Growth: reading, learning.

I started reading a book. It wasn't the one that the article suggested. It was a book I had actually picked up as a joke gift to my mother that I later decided not to give her because it might actually hurt her feelings. It's called "The invisible presence." How a man's relationship with his mother affects all his relationships. I made it about fifteen pages in before the spiritual mumbo jumbo about finding the warriors way got to me and I had to put it down.

I then went out and bought the book the article recommended, "Attached: The new science of adult attachment and how it can help you find and keep - love.", and so far it is fucking fantastic. It has a different tone than I expected.

The first part of the book breaks down how we need attachments and how they evolved with us as a species to give us a survival advantage. It explains that there are three basic types of attachment behaviors: avoidant, anxious, and secure. There is no finger pointing or saying one is evil or anything. More so explaining that different people require different types of behaviors to meet there emotional needs.

The book also gives you a link to an online test, which I thought was pretty transparent but was still worth taking. I recommend it for everyone. You can find it here. It allows you to see what your attachment style is. Turns out I'm not as avoidant as I could be, but am still very avoidant. On a scale of 1-7 I was a 5.25.

The one part of the book that blew my mind almost instantly was the situational stress test they talked about. It is an experiment that was performed on a child because child to mother attachment is surprisingly similar to that of regular adult attachments. They took the child and mother put them in a room filled with toys. The child would venture out from the mother and explore the room. The mother would get up and leave the room and the child would freak the fuck out and go to the door and cry. The mother would come back and  console the child and eventually the child would go back to exploring. The part that blew my mind was that the same parallels could be drawn to adults. The child could only develop and grow, becoming more independent and growing it's strengths when the emotional/physical attachment of it's mother was there. This means that as adults we may not reach our true potential without some sort of attachment to be dependant on to encourage us to grow and actually be stronger. Seemed so paradoxical in my mind before but now it just seems to make sense.

I'm still reading and working away but I wanted to give you guys an update.

Turns out, I'm not a lost cause.

Later Days,
Hero.