Attachment issues up the yang

Beth Orton has a song called "Feral Children". I can hardly listen to it, and I love her stuff. I also can't read books about abused children or watch documentaries about them, even though they fascinate me. It hits my sensitive soul too close.

People who have been abused as children are all around us in the world, living normal lives, doing normal things. But their souls bear scars that are unseen by the world. Sometimes these are the people who successfully suicide. The pain is too great to bear. Or these are the people who turn inside themselves, or turn on other people. These are the people we love to hate, the crazies of the world. Then there are the more resilient types, who for one reason or another are able to withstand the the soul-beatings and live to tell about it. But they still suffer.

Have you ever had a friend abandon you for seemingly no reason? Have you ever known someone with such strong commitment issues that one intense conversation might set them back into themselves for a week or more? Part of this is attachment, that thing borne inside of us when we are born, that thing we create with our parents, that thing that tells us how to orient to the world. Is the world a safe place? Should I be afraid, or alert? This often looks like paranoia.

When a person is scared to be loved, they will do everything in their power to avoid that love. They will self-sabotage in every way they can imagine, and they may not even realize that they're doing it. Perhaps it is our job, those of us who are able to trust and hope, to love these people unconditionally, to commit to them unconditionally, to see them for who they are at their very best, even when their very best is hard to see.

Throwing people away because they are imperfect does nothing for the status quo. It only perpetuates a belief that a person can be thrown away, that a person is worthy of being thrown away. This is never true.