Annette Kussin - Its Attachment: A New Way of Understanding Yourself and Your Relationships (MiroLand)

A New Way of Understanding Yourself And Your Relationships

Guernica Editions Inc. acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council. The Ontario Arts Council is an agency of the Government of Ontario.

We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada.

A New Way of Understanding Yourself And Your Relationships

Annette Kussin M.S.W., R.S.W.

MIROLAND (GUERNICA)
TORONTO CHICAGO BUFFALO LANCASTER (U.K.)
2020

Copyright 2020, Annette Kussin and Guernica Editions Inc.

All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication, reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise stored in a retrieval system, without the prior consent of the publisher is an infringement of the copyright law.

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Michael Mirolla, editor

David Moratto, cover and interior design

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First edition.

Printed in Canada.

Legal DepositFirst Quarter
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 2019946963
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Title: Its attachment! : a new way of understanding yourself and your relationships / Annette Kussin, M.S.W., R.S.W.
Names: Kussin, Annette, author.
Series: MiroLand imprint ; 23.
Description: Series statement: MiroLand imprint ; 23
Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20190161108 I Canadiana (ebook) 20190161116 | ISBN 9781771835183 (softcover) | ISBN 9781771835190 (EPUB) | ISBN 9781771835206 (Kindle)
Subjects: LCSH: Attachment behavior. | LCSH: Interpersonal relations.
Classification: LCC BF575.A86 K87 2020 | DDC 155.9/2dc23

To my husband and my daughter for their unwavering love and support.
Thank you for being my inspiration on my own journey to becoming Securely Attached.

I am a Social Worker/Psychotherapist. I became a Social Worker in my early twenties. At that time, I wasnt interested in being a therapist. I wanted to be a Community Organizer and help people from the inner city become a stronger force in the decisions that landlords and politicians were making in their community. I did this for a number of years. Doing such work was important and I felt that I was successful in helping disadvantaged people find a voice in their community. It was only in my later twenties when I began to work in a psychiatric hospital that I realized that I had difficulty dealing with the strong emotions of my clients. It was this realization that led me to enter therapy for the first time. I joined a therapy group and realized after a few weeks that I became somewhat of a co-therapist. Other members of the group were able to share their pain and sadness, cry, get angry, and join in all the exercises that promoted emotions. I thought all these exercises were phony and useless and refused to participate. In one of these games the other people in the group decided I would be the perfect person to have on a desert island because I was so rational and calm; not because I was an emotional support and sexually attractive.

I wish I would have realized then that maybe I was too rational, had great difficulty being in touch with my feelings and expressing them, had great fears of getting close to men, in particular. I was much more comfortable being on my own and focusing on my career, my hobbies, my fitness and my friends. It would take me many more years to recognize how significant these issues were for me. I did try a number of different therapies in my journey of self-awareness: group therapy, psychoanalysis, gestalt therapy and traditional psychotherapy. Most were helpful to some extent but none of them had a profound effect on my emotional expressiveness or difficulty with intimacy. I continued my patterns in relationships, which was to stay distant.

I developed my interest in Attachment Theory when I became the clinical director of a Childrens Mental Health Centre. The theory helped me understand that the relationship between the mothers and children that led to these very young children being so challenging. I read about Attachment Theory, went to workshops on Attachment and then began working with Adopted Children and their Families from an Attachment Focused Model. I spent years developing my knowledge and skills in this model, working with Dan Hughes, a well-known specialist in Attachment, and other professionals. But the therapy was focused on the children and parents. I still didnt apply this to myself.

I became more interested in Adult Attachment and the different types of Adult Attachment in order to understand the parents of these adopted children and why they personalized the difficulties of their adopted kids.

As I read about the categories of Adult Attachment, particularly those developed by a researcher named Dr. Mary Main, I was startled to read about myself. All the behaviours that I demonstrated in relationships: my avoidance of the men I was interested in, my difficulty being in touch with feelings, my focus on my career, my valuing being smart and intellectual and my need to be active and busy were all described in one category of Attachment: Avoidant or Dismissing.

So now I knew what kind of Attachment I had and how I got to be this way. But how could I change this? There was very little in the books and articles I was reading that offered guidance on how to change ones Attachment Category.

There have been more books about this in the past 10 years but most of these are written for professionals. There are very few that are written to help people like you understand your Attachment Category and how to change it. This is why I have written this book.

Perhaps you also have difficulty becoming close and making commitments in intimate relationships. Or maybe you become dependent and demanding very quickly in relationships. Or perhaps close relationships terrify you.

All these problems are described in Attachment Theory. I hope you also will find yourself described in an Adult Attachment Category and suddenly have a new and profound way of understanding your personality and why you behave the way you do in relationships. I hope this book will bring that understanding to you in a useful way and offer you guidance on how to become a secure person with good self-worth, how to pick healthy partners/spouses and how to become a parent who passes this security on to your children.