Attachment Vrs. Authenticity

The Root Cause of Many Mental Health Problems

When two basic human needs (Attachment and Authenticity) collide.

In the last few years, there has been an increasing acknowledgment of the important role mental health plays in our development and overall well-being.

However, we still have the tendency to talk about it very superficially.

We talk about anxiety, but we rarely talk about attachment. We talk about depression, and feelings of unworthiness, but we rarely talk about where these feelings come from. We talk about codependency, but we’re still afraid of using the word “narcissism”.

This needs to change. If we truly want to heal, we need to be brave enough to recognize what’s wrong. We need to face the essence of the problem.

Dr. Gabor Maté, a renowned author and physician, says “the loss of the Self is the essence of trauma”. I’m here to share his perspective with you.

When Two Basic Human Needs Collide

According to?Dr. Maté, we all have?two basic emotional needs:?attachment and authenticity.The attachment has to do with our need for love, connection, and intimacy. Without it, infants don’t survive. We need to feel loved by our caretakers; we need to feel attached to our parents.

On the other hand, authenticity refers to our ability to manifest our true self, to express our inner realities. When we’re authentic, we listen to our gut feelings, we know what’s best for us, and we’re in touch with our body, as well as our emotions.

In the ideal world, these needs can coexist in harmony. It’s what happens when we have emotionally mature, healthy parents who make us feel unconditionally loved — providing us a secure base that allows us to express ourselves fully.

But?what happens when these needs collide??What happens when we feel like our attachment figures (our parents) will reject us if we show them our authenticity? The result is that?we suppress our true selves?— which leads to many mental (and physical) health problems.

Dr. Maté says,“Parents convey these messages all the time. Not because they mean to, not because they don’t love the child, not because they’re not trying to do their best, but because they themselves are suppressed, or traumatized, or hurt, or stressed.”?

When you’re a child, you have no choice in the matter. You know that if you give up your attachment for the sake of your authenticity, you’ll lose the relationships on which your life depends.?

So, you adapt, you perform, you do your best to please your parents. You play a role. The problem is that we then carry this coping mechanism into adulthood.

Suddenly, we’re 25, 30 years old, and we’re still playing a role. We don’t know who we are, what we want, or what makes us happy because we’ve spent years ignoring our true selves. In extreme cases, we develop mysterious illnesses — our body is literally forcing us to look at our own problems.

?“We’ve all had the experience of having an inkling of a strong gut feeling, and then ignoring it and getting into trouble… Well, that tells us what happened. At some point, we found out it was too costly for our attachment relationships to be in touch with our gut feelings.?So, it then becomes our nature to suppress our feelings, to lose touch with ourselves. And we pay the cost later on in the form of addictions, mental illnesses or physical illnesses.”

Dr. Gabor Maté, in?Authenticity vs Attachment

The good news is, as adults, we have the power to choose both authenticity?and?attachment. We have the power to heal our inner child and create relationships that support our personal growth.That requires becoming aware of our trauma.

Trauma Is Much More Common Than We Think

It’s time for us to let go of the idea that trauma can only stem from sexual abuse, physical mistreatment, or living in a war zone because that’s exactly what prevents us from identifying and healing our emotional wounds.We tend to think we’re normal and that we should be grateful for our seemingly normal circumstances.

We think other people have it way worse than we do, which may be true but shouldn’t be an excuse to invalidate our own not-so-bad trauma.

As he wrote in?We Need To Stop Minimizing Small, “Unimportant” Traumas: “Trauma can come in many forms.·????????It can come in the form of an emotionally immature parent who’s not able to accept you for who you are, and instead projects their fears and insecurities onto you.

It can come in the form of a parent who cannot regulate their own emotions — which creates an extremely unstable, chaotic environment where you don’t feel safe to express yourself.

It can come in the form of a messy divorce between your parents, causing you to see romantic relationships in a negative light. Or in the form of an absent parent, leading you to unconsciously search for that parental figure in your relationships.

It can come in the form of an insecure attachment style, causing you to cling to unhealthy, even emotionally abusive relationships — because you’re merely replicating the patterns you learned when you were a child.”

These circumstances lead to a messed up self-esteem and a critical inner voice that deteriorate your mental health little by little, to the point where you don’t even know who you are anymore.·????????Or, they lead you to unhealthy relationships in which you give way too much and make excuses for other people’s dysfunctional behavior.

If you’re thinking, “well, I don’t have any trauma, I’ve never been abused,” I invite you to do some introspection and get in touch with your inner reality.

The environment you grew up in, was it stable and loving? Or did you feel like you were walking on eggshells?·????????You might have had your physical needs always met in your childhood, but what about your emotional needs?

Did you have the freedom to express yourself and show your true colors?

Did you feel like home was the place you could always go-to for comfort and validation? Or were you afraid to share your feelings?

Were your boundaries respected? Was your individuality respected?

When you showed your emotions, were they welcomed with interest? Or did your parents react with indifference, or even anger?

?If you conclude that maybe your childhood was not as loving as you thought, it doesn’t mean your parents are bad people. It simply means they did the best they could with their own level of awareness.

?In my case, I always believed my childhood was filled with love — my parents kissed me, hugged me, and gave me all the academic opportunities I could ever ask for. However, I always felt emotionally lonely and confused. I knew they couldn’t handle my true self on a subconscious level because there would always be conflict every time I expressed my emotions.

?As a result, I turned into a people-pleaser. I did my best to meet their expectations and make them proud, even if I had to deny my needs in the process— because all I wanted was to feel loved.

Most of us live in autopilot mode. We never stop to question our personality, our beliefs, or our emotional triggers. We think this is just the way we are, and there’s nothing we can do about it.

This usually happens because we’re all running away from something. We know that introspection inevitably brings the acknowledgment of some painful realities we don’t want to face — so, we hide, we run, we keep ourselves busy.

We may think we’re pursuing our dreams when, in reality, those dreams are not really ours.?They’re the dreams we’ve created to feel loved and accepted.

But it’s never too late to reconnect with our true self and pursue our true dreams.