My therapist and I had a long discussion about attachment disorder yesterday. Not just in terms of my own, but in general terms for people who come from broken families. The majority of us tend to overly attach to things when we become adults. I have trouble parting with inanimate objects. I'm not a hoarder. I can actually let GO of them, but I always have to say goodbye. I feel sad for several days.
A lot of adults from broken homes have manifested their attachment disorder on their own children. It makes sense. For the first time ever, the idea of family is something THEY can control. They have this new little person who is theirs. Of course their attachments are going to be extreme. People blame parents for a lot of things these days, but in some cases, I think it's best that we remember a lot of parents are still little kids inside, little kids who are just trying to form some bonds.
Parenting is weird anyway. We basically expect people who rarely have it together to raise a batch of new little people. Most of them do this cluelessly or, at best, assuming that everything they do is wrong. My therapist said she gets really nervous when her kids ask for hotdogs because she knows that kids can choke on hotdogs. Then she laughed and said that when she was her oldest daughter's age (five) they let her hold a wire into an open fire with a hotdog attached to it and then advised her not to burn herself as she ate it off the wire. She survived. Surely her kids will.
I wonder if our parents ever wonderd if they weren't doing enough.
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