We recently caught up with Neil Strauss, a man who's gone from being one of the world's most famous pickup artists to an evangelist for longterm monogamy.
It's a journey that he chronicled in the bro-classic "The Game: Penetrating the Secret Society of Pickup Artists" and the new "The Truth: An Uncomfortable Book About Relationships."
One of the major themes in "The Truth" is that our romantic relationships in adulthood are shaped by our experiences as children.
"Our first experience with love is with our parents," he said. "That sets the template for how we see love and what we want out of love."
In "The Truth," Strauss checks himself into sex addiction therapy, where he learns all sorts of things about relationships. Namely, that the relationship you have with your opposite-sex parent (or same-sex if you're queer) predicts the kind of relationships you'll have with boyfriends or girlfriends in adulthood.
There are basically three ways of raising kids, Strauss discovered in therapy: functional bonding, neglect, and enmeshment.
Childhood experiences provide the models for our adult relationships. For better, and all too often, worse.
Kids who grow up with functional bonding will have a secure attachment style as adults.
"Functional bonding" is where "parents or primary caregivers love, nurture, affirm, set healthy limits with, and take care of the child," he reports.
Kids who grow up with functional bonding will have secure attachment in adulthood.
This is a fortunate way to grow up.
As clinical psychologist Lisa Firestone notes, when you have secure attachment, you're confident, self-possessed, and able to interact with other people while meeting their needs and taking care of your own.
Kids who grow up with neglectful parents develop an anxious attachment style as adults.
Neglect happens when the caregiver abandons the child in any number of ways.
It could be that they just weren't physically there; it could be that they were immersed in their work or drank all the time; it could be that they were emotionally distant. The result, Strauss says, is that neglected kids grow up feeling like they were unwanted or unimportant to their parent.
The kids, in turn, are wounded: depressed, indecisive, incapable of facing the world alone, seeing themselves as fundamentally flawed. Psychologists call it "anxious attachment."
As you might imagine, these "love addicts" have trouble in romantic relationships.
Strauss counts the ways:
They may feel like they're not enough for their partners; become so wrapped up in their relationships that they lose sight of their own needs and self-worth; and be emotionally intense, passive-aggressive, or in need of constant reassurance that they're not being abandoned.
In other words, children who grow up with neglectful parents can grow up to be needy adults.
Kids who grow up enmeshed have an avoidant attachment style as adults.
In the case of enmeshed kids, Strauss explained, they end up "taking care" of the parent instead of the parent taking care of them — like becoming a surrogate spouse, therapist, or caretaker. The parent might lean on the child for emotional support or live vicariously through them.
Strauss says that if you "grew up feeling sorry for or smothered by a parent," then enmeshment is likely.
This can create a problem in adulthood, he explains, because enmeshed kids will guard themselves from getting into a relationship that feels like it will drain them as much as their relationship with their mom or dad.
And while the kids that grew up in neglectful families can't contain their feelings, kids that grew up enmeshed are cut off or controlling of their emotions.
He explains how it shakes out in adulthood:
Though they may pursue a relationship thinking they want connection, once they're in the reality of one, they often put up walls, feel superior, and use other distancing techniques to avoid intimacy. This is known as avoidant attachment.
In other words, enmeshed kids become aloof adults.
If you identify with the abandonment or the enmeshment histories, you may wish to wring your fists at the injustice of the universe and curse the way you were raised — it's pretty tempting.
But as Strauss notes in "The Truth," the more constructive approach is to do the homework of digesting your childhood so that you can become an adult with more secure attachment. He went through years of therapy to do this.
Others (including this reporter) develop a meditation practice in order to observe emotional patterns without being controlled by them. And curiously enough, other psychology research has found that "good people" — those who care for others in a constructive way — often views their lives as a redemption narrative.
So even if childhood was hard, there's lots of hope out here in adulthood.
