A mature individual will learn to stand on their own two feet. The will not need to make attachments for mental, moral, and emotional support. Attachment goes by many other descriptive terms, bonding by infants to mothers is the best well known. However, adults, form attachments to others throughout their lives. Depending on one’s maturity, we can either be helpful or harmful. It isn necessary, that we each learn to stand on our own without unhealthy human attachments. Getting to know yourself is understanding who you feel comfortable around and who makes you anxious and who is it that you prefer to avoid. A lot of the attachments we have to other people, whether it be to our mother, our brothers or sisters, our children, have to do with several notions: Do we like being around them because we truly enjoy them, or are we ‘attached’ to some pre-conceived notion that won’t let us cut the cord that binds us.
Maybe your mother kept you emotionally tied to her and although you love her, your ‘attachment’ is nearer the neurotic than the need. In other words, she needed you more than you needed her. Something in her growing up forced her to cling to you. It’s not something she did deliberately, but she was simply reacting to a need not to be left alone.
That is one kind of adult attachment. Other kinds of attachments are not of he need to be around people, but the need not to be around them. Maybe in their presence you feel less than you know them to be. By yourself you can think and act and do as you please, but when you are with people you get confused. It takes practice learning to hold on to your convictions when strong outside influences dictate otherwise, but if you keep at it, soon you will stop letting other people make you uncomfortable.
Understand that you have a right to your opinions and it is not absolutely necessary that others agree with you. It does not mean you are able to contribute good and worthy ideas to other people. Get in the habit of being yourself and stop expecting others to agree with you. It’s a fifty-fifty deal, you don’t agree with them all the time and you don’t hold it against them. Be assured they will do the same for you.
The world is full of people and after we grow up we should attach ourselves only loosely to others. Each need their freedom to be themselves. That is what make wholesome conversation so edifying, the result of two, three, or more fully mature human beings engaging in conversation where the free flow of ideas are not denied. An where, of we so choose, we will or not participate the next time.
But you will say: what about the attachments of partners. don’t we matter to them? Well, I certainly hope so but togetherness should not be hampered with neurotic attachments. Two adults can love and appreciate each other and even feel responsible for each other’s well being, and still not be neurotically attached. In fact, I say that is about the happiest kind of marriage or relationship, the one where each fills in for the other what’s missing in his/her personality without feeling compelled to do so.
It’s like the story of mothers. Which one loves her children the best? The one that loves them enough to allow them to be themselves and to develop into healthy adults, or the one who love them so much she keeps them tied to her?
