When The Need For Authenticity Conflicts With The Need For Attachment

We have two fundamental needs – the need for healthy attachment (connection, sense of belonging, acceptance, freedom) and the need for authenticity (to know your needs and to express them without fear of rejection).

These are evolutionary adaptive traits in mammals, especially in humans. On a basic level, when you’re authentic, you can read your body and how it’s responding to the environment. You can detect danger and you know how to respond appropriately. The suppression of this need is connected to generalized anxiety disorder, where we are no longer able to read what our body is saying about the presence of threats according to what stimuli the body is unconsciously responding to. As Dr. Gabor says, the more we are out of touch with ourselves, the less we will see a threat when its there, or the more we’ll imagine it when it’s not there.

If a parent rejects a child’s authentic expressions of its needs, such as with frustration or stress, then the child learns to suppress its need for authenticity as a coping mechanism in order to maintain its need for attachment to its parents. This means we’re no longer connected to our authenticity, to our real healthy needs, and what our emotions are telling us. Essentially, we’ve disabled our ability to rely on our own strength in order to rely on our parents or authority figures, which has serious ramifications during adulthood.

Dr. Gabor says this is a dilemma for a child between its need for authenticity and its need for adult attachment. So on the psychological level, what happens to a child when the attachment need is not compatible with its need for authenticity? We end up internalizing the belief that “If I’m authentic, I will be rejected.” We end up disconnected from ourselves and our needs, so then when it comes to adult relationships, we don’t know what we want or what to look for, and therefore what to value. Now our need for healthy adult attachment is incompatible with our need for authenticity, which means that our understanding of healthy attachment is also corrupted. Instead of acceptance and safety, attachment to us is the fear of abandonment and a sense that relationships inherently involve shrinking oneself and dismissing one’s needs.

So if the expression of your authentic Self through your needs was met with rejection, then of course as an adult you’ll see relationships where you’re vulnerable as threatening, even if that person is not a threat to you at all.

On one hand our authentic Self still exists, and those needs for healthy attachment and authenticity are still there on some level but we can’t recognize it. And on the other hand, we are trying to avoid the pain of having our authenticity rejected. We end up stuck between trying to sift through what’s a threat and what’s not, all because we’re out of touch with ourselves, and because what’s familiar is not healthy for us. Our indecisiveness and our avoidance is thus largely a coping mechanism to avoid that pain of abandonment while still trying to maintain that need for a healthy relationship.

We may see vulnerability, and therefore healthy attachment, as a threat because that’s where we were hurt, and we may not see unhealthy attachments and dysfunction as a threat because of their familiarity. Or perhaps we are capable of recognizing dysfunction as threatening, but still yet unable to recognize healthy attachment. So then the indecisiveness causes us to become paralyzed between what our authentic Self really wants, even if we’re not aware of it, and contrived needs, or what Dr. Gabor calls, “false needs”, which revolve around the fear of abandonment. We often think “Is this what our parents want?” when it comes to wanting to fulfill our own need for healthy relationships.

When your authentic needs are eroded, your Self is eroded, which means that your Will is also eroded. You no longer can recognize the voice of your Mind. It becomes replaced by the Will of others and what they want for you, which is why the pseudo-religious ethic of “obedience to parents” is so harmful. So now you’re stuck between what you really want based on your repressed authentic needs and what you think you should want, which usually reflects the voice and aspirations of others. When you don’t know yourself, as an adult, you can’t really make real decisions or know how to take responsibility, which are adult traits. This causes a lot of confusion, and as we struggle with this, we become paralyzed by indecisiveness in life.

Healthy wants connect us to our healthy or authentic needs. When you’re authentic, you know what you want because you are attuned to your needs, so you’re able to recognize what will fulfill those needs. Unhealthy wants are means towards unhealthy needs or “false needs”. A false need might be the unhealthy need for social or parental validation, which is ultimately the need to maintain in one’s life a sense of dysfunction and devaluation. So if we define ourselves by external validation, first from our parents, and then from society and the social institutions that replace the archetype of the parent, then what we want tends to revolve around what will gain acceptance from those objects of validation, such as status, wealth, a certain image, and so on. However, all of these merely buries more deeply our authenticity, and therefore distances us further from our essence.

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