Attachment: Healthy, or Emotionally Risky?

It’s Valentine’s Day soon, a day which has been set aside for celebrating all things that represent love and affection. We all become attached to things—people, items, our homes, our pets. Attachment is a condition of being human. Most of the time, it’s a comfortable place to be, positive, life-affirming, satisfying. It mirrors our affection, fondness, or sympathy for something or someone.

But sometimes it doesn’t show up in such a positive way. With attachment, there is always the risk of loss. And when we lose a home, an item or someone we love, our attachment may end up causing us pain.

In our culture, we value a relationship which is sometimes described as being ‘in love’. Being in love is characterized by excitement, desire and wonder. When you’re in love with someone, you feel a strong, almost inexplicable desire for that person. In early stages, people in love delight in mutual discovery, fantasies, and passion.

People who feel this way are strongly attached. If the feeling is mutual, the relationship can be enormously satisfying and may lead to a permanent connection, sometimes culminating in co-habitation or marriage.

But the state of being in love, especially in our culture, is emotionally charged and unless there is solid commitment, it can be risky. As phases tend to do, early love passes as jobs, bills, children, conflicts, aging parents, and other realities of long-term love begin to push those fantasies aside.

When you’re in love, deep feelings can be fleeting. Intense adoration can become indifferent as time passes, and your partner’s novelty can wear off. Being in love with someone today isn’t a guarantee that you’ll both feel the same way forever.

If such a liaison ends, the one who leaves moves on, but the one who is left will likely harbour feelings of sadness, abandonment, and bitterness.

There are other situations in which emotions can be involved. It doesn’t have to be a question of being in love. Sometimes our connection is simply one of friendship. Those connections as well, can fail, and become fraught with pain and feelings of loss.

If you are among the many people who have experienced this level of attachment, you might remember the intensity and urgency of your feelings. If your relationship ended on a negative note, you will no doubt recall the emotional fallout, the pain and suffering you experienced.

When you are in the midst of such emotional turmoil, you frequently don’t understand why you feel the way you do. What you do know and understand is that you feel devastated.

It might be a comfort to know that many, many people have experienced the feelings associated with having loved and lost, notwithstanding the many popular ballads and cowboy songs devoted to such feelings. It is so much so that psychologists have studied it and come up with some clarification: The stages of grief, as explained by psychologists are denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance. It might take a great deal of processing before you get to that final stage, acceptance, but until you do, you will not be able to move on.

With acceptance comes the ability to process the changes you experienced and adapt to the new reality. In many cases, the new reality means creating a life without the love and companionship of the person you felt so strongly about. You would have to learn to go it alone.

It takes strength of character to carve out a new life after you have suffered the loss of someone you loved, especially if they were not committed to the relationship. Although that person did not die, the process of grieving a lost relationship is akin to the bereavement of someone who has died. It is actually worse, since you are not only grieving the loss, but you are experiencing the emotional upheaval of rejection.

It is understandable that you need time to process this, and time to heal. Dealing with those feelings by yourself can be extremely difficult. Ideally, you should see a counsellor who is trained in the steps required to alleviate the pain and find new alternatives to your current situation.

This is not a topic I have chosen lightly, something to be aired and discussed objectively. It is something close to my own feelings, and an outcome of a recent experience.

For the past few months, I have become acquainted with someone in my neighborhood, a mature woman, someone close to my age. We started going out for coffee, and that led to visits in our homes and the occasional dinner at a restaurant close by. It seemed like a perfect arrangement, we are both retired and have similar interests, so we had lots to talk about. We shared many thoughts and disclosed much of our history to each other.

We grew to trust each other. In discussing our backgrounds and history, I discovered she has very strong opinions on many topics. Although I didn’t agree with her consistently, it reminded me about my experiences with my five sisters, with whom I discuss my ideas freely, despite our different views.

So, it was a shock to me when suddenly it all changed. Quietly, without sharing it with me, she had been making plans to move away and now is in the throes of planning to sell her home. I understood that she didn’t owe it to me to tell me, blow by blow, what her plans were. But still, it caused me some discomfort and pain.

This brings me to my current situation, having allowed myself to feel a certain level of attachment and facing the risks of loss and the emotional fallout that comes with it. Although it’s not my true nature to remain ‘cool’ and unattached, I would have come out of this feeling better had I done so.