I tweeted yesterday: “The higher my quality of life, the more secure my attachment, the less hold my addictions have on me.”
Harel responded: “Luke, this really hit home with me. Can you expand on this?”
We are wired to connect. People with secure attachment connect with other people without much effort and tend to form long-lasting relationships. They’re consequently less likely to be unhinged. They’re less likely to be sports fanatics, compulsive debtors, or porn addicts. People with insecure attachment such as myself tend to obsess about the quality of their most important attachments and this reduces one’s ability to connect normally. People with avoidant attachment feel that they don’t need to connect to others. This is the hardest attachment pattern to shift. By contrast, people with insecure attachment can become secure, and people with secure attachment can become insecure, depending on who they attach to. We affect each other. The insecure tend to make people around them more insecure and the secure tend to make others feel more secure.
I know that when I’ve been surrounded by secure people, my attachment system calms down and I feel more secure and as a result, I act out less and I am less likely to needlessly damage my relationships with other people and with myself.
When I was a child, I was often miserable and I learned to escape by fantasizing about myself as a very important person (aka narcissism served to protect my wounded self). When my adult life did not work right, I tended to relapse to past coping mechanisms such as grandiose fantasy, sex and love addiction, TV and sports addiction, and hiding and biting.
All addictions tend to spiral. They all tend to be progressive and fatal. Loneliness kills more people than cigarettes. When you feel insecure, you will naturally isolate and be easily thrown by the buffeting winds of normal life.
The quality of one’s life correlates with the quality of one’s relationships. If you’re relating well to others, you feel less need to escape from your life through familiar compulsions.
