Last article we talked about how in a toxic relationship you’re forced to choose between your need for attachment and your need for authenticity.
I admit that this might sound touchy feely and cheesy. I mean, we obviously need food, water, and shelter, but do we really need attachment and authenticity? Authenticity sounds more like the luxury pursuit of rich white women on Instagram than a genuine need, amirite?
Given the amount of eye roll-inspiring hackery that exists in the mental health field, I don’t blame anyone for being skeptical. Still, though, in this article I hope to use the insights of evolutionary psychology to show how the suppression of authenticity in the name of attachment has profound consequences for your mental and physical health.
At the end of the day, having to choose between authenticity and attachment is basically the relational equivalent of being forced to choose between air and water. Here’s why.
WHY WE NEED AUTHENTICITY AND ATTACHMENT
If we say something is a need — like shelter, water, food, attachment, or authenticity — it means that it’s necessary for our survival.
In order to understand how attachment and authenticity are necessary for survival, though, we need to remember that, evolutionarily speaking, our brains haven’t caught up to the fact that we’re living in cities, watching Netflix, and sipping lattes. As far as our brains are concerned, we’re still living in caves surrounded by predators, and one wrong move could get us killed very quickly.
Understanding that we’re still operating with cave person brains is necessary for understanding our need for attachment.
From an evolutionary perspective, one of the main advantages we humans have over much bigger, stronger predators is our ability to team up with other humans. One lone cave person is going to starve or get eaten pretty quickly, while a group of humans can stay safe and well-fed, even with bears or tigers roaming around.
So what do you think happened to cave people who were cut off from their parents or their tribe? That’s right: they died.
This situation favoured the survival of those who felt a need to attach to other humans. They survived and procreated, passing on their genes and dispositions, while the loners got eaten and bred out of the species. We’re now descended from those original homo sapiens with the adaptive advantage of seeking attachment with other humans, and, for better or worse, we’ve inherited their same need for attachment.
Understanding this can help us to understand why a lack of attachment is perceived by your cave person brain as an imminent threat to survival, just as surely as it would perceive the sudden appearance of a grizzly to be an imminent threat to your survival.
And when your brain perceives something to be a threat to its survival, it hits the holy shit button, aka the fight/flight/freeze/shutdown response, aka the stress response.
As far as authenticity goes, we know that another evolutionary advantage humans have is the phenomenon we call emotions.
Emotions have gotten a bad rap, but in reality they’re nothing more than automatic scripts, known as fixed action plans, passed down through evolution. Over the millennia, homo sapiens developed these fixed action plans to help us deal with the common survival problems encountered by humans.
These emotional scripts fire automatically in the face of difficult situations, and they cue an impulse to engage in some kind of protective behaviour. For example, fear makes us want to flee threat, anger makes us want to defend our boundaries, guilt makes us want to repair interpersonal harm, shame makes us want to hide behaviour that could get us rejected, disgust makes us want to avoid people or food that could hurt us, and so on.
You could imagine that these scripts are really handy when you’re trying not to die at the hands of an angry grizzly bear or get kicked out of your tribe.
So how does this relate to authenticity? Among other things, authenticity is the ability to accept, express, and work with our emotions. Suppressing your authenticity means suppressing an impulse that has been programmed into you in order to keep you safe.
And how do you think your brain responds when you suppress an impulse that’s supposed to keep you safe? That’s right: it hits the holy shit button and your body dumps a whole bunch of stress hormones into your system.
So to summarize:
Losing the safety of attachment leads to a stress response, AND suppressing our authenticity also leads to a stress response.
When your brain perceives something as a threat to survival, your body responds by secreting cortisol and adrenaline. It also redirects all your energy to the fight/flight/freeze response, shifting it away from energy-intensive systems like the prefrontal cortex, the reproductive system, the immune system, and the digestive system.
The stress response is awesome when you’re actually about to die. But when your brain just thinks you’re going to die because your need for attachment or authenticity are chronically unmet, it causes some serious problems.
One such problem is that it messes your digestion up. The stress response shuts down your digestion in favour of muscle tension to fight or flee, which means people in toxic relationships tend to experience digestive distress like IBS.
Chronic stress also reduces your immune system’s functioning. Again, if (you think) you’re about to die, your body directs energy away from your energy-intensive immune system. When stress compromises your immune function, your body isn’t able to fight off infections, which can lead to a whole host of physical illnesses, even extreme ones like cancer.
People in toxic relationships also often experience sexual dysfunction. Again, the stress response shuts down your ability to become aroused in favour of the fight/flight/freeze response. Sexual dysfunction is difficult for anyone, but especially for people who have a partner who might lose their shit if they can’t perform sexually.
Since your prefrontal cortex also tends to get shut off during the stress response, you’ll also notice difficulty focusing, learning, planning, and just generally being present in day-to-day life.
And since the stress response tightens your muscles in preparation to fight, flee, or freeze, it can also lead to or exacerbate chronic back, shoulder, or other forms of pain. Which explains why people in toxic relationships often struggle with some form of chronic pain.
Lastly, we know that there are profound mental health implications of chronic stress. Complex PTSD, anxiety disorders, depression, and other disorders can result. People will often turn to destructive ways of coping with these difficulties, like substance use, infidelity, disordered eating, or just completely shutting down. The list goes on and on.
So there you have it: a look through the lens of evolutionary psychology as to why precisely the needs for attachment and authenticity are actual needs, and why suppressing them is a major problem.
In fact, it is not at all overly dramatic to say that if you’re in a toxic relationship, and you’re forced to choose between attachment and authenticity, it is literally killing you.