Seven Things You Might Be Attached to Without Realizing It, and None of Them Is a Person

When people talk about “attachment,” they almost always think of love. But psychologist Walter Riso documents, in his book Desapegarse sin anestesia (2012), real cases of people trapped in forms of attachment that have nothing to do with a romantic relationship.

The definition he uses is always the same: a mental and emotional bond to something, whatever it is, sustained by the belief that it’s indispensable to feeling okay.

Here are seven of the less obvious forms he documents.

1. Attachment to social approval

Riso tells the story of a spiritual teacher who, in his own words, lived like this: “until I was twenty, I never worried about what people might think of me. From twenty on, I constantly worried about what my neighbors might think. But one day, after turning fifty, I suddenly realized they had barely thought about me at all.”

• Attachment to approval isn’t wanting to be liked, which is natural for anyone.
• It’s the belief that you cannot live without other people’s constant recognition.
• Riso describes it as one of the most common dependencies precisely because it’s socially rewarded: no one finds it strange that someone “needs” to be accepted.

2. Attachment to an object that “changes” the person wearing it

One of Riso’s patients kept, as her most prized possession, a pearl necklace. She didn’t just like it: when she wore it, according to the author, “her personality changed, she became more outgoing, bolder, more confident.” It wasn’t, Riso writes, “just a piece of jewelry.”

• The object itself is neutral. What creates the attachment is having placed a psychological function in it (security, identity) that doesn’t actually belong there.
• The proof that an attachment exists, not just a preference, is what happens if the object is lost or damaged.

3. Attachment to a tan

A forty-year-old man came to therapy because his partner “felt embarrassed” by his exaggerated tan. He’d been going to a tanning bed daily for five years, with skin damage that already concerned his doctors.

• The origin, according to the case, traced back to childhood teasing over having very pale skin.
• After a period of therapy, the patient made a discovery Riso describes as decisive: no one actually cared, in reality, about his skin color. The attachment lost its grip as soon as that belief was tested against reality instead of just fear.

4. Attachment to always staying current

Riso describes, from his own observation at technology fairs, people who feel like “something is missing” if they don’t pick up every new release available, even if it’s, in his words, “a USB port, just to feel a little less incomplete.”

• It isn’t curiosity about technology. It’s the feeling of being permanently at a disadvantage if you’re not the first to have it.
• It’s the same logic, the author notes, as attachment to fashion: only the object changes.

5. Attachment to work

One of the book’s most cited cases is an executive with a serious work addiction (fourteen-hour days, including weekends), estranged from his wife and his two teenage children.

The turning point came when his younger son was diagnosed with a brain tumor. Before going into a risky surgery, the boy asked his father for a single favor: “Please, Dad, don’t work so much, I hardly see you anymore.”

• The patient didn’t stop working. He learned, in Riso’s words, to work “without overdoing it,” enjoying the activity without letting it swallow the rest of his life.
• The case illustrates something that repeats throughout the book: attachment rarely breaks through abstract reflection alone. It’s almost always a circumstance that forces you to face what you were avoiding.

6. Attachment to a tradition no one remembers the reason for

Riso recounts a classic story about a guru who, to stop his cat from distracting worshippers during the evening service, would have it tied up while they prayed. Long after the guru died, his disciples kept tying up a cat during the service, generation after generation. When that cat also died, they brought another one to the temple so they could keep tying it up.

• No disciple remembered anymore why it was done. They only knew “it had always been done this way.”
• Riso uses the story to point out that attachment to the past and to habit can outlive its original reason long after that reason has disappeared.

7. Attachment to never making a mistake

Riso describes the case of a bright young woman, with an IQ in the seventieth percentile, who was convinced she was “not very intelligent” because she’d repeated a grade due to undiagnosed dyslexia. She’d built an extreme self-demand as a way of compensating for that fear.

• The irony, according to the case, is that the self-demand meant to “protect” her from failure was, itself, the main cause of her distress.
• Riso sums it up with an idea that applies to several of the attachments on this list: the remedy someone builds to soothe an insecurity can end up weighing more than the original insecurity.

The thread connecting all seven cases

In none of them is the object the real problem: not the phone, not the necklace, not the tan, not the job. The problem, in Riso’s framework, is the belief that this specific object is the only possible source of something that could, in reality, be sustained in more than one way.

That doesn’t make these attachments any less real, or any easier to let go of. It just explains why they’re almost always resolved by looking at the underlying belief, not by swapping the object for a similar one.

Sources

• Riso, W. (2012). Desapegarse sin anestesia: Cómo soltarse de todo aquello que nos quita energía y bienestar. Editorial Planeta Colombiana.