Pick One: Attachment to Love or Attachment to Attention

In a healthy upbringing, an infant attaches to his/her mom (or a different, but continuous caregiver).

This attachment to mom secures love for the child.

The person learns that attachment to a specific devoted person equates love.

When the child grows up, he/she seeks out a committed, devoted partnership in order to continue his/her security of love.

When an infant doesn’t have an attachment to his/her mom, he/she might give up on securing love—especially if he/she us unaware that securing love is even an option. And instead he/she seeks to secure attention.

This forms, within the child and later the adult, the drive for attention, rather than for love.

To get attention, the person needs an audience member.

Instead of seeking a committed partner to secure love, the person will seek out one or more audience members in order to secure attention.

To this person, attachment to any number of audience members equates attention.

Perhaps, this person never really knows what love is. Thus, love is off of his/her radar. Perhaps he/she sees people as only potential audience members, and thus as objects.

Attention is always temporary as it’s superficial. Love is lasting because it’s from the heart and soul and is authentic.

As such, attention-driven people, for their very survival, must be open to attention from anyone at anytime—in order to meet their insatiable need for their never-lasting attention hit.

Additionally, these people, instead of having the need to give love, have the need to give attention. Which means they have the need to be an audience member too. Since attention, in and of itself, doesn’t have much depth to it, neither does the attention they have to give; and they are willing to be an audience member for almost anyone or anything.

Their being an audience member, in order to feel like they are giving attention, could look and seem similar to a baby absorbing stimuli and sensations while carried in mom’s arms, and could be as elementary as their simply

• having their body around, in view or displayed

  • not requiring them to actually be present

  • not requiring them to have to actively participate and contribute

• willing to look at or watch said object(s)-of-their-attention

• willing to hear sounds coming from said object(s)-of-their-attention

  • sometimes only being concerned with the tones of sounds, over the content—much like a newborn

Potentially, to meet the insatiable need for having audience members and for being an audience member, they might even have to create such scenarios, or to alter real-life, in their imagination, grandiose daydreams, and fantasy.