The goal of coaching

Emotional attachments, part 6
Reza Hossein Borr

There are different kinds of attachments. Every attachment has a specific time of usefulness. Overstaying attachments can trigger meltdown for both sides. A very good example is the leaves of a tree that are supposed to be detached from it during the winter time. There are two kinds of trees: those that were supposed to abandon their yellow and dried leaves during the winter. If these trees do not abandon the leaves, they will be killed by the leaves. Those trees that are supposed to retain leaves, if they abandon the leaves, will be killed too. There are things to detach and let go and there are things to retain and endear. Detach yourself from what is not needed and the alternative will turn up automatically. The profession of the coach is to facilitate this process.

Emotional attachments

Emotional attachments can keep you in one spot for a long time to come. The emotional attachments are more difficult than others to get rid of. If you are emotionally attached to somebody and his attachment is not generating any useful and positive emotions in you, it is time to give up that attachment. But how can you detach yourself from emotional attachments that involve every sense of your being? The emotional attachments are not only to people but to animals, material things, and whatever you have internalised during many years.

The techniques that the coach must use for emotional detachment are different from the techniques that are used with other kind of attachments. The coach must persuade the client in this case to create new emotional relationships with other people, new people and new subjects that may be somehow similar to the previous experience or completely in contrast to them. If you recommend as a coach meeting people that were in contrast to the previous people, you will open not only different perspective which would be very useful in discovering and developing new alternatives.

It must be realised that to detach yourself emotionally from emotional matters is a challenging task. If you loved somebody some time ago and now that person is the source of hurt and trouble it is difficult to forget the moments that you had lovely memories with her or him.
I had a relative that I had nourished like my own brother as he was a classmate of my brother. As I saw him grow and in fact, I helped him in different ways: financially and emotionally to grow, I developed a lot of attachment to him. During the Iranian revolution when things have become extremely tough for me, he turned against me and he did whatever he could to endanger my life. I was so disappointed and so angry that I became sick but yet I was not able to detach myself emotionally from him. It took me many years to complete the process of detachment from him. I suffered all these years during this time when I was trying to detach myself. At the end I detached myself and felt enormous relief.

Emotional attachments are highly developed in the families especially to the children. The parents live for their children and they do whatever they can to make the lives of their children as much comfortable and successful as they can and when the children want to assert their own independence, it seems that the children are detaching themselves from parents who are totally attached to them. For the children it is a natural experience for the parents to love them, do everything they need, sacrifice their own lives and privileges for the children and at one stage, be prepared to let them go, detaching themeselves completely or partially. The parents who have put their complete whole in the children and in their welfare just cannot believe it that the children can be so much ungrateful. For the children it is not being ungrateful but it is being independent in order to survive independently in the world that needs their independent decisions.

The parents who are completely attached emotionally to the children feel a lot of pain to allow the children to move away fully or partially. Yet there is no any alternative for the children except to have the alternative of moving away. They still can keep the relationships with the parents closely in order to give and receive emotional backup. The children need emotional backup even when they are supposed to be completely independent. It is a two-way street. Sometimes the children begin the process of abandoning and sometimes the parents. Both of them need to learn how to detach themselves emotionally to reduce the level of pain.

Mutual emotional attachments can survive for a long time and can be extremely fruitful and one sided emotional attachment can cause immense pain and panic.

Reza Hossein Borr is an NLP Master Trainer and a leadership consultant and the creator of 150 CDs and 14 Change management models. He is also the author of Manual Success, Manual of Coaching and Mentoring, Motivational Stories that Can Change Your Life, and a New Vision for the Islamic World. He can be contacted by email: sarawani@aol.com www.rezaaa.com