Healthy Attachment

25 Mar Healthy Attachment

Nonattachment is a teaching about our ultimate nature. Our buddha nature is totally, intrinsically nonattached. Attachment in the Buddhist sense has the negative meaning of clinging. Being free and open, our buddha nature has no need to cling.Yet to grow into a healthy human being, we need a base of secure attachment in the positive, psychological sense, meaning: close emotional ties to other people that promote connectedness, grounded embodiment, and well-being. As John Muir the naturalist wrote: “When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find that it is bound fast by a thousand invisible cords that cannot be broken, to everything in the universe.” Similarly, the hand cannot function unless it is attached to the arm—that’s attachment in the positive sense.  We’re interconnected, interwoven, and interdependent with everything in the universe. On the human level we can’t help feeling somewhat attached to people we are close to.Thus it’s natural to grieve deeply when we lose someone we’re close to. Acknowledging close ties to another and letting our feelings show like that, is a beautiful vulnerability.

Since we cannot avoid some kind of attachment to others, the question becomes, “Are we engaging in healthy or unhealthy attachment?” What is unhealthy in psychological terms is insecure attachment, for it leads either to fear of close personal contact or else to obsession with it. Interestingly, people growing up with secure attachment are more trusting, which makes them much less likely to cling to others. Maybe we could call that “nonattached attachment.” I’m afraid that what many Western Buddhists are practicing in the relational area is not nonattachment, but avoidance of attachment. Avoidance of attachment, however, is not freedom from attachment. It’s still a form of clinging— clinging to the denial of your human attachment needs, out of distrust that love can be reliable.
– from an interview with John Welwood