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This is one of a series of articles on Lesson 1 of 8 in
this Web site - (a) free your
true Self
to guide you in calm and conflictual times, and (b)
reduce
sig-nificant false-self wounds
Thisarticle
focuses on one
common wound an impaired ability to
form normal attachments or bonds. This and related wounds prevents
interpersonal intima-cy, caring, and exchanging love.
The article offers perspective and opinions on these questions:
Newborn humans and
other animals have the primitive instinctual ability to form strong emotional at-tachments,
or bonds, to special "things." Universal examples are (a) the fierce bonds between
parents, specially mothers, and genetic offspring; and (b) the bond between
healthy mates. When young
children are deprived of key psychological nurturances "too
much" for "too long," they survive by automatically evol-ving a fragmented
personality
Parts of their personality want to emotionally attach
to (care about)
special people. From abandon-ment and abuse trauma, other
parts develop a primal terror of attaching too
much or at all. Depending on many variables, such wounded girls and boys grow into
adults who are ambivalent about true bonding and
commitment, or are too
shamed, distrustful, and
fearful to achieve real bonding with
appropriate people.
Such
Grown Wounded Children (GWCs) are burdened with the indescribable anguish of wanting
to exchange lovingcommunion and attachment with special people, and being unable to
do so - living in a society that relentlessly glorifies pleasure and love.
Shame-based
kids may be able to care for others, but
their ruling subselves feel
worthless and rejectothers' love. People who experience
"soul-mate" relationships eloquently affirm that there is a deep
spiri-tual dimension to the bond between them.
Other common
facets of this tragic psychological wound are being unable to
(a) care about your-self
(self-neglect)
and to (b)
bond meaningfully with a nurturing
Higher Power
What causes this
"bonding block"?
Shelves of scientific, philosophical, and romantic books
focus on this pervasive human mystery. After
71 years on Earth,
30 years' clinical
study, and 23 years'
wound-recovery learnings, my guesstimate is this:
Every infant (including newborn you) has the innate capacity
to attach. S/He is exquisitely responsive at birth to the
sensory
interactions s/he has with primary caregivers. A newborn's pre-birth
experience and perhaps genes may influence her or his predisposition to
trust
themselves to connect with this awesome giant being later called
Mother.
If a baby's physical, emotional and
spiritual needs for gentle attention, security, touching,
stimula-tion, mirroring, feeding, rest, comforting, and cleaning
are filled well enough by a primary
caregiver who is consistently...
emotionally present ("available"),
vs. distracted or absent ("unavailable"),
genuinely pleased the baby
is there, and wants to nurture him/her; and is...
able to attach
(does not have significant false-self
wounds), and is...
steadily alert to things that
please and upset
the baby and effective at providing comfort (filling needs), then...
the baby and caregiver will probably develop a
balanced, unambivalent mutual bond.
Initially, the baby's side of the bond is
dependence. Over
the years, if the growing young child stead-ily experiences being prized, wanted, and important ("loved") by key
caregivers, s/he'll shift her part of the bond from "I need you" to
"I love you."
If the baby's
needs are inadequately, erratically, and/or harshly met, or caregivers' looks, sounds, and actions send confusing
"You're good! / You're bad!" double messages then the baby
instinctively begins
to form a fragmented personality.
Her or his bond becomes ambivalent: "I need you /
I fear you." Over time, that promotes self distrust, dislike, and
shame
("bad me" feelings), confusion, and significant guilt. Typical
babies begin to developing a protective
false self to reduce these discomforts.
If the child's first three to six years feel too
confusing (I'm safe and good / I'm unsafe and bad) and/or too scary and painful, then
her or his
false-self development and unconscious bonding-ambivalence deep-ens. If s/he
experiences "too much" shame ("bad me" feelings), guilt ("I do
bad things"), and
fears (dis-trusts
and anxieties), s/he begins to protectively numb out,
distract, and/or detach psychologically from the people associated
with their pain.
The young child's
personality subselves who want to trust and bond
are overruled by protective dis-trustful subselves who say "No!
It's not safe (to care) because we always
get hurt!"
These subselves form the child's
"bonding block." Such children
increasingly depend on themselves to get key needs met. This becomes
normal, reflexive, and unremarkable.
Other wounded kids become apathetic and numb. Still others become strategically
helpless to force caregivers to attend them, but life
is still not really
safe because the care they get doesn't feel genuine, spontaneous, and loving.
Genetics and the
nurturance level
of the growing child's environment over time determine how her or his
personality subselves develop, and which subselves dominate. Accumulated pain/pleasure and beha--vior > response experiences
shape...
how intense
the bonding ambivalence or block is (weak to strong);
how wide it's scope ("I
trust soft furry animals but not short
red-headed women who frown and growl");
how the child adapts to the
environment's reaction to their block (brazenly, furtively, apologetically,
etc.); and...
how
their family reacts to their growing distrust, detachment, and
perhaps pretense.
A major aspect of this
bonding wound seems to be the child's ability to experience some or all
emo-tions. Some children who
learn to automatically associate feeling with guilt, shame, and fear respond by
muting their ability to feel. As teens and adults, they must compute
what they believe they're "supposed to" feel to be accepted as "normal."
This promotes feeling (even more) abnormal, weird, and shamed with-out
knowing why.
The bottom line seems to be: if a young child feels genuinely wanted, safe,
noticed, appreciated, stimulated, comforted, and enjoyed enough
during early years, s/he'll probably develop a healthy-enough ability
to bond with others. If s/he's too deprived too often of
genuinely loving (vs. dutiful,
ambivalent, and/or shaming)attention,
touching and holding, encouragement, affirmation, comforting, and protection, the
child
develops a protective group of
Guardian subselves who provide comfort and
distraction from current or ex-pected pain.
Inner Kids
and
Guardian subselves form a
false self which causes
up to five other psychological wounds.
If
dominant subselves are too fearful, distrustful, and ashamed, the child has
trouble genuine-lyattaching with selected others, themselves, and/or
a benign Higher Power.
How does this bonding
wound relate to giving and receiving love?
Until well into real
(vs. pseudo)
recovery, many
survivors of major childhood
neglect unconsciously
associate love with disappointment, rejection, and
abandonment -
i.e. pain. From
early agonies, alert sub-selves are sure
"If I risk loving (caring about) somebody, it will hurt."
Survivors who have never experienced healthy, sustained, genuinely love from another person often can't comprehend that love is other than a mix
of lust, neediness, duty, and pity. To such
dis-abled people
"I love you" really means "I feel sad / lonely / sorry
/ compassion / lusty / responsiblefor you."
They semi-consciously equate giving material things as a way of
"showing love."
If partners
complain "I don't feel loved by you," unrecovering
Grown Wounded Children (GWCs) pro-test
uncomprehendingly "but I do - why don't you see that?" (i.e.
"What's wrong with you?"). Similarly,
shame-based
GWCs have little idea of what it feels like to "love myself."
To gain some self and social acceptance, Most false selves
develop the survival skill of
camouflaging this
"shameful" inability to really give and receive love from
themselves and
others.
What is "pseudo" (false) bonding?
Psychologically-wounded adults and kids who can't feel, bond, or exchange love
live in a society which glorifies and idealizes love, "closeness,"
intimacy, and
caring. Behavioral evidence of genuine bonding is an inescapable social
norm.
Seeking to feel normal in their own eyes and in society's,
these wounded people often become
ex-perts early in life in pretending to feel true attachment to
parents, relatives, friends, and lovers.
They ob-serve how loving adults and kids behave, and become skilled at
sounding and acting just like them - but they don't feel attached or
committed.
A common result is they convince
themselves that they can bond and love - so if another person
doesn't feel a bond, the GWC in protective denial is sure the other person is
the problem, not them. These wounded people are often vey attractive
socially and professionally.
However, eventually their behavior doesn't match their words in key
relationships, which leads others to feel confused, hurt, guarded, and
distrustful despite the GWCs earnest proclamations of "But I really do
care about you!" Paradoxically, that's their truth, for they don't know they
don't know what genuine caring feels like.
How does difficulty bonding
and feeling affect
typical family relationships?
In ways like these:
One or both courting
partners commit to each other for the
wrong
reasons (like duty, res-cuing, loneliness, sex,
social normalcy, or
revenge, rather than for real love);
After courtship excitement and illusions
recede, one or both
mates feel increasingly "empty" in their partnership.
This bonding wound promotes emotional numbness and hinders or blocks
the normal exchange of emotional-physical-spiritual intimacy.
Over
time, this usually promotes secondary relationship problems like hurt,
frustrations, distrust, resentment, disrespect, avoidances, distancing, and
affairs.
People with this "hole in the soul" and other false-self wounds often
are controlled by an
Addict subself who strives to mute or distract
inner kids' discomfort or numbness and empti-ness.
Addictions to
substances, activities, relationships, and/or emotional states inevitably corrode personal
health and marriages, promote
low-nurturance environments, wound depen-dent kids,
and cause more inner pain;
Adults unable to feel and bond (and
some
professionals they hire) may misdiagnose their persistent emptiness
(emotional/spiritual disconnection) as
"depression." This can raise per-sonal and
family anxiety, and usually doesn't respond to "anti-depressants" and/or therapy.
It also lowers trust in the outcome of hiring professionals to help;
People with serious bonding blocks are prone to having
loveless (physical only) sex, leaving one or both partners increasingly dissatisfied and
unfulfilled;
Partners who feel "empty" (as in
childhood) are vulnerable to
the excitement and temporary relief of (a) fighting or rebelling, (b) taking
major risks, and (c) sexual
affairs. including pos-sible incest;
Kids raised by adults who can't genuinely
attach
often feel unloved, and conclude "some-thing's wrong with me -
I'm unlovable and bad."
They develop a shame-based
false self, which deeply distrusts
that anyone offering love really means it. This promotes social isola-tion
and/or approach-avoid or "hollow"
(emotionally-spiritually empty), "independent" relation-ships. It
may also contribute to
codependence;
A parent
or grandparent with
this bonding wound may not be able to nurture
kids effectively. Their ruling subselves may provide care
from duty, guilt, or anxiety, but not from their heart.
This risks re-creating the low-nurturance family environment that the
wounded adult survived as a child, specially if s/he divorced and/or
re/married another Grown Wounded Child.
And this bonding-block wound can also affect family relationships like
this...
Because people with this disability form weak or no
genuine attachments, they have little to
grieve. That may confuse or alarm caring (unaware) others who judge the wounded person as
cold, indifferent, self-absorbed, detached,
intellectual, phony, plastic, materialistic,
wooden, frozen, egotistic, Narcissistic, or uncaring.
These strengthen subselves' belief that their host person
is alien, bad, and defective as an individual, a fe/male, a mate, and/or
caregiver.
Attempts to heal a low-bond or no-bond
relationship through marriage counseling usually fail, unless ...
the therapist knows how to
assess and
treat false-self wounds (e.g. with some ver-sion of
inner-family therapy), and...
each wounded partner
admits their true Self is
disabled, and...
My professional experience is that
over 80%
of typical troubled adults are signifi-cantly affected by
false selves, and are unaware of their
psychological wounds and what they
mean.
Typical Symptoms of a
Bonding Block
Feeling and bonding
blocks probably result from all five other false-self wounds. These
blocks
have common
behavioral signs like these:
_ 1) Oftenfeeling alone with (“disconnected”
from) other people.
_ 2) Periodically feeling
“There’s something missing in my
life, but I don’t know what.”
_ 3) Inability to relate to the personal reality of “a still small
(spiritual) voice within.”
_ 4) Being harshly critical of religions (“a crutch for
the weak"), clergy, church, worship, “do-gooders,” missionaries, etc.
_ 5) Periodically feeling sad or depressed “for no
reason.”
_ 6) Often
feeling "nothing," and/or being unable to feel normal emotional
pleasures (anhedonia).
_ 7) Often feeling like “being on the outside looking in (at others’
lives).”
_ 8) Feeling “There’s something basically
different
about me - I’m not like other people.”
_ 9) Having chronic difficulty empathizing
with other people, and denying, joking about, or
rationalizing that. A related symptom is communication partners seldom
feeling included in the wounded person's
''awarenesss bubble.''
A related symptom is being described as
Narcissistic or egotistical.
_ 10) Being “religious” but not
spiritual, and denying or justifying that.
_ 11) Having no
genuine two-way relation with a personal
Higher Power (“God”).
_ 12) Being puzzled by, and unable to empathize with, others who talk about
“feeling God’s presence” or “having a personal relationship with
God.”
_ 13) Often being unable to identify clearly “what I
feel, want, or need
now.”
_ 14) Not really understanding or empathizing with any of these symptoms.
_ 15) Being described as cold, phony,
"plastic," over-intellectual, distant, aloof, insincere, glib,
unappro-achable, and/or impersonal.
_ 16) Confusing “love” with
pity (for a
needy partner), so “I love you” means “I feel sorry for
you.” This promotes marrying to rescue,
and later heartache.
_ 17) Emotionally numbing out or withdrawing when real unconditional
love and intimacy is offered, and denying, rationalizing, and/or minimizing this.
_ 18) Being unable to describe clearly what adult-partner
love feels like or means.
_ 19) Becoming anxious, evasive, defensive, mute,
reactive, or
numb if intimate conversation or behavior turns to “love.”
_ 20) Confusing “love” with lust and
intercourse, so “I
love you” means “I desire you sexually;”or
having little or no genuine need for full spiritual -
emotional - physical sexual union (having a "low sex drive").
_
21) Complaining that a partner never demonstrates their love enough
or "right." This can be true, or an inability to receive
(feel and respond to) love.
_
22) Righteously expecting something in return for providing
“love;” Not really understanding unconditional love.
_ 23) Confusing “love” with
dependence, so
“I love you” means “I (mainly) need you, and expect you to fill my
needs.”
_ 24) Insisting “I love you,” but the receiver doesn’t
feel
loved (but they may have a bonding-block too.)
_ 25) Showing “love” by providing physical things
and/or money.
_ 26)Confusing “love” with
duty, so “I
love you” means “I’m
supposed to feel ‘love’ for you
(but I can only guess what that is.)”
_ 27)Chronic
self neglect - being unable to genuinely
feel
and demonstrate consistent, unconditional love for one’s Self - e.g. putting
healthy food, rest, exercise, and medical care at low
priority and trivializing, justifying, or joking about that, or saying "I can't help
it."
_ 28) Confusing love with power: “If you
really
loved me, you would/n’t…”
_ 29) Habitual discomfort with, or avoidance of, spontaneously
expressing love physically - i.e. avoiding appropriate caressing, hugging, stroking, and
kissing. Alternative: pretending to want to do these ("faking
it"), and denying that.
_ 30) Having acquaintances but
few or no real friends. Paying professional counselors to listen, because "there's no one else
I
trust."
_
31) Often experiencing
family gatherings and social events as
chores to be endured or avoided, vs. en-joyed.
_
32)
A history of approach-avoid relationships, maritalseparations,
affairs, and/or emotional or legal
divorces, or never marrying.
_
33) Appearing to feel more attachment to animals or plants than people; or having no interest in
pets or plants at all.
_ 34) Having one or several
addictions, and focusing on denying that, and/or on reducing the secondary problems they
cause rather than assessing for false-self wounds.
Addictions (compulsive
self-medication for
inner pain) imply several
or all six false-self
wounds, not just a bonding block.
In general,
the more bonding-block symptoms like
these that you or another person has, the higher the odds
you or s/he is dominated by a protective false self. Recall:
this article is one of 11 false-self sym-ptom checklists in
Lesson 1.
I suggest
you fill out
all 11 before drawing any
conclusions.
Can This Bonding Wound be "Cured"?
My clinical experience since 1986 is that this bonding
block can be reduced(vs. cured) over time, when the
wounded person...
fully acknowledges that s/he is often ruled by a protective false self (hits
true bottom
and breaks
denial),
genuinely wants to
heal, and
makes that a stable high priority; and...
finds
and uses
competent clinical and pastoral
help, over time.
As our culture
wakens to the reality and meaning of unqualified child conception, epidemic child neglect
(ineffective parenting) and false-self wounding, effective
wound-reduction help is
slowly becoming easier to find.
I
believe this bonding-block wound results from
having all five other false-self wounds. If this is true, patient work at
reducing each of them and harmonizing the inner
family (personality) under the true Self's leadership will also reduce
this tragic block. My clinical experience is that skilled
inner-family, psycho-drama, and/or
Voice-dialog therapy can help
self-motivated GWCs do this.
This is one of a series of articles describing six widespread false-self
(psychological) wounds that can happen to kids from low-nurturance
childhoods. This article describes the nature, symptoms, and some
typical effects of the
inability to feel, bond with selected other people, and to give and
receive genu-ine love.
After 30 years' clinical research, my professional guess is that this
wound - called Reactive Attach-ment Disorder (RAD) by psychiatrists - is
really the composite result of five other widespread wounds: a
fragmented personality + excessive shame, guilts, fears, and reality
distortions + difficulty trusting wisely.
The article proposes common behavioral symptoms
of this wound which allow assessing for it.
It can be reduced by admitting
and working intentionally to
heal
the other wounds that cause it. Lesson 1 in this nonprofit Web
site offers an effective way to do that for people who have hit true
(vs. pseudo)
bottom - often in mid-life.
Reflect: why did you read this article?
What are your subselves
thinking and feeling now? Did they get what they needed here?
If not, what do they need?
Who's
answering
these questions - your wise
true Self
or
''someone else''?
The Web address of this
article is
http://sfhelp.org/gwc/wounds/bonding.htm
About Feeling
and Bonding
What causes this
"bonding block"?
