The Conflict Between Authenticity and Attachment: Navigating Relationships and Self

Understanding the Struggle Between Being True to Ourselves and Connecting with Others

From the moment we are born, two of our critical psychological needs are in conflict: the need to be authentic and the need to be connected to others. Authenticity involves being connected to ourselves, knowing our needs, maintaining our boundaries, and expressing ourselves. Attachment involves feeling belonging, understood, deserving of warmth, tenderness, inclusion, protection, and guidance.

We need to fulfill both needs, but in our childhood, within the family unit, we often have to choose between connection to ourselves or connection to the adult who takes care of us. This difficult choice is usually not imposed out of a parent's sadistic impulse or domineering for its own sake. In most cases, parents are not even aware that they are encouraging their children to sacrifice their authenticity to gain a stronger connection to the parent.

Many parents cut their children off automatically and out of awareness. This can happen when a parent confuses education with a war on the child's connection to themselves. Suppose a child wants to go to kindergarten naked. How do you deal with it? It is not easy to create a space where the child's desires are not judged but protected as a place for investigation and play, while also helping the child understand the consequences and come to the decision themselves to go dressed.

It is much easier to laugh at the child, scold them, shame them, or scare them. Each time there is another reason to take the short way, for example, because we are in a hurry to work or because we think the child is doing it to upset us. But if such interactions happen often and are almost always resolved the same way, we teach the child to start disconnecting from their needs and stop "bringing themselves" in a spontaneous and complete way to those whose love they need.

This is the most basic and common scenario, but there are also more serious cases. Childish parents who turn their children into parental figures force the child to disconnect from their own needs. This happens when the parent chronically needs the child to take emotional responsibility for themselves, their siblings, or the parent. It may also happen when there is a constant threat that if the child does not do this, the parent will fall apart, and the child will lose this person who at least looks like a parent. In these cases, most children will give up the connection to themselves in favor of the connection to the parent.

This is not a conscious process but a normal developmental choice. In normal circumstances, where the nuclear family overlaps with our home, and certainly in the young ages before puberty, successfully connecting to a parent is a much more important task for our survival than connecting to ourselves. Authenticity can wait; we need a mother.

But since the need for authenticity still exists, and since we suffer when it is not met, each of us develops strategies to deal with this suffering. These strategies are designed to help us bring the parent closer while mitigating the emotional noise our authentic selves make when we leave them locked in the basement and sit down to dinner with the family. These strategies vary from person to person but usually fall into one of three groups: appeasement, confrontation, or emotional detachment from the pain.

The appeasement strategy will get the child to conform. Its benefits are clear because it erases the gap by making the child believe that the parent's needs are their own. However, over time, this increases the gap between the environment's demands and the child's authentic needs.

The confrontation strategy, which brings the parent to give up their demands, has clear advantages but can damage relationships and make them unsafe.

The third strategy, emotional detachment, manifests in the child either conforming or not, depending on circumstances, but detaching from the emotional pain caused by the need to choose. If the child conforms, they detach from the sadness, loneliness, or fear caused by the parent's imposition. If they do not conform and are criticized, they detach from the difficult feelings that arise.

As children, we learn to move between these strategies, but there is usually a fixed hierarchy that directs our responses, determined by what is most effective in our family. We carry this emotional dowry into the world, first in social relationships and then with potential mates.

We apply what we learned in our relationships with our parents to our relationships with our partners. Most of us leave our parents' house disconnected from our true selves. When we fall in love and enter significant relationships, we do so while our authentic self is still locked in the basement. We learned in childhood that it is not possible to feel both connected to others and to ourselves. When the gap between the need to be authentic and the need to be connected starts to hurt, we use the same strategies: appeasement, confrontation, and emotional detachment.

These strategies work in the early stages of a relationship but eventually tire us out. In adulthood, the need for connection with another no longer unequivocally outweighs the need for connection to our true self. To thrive, both as individuals and as couples, we cannot keep our true selves locked up.

This is when we experience a marital crisis. What seems like the loss of harmony is actually the loss of connection to the self. The marital crisis results from recognizing that for the relationship to develop and become an arena of joy and security, it should not require the relinquishment of the authentic self.

Therefore, the marital crisis is not a crisis of loss and fragmentation but of connection. It forces us to face the fact that we have locked our inner child in the basement. Until the big marital crisis, we could ignore this conflict. Fortunately, a good relationship does not allow this, inviting us to an essential developmental crisis necessary for proper growth as human beings.