Trusting Love

I have a friend who mentioned in passing that their relationship had everything they ever wanted; but still they remained pensive.  They talked about past expectations landing on disaster, or how so many of their past romances began strong but then went under a metamorphosis of nightmare proportion: I could relate.  It brought me back to something I learned a while back that still influences my endeavor to understand why we sometimes make poor decisions even when we have good reasons for not doing what we do. 

  I am speaking today on attachment styles.  John Bowlby (1907-1990) was a psychoanalyst (like Freud) and believed that mental health and behavioral problems could be attributed to early childhood.  His evolutionary theory of attachment suggested that children come into the world biologically pre-programmed to form attachments with others, because this helps them survive.  His observations were quite detailed in defining how performance of a parent; how they interacted in that relationship with their child, would influence a child and its future choices.  This was demonstrated with future work by Mary Ainsworth (1913-1999) in her more famous body of research:  Strange Situation Classifications, which offered explanations to individual difference in attachment choices.

  Without getting into all of the really interesting ramifications with that research, I would encourage anyone interested to Google both John Bowlby and Mary Ainsworth Strange Situations work.  The gist of what I learned from this research was that children would consistently fall into categories that would then be very reliable predictors on how they would succeed in life within choices they would make in building relationships as they matured.   

   Not that in exploring this research would it be fair to say we are hence-forth fated to a less than satisfying life if we discovered we were influenced by less than ‘best’ parenting when we were young.  But here is the point of my bringing any of this up.  And that would be finding how we fashion our beliefs can lead to influencing them to serve our hopes and desires.  That too is a process known as dissonance; where we have to resolve the conflicts between the facts of our current situation and the bedrock values that we cling to about our perceptions, in order to convince ourselves we have a fighting chance to survival.

   Now I’ve written about four hundred words to guide this topic towards this very tender place where I can speak honestly…speak angel as my new age buddies are prone to say.  And that is that we are powerful creatures with amazing ability to find our way to the light of feeling love.  I read something the other day that touched me.  “Words must find their way through your mind to touch your heart.”  

My continued desire in addressing these peculiar ways we reason our way on our journey, is always to notice how valuing the trip with clarity can affect the quality of life when it is free of deception. If we dare to seek the actual nature of the world in which we reside we are the masters of the direction our lives take; and most important, not take events that frustrate our desires as anything personal; rather just the way we construed how we got where we are.