Attachment disorder / disfunction

[Rayakins]

Hi - I'm quite new here and I wondered if anyone has some good information on attachment disorders particularly the tendency to attach in a deep emotional way to someone when those feelings are not reciprocated or falsely reciprocated. I have done a little therapy in relation to this last year but I still find it to be a state that recurs in my life along with deep emotional highs and lows.

[Wesley]

What were your experiences with close relationships in your childhood? Especially your relationship with your parents?

[Rayakins]

My relationship with my mother was exceptionally close but also abusive - she was a stay at home mum and spent a lot of time with us but was also controlling and manipulative using a lot of anger and character assasination techniques. I feel she is at least a borderline sociopath. My father was a lot more distant but less controlling. Both prents spanked and also used implements at times to hit my suister and I. I had no close friendships till adolescence.

[Wesley]

My assumption is that you wanted love more than anything, but it was withheld from you by your parents. Thus, when someone begins to show love you drink it up like someone who is dying of thirst in a desert who stumbles across an oasis. However, If you are dying of thirst it is better to take in water slowly and measured, just like not loving someone until you know them and their values and not rushing into it.

 

I think that show 711 is the show I am thinking about, but they called this fusion where you become way, way attached much more quickly than would be appropriate. It is in the context of a show on relationships as a whole, so there may be a bit of wading, but I think they get into fusion early in the podcast.

 

I do know that this can be very difficult to know when to trust someone and when to love someone without being hurt and being wrong when one wishes more than anything to get love from someone else. As usual, therapy may help. Hopefully someone else can be more useful in dealing with this kind of situation as I do not have experience to know how, only guesses.

[Rayakins]

Thanks Wesley - having listened to episode 711 I think all of the relationships I have had have been marked by fusion and the more 'successful' ones by mutual fusion.

[AdamC]

Stan Tatkin [wikipedia] [blog] studies attachment issues arising within intimate adult relationships.

 

Some resources:

 

Allergic to Hope: Angry Resistant Attachment and a One-Person Psychology Within a Two-Person Psychological System by Stan Tatkin (PDF)

 

Addiction to Alone Time: Avoidant Attachment, Narcissism, and a One‐Person Psychology Within a Two‐Person Psychological System by Stan Tatkin

 

And a podcast interview series:

 

Stan Tatkin: Putting Your Relationship First: Lessons from Your Brain on Love: Part 1 | Part 2

[LovePrevails]

Hope you find these useful:

 

 

 

[cherapple]

Here's another podcast you might want to listen to:

 

The Hell of Attempting Connection

http://media.freedomainradio.com/feed/FDR_720_The_Hell_Of_Attempted_Connection.mp3

 

The reason for your struggles with attachment can be found in this statement:

 

"My relationship with my mother was exceptionally close but also abusive."

 

I wonder who would define your relationship with her as "close." You or her? If she was abusing you, you would have experienced her as the opposite of close to you. I also would not define the "attachment disorder" as yours, but hers. Don't accept "disorders" upon yourself that were inflicted by someone else when you were a child. You were born with a perfect ability to attach, and your mother prevented that from happening. She forced you to attach to abusiveness.

 

You describe the "disorder" as "the tendency to attach in a deep emotional way to someone when those feelings are not reciprocated or falsely reciprocated." That is a perfect definition of your relationship with your mother. She left you with a huge hole of want and need for healthy attachment, and relationship scars where she should have instilled relationship skills. She left you worse than in the dark about how to find and build relationships.

 

Be gentle with yourself. Place disorder and dysfunction where they belong – not on you. Give them back to the person who inflicted them on you. You didn't choose them or inflict them upon yourself. You would never have done such a thing to yourself, had you been given a choice. 

 

[Rayakins]

Thanks everyone for the info - there was plenty that was useful in all of it. Cherapple I think that I am just beginning to realise the truth of what you said. Funnily enough beating myself up about my poor relationship decisions and painful unrequited fantasies never stopped me repeating the pattern over and over again and I could never work out why. In addition to parental abuse I was extensively bullied physically and emotionally at school throughout my childhood and have probably spent most of my life asking myself "what is wrong with me?" and it is a hard habit to break.