by Eva at LoveTrust
Many people are ambivalent about attachment, need, and desire. These signature human qualities express themselves naturally in all of us, and yet we tend to be complicated about them. I dare say that attachment, need, and desire are part of the beauty of who we are as human beings. Why then do so many of us have a hard time allowing their expression?
Many religious and spiritual paths, both Western and Eastern, teach us that attachment and desire are problematic. Some idolize celibacy, or consider sex sinful if not done for the reason of procreation. Some warn against “women and gold” and encourage channeling human desire into desire for God. You don’t need to be Catholic to feel complicated about your attachments, needs, and desires. If you are at all serious about your spiritual path or want to be close to God, it’s likely you will feel some ambivalence about getting attached, wanting, and needing people.
This ambivalence is not limited to “spiritual types.” There is an obvious reason why attachment, need, and desire got such a bad name. We’ve all seen examples of toxic attachment, we’ve seen the ugliness of grabby desire, and the sucky form of neediness. Nobody wants to see that coming, and it’s best to steer clear of those twisted emotions in ourselves too. Indulging in them will sink your spirit in no time. No wonder that religions warn against them. When attachment, need, and desire are poisoned by selfishness, they become obnoxious, no doubt about that. Letting go is the answer in those cases.
But wait a second. Aren’t there other reasons why people may want to avoid attachment, need, and desire? Oh yes! Being attached, needing, and wanting people makes us vulnerable. It makes us feel so much about them. Desire can make us a bit edgy, as if we were about to jump out of our skin at the sight of the one we love. If we withhold those feelings from others out of self-protection or fear of being rejected, this is one more way our ego gets the upper hand. Friends, let’s not get hoodwinked. If we are suppressing our need and desire for others, and pursue detachment as an antidote to being vulnerable to someone we’re attached to, love loses and ego wins.
Having a judgment against attachment, need and desire causes us to suppress those powerful emotions, leading to an unfulfilling existence. I’ve known many people struggling with that particular hang-up, and I did struggle with it myself. We can make our lives so not worthwhile by cutting ourselves off from our more vulnerable feelings! The result is feeling a bit dry, a bit detached, maybe even aloof, somewhat removed from life and human emotions, not feeling their edge anymore.
TRUE STORY
Mary was a passionate woman. As a teen, she easily fell in love and was always ready to throw herself into relationships. She was full of feeling and full of desire. She would obsess about her boyfriends to the point of becoming a bit like a stalker, wanting attention and manipulating them to get it. When they didn’t like it, she would feel hurt. After a few relationships that didn’t work out, she decided that falling in love makes life too hard, and relationships too hot to handle. She grew suspicious of her feelings. She decided to focus on other aspects of life: her hobbies, her career, etc. Even if she liked someone, she acted indifferent or controlling, so that her deeper feelings were kept on a tight leash. A few years later, she noticed that rarely did anything get to her anymore. She wondered, how did life become so dry? And how did she get so lonely?
TRUE STORY
Kevin was a sensitive and brilliant man. He had a successful career and a wife he loved. However, after a few years, their relationship ended painfully. After the break-up he grew more and more disillusioned with his job, and eventually quit it. He didn’t have anyone to provide for, so he felt he simply didn’t need much and wasn’t motivated to put much effort into anything. He felt burned by his experience, and the challenge of close intimacy was daunting to him. He was afraid to care that much, or want that much, or get that attached and then lose the person he loved.
He found himself alone and depressed. He turned to spirituality as a solution and focused on his spiritual practices. Consistent meditation practice helped him regain some peace of mind. He told himself that a failed marriage and a lost career were necessary steps in spiritualizing his life. He became further detached from his human feelings and considered it a sign of spiritual progress. This sounded plausible to him, but didn’t really satisfy his heart. Serving the public and being kind to everyone were the forms of love that were easier to manage, and so he dedicated himself to this way of living, but he was still alone and didn’t talk about his deeper feelings.
Understandably, Kevin turned to spirituality for help after he got burned in a relationship. However, his pursuit of spirituality was also fueled by the avoidance of intimacy. True spirituality is not about avoiding the challenge of human relationships and seeking a safe mental space. It’s about facing the challenge with a constructive and loving orientation.
Life gets messy. Without clear insight into what exactly caused the problems and how to fix it, being fully invested in relationships may sound like being involved in an endless mess, the realm of samsara itself! But, renouncing our humanity and suppressing our feelings toward people is no solution. We may avoid this challenge by cutting off the more vulnerable, human parts of ourselves, but we will also deprive ourselves and others of exactly those very parts. Is it worth it? It may be temporarily useful, for as long as it takes to regroup, but in the long run our evolutionary journey will bring us back to face our humanity. Sooner or later.
When we are ready and willing to overcome abeyance from relationship and restore our natural human responses to people, including need, attachment, and desire, there are deeper inquiries as to the causes of relationship failures. There are things to learn about what worked, what didn’t, and why. There is a spiritual perspective to gain that can be helpful in reapproaching relationships of high affinity.
There are two fundamentally selfish (or ego-centric) ways we can misuse our attachments, needs, and desires. On one side, there is a drive to take advantage, get what we want and need, obsessively hold on, without caring for the person being taken advantage of. On the other side of the same coin, there is withholding and self-protection, which result in lack of vulnerability and lack of healthy human interdependence. This is what happens with attachments, needs, and desires when used for selfish purposes. They are either abused or withheld.
Once we’ve experienced those forces being toxified by selfishness (either from within or from without), to experience them again puts us up against all the fears inside that oppose the boundary-dissolving movement of love, the urge to merge. Those fears have everything do with “what can go wrong” when we either desire or are desired. Withholding seems justified to us, but what about the other person, the one we want, who wants and needs us back? They don’t deserve that fear response. It is hurtful to be feared.
We all want to be wanted and need to be needed. We also need to be able to bond, and attachment is a healthy element of all human bonds. To withhold those expressions of love from one another is to hold back what’s humanly important to us.
Desire, need, and attachment are powerful forces. By nature, they powerfully move us toward each other. This towards force is driving us to unity. It leads to transforming “you” and “me” into “we,” naturally. Aha! Isn’t unity a spiritual ideal? “We” is bigger than “me.” The love desire, the need to be cared for, the attachment we develop when we love someone carry an energy that naturally moves us toward each other.
We can be more expansive and more inclusive when we become a part of a close relationship. That is, IF we:
- Care about others more than whether we get what we want. To truly love the one we want, need, and are attached to means to care about what’s good for them, above what we want from them.
- Don’t become selfish when we do get what we want and need, and consider the relationship as something primarily “for me.” To stay true to the beloved is to stay true to what’s right for “we,” and that happens on a moment-by-moment basis, without a book of rules.
- Use those powerful emotions in the right context. Rightly expressed, they are gifts for the other, showing them that they make a difference to us, they make us happy, and that we trust them with our needs.
Challenging? Yes! To say the least.
There is much to learn and master that can’t be covered in a short article like this one.
To allow ourselves to want, need, and be attached in relationship is to enter the arena that requires plenty of love, astute spiritual discernment, a lot of self-awareness and self-control, even self-mastery. Isn’t it where we need to exercise our spiritual awareness the most? Friends, let’s not take relationships out of the realm of spirituality. It’s exactly where they belong. When the emotions run high, everything seems more stark, and that’s good.
Love is not just a nice word that goes with hearts and flowers. Love is a powerful force, and it presses through, beyond what we find “safe.” When we are loving truly and unstintingly, without putting stops on our involvement with others, we will feel that we want them, need them, and we will get attached to them. Guaranteed. We will be enlivened by the force of life that is present when we allow ourselves to feel those powerful emotions. Desire is the spice of life. Let it not be dull.
In reality, spiritual growth is necessary to make relationships work. We learn as we go, and must keep on learning, or we will cut off the aspects of ourselves that we find too problematic. We also need relationships to grow spiritually. We need each other as both companions and mirrors. We need both the support and challenge of each other. We need each other’s love, attention and consciousness. After all, what is spiritual life if not a life of love? We are not meant to go it alone. Not at all.