In the stone-faced baby experiments, an infant denied loving attention cycles through strategies — cooing, crying, screaming, going still — to get any attention at all. For a child, attention is equated with love, and love is equated with safety. So we learn that getting upset, being cute, being right, or being valuable is how to secure it. Those strategies follow us into adulthood, where they no longer fetch love. They fetch attention, which is not the same thing.
“If I learned that as a kid that when I got upset, I would get love, then often times I’m going to get upset to get your love. But it’s no longer love, it’s just attention.”
There’s even a descending scale of what we’ll accept: pure love first, then any positive attention, then — if nothing else is available — the attention of someone being angry with us, because at least it means we’re not abandoned. The cruel twist is that the attention-seeking behavior that once worked is now exactly what drives real love away. We’re doing the very things that repel the thing we want most.
Related Concepts
- Attunement patterns in childhood become the emotional cycles of adult life
- Jealousy is a bid for love that pushes love away
- Digesting the attention you already have stops the hungry ghost
- What we do to maintain love erodes our power
- Fixing your partner’s emotions is manipulation, not love
- Loving something to make it go away stops working