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This is one of over 150 articles focused on building high-nurturance family relationships and preventing divorce. This introduction describes the Web site's purpose and the best ways to use its resources. Each article is part of a mosaic of ideas, so the more you read, the more sense they'll all make.         These articles augment, vs. replace, other qualified professional help. The "/" in re/marriage and re/divorce notes that it may be a stepparent's first union. "Co-parents" means both bioparents, or any of the three or more related stepparents and bioparents co-managing a multi-home nuclear stepfamily.          Before continuing, reflect: why are you reading this - what do you need?

        This Project 1 article focuses on one of six wounds common in troubled relationships and families: an impaired ability to form normal attachments or bonds. This and related wounds prevents true inter-personal intimacy, caring, and exchanging love. This page offers brief perspective and opinions on these questions:

• How and when do bonds form?

• What causes this "bonding block" (wound)?

• How does this bonding wound relate to giving and receiving love?

• How does this false-self wound affect typical family relationships?

• What are typical behavioral symptoms of this wound? And...

• Can wounded people learn to genuinely bond (feel and receive love)?

 About Feeling and Bonding

        Newborn humans and other animals have the primitive instinctual ability to form strong emotional attachments, or bonds, to special "things." Universal examples are (a) the fierce bonds between parents, specially mothers, and genetic offspring; and (b) the bond between committed mates - specially co-parents. When young children are deprived of key psychological nurturances  "too much" for "too long," they survive by evolving a fragmented personality.

        Parts of their personality want to emotionally attach to (care about) special people. From abandon-ment and abuse trauma, other parts develop a primal terror of attaching too much, or at all. Depending on many variables, such wounded girls and boys grow into adults who are ambivalent (split) about true bond-ing and commitment, or are too shamed, distrustful, and fearful to allow real bonding with key people.

        Such Grown Wounded Children (GWCs) are burdened with the indescribable anguish of wanting to exchange loving communion and attachment with special people, and being unable to do so - living in a society that relentlessly glorifies and focuses on love.

        Shame-based kids may be able to care for others, but their ruling subselves feel worthless and reject others' love. People who experience "soul-mate" relationships eloquently affirm that there is a deep spiritual dimension to the bond between them.

Other common facets of this tragic psychological wound are being unable to (a) care about yourself (self neglect), and (b) bond meaningfully with a nurturing Higher Power.

  What causes this "bonding block"?

        Shelves of scientific, philosophical, and romantic books focus on this pervasive human mystery. After 70 years on Earth, 29 years' clinical study, and 19 years' wound-recovery learnings, my guesstimate is this:

        Every infant (including newborn you) has the innate capacity to attach. S/He is exquisitely responsive at birth to the sensory interactions s/he has with primary caregivers. A newborn's pre-birth experience and perhaps genes may influence her or his predisposition to trust themselves to connect with this awesome giant being later called Mommy or equivalent.

        If a baby's unfolding current physical, emotional and spiritual needs for gentle attention, security, touching, stimulation, mirroring, feeding, rest, comforting, and cleaning are filled well enough by a primary caregiver who is consistently...

• emotionally present ("available"), vs. distracted or absent ("unavailable"),

• genuinely pleased the baby is there, and wants to nurture him/her; and is...

• able to attach (does not have significant false-self wounds), and is...

• steadily alert to things that please and upset the baby and effective at providing comfort (filling needs), then...

the baby and caregiver will probably develop a balanced, unambivalent mutual bond.

        Initially, the baby's side of the bond is dependence. Over the years, if the growing young child steadily experiences being prized, wanted, and important ("loved") by key caregiver/s, s/he'll shift her part of the bond from "I need you" to "I love you." 

        If the baby's needs are inadequately, erratically, and/or harshly met, or caregivers' looks, sounds, and actions send confusing "You're good! / You're bad!" double messages, then the baby instinctively begins to form a fragmented personality.

        Her or his bond becomes ambivalent: "I need you / I fear you." Over time, that promotes self distrust, dislike, and shame ("bad me" feelings), confusion, and significant guilt. Typical babies begin to developing a protective false self to reduce these discomforts.

        If the child's first three to six years feel too confusing (I'm safe and good / I'm unsafe and bad) and/or too scary and painful, then her or his false-self development and unconscious bonding-ambivalence deep-ens. If s/he experiences "too much" shame ("bad me" feelings), guilt ("I do bad things"), and fears (dis-trusts and anxieties), s/he begins to protectively numb out, distract, and/or detach psychologically from the people associated with their pain (i.e. neglect their wholistic needs).

        The young child's personality subselves who want to trust and bond are overruled by protective distrustful subselves who say "No! It's not safe (to care) because we always get hurt!" These subselves form the child's "bonding block." Such children increasingly depend on themselves to get key needs met. This becomes normal and unremarkable.

        Other wounded kids become apathetic and numb. Still others become strategically "helpless" to force caregivers to attend them, but life is still not really safe because the care they get doesn't feel gen-uine, spontaneous, and loving.

        Genetics and the nurturance level of the growing child's environment over time determines how her or his personality subselves develop, and which subselves dominate. Accumulated pain/pleasure and behavior > response experiences shape...

• how intense the bonding ambivalence or block is (weak to strong);

• how wide it's scope ("I trust soft furry animals but not short red-headed women who frown and growl");

• how the child adapts to the environment's reaction to their block (brazenly, furtively, apologetically, etc.); and...

• how their family reacts to their growing distrust, detachment, and perhaps pretense.

        A major aspect of this bonding wound seems to be the child's ability to experience some or all emotions. Some children who learn to automatically associate feeling with guilt, shame, and fear respond by muting their ability to feel. As teens and adults, they must compute what they believe they're "suppos-ed to" feel to be accepted as "normal." This promotes feeling (even more) abnormal, weird, and shamed without knowing why. 

        The bottom line seems to be: if a young child feels genuinely wanted, safe, noticed, appreciated, stimulated, comforted, and enjoyed enough during early years, s/he'll probably develop a healthy- enough ability to bond with others. If s/he's too deprived too often of genuinely loving (vs. dutiful) attention, touching and holding, encouragement, affirmation, comforting, and protection, the child adaptively develops a pro-tective group of Guardian subselves who provide comfort and distraction from current or expected pain.

Vulnerable and Guardian subselves form a false self which causes up to five other psychological wounds. If dominant subselves are too fearful, distrustful, and ashamed, the child has trouble genuinely attaching with selected others, themselves, and/or a benign Higher Power.

  How does this bonding wound relate to giving and receiving love?

        Until well into real (vs. pseudo) recovery, many survivors of major childhood neglect unconsciously associate love with disappointment, rejection, and abandonment - i.e. pain. From early agonies, alert subselves are sure "If I risk loving (caring about) somebody, it will hurt."

        Survivors who have never experienced healthy, sustained, genuinely unconditional love from another person often can't comprehend that love is other than a mix of lust, neediness, duty, and pity. To such disabled people "I love you" really means "I feel sad / lonely / sorry / compassion / lusty / responsible for you." 

        If partners complain "I don't feel loved by you," unrecovering Grown Wounded Children (GWCs) protest uncomprehendingly "but I do - why don't you see that?" (i.e. "What's wrong with you?"). Similarly, shame-based GWCs have little idea of what it feels like to "love myself."

        To gain some self and social acceptance, Most false selves develop the survival skill of camouflaging this "shameful" inability to really give and receive love from themselves and others.

  What is "pseudo" (false) bonding?

        Wounded Americans (and most others?) who can't feel, bond, or exchange love live in a society which glorifies and idealizes love, "closeness" and caring. Behavioral evidence of genuine bonding is an inescapable social norm. Seeking to feel normal in their own eyes and in society's, these wounded people often become experts early in life in pretending to feel true attachment to selected others - parents, sib-lings, friends, and lovers. They observe how loving adults and kids behave, and become skilled at sounding and acting just like them.

        One common result is they convince themselves that they can bond and love - so if another person doesn't feel a bond, the GWC in denial is sure the other person is the problem, not them. These burdened people are often vey attractive socially and professionally.

        However, eventually their behavior doesn't match their words in key relationships, which leads others to feel confused, hurt, guarded, and distrustful despite the GWCs earnest proclamations of "But I really do care about you!" Paradoxically, that's their truth, for they don't know they don't know what genuine caring feels like.

  How does difficulty bonding affect typical family relationships?

        In ways like these:

One or both courting partners commit to each other for the wrong reasons (like duty, rescuing, loneliness, sex, social normalcy, or revenge, rather than for real love);

After courtship excitement and illusions recede, one or both mates feel increasingly "empty" in their partnership. This bonding wound promotes emotional numbness and hinders or blocks the normal exchange of emotional-spiritual intimacy. Over time, this usually promotes secondary relationship problems like hurt, frustrations, distrust, resentment, disrespect, avoidances, distancing, and affairs.

People with this "hole in the soul" and other false-self wounds often are controlled by an Addict subself who strives to mute or distract inner kids' discomfort or numbness and emptiness. Addictions to substances, activities, relationships, and/or emotional states inevitably corrode personal health and marriages, promote low-nurturance environments, wound dependent kids, and cause more inner pain;

Adults unable to feel and bond (and some professionals they hire) may misdiagnose their persistent emptiness (emotional/spiritual disconnection) as "depression." This can raise personal and family anxiety, and usually doesn't respond to "anti-depressants" and/or therapy. It also lowers trust in the outcome of hiring professionals to help;

People with serious bonding blocks are prone to having loveless (physical only) sex, leaving one or both partners increasingly dissatisfied and unfulfilled;

Partners who feel "empty" (as in childhood) are vulnerable to the excitement and temporary relief of (a) fighting or rebelling, (b) taking major risks, and (c) sexual affairs, including pos-sible incest;

Kids raised by adults who can't genuinely attach often feel unloved, and conclude "some-thing's wrong with me - I'm unlovable and bad." They develop a shame-based false self, which deeply distrusts that anyone offering love really means it. This promotes social isola-tion and/or approach-avoid or "hollow" (emotionally-spiritually empty), "independent" relation-ships. It may also contribute to codependence;

A co-parent with this bonding wound may not be able to nurture biokids and/or stepkids effectively. Their ruling subselves may provide care from duty, guilt, or anxiety, but not from their heart. That risks re-creating the low-nurturance family environment that the wounded adult survived as a child, specially if s/he divorced and/or re/married another Grown Wounded Child.

        And this bonding-block wound can also affect family relationships like this...

Because people with this disability form weak or no genuine attachments, they have little to grieve. That may confuse or alarm caring (unaware) others who judge the wounded person as cold, indifferent, self-absorbed, detached, intellectual, phony, plastic, materialistic, wooden, frozen, egotistic, Narcissistic, or uncaring. These strengthen subselves' belief that their host person is alien, bad, and defective as an individual, a fe/male, a mate, and/or caregiver.

Attempts to heal a low-bond or no-bond relationship through marriage counseling usually fail, unless the therapist...

• knows how to assess and treat false-self wounds (e.g. with some version of inner-family therapy), and...

• each wounded partner admits their true Self is disabled, and...

• commits to intentionally freeing it from false-self control (Project 1).

My professional experience is that over 80% of typical troubled divorcing and stepfamily partners are significantly affected by false selves, and are unaware of their psychological wounds and what they mean.

Continue with typical symptoms of an inability to bond, and requisites for reducing it. Do you need a break first?

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Updated September 02, 2008