Causes of fear of commitment
The role of the mother
Whether or not we are capable of commitment in our later lives depends to a great degree on our relationship with our mother during the first years of life. It depends on whether our brain associates attachment in earliest childhood with feelings of “security, warmth and protection,” or with “abandonment, loneliness and fear.” Since the first two to three years of life fall victim to infant amnesia and we are unable to recall them, our experience during that period is normally not accessible to our conscious mind. Consequently the unconscious plays a very large role as a powerful instrument of control in commitment phobia. A small baby is wholly dependent on its mother. In the first months of life it does not even know that it and its mother are two separate beings.
The infant is totally governed by its needs and feelings. Its emotional life consists of sensations of pleasure and displeasure. Feelings of displeasure can result from hunger, thirst, cold, heat and physical complaints. The infant cannot deal with too much displeasure by itself. The feeling of displeasure triggers severe stress and the child begins to cry. The mother’s job is to stop the stress if possible, to calm the child, to feed it, warm it and comfort it. Along with the need to have its displeasure alleviated, the infant also has a congenital need for social contact and human affection, so the mother’s job is not just to relieve the stress of displeasure but also to impart in the child the feeling of wellbeing that results from human affection and attention.
In the first year of life the child learns increasingly to control its motor skills, to grasp more firmly, to turn from its back onto its stomach. It learns to crawl, and toward the end of its first year it takes its first steps. Increasingly, therefore, the child can control its desire for affection and food itself, by reaching for its mother or its bottle, crawling towards its mother, or turning away from or toward her. If all goes well, mother and child become attuned to one another. The mother understands her child’s signals better and better and reacts to them. The child learns that it is understood and that it can influence the satisfaction of its needs. It learns from experience that it can actively provoke the reaction it wants from its mother. That includes not only its wish for affection, but also for independence. The better the child can move, the more it wants to explore its surroundings independently. Important as it is to satisfy the child’s hunger for affection, it is equally important to let go and allow it to explore the world. A mother’s ability to empathise with her child’s needs is a fundamental prerequisite for enabling the child to establish a stable bond with the mother.
If during this period the child finds that its mother is there when it needs her but sometimes leaves it in peace when it wants to be alone, it learns to rely on her. The mother becomes a reliable source of comfort and protection, a stable base from which the child can fulfil its desire for independence by turning to other interesting people and things in its surroundings. The mother’s empathetic behaviour enables the child to gain confidence in relationships and a sense of basic trust. This can be understood as a feeling of being welcome and accepted in the world. It is a whole-body experience. The child stores the information about whether or not it is accepted and loved in its body. It feels acceptance and trust with its entire body, as a sense of wellbeing that it carries into adulthood as an attitude to life. The traces of remembrance of this time are buried deep within us even if they can no longer be accessed by the memory or the conscious mind. Also linked to the sense of basic trust is the certainty of being able to influence relationships rather than being helplessly exposed to them. Thus the child learns that in principle one can rely on relationships, regulate and establish them.
If this interaction and interplay between mother and child succeeds, from around the second half of its second year the child develops an