Beyond Secure Attachment

Towards Erotic Attachment

I’ve spent the past couple years listening to people talk about secure attachment, anxious attachment, avoidant attachment, all the attachment things. Over the past year, I’ve gotten much closer to what seems to be called “secure attachment” than I ever have before. And it’s given me suspicions.

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The frame that feels most resonant in my body around attachment goes something like this:

• Avoidant attachment and anxious attachment are involuntary reflexes in the emotional/energetic/somatic system.

• Avoidant attachment is an involuntary awayness reflex — either pushing people away, or backing away from them.

• Anxious attachment is an involuntary towardness reflex — either pulling people in, or moving closer towards them.

• Towardness and awayness aren’t the problems, the involuntary nature of the reflex is.

• Secure attachment, at least how I’ve seen it most often talked about, and how I’ve mostly felt it in myself, feels like an extinction of those reflexes. The involuntary pushing and pulling dies down quite a lot. You’re okay simply being there.

My suspicion about this flavor of secure attachment is that it primarily appeals to avoidant types. If avoidance tends towards an impulse towards one’s own conscious, deliberate, autonomous control of a situation (not merging with other people/situations or losing yourself in them), then it makes sense that when an avoidant becomes aware of their avoidant reflex, their next reflex will be to get conscious, deliberate, autonomous control of that too.

This explains why so much of the discourse around secure attachment is so academic, professional, heady, detached.

Which isn’t to say it’s bad or anything, just that it’s pretty easy to trace the impulse, and only a short hop from there to be aware of its limitations.

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The biggest limitation I see is that the extinction of unhelpful reflexes is not a particularly ambitious goal. Conscious choice of when to push or pull is pretty unambitious.

(I know I’m going to run into some pushback here, but: I view the worship of conscious choice as profoundly unambitious in most domains — let’s talk about it in this domain and you can extrapolate from there.)

Let’s use sports as an easy example: you might start playing a sport and have all kinds of unhelpful reflexes, picked up from years of traumatized living. Someone throws a ball at you, you drop to the floor and guard your face rather than catching it or swinging your bat at it. Someone tries to tackle you, you turn around and run backwards the other direction instead of leaning into the hit to power through it. Someone swings their fist at your face, you jump back and leap out of the boxing ring. If you’re stuck in these old reflexes, you’re going to suck at whatever sport you pick.

So you have to go towards reflex extinction, of course. You learn to consciously lean into the hit, even when you’re scared. You feel the reflex and let go of it. You practice catching the ball when it’s thrown hard at your chest. You resist the urge to throw your arms up and ward it off, or leap out of the way. If you keep practicing, the old reflexes die down, and you can now more consciously choose how you react. Hooray! Secure attachment! (Or secure athletics or whatever.)

But if that’s where you get to, conscious choice and extinction of old reflexes, you’re still going to kind of suck at the sport.

Mastery in sports (really mastery in any domain) isn’t about conscious choice — it’s about retraining your reflexes so that you have to make fewer and fewer conscious choices. Everything simply happens because you’ve trained new, better, more aligned reflexes. The best athletes hardly think at all when they’re immersed in play. In fact, the big problem is when they do think about what they’re doing.

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I suspect that attachment follows this basic pattern too — but that the people who talk the most about secure attachment are often scared to lean in to the next step. Because the next step once again involves surrender to Eros, loss of control, training yourself to hand the reigns over to well-attuned inner reflexes that pour through you. All of which is very at odds with the heady, distanced, highly composed vision of secure attachment that dominates the discussion.

What I see is something like:

• Starting Point: Insecure Attachment, subject to involuntary reflexes

• Step One: Secure Attachment, extinction of reflexes

• Step Two: Erotic Attachment, intentional training of and submission to appropriate energetic reflexes of towardsness and awayness

I’d love more people who feel or recognize something in this journey, it’s been feeling super alive to me since I wrote a draft of this article a couple months ago.

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Coda

Typing this out, it actually now reminds me of Rob Burbea’s journey deep into emptiness and Buddhist practice… followed by a turn towards soul-making, eros, and Jungian archetypal currents.

There’s this same pattern of emptying out old reflexes and ways of being, reaching some kind of peaceful but somewhat detached space — and then rebuilding something new and intentional and deeply alive from there. Not building from conscious control and decision-making, but from conscious co-creation with currents of Being you don’t fully understand, but which feel deeply Alive and Present.