It has taken me many years to get past the individualistic bias of Western psychology and classical psychoanalysis to be able to see this simple fact; we are dancing in human connection, all the time, whether we know it or not. From the cradle to the grave. It is the exengencies of western culture, which require so much emphasis upon making our own individual way, a particular adaptation to the world, that makes it so hard to discern the underlying drama of how we are in an attachment story always, from one moment to the next.
For years as a therapist, I had no idea. I was highly sensitive to the dynamics of individual inner life, and to the pain of existential delimmas in modern isolated life, but I accepted the individual backdrop of life as simply reality… sometimes joyful, sometimes tragic. It was only after I embarked on studying modern attachment research, followed by extensive training in attachment-based couples therapy, followed by many hundreds of hours of actually doing attachment-based therapy, that I finally began to tune-in to the drama of “people needing people” all the time. And that when it is not obvious on the outside, it is happening internally through inner dialogue or fantasy… all the time! And when it is denied, it is still happening.
