Insecure attachment style? Blame capitalism!

Why is it that our societies seem to be designed to actively sabotage our emotional health?

Photo of a card in my parents’ house, by an artist identified as ‘Sara’

When it comes to non-fiction, I have two kinds that I tend to read. One is ‘politics’ and the other is about personal development in a very broad sense — from healing trauma to parenting to the mind-body connection.

Of course, in real life, these two things — the personal and the political — are not separate. Our social systems deeply shape our personal lives and, in turn, who we are as individuals can help to either perpetuate or disrupt the status quo of our societies.

But in writing, the personal and political are very often stripped apart. This is something I find frustrating and Loveconomics aims to change this.

The best of what I’m calling the ‘personal development’ type of writing does at least acknowledge that we are operating within the constraints of our social systems, that our cultures can be very challenging contexts in which to develop and grow. I’m thinking of people like the physician and trauma specialist Gabor Maté, who has written books about chronic illness, addiction, parenting and ADHD — topics all very close to my heart.

But even these books don’t dwell long on the irreconcilable conflict between our personal needs and the societies within which we are struggling to meet those needs — which I get. This writing focuses instead on what we can do as individuals within the given constraints of those deeply flawed societies. And I see how this is important and I read a lot of these books. But still, I also think it’s important to pause for a moment and let this basic fact sink in:

Not only do our societies not support and nurture our personal growth, they are actually designed to actively sabotage it.

This simple, devastating fact has become so mundanely obvious that we just take it for granted, and spend what precious little time and energy we have trying to hack the system and navigate it so that we can limit the damage as much as we can.

We need to do this for our very survival. But we can also take a beat to reflect on quite how fucked up this situation is and imagine what life could look like if we actually had societies designed to give a shit about us.

There are many, many ways in which capitalism stunts our personal growth, but as the mum of a two-year-old, let’s start with one that’s taking up much of my bandwidth: how to raise human beings who are emotionally healthy and capable of forming secure, loving relationships with others.

Unconditional what?

If you are currently raising a child and ever read parenting books, follow parenting influencers or go on the internet at all, you will know that basically the only style of care-giving sanctioned by the gods of parenting is some variation or other of ‘gentle parenting’.

Gentle parenting draws heavily on attachment theory: that in order to raise children who will be emotionally healthy in adulthood, the most important thing we need to give those children is a secure attachment with us, their primary care givers. This means things like showing them unconditional love and acceptance, while having firm boundaries that you nevertheless assert kindly and with the right degree of flexibility.

Right, ok. Totally on board. Definitely want to do this. One problem: what the hell is unconditional love when it’s at home and how do you practice it? I literally didn’t know what a boundary was until I read

Philippa Perry

’s The Book You Wish Your Parents Had Read.

Gentle parenting is in; authoritarian parenting is out out out. My conscious mind 100% agrees and wants to do this, but tell that to the unconscious programming of me and most of my generation — especially those of us with immigrant parents who had little choice but to drill into us that we needed to work twice as hard as anyone else in order to get half as far.

Unconditional love is, apparently, something to do with showing your child that they have innate worth that is constant and entirely unaffected by their achievements or how they perform. We need to feel this stable sense of inherent worth in order to have self esteem, which in turn affects things like whether we’ll suffer from mental illness, addiction, abusive relationships or even serious health conditions (including inflammatory illnesses like my ulcerative colitis, btw).

Right then. Is it just me or has anyone else noticed that this is exactly the opposite of what capitalism teaches us? Capitalism is based on competing under conditions of falsely imposed scarcity. Competing not just for approval but for our lives. Competing in order to get our basic needs and the needs of our loved ones met.

Capitalism is also a system of hierarchy. It literally says that some lives are worth less than others, based on arbitrary attributes such as our passport, gender, race, disability, sexuality and the economic circumstances of our parents. This hierarchy and this false scarcity are the basis of the profits and power that are the driving force and entire point of capitalism.

Does this sound like the basis of unconditional love and healthy self esteem to you?

Chance would be a fine thing

If we are really going to do the kind of parenting that nurtures secure attachments, we are going to have to take the following steps: a) process our own trauma, b) deprogramme everything we have been taught from our earliest years, c) learn all the new stuff from scratch, d) put all the new stuff into practice.

This is a lifetime of work. And we are going to have to do it all while scrabbling around trying to meet our children’s immediate needs, with virtually zero support, and having to work all God’s hours at an actual job for, you know, money.

The nuclear family is basically a trauma factory. Capitalism, obsessed only with profit and power, pushes us to raise children in tiny isolated units, makes childcare unaffordable, and forces us to work more and more hours to make ends meet. This makes it virtually impossible to take a minute to break the cycle of trauma that this same system inflicted on our ancestors, who passed it down to us through the generations.

Healing our way out of this circus

Again, I’m not saying that we shouldn’t be working on our personal development. I get that we’re in this circus now and we need tools to muddle through as best we can. But how much better and easier would it be if we didn’t have to fight against our social systems at every turn, just to get what we need? Imagine how life would be if our societies were actually designed to help us nurture ourselves and our beloveds, to let us give each other that unconditional love that we all crave and need?

If we give ourselves a minute to let the fundamental disconnect between our needs and our socioeconomic system really sink in, perhaps we can then start extending our self development outwards towards a social development — taking those baby steps to build a new system that has love at its heart.