Embrace This Moment
This past year has been a year of unparalleled loss in my family and in several families who are close to me. As I have said goodbye forever to precious loved ones, I am reminded of the fragility of human life.
Grief grips us and arrests our attention. We are pulled powerfully into the present moment where everything stops, and we are forced to take stock of the lives of our loved ones. It beckons us to look at our own lives too
I am a psychologist. So I sit with hurting people each and every week, and I am privileged to be a part of their journey. Often I get to be a minister of healing and reconciliation in the midst of their pain.
One of the profound gifts of this vantage point is that it motivates me to go home and express my words of love to my wife. It also inspires me to be grateful for the things that God has blessed me with.
I conduct a lot of marital therapy, and so I see marriages in their toughest moments. My own marriage is not perfect. We have had our rough places. But we have worked hard to get through them and to grow stronger through the power of Attachment.
I write and speak often about Attachment, which is the bonding process that God ordained for us as humans. It starts in infancy with the bond between parent and child, and it carries into our adult lives. There are key ingredients to building a Secure Attachment bond, which I have written about in other articles and in my book, “Face to Face: Seven Keys to a Secure Marriage.”
Right now, I want to hone in on the core reason why God created Attachment. In Genesis 2:18, The Lord God said, “It is not good for man to be alone.” Neither man nor woman is supposed to walk this life alone.
Loss experiences, in particular, galvanize our awareness of our needs to “not be alone.” Loss hurts because we were attached to the ones who have gone away. Grief is the process that the human heart goes through to let go of the immediate attachment bonds that we had with precious loved ones.
The founder of Attachment Theory was Dr. John Bowlby, and he entitled his seminal work, “Attachment and Loss” (Bowlby, 1969). While grief and loss are painful, they can also serve as anchor points. They can motivate us to focus on what matters most.
Ultimately, they can drive us closer towards our key relationships, motivating us to say what is important and to embrace the ones that we love. You may never get this moment again.
Recently, I sat with a family who was going through profound loss. Although I am clinically trained to remain calm and steady, there are times when my own internal emotions are deeply stirred by what I hear and experience. This was one of those times.
After I sat with this family in loss, I had an evening where gratitude welled up in my heart for all that God has given me. I needed to embrace the moment.
I went home that night and gave my wife an extra long hug in the middle of our cozy kitchen. She didn’t fully know why I was holding onto her a little longer and a little tighter than I usually do.
I went into the living room and picked up my children. I hugged them and danced them around the room for several minutes. They laughed. They soared. I was joyful and breathless, all at the same time.
Attachment is all about lingering touch, vulnerable expression of emotions, and being present to the moment with your loved ones.
My prayer for you is that you will have Attachment building moments today, and I hope that you will create these moments with the ones you love.
Embrace the moments you have today. Seize the days while you have them.
Love them while you can. These are the greatest gifts we have on this journey of life.
