“Forbidden Love”

Trust Your Feelings

In a previous essay I wrote about how the Patriarchal Dominance Hierarchy that our society is, overwhelmingly, grooms, trains, all of us, from very shortly after we are born, to adhere strictly to a uniform cis-gender, heterosexual model of thinking and behavior.

The punishments for straying from the prescribed models of “normal” life are increasingly harsh the farther a person strays from the model they have been assigned.

We know, thanks to the writing and lectures of experts such as Dr Gabor Maté and Dr Nadine Burke Harris, that attachment in early childhood is profoundly important. The secure attachment to a loving, nurturing, mother, and, to only a slightly lesser degree, the attachment to other family members and close friends, are literally the 'ties that bind’.

Those attachments are the ties that bind to us self-esteem, a basic feeling of worthiness, a sense of purpose and a solid sense that we belong in this world, in this society.

Without them, if they are severed or simply not properly formed, we are lost. We have no solid sense of self, we grasp at inappropriate people, behaviors and things to “hang" our self-esteem on. We may even form strong, irrational, attachments to them,(addiction).