Hi tt,
Here are some answers to your questions:
Could you talk a little about attachments vs relationships? What is the difference? I'm trying to decipher whether I have attachments or relationships or a mixture and if a relationship can be a part of an attachment? Am I doing relationships well? Are my attachments healthy?
Most of us have “relationships” with many people, but attachments to relatively few. I think it’s a matter of degree—how much does the person affect you (both when you are with them and not with them) and how much would it affect you if they left permanently or died? The people we are “attached” to have much larger effects on us—and I suspect there is attachment circuitry in our brain that is different from the typical relationship circuitry. I also suspect that the attachment circuitry is part of many animals for survival reasons. If parents did not form these attachments to children and children to parents, the children—and their genes-- (at least in the human species) would be far less likely to survive.
It is interesting to note that Buddhism sees attachments as pain inducing (in part because they are always—ultimately—temporary), and through meditation people learn to reduce the affects of inborn attachment circuitry, and substitute other brain pathways.
So, are attachments healthy? Desirable? And if so, with whom? How emotionally and psychologically independent/self-sufficient should one strive to be? In my talk, I gave my personal answer to these questions, but each person must answer them for themselves.
By unusual (attachments), I'm thinking you mean it in a very practical sense (like perhaps forming a bond with one of your buds at the dog park) as opposed to unusual in a strictly psychological sense?Actually, I suspect, given this particular dichotomy, I’m referring to the latter. I cannot talk about my attachments to my patients (for obvious reasons) except to say that (and I think I’ve said this before on the Board) up until this year, none of my long-term patients has ever referred to me another person except for a beloved family member—and that’s only happened twice I think (and with some ambivalence). Now, that may mean my patients feel they got stuck with a lousy therapist, and they don’t want to inflict the same on others they know. But I think (and hope) that what it means is that 1) they don’t want interference in the relationship from other people revealing information about them, of their revealing information about other I know, and mostly 2) they don’t want to share me. It is the second reason that my patients have talked about—and this, IMO, has a lot to do with unusual “attachment”. I say unusual because, in my experience, most people in therapy who are happy with their therapist, if asked, are more than willing to recommend their therapist to a friend. (BTW, if any therapists-to-be ever read this post: mine is a lousy business model.)
Re: unusual attachments to family/friends, I’ll just give one example. I e-mailed M. (my daughter) a copy of my talk this year (above). She got back to me almost immediately, said it was “great”, talked about the importance of genetic “passages”, told me that she had found on-line many of the family graves in Brooklyn, and suggested we do a walking tour together--a kind of father-daughter “morbid family bonding” experience.
Also, I've tried to find one of your posts from about two years ago where you mentioned that your daughter lived not far from the burial sight of her grandparents. I remember the comment you made about it being right humorous, something to do with her visiting them. I couldn't find the right word to get the browser to pull it up. Do you remember the one I'm talking about?Sure. That was on the first page of the lovely Daphne Merkin thread:
http://www.voicelessness.com/disc3//index.php?topic=9595.0BTW, the mausoleum I refer to in that post belongs to my father’s side of the family--another stop on the walking tour!
Richard
