Finished “Becoming Attached — first relationships and how they shape our capacity to love”. Best Attachment Theory book read.

Main takeaways:

1. The pattern and style the child relates to the parents largely shaped the patten and style s/he later on relate to the significant others in life. We have no better choices.

2. The child’s understand of relationships can only be from the relationships he’s experienced.

3. Love is a biological necessity. Every normal human being needs it.

4. The ambivalent child — they are constantly trying to hold on to the mother or to punish her for being unavailable. They think they can get her attention if they plea or make a big enough fuss. They’re widely addicted to the mother. But through it all they do not believe they have what it takes to get what they need from the mother. They tend to emphasize their feelings of helplessness to elicit care. They learn to scan the environment in search of threatening elements that will enable them to become fearful and thereby get attention. This extreme attentiveness saps energy that might be available for play or work.

5. Most ambivalent children are anxious about abandonment. Their attachment antennae are always up and receiving.

6. The avoidant child who is ashamed of being needy may grow up to be a man who is a caricature of independence, unable to ask for help or closeness or even to feel those longings within himself without rising the disintegration of his self-respect.

7. The ability to vicariously experience the feelings of another, is the foundation of attachment and the price we pay for it.

8. Despite our conscious protests and longings, we often prefer relationships that repeat our early experience, no matter how unsatisfying. There is a “natural bias” in favor of what we already know. No matter how painful or unfulfilling it may be, it offers the second-rate security of being familiar.

9. How parents make you feel…will affect your behavior with others in the future.

10. In emotional life, much as in history, we are only doomed to repeat what has not been remembered, reflected upon and worked through.