I have been meaning to comment on your blogs for a long time. I think they are some of the most insightful and useful blogs on this site. Thank you for that.

I have a question about this blog in particular. Towards the end of the blog, you suggest that in order to acheive the balance of attachment/detachment, it is better to first detach so you can find yourself and have a better idea of how much you are giving of yourself to others.

I did just this many years ago and now am too detached. I am in therapy to help with this, but I would like to hear your thoughts (perhaps in a future blog) on what happens when one is too detached and how to fix it. What are the positives, the negatives? Is it more difficult to attach or detach?

Thanks again for your wonderful insight into this very important issue. They help me out quite a bit.

John Walt

As someone who sometimes (oddly, not always - something I need to figure out the 'whys' of) can become too attached to people or relationships, this is helpful.

What it ties into for me is an inquiry I did a year or so ago where I turned around a statement/assumption/perception I made in every way I could possibly turn it around and asked myself if the 'turned around' version was as true, more true, or less true than the original statement.

This is a Byron Katie technique. I am not a large fan of Katie as I think the methods she uses encourage too much detachment. However this inquiry exercise can be valuable because the mind is tricky. Sometimes it (we) turn things around - sort of like the ambulance when we're out driving. When we look at it head-on it's backwards, but if we look at it in our rear-view mirror, we can read it.

Anyway, what resulted was "I don't want to have a relationship with myself."

Huh...

That was as true to me as my original statement. It seems as if not wanting to have a relationship with one's self would throw the balance of attachment/detachment off-kilter quite a bit.

In other words, maybe having a solid sense of self (the 'who am I' question) is apparently what helps balance out the excessive taking on (absorption) of other people's definitions of you- or excessively allowing yourself to be absorbed into them so-to-speak. If you are not clear on who you are, it's easier to just absorb or be absorbed by others.

Or, maybe I'm way off with that but I found the ways in which these things might fit together into some meaningful insight interesting, anyway.

I'm reading through your various blog entries here and finding many of them very clear and very helpful.

Thank you!

It would be really awesome if there were some tips, strategies, guides, etc. on how to deal with attachment for introverts and detachment for extroverts. Like an article on each.