Bondability - Who does this mean?

 What is the meaning of each connection we create?  Answering this question will help set the orientation for how we will show up to others.  When a connection is significant we can see the responsibility reciprocated.  There is a positive correlation between effort and interest.  As in our parents, we connect expecting a responsibility, because they provide us with everything we need to survive for such a critical time, likely the most critical connection we have.  Can we survive without parents?  Some people have to, and this does not minimize the need for surrogate families or community when this happens.  The level of responsibility might be associated with the power of the bond.  The covalent strength of the connected parts of our lives synced with the level of devotion and responsibility to the meaning that is rooted in our connection describes what I see as bondability.  The meaning in our connections define the commitment and security of our bonds. 

With meaning I found it easier to understand how to work with reactive children.  What does this relationship mean for this child.  Granted it was usually a best guess, often summed up as speculation, and likely more often projection.  Having an observation in the form of some type of meaning, lets me establish the necessary curiosity that will enhance this guess. The guess evolves into a better informed bond assessment. What does this child need from this relationship and in other words what does this person mean to this child.  Many of the children that I worked with were in foster care or parented by someone other than their biological parent.  So I often had the challenge of working to see what meanings the custodial interactions could mean for the child client.  It is hard to unpack what mom or dad means to a child.  We don't often build that into our culture.  I have never had to think about what my mother means to me. 

As soon as I can start unpacking what I need from the people I know as parents, I can construct an awareness for being accurate with what I need for love.  Mom and dad as archetypes are socially cliché people we dogmatically rely on.  Parents are instinctively vital to our survival.  Through our culture's lens we build up expectations for who we want our parents to be.  Working through the complexities of these influences and how they spill over into less vital, less expectation filled, and more selective relationships is a big part of maturing.  This is what the industry calls "doing your work".  For me doing the work, is the process of understanding what I need in relationship to my environment.  Once I have a strong awareness of what I have needed, I can apply it to the child in front me.  Cultural awareness is a critical component to applying my speculative guesses because my speculation is only as good as my experiences have taught me.  Although I do believe that what we all need is very similar, and paradoxically different enough.  So any empathetic and loving attempt at relating should bring a bondable experience.  This is hard to teach.  

Take a mother and child for example.  There are several hypothesis as to why a mother cares for a child.  And this journal entry isn't revisiting any biological research to interpret any of these, this entry is for capturing my interest to explore the meaning behind a mothers responsibility.  I have to take the child's perspective because I'll never understand what it truly is to be a mother.  As a son I see how the meaning in my relationship with my mother has evolved from being completely reliant and tightly covalent to now becoming balanced or a harmonious covalence. This shift has also help me have new meanings along the  way.  As a youth my mom meant safety, comfort, and home as I have matured this meaning has evolved to become peer, friend, and lineage.  These meanings reveal the philosophical attributes my mother child bond has created, what makes me curious are the psychological reasons and physiological process that get put into play in order for this bondability to cultivate.  

Now how does this apply to navigating a relationship? The fundamental atomic parts of a bond are found in the polarity of what we need!   

NYC Sidewalks are Socialist

The socialist part of New York City appears to be its sidewalks.  All other areas are the trophies of what American championship seems to be.  New York City is like a honey pot for the spoils and booty siphoned from the World's economies.  New York City is one of capitalism's trophy cases.  The only part of New York City that has to be completely shared, are its sidewalks.  And New York City is home for so many.  And it is a rallying point for the ambitious, because it is a launchpad for dreams.  And sidewalks are the path that the modern day Conquistadors, Pilgrims, Rockefellers, and so many other invisibles all take to turn their ideas into experiences.   

I am living in the pinnacle of the economic olympics.  I feel apart of a people who are embarrassed that our lives are not inspiring enough in small towns, to such an extent that some rush off to locations that might help the self worth grow, like a New York City.  We have our aspiring people possibly believing they are the next set of conquistadors, but in this era it's the conquering of the cosmos.  Our countries borders magically keep the riches and opportunities conveniently organized in a way that keeps the American citizen uniquely authorized to play this patriotic pastime of Monopoly, except the 2 dimensional board wasn't ever going to be enough for Rich Uncle Pennybags.  I walked the city this summer and felt the paradox of how marvelous it is while also seeing how saddening the way we have disorganized the shared parts of our communities.  The only part that included everyone was the sidewalk.

I think we leave our home towns out of a fear of facing the existential pause we all have, reminding us of how anonymous we are.  The anonymity that is likely a reminder of what was always gonna be there pointing to a paradoxical yearning for the acceptance of home and yet trying to find it over there, in the big city lights.  New York City provides a metaphor for this.  I now recognize New York City as that city that people hope will erase this existential anonymity.  It is now in my eyes the reminder of what was always gonna point me back to the existential pain of being a tiny moment in a large existence.  Likely a destination that can't erase the human tantrum that happens when we don't arrive at a legendary status.  I am not a celebrity and walking anonymously through New York City was a nice reminder of this.  I don't see New York City as a champion's city, I see it as a pilgrimage for the spirits wounded by not having been seen by those closest to them, especially in their hometowns. 

When walking through the streets of New York City the first thing I hold with tension is how every class of people, at some point, has to share the same grimmey sidewalk.  The wealthy have to share the pungient smells, and walk through the same propagandist advertising.  New York is where the classes are forced to share the narrowest of real estates.  Makes me wonder how long before there are toll booths on Park Ave.  I can't be misled, this caste crossroads does not imply any form of sharing, and no such communal caring, a minor consequence of business, spilled out from profit sharing.  As a metaphor for how much the businessman, person, has any use for the socialist playbook, the sidewalk might fit.  I can picture the New Yorker with the suit and tie tolerating the 12 ft or more of concrete running along the streets. Only the lower castes truly depend on sidewalks.  The moguls only need it for the time it takes them to duck into a chauffeured transport swept away to an elite way of life that probably inspires everyone they've just blew by.  The wake left by these champions are communities and citizens that need more than a sidewalk to grow.  

Are these American champions living a life of civility and prosperity?  The sidewalk metaphor fits for now, I can accept and move more into my financial simplicity because I hope to be one who carves out space where sidewalks become more than a segway.  More like a responsibility.  A reason to look around more than pass through. I don't need assholes in a high-rise penthouses, and I know it is critical to learn about the gravity in the stars pulling these men and women towards the sky.

And like the metaphor of a sidewalk, how does one who has no need for a glamorous high rise make people see there are far better ways to be seen?  How does a small city champion, share the wisdom that comes from having more than a sidewalk to share?  I don't need a sidewalk as much as I need people to see their worth in a life where feet touch the soil, better yet bare feet, and not necessarily on a beach, people who are grounded, without paying $15,000 for a Costa Rican retreat.  Grounded in the natural and simple in a humanistic form.  So here are more thoughts from a Chicano mind in New York City.  I respect the hustle and feel a sadness for the disparity.  It felt a lot like sharing a sidewalk is the only way elite American will tolerate the likes of people like me.  And at the same time I can't see myself in the deep sadness that is shared along the New York City sidewalks, that are the doormats to even more painfilled luxury high rise. I cannot live with the pain I feel when watching homeless people disappearing into the nooks and crannies, desperately hanging onto life, surviving on the concrete real estate they can't be removed from because Sidewalks are socialist.  

Bondability - a synthesis before a condition

  

I feel the categorization by styles found in Attachment Theory is restricting the theory's opportunity to heal.  I am beginning to shape my Bondability perspective because it addresses this duality.  I believe the principles underlying attachment are birthed of the colonial and categorical mindsets that taught us to emphasize the definitive versus paradox.  Paradoxical thinking points to the polar tensions I feel exist between the four styles of attachment.  These polar tensions describe most of nature's important synthesizing processes.  Attachment Theory is used like musicians who see the math in music where as Bondability is the awareness that everyone is a musician.  I am trying to emphasize that seeing the math is important but unnecessary.  How do you tell a musician to ignore the math and tell the child to see the patterns.  Bondability is trying to do this in one sentence.  This is the hope for Bondability. The chemists reached this point when seeing Hardy's paradox.  We have so many counter-intuitive insights and while working with families I found that teaching Attachment as 4 possible styles did an injustice to the dynamicism that neuroscientists were revealing. 

The observation is that all of these styles exist in most people just under different stressors.   I found it hard to teach clients the value of seeing everything in a non-binary way.  I found that parents wanted the sheet music.  I couldn't express how their child was not a song to be learned, but a rhythm, at times a clanging, and yet a sound that was adapting and adjusting to the tempos around them but with a beat that was ingrained in them at conception.  This broke me and still makes me cry.  Some in the industry call it burn out.  I don't I call it awareness for the abusive task of doing a job with the unsharpened tools.  Americans or Spaniards want sheet music when the sounds are in our movements.  Better yet our awareness.  I could not teach this paradox very well working through the model of attachment because the tools it provided me didn't help people accept there isn't an answer, only an encounter.  How do you teach that a behavior is not treatable, the culmination of events and experiences that lead up to the observable event are transcendable. Parents need the steps to change the behavior and I cannot help them understand that the encounter will be the only medicine, so make it a loving one because you don't know how many more loving encounters will be necessary to see a change in the next similar behavior.  The gift of the encounter is how it landed on our history and immediately resolving it to be meaningful in the now is the talent God might have given the Angels.  How do you teach this?  

This is putting paradox to use. The disservice is often times seeing this contradiction as dysfunction, or worse cognitive dissonance.  How can discipline be seen as chaos?  Well that is what love can feel like to an abused child.  Love invites vulnerability and vulnerability is most animals understanding of defenselessness, ultimately becoming the potential for demise.  

I can't overlook the criticality of the science behind the concept of attachment.  Dan Siegle, puts this physiology into a dense yet palatable way.  Neuro scientist are giving us the tid bits of research that teach that the brain isn't compartmental more a well orchestrated nebulous mass distributing energy.  We share our pain in the same fashion we share a smile.  Each being too intense to keep to ourselves.  This is what Bondability tries to highlight.

Bondability Continued

Attachment Theory Misconception Relationship Spectrum

Empire of 22nd Kind

    Sitting at a bar name Lucky Jacks, my mind is on vacation, I am in New York City, the lower eastside to be exact.  This trip is full of emotions around the evolution of my parenting.  I will no longer be parenting children and I will now be parenting adults.  This trip is loaded for me.  I brought my daughter to help her settle in for her first week of a dance program.  The big apple is where this famous dance school brings young adult dancers with bright dreams, cultivating their skills.  In my eyes, they are aspiring spirits believing that New York City is where all the greats go to learn. 

 I wonder how much value this experience will provide for my daughter.  How much it will draw her out of what she understands as home.  The process reminds me of the same hope I had while attending baseball camps.  I can remember how I'd think this camp or coach could provide me the chance I needed to make a statement. Looking back I see that it turned into another thousand dollar contribution to University of Arizona's baseball program.  I appreciate being able to see New York in a practical way.  I no longer see the way my daughter appears to see.  The dogmatic romance around this icon of gangsters of the economic kind.  I lost my aspiration and replaced it with stewardship.  I see she still has an aspiring vision for it and what it can do for her.  I have evolved to worry that New York is what it attracts, hoards of seduced adolescent hearts caching in on free market liberties, with all except a tiny slice depositing more money into their reservoir of capital.

This is New York City, so many young minds gravitating to this icon.  The infrastructure changes slowly and these legal and illegal immigrants stir its economics by contributing their admiration and possibly romance for the big city life.  The interesting part of New York is how so many people bring their newness and vibrancy to add their uniqueness in micro doses, making it not so much what they thought it was going to be, but in many ways contaminating it with what they hoped it would be.  New York isn't a destination or checkbox.  It is a complex participation in a living pinnacle.  It might be the consequence of their wonderment about finding themselves over their, instead of believing their greatness is always at hand.  I don't want to be cliché to call New York a Mecca for arts, but it is surely a vacuum for the existential need to be seen.  There is a paradigm of polarities, driving and fueling the city's economics, culture, and maturation.  There is maturation and I can recognize the tragedy behind the romance.  What makes New York newer might be the economic luster.  What makes New York an empire might be its cultural pollution.

    

Bondability - An evolution of relationship

     I gravitated towards the attachment theory early on in my counseling program.  I grew out of a Rogerian way of thinking.  Rogerian, because it  naturally aligned with my humanistic and Catholic ways of living.  And to be clear, these were ideal identities not so much how I could be seen.  Karen Horney opened up my understanding to the idea of needs and relationships in a profound way.  She elegantly describe this complicated dynamic from a medical perspective.  This sparked my interest in and induction into the bodies role in relationships.  It also became the junction that helped me leave the counseling professional systems.  

A women, in a world of male dominated ideas, had the courage to label neurosis as complex first before disease.  Again this is my perception and not a statement about  the psychoanalytical world.  Dr. Horney saw the movement and transfer of energy between experiences and encounters, and had the fearlessness to make it shared across all of us versus calling it dysfunction.  Her promotion of directions taught me early on how we have a preference for clarity, or maybe exactness, while functioning in a  realism of unknowns and the infinite.

Dr Horney helped me see the complexity that human relationship creates in the context of existential safety.  This is completely out of the colonial concept of safety.  A safety  that might have been birthed from the idea or mentality known as  civilized.  Safety in the moral sense, maybe.  Regardless it was a safety that has continued and possibly expressed best as the idea we now call dignity.  

Centuries after Dr Horney challenged the likes of Freud and Jung, we still arrive at the necessity of healing.  The torch was passed in several directions and this is what a counseling foundations course will describe.  All the different attitudes towards one destination, wellness. The evolution of  healing might best be described in an anthropology of medicine track.  And we all can't enroll in a program to gain the knowledge that informed me of how we are constantly wounding ourselves while also satisfying our survival needs, trying to unrealistically maximize our pleasures.  This cannot be a sustainable understanding of civilized.  

After reading the works of Dr Dan Siegle and Dr. Bessel Van der Kolk I was pulled into needing to know more about how much our physiology impacted our behavior.  I couldn't undo the rational that the behavioral strategies were suffocating the healing process.  I could see the criticality of propagating the message that our physiology and neurology are profound and dealing with their shortcoomings were counterintuitive to addressing the notion of healing.  The counterintuitive will be the basis of this book because I see the counterintuitive as the pathway into the clarity of paradox.  

The trauma work of Dr. Van der Kolk and the mindfulness neuroscience of Dr. Siegle were layers in my maturity as a counselor, giving me concepts that started to overlap.  Like a venn diagram's layers falling into place, overlapping to create areas of opacity.  Lets call, for simplicities sake, these layers as trauma, brain as part of body, and attachment.  The areas that I was now see standing out, bolded.  These insights in retrospective were most effective in my practice. 

 I think this is where I began to graduate out of the ideas that the child attachment research taught me to think of and categorize myself and my clients as being in a condition.  It may be that the four attachment styles were meant to be seen as loose boundaries, and I feel inspired to take it further.  I want to preach the necessity for the chaotic sojourner and teach the essentials of orientation versus condition.  I began to recognize how the counseling profession either wasn't even looking at the attachment perspective or convincing families that our wellness could be found in a simple willful explosion of better cognitive decisions, choices, or worse morality. 

 Without going too much into what attachment is; there are endless literatures on the foundations of attachment theory.  Attachment has been the evolution of several people's life work and can't be  summarized into a well intention blog on how attachment theory is incomplete.  I see it as the biological perspective to describe how our early neurobiology is informing, constructing, and distributing energies from our environment, genetics, and consumption of numerous natural and artificial resources. These variables are just a summary to hint at the vastness of what goes into our psychology.  And keep in mind I cannot speak with truth about this.  

What I share is through observation first. Observations gathered as an inspired broken man working through my own experiences and my finding opportunities for growth.  Secondly through my work as a counselor and the progress of the families I've witnessed.  These variables mentioned are how I see us generating and sharing energy at a quantum level.  I suggest this because I learned that it is often helpful to see it as as small as a molecule and as significant as a hormone, from something as powerful as a hurtful phrase to a car accident.  It could be the amount of vegetables your mother ate during her pregnancy to the trauma your grandmother experienced in her childhood.  These variables are also well written about and, most importantly, still being written about. 

 Bondability Continued

Bondability - I don't attach, I bond

 This post will be my first attempt at writing about what made me an effective counselor and how my mindset is ineffective in the counseling world.  First it is extremely important to read the following posts with a paradoxical mindset.  If you don't know what a paradoxical mindset is, then step away from this literature and set yourself on a learning path for paradoxical thinking (Hameiri et al., 2014).  Much of my mind over the last several months, possibly last couple of years, has been in the cloud of doubt around our (humanity's) ability to put a dent in the disparity between the civil dysfunction and grow social harmony.   So I've been wrestling with how to put that chaos into words.  

How do I write without authority in a field full of passionate, good intentioned, charlatanistic, wounded, talented, experts, who function out the same legalistic, profit driven, insurance tethered, evangelistic, conservative systems that damaged the people they are wanting to rescue.  This isn't going to be easy.  So I am going to chip away at it. I am no longer a counselor because I was becoming a counselor.

I found my platform.  I found my model of treatment.  I found a diagram that will invite people to orientate versus locate themselves.  I have had to step away from the great teachings of Ainsworth, Bowlby, Harlow, and Siegle. When I say step away it is in a modest non American sense of the phrase.  I say it like a young child might step away from their first 2,000 piece puzzle to take those 2,000 pieces and have the curiosity to draw a new picture from that puzzles box cover image.  I don't have the medical knowledge to fully understand the brain, nervous system, hormone balancing, dietetics, or pharmacology and yet I experience each of these while applying these fore parent's expertise on modern mental healing.  For me it is lifestyle health more than mental health.  As if I found a new way of looking at nature versus nurture; Mindset versus Lifestyle!

I don't attach....I bond.  And my aptitude for building relationships with others is what I call my Bondability...it isn't a collection of patterns it is an inborn instinct, that must develop into a skill, taught through culture and environment, and exercised through lifestyle.   

Bondability Continued