Unable to bond: What to do to bond anyway

People and social relationships are essential to our lives. We are social beings, and our society is structured around total cooperation with one another. Of course, there are jobs where you interact less with people, but having absolutely no interaction with people is nearly impossible—and that’s just when it comes to earning money and meeting your basic needs.

After all, we’re social in more ways than one. Having strong social connections is also good for our health. For example, we’d like to have a partner to grow old with, and a strong bond with your children is always wonderful.

But what if you feel that you can't bond well and therefore don't have a good relationship with your children or partner. Or that you can't find a partner at all?

What does attachment mean?

First, it’s helpful to understand what attachment actually is. Attachment is about how you relate to people who are important to you, such as your parents, partner, and children. It also involves the trust you have that they provide a secure foundation for you.

For example, if you try something and it fails, a good attachment makes you feel that family and friends will take care of you then. They are your safe haven, so to speak, if you have good attachment[1].

When you look at it this way, good friends can also be a safe haven—especially if you can discuss with them the risks you’re willing to take and whether they’d be willing to serve as a safety net in case you fail.

How you bond with people is something that comes about early in life and this can affect the rest of your life (source 1, page: 194). Mind you, it can, because eventually you can also influence yourself to attach in a different way if you find that what you have been doing up to that point is not working for you.

Why is attachment important?

Being able to form strong bonds with people has several benefits, such as giving you the courage to take risks. And thus, you’ll be able to live the life you truly want. Or, at the very least, have the courage to take the steps needed to get closer to it.

In addition, being able to bond well is also helpful if you ever get therapy, because if you can bond well with your therapist, this is good for the treatment. It is then more likely to be successful (source 1, page: 194).

Types of attachment

There are multiple ways you can get attached.

Secure attachment

With safe attachment, you feel a secure foundation. This makes you open to new experiences, able to collaborate and commit to a project.

Scattered anxious attachment

If you struggle with a scattered attachment style, you often have low self-confidence and tend to view other people as superior to you. This can lead you to adopt a dependent role in relationships.

As a child, for example, you might have found it scary to be away from your parents, perhaps suffering from homesickness.

You’re also more likely to suffer from borderline personality disorder, anxiety disorders, or substance abuse[2].

Avoidant attachment

In this form of attachment, you try to avoid emotional intimacy and connection. As a result, you are usually very good at taking care of yourself. You tend to be secretive and don't let other people take you off track. You also usually don't reveal your plans to others.

If someone wants to be intimate with you break contact.

You can get this form of attachment if your parents did not respond well to your signals that you needed something. As a result, you have learned that expressing what you need does not ensure that you will necessarily get it. This makes you feel that you can only rely on yourself in your life.

However, because you’re not truly being intimate, you still don’t get what you really need. The people you’re in a relationship with may also feel neglected. For example, your partner might feel lonely in the relationship[3].

What is insecure attachment?

Insecure attachment is really about the attachment you were given as a child. If that was unsafe, you are more likely to have avoidant or scattered attachment later in life.

But what can you do with this knowledge to still have a good attachment with important people around you?

Attach to your partner

For how you attach to your partner, it is helpful to know the way you attach whether this is the fearful scattered attachment or the avoidant attachment. Maybe while reading this you already have the idea "this describes me" and that may be true.

But to then make that attachment healthier, it can be helpful to take a moment to go back to the moment in your life when you decided that you were either very dependent on people or just didn't need people (not really). This is usually a moment from childhood.

In hypnotherapy, this is usually done using the regression technique. The hypnotherapist puts you into a state of hypnosis and then helps you go back in time to the moment when you thought , “I’m not good enough,” or “I need to trust myself.”

Next, you're going to do something with that moment. After all, you know much more about how life works now than you did then. The therapist helps you reinterpret this moment.

This regression technique has also been studied by scientists to see if it can transform insecure attachment if someone has had a traumatic childhood, and in this early research it did[4].

You can also learn other techniques, such as talking to your inner child. In this way you can tell yourself, so to speak, that you are no longer dependent on your parents and that everything has turned out well and that you are allowed to attach yourself to people. You may also give people your love so they know that you care about them. You are allowed to discuss intimate thoughts with your partner, and your partner is just as dependent on you as you are on him/her.

Attach to friends

The way you form attachments also influences the friendships you have. With secure attachment, you can build meaningful friendships and expect to have them as well.

With the more insecure attachment types, friendships are also less good. People with avoidant attachment often also have negative expectations about friendships[5].

Also for friendships, you can perform regression and have the conversation with your inner child. But in addition, you can also change the future image you have about friendships so that you have more positive expectations and therefore show more positive behavior, such as trust and planning in the future with your friends.

For example, instead of a regression, you can perform a progression. In that case, for example, you can visualize what your social life will look like in, say, a year from now. Then you go back in time, so to speak, to the moment of therapy, and in that journey back you see everything you do to form those optimal friendships.

Bonding with your parents

Your parents have a lot of influence on your bonding, and if that hasn't gone well, it can be very easy to blame your parents for how you have relationships. But that doesn't help yourself or your bond with your parents either. Especially not if you actually prefer to have a good bond with your parents anyway.

One way to turn your anger around is to consider what that which you think your parents did not do right has ultimately brought you. Blaming will help you no further.

Gratitude is important for the attachment you have with your parents in adulthood[6]. So what can you be grateful for?

If you had to do everything yourself it did bring you independence, for example. That can then be something you are grateful for. If they were very protective which makes you feel somewhat dependent now they at least wanted you to be safe and you are aware of dangers which makes you not take unnecessary risks. That can also be something you are grateful for.

In this way, the view of your parents can still change and remember that they too were only doing this for the first time and they did their best with all their life experience and situations they had in their lives at that time.

Bonding with your (adult) children

When all is said and done, you've automatically become fairly attached to your children, but you may find that when they're out of the house you still find that comforting. You may think your attachment has not worked out well when you hear friends talk about missing their adult children.

Then remember that everyone is different. You also don't want to be dependent on your children as you want to give them the space to live their own lives.

What is most important is that you can be proud of your adult children and that they are getting their lives in order. The phase of parenting is basically over and now you may just enjoy the fruits they reap. Do things still go wrong? Then you can now help your child precisely as friends instead of giving them another lecture.

You can also perform a progression technique with your children to see how to strengthen your bond with them to improve bonding and build a fine adult life with them.

And you can even perform regression—even with adult children—to see if, over the course of your life, you’ve developed certain beliefs about how to relate to adult children, and to change those beliefs if they’re hindering your bond with your child.

Want to learn more about hypnosis and how it can help all kinds of problems? Then come to the free online master class.

Or sign up for one of the courses offered by the Hypnosis Institute of the Netherlands.

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