

Before you learned to talk, you were already running one experiment, over and over, on the one person you had. Will she come. What happens when I cry. Is needing her safe, or is it going to cost me something. You ran it thousands of times and you drew a conclusion. You had no choice but to draw a conclusion. Your life, at that point, literally depended on reading her correctly.

That conclusion is now what you call your personality.

If she showed up unpredictably, you learned to watch. You still watch. You catch the shift in someone’s voice before they know it shifted. You are in a perfectly fine relationship and some part of you is already preparing for it to go wrong, because preparation was the only thing that ever helped.

If she was somewhere else entirely, checked out, unreachable, you learned that needing people is a losing bet. You are now very good at not needing anyone, right up until you can’t stand it anymore and you blow the whole thing up and tell yourself you chose to leave.

If she was the one you needed and the one you had to hide from at the same time, then love and danger got wired together so early you don’t remember a time they weren’t the same thing. You are drawn to exactly the wrong people with exactly the right instincts and you cannot explain it to anyone, including yourself.

She didn’t do it on purpose. Her own unconsicous programming dictated her behavior, just like yours does for you. That’s the part that makes it so hard to be angry at her, and so easy to keep repeating this pattern endlessly.

The best advice I can offer you is this: become a therapist. If you need some guidance in that direction, just contact me and we’ll figure it out together. When you do become a competent therapist, this pattern becomes too obvious and you can break it at will because you notice it in others all day long, and then in your self when you return home.

It worked for me.

xx, so...

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