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 gathers, in his book Desapegarse sin anestesia (2012), cases from his practice in which a person was clinging to something that had nothing to do with a partner.

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.

Two “attachments” that share a name

Before the list, a clarification is in order, because in this category we use the word in two senses.

• Riso’s attachment comes from the Buddhist tradition: it’s clinging, the belief that you can’t be okay without something specific. It can fall on a person, an object, an idea or a habit.
• John Bowlby and Mary Ainsworth’s attachment, the one behind attachment styles such as avoidant attachment, is a concept from developmental psychology: the emotional bond with those who care for us, later projected onto a partner. It’s measured with its own instruments and has decades of research behind it.

This article is about the first. To give it more than anecdotes, alongside each of Riso’s cases we point out what experimental psychology has studied about that same phenomenon.

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 hardly ever 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.

The anecdote has an experimental counterpart. In 2000, Thomas Gilovich, Victoria Medvec and Kenneth Savitsky asked Cornell students to walk into a room wearing an embarrassing T-shirt (with singer Barry Manilow’s face on it). The participants estimated that about half of the people present would have noticed; in fact, fewer than a quarter had. They called it the spotlight effect: we overestimate how much others notice us because we start from our own experience, which is very intense, and adjust too little.

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, as the author describes, “her personality changed, she became more outgoing, bolder and more self-assured.”

It wasn’t, Riso writes, “just a piece of jewelry.”

Two lines of research help explain why objects carry so much weight. Consumer researcher Russell Belk proposed the idea of the extended self in 1988: we treat certain possessions as part of our identity, and losing them feels like losing a piece of ourselves. And Daniel Kahneman, Jack Knetsch and Richard Thaler documented the endowment effect in 1990: in their experiments, people who were given a mug asked roughly twice as much to sell it as others were willing to pay for it. The simple fact of owning something makes it more valuable in our eyes.

The necklace of Riso’s patient is an extreme case of both: an object that has become part of identity and is therefore given a disproportionate value.

• The object itself is neutral. What creates the attachment, according to Riso, is having placed a psychological function in it (security, identity) that doesn’t 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 into a tanning bed every day for five years, with skin damage that already worried 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 about his skin color. It’s the same spotlight effect as in the first case. The attachment lost its grip as soon as that belief was tested against reality, not just against fear.

The case isn’t as unusual as it seems. In 2010, Catherine Mosher and Sharon Danoff-Burg adapted addiction screening questionnaires to indoor tanning: among 229 college students who used tanning beds, about a third met adapted criteria for “tanning addiction,” and those students reported more anxiety. These are research criteria, not an official diagnosis, but they show that the need to tan can work the way Riso describes.

4. Attachment to always staying up to date

Riso describes, from his own observation at technology fairs, people who feel that “something is missing” if they don’t acquire every new release available, even if it’s, in his words, “a USB port, just to feel 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 strong work addiction (fourteen-hour days, weekends included), estranged from his wife and his two teenage children.

The change came when his younger son was diagnosed with a brain tumor. Before going into a risky operation, the young man asked him 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 absorb the rest of his life.
• The case illustrates something that repeats throughout the book: attachment rarely breaks through abstract reflection. 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 folk tale, which circulates in several versions and is often associated with the story collections of the Jesuit Anthony de Mello, about a guru who, to stop his cat from distracting the faithful during the evening service, had 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 survive long after its original reason has disappeared.

Behavioral economics has a name for an everyday version of this: status quo bias. William Samuelson and Richard Zeckhauser showed in 1988 that, faced with the same choice, people disproportionately prefer the option already in place, simply because it’s the existing one.

7. Attachment to never making a mistake

Riso describes the case of a young woman with an IQ in the seventieth percentile (that is, above seven out of ten people her age) who was convinced she was “not very intelligent” because she’d repeated a school year due to dyslexia that wasn’t diagnosed in time. She had imposed extreme self-demands on herself as a way of compensating for that fear.

• The irony, according to the case, is that the self-demands meant to “protect” her from failure were, in themselves, 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.

Research on perfectionism, in the review by Joachim Stoeber and Kathleen Otto (2006), distinguishes precisely between striving for excellence, which tends to be compatible with wellbeing, and concern over mistakes and fear of evaluation, which is the part most associated with distress. If that nuance interests you, our perfectionism test explores it.

The thread connecting all seven cases

In none of them is the object the problem: not the phone, not the necklace, not the tan, not the job.

The problem, in the framework Riso proposes, 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.

The studies cited fit that idea along different paths: we overestimate how much others look at us (spotlight effect), we overvalue what is already ours (endowment effect), we fold objects into our identity (extended self) and we prefer what is already in place (status quo). None of these biases is a personal flaw; they’re general tendencies of the mind that, in certain cases, become rigid.

That doesn’t make these attachments any less real or any easier to let go of. It explains why, in Riso’s approach, they’re worked on by looking at the underlying belief and not by swapping the object for a similar one.

If you recognize yourself in the first one, attachment to approval, our people pleaser test measures that tendency; and if the clinging falls mainly on people, the emotional dependency test explores it in more detail.

Sources

• Riso, W. (2012). Desapegarse sin anestesia: Cómo soltarse de todo aquello que nos quita energía y bienestar. Editorial Planeta Colombiana.
• Gilovich, T., Medvec, V. H., & Savitsky, K. (2000). The spotlight effect in social judgment: An egocentric bias in estimates of the salience of one’s own actions and appearance. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 78(2), 211-222. doi:10.1037/0022-3514.78.2.211
• Belk, R. W. (1988). Possessions and the extended self. Journal of Consumer Research, 15(2), 139-168.
• Kahneman, D., Knetsch, J. L., & Thaler, R. H. (1990). Experimental tests of the endowment effect and the Coase theorem. Journal of Political Economy, 98(6), 1325-1348.
• Samuelson, W., & Zeckhauser, R. (1988). Status quo bias in decision making. Journal of Risk and Uncertainty, 1(1), 7-59.
• Stoeber, J., & Otto, K. (2006). Positive conceptions of perfectionism: Approaches, evidence, challenges. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 10(4), 295-319.
• Mosher, C. E., & Danoff-Burg, S. (2010). Addiction to indoor tanning: Relation to anxiety, depression, and substance use. Archives of Dermatology, 146(4), 412-417. doi:10.1001/archdermatol.2009.385