Three Considerations for Healthy Bonding

Learning to create a healthy bond with a partner, friend, or family member can be challenging and complex. As you enter into greater intimacy with someone, it may trigger a variety of surprisingly intense and conflicting feelings. In one moment you might feel desperate for connection and in another you might feel completely shut down and want space. You might feel torn, as you notice the impulse to connect more deeply with someone, while simultaneously pulling away for fear of losing yourself. This pattern might have played out in a variety of your relationships over the years. This kind of tumult can block your ability to access wise discernment and skillfulness when attempting to create a bond with someone.

There are many places you could turn to for help with dissolving obstacles and cultivating skills for creating a healthy bond with someone. Let’s examine three basic considerations for healthy bonding.

First, it’s important to acknowledge that healthy attachment bonds with others are fundamental to your thriving. This psycho-emotional-physiological attachment bond with others is part of what keeps you balanced and feeling whole. So investing time and effort in creating these will have a considerable positive impact on your mental and physical well-being long term. 

Next, it might be a relief for you to know that true intimacy and bonding actually support boundaries and healthy differentiation. This may be difficult to believe, because so much of what you have seen modeled was likely intimacy entangled with enmeshment and codependency. In reality, a true “yes” to connection (as with anything) implies the ability to say “no” or to set boundaries at any time. When intimacy is entangled with enmeshment, you might lose access to what’s true for you and what supports thriving. A true “yes” to bonding rests on a confident sense that you are lovable and that receiving or giving love doesn’t depend on any one relationship or on any one interaction or behavior in a given relationship. It also connects you to conscious choice and enables your interactions and words to come from a different energy.

Third, it’s very useful to have some understanding of your own history of attachment with your caregivers growing up and the healing work you have yet to do regarding that. There are numerous helpful resources for understanding human attachment in adult relationships.* Having mental clarity about how these patterns play out will give you an opportunity to identify when you are unconsciously re-enacting childhood attachment challenges within your adult relationships, see reactive patterns for what they are, and look for resources to ground yourself in the truth of what’s happening in the moment.

Practice

Take a moment now and choose one relationship in which you would like to be especially mindful about your bond with that person. Identify situations in which your bond seems natural and easy. What contributes to that feeling natural and easy? (You might want to look at the environment, both of your resource levels at that moment, the type of activity you´re engaging in, etc.) Identify one situation in which you need more support to enter that flow. Are you able to notice which pieces are missing or different from the easier interactions? What would be supportive in that context?

*Resources on Attachment Theory & Practice

Attachment in Adulthood: Structure, Dynamics, and Change by Mario Mikulincer and Phillip Shaver

A General Theory of Love by Lewis, Amini, & Lannon

Hold Me Tight by Sue Johnson

Attached by Amir Levine, M.D. and Rachel S. F. Heller, M.A.