Lena Dunham’s new Netflix present Too A lot is a rom-com for the TikTok-scrolling, influencer-besotted age. Within the present, 30-something Jessica relocates to London after a thunderous breakup that causes her to go a bit of insane. Whereas Jessica is the type of frumpy, infantile mess acquainted to followers of Dunham’s different work, she additionally instantly meets and falls in love with an astoundingly good-looking indie musician named Felix. The present mainly considerations the pair’s lighting-fast courtship. In a single episode, Felix tags alongside to Jessica’s chaotic work celebration. In one other, she’s his plus-one at a farcically posh British wedding ceremony. There’s lots of intercourse, a good quantity of medicine, and—seeing that Felix is a musician—some rock and roll as effectively. A constant theme is that Jessica runs too sizzling—she’s an excessive amount of, because the title suggests—and Felix runs too chilly. He is emotionally distant and laborious to learn, whereas Jessica is an open e book.
Nevertheless, whereas Too A lot finally ends up being an overstuffed if eminently bingeable rom-com, probably the most attention-grabbing moments come not from the primary characters, however from Jessica’s ex-boyfriend, Zev.
Whereas Zev at first looks as if a sufferer of Jessica’s obsession (we meet him after she’s actually damaged into his home), he is finally revealed to be a jerk of a now-familiar sort: the remedy boyfriend. Utilizing the pseudo-intellectual language of remedy, Zev sanitizes meanness and neglect. When Jessica (fairly) feels insecure, he tells her that she “cannot all the time ask for fixed reassurance,” including that she ought to “perhaps see a therapist, ‘trigger it is really actually egocentric of you to not let go of this anxious attachment fashion.” In a remedy session after their breakup, he compares Jessica to his overbearing mom, casting himself because the sufferer of her overwhelming, suffocating calls for for affection.
“The very first thing I scent, earlier than I see it, earlier than I hear it, is a woman in want of that type of love,” he says. “And for a second, I am her knight in shining armor, however little by slowly, she begins to hate me.”
And certain, Jessica is a stereotypical “high-maintenance” girl. She’s needy, she’s intense, however she’s no succubus. What makes Zev’s remedy of Jessica—and later his new girlfriend, Wendy—so irritating is his capacity to forged his meanness within the language of remedy. As Wendy later tells Jessica, “He chooses sturdy ladies simply to tear us down.”
His fixation with attachment concept specifically reads as a send-up of on-line remedy tradition. Over the previous few years, on-line remedy tradition has helped flip attachment concept from a dry, educational idea right into a wide-ranging clarification for almost each relational downside. On TikTok the hashtag #anxiousattachment has practically 140,000 posts.
In its unique context, attachment concept referred to an attachment between a guardian and little one. Up to date attachment labels like anxious and avoidant attachment come from analysis finished by psychologist Mary Ainsworth within the Nineteen Seventies. In her experiments, she noticed how infants behaved in a battery of mildly disruptive conditions—like assembly a stranger or being left alone. Ainsworth noticed that whereas some youngsters (whom she referred to as “securely” hooked up) may very well be simply comforted after these disruptions, different youngsters reacted unusually. Some, whom she referred to as “ambivalently” hooked up (although most influencers name this “anxious” attachment), have been clingy and couldn’t be simply calmed after their mother and father returned. Others, the “avoidantly” hooked up, by no means obtained upset within the first place. Nonetheless different youngsters exhibited behaviors that have been tough to categorize.
Over the intervening a long time, what started as an instructional concept to elucidate child-parent relationships has now grow to be an all-purpose clarification for almost any interpersonal wrestle. Do you want reassurance or concern folks dislike you? You are most likely anxiously hooked up. Do you wrestle to commit and sometimes really feel smothered by your associate’s affection? That is avoidant attachment.
Jessica most likely is not anxiously hooked up in any method however the pop-psych sense. Positive, she’s a bit nuts, however in ways in which have extra to do with Dunham-ian neuroticism than with a childhood trauma–adjoining attachment dysfunction. If any character within the present has a legit case of attachment points, it is Felix, who was genuinely uncared for by his mother and father and abused by the nanny who cared for him throughout their lengthy absences.
Largely, Jessica simply needs to be liked. Nevertheless, this, too, is an indication of attachment points in line with some remedy influencers. When you really feel clingy, if you happen to anticipate your boyfriend to let you know he loves you or reply to your texts, that is an indication that one thing is incorrect with you. Effectively-adjusted folks, mentally wholesome folks, are presupposed to be fulfilled by nothing however their very own firm.
When watching movies about anxious attachment specifically, it is laborious to not really feel like so lots of the issues these influencers establish are simply regular. The sentiments of insecurity these influencers describe can be acquainted to anybody who’s had their coronary heart damaged.
“Once you really feel them pulling away, you are ready on communication, you’re feeling them changing into inconsistent, you may sense the change of their vitality towards you, it might really feel intense. It feels such as you had some love and a focus, and it is now being taken away,” says one influencer in a video about anxious attachment with greater than 30,000 likes. She assures her viewers that, after they really feel apprehensive, “In that second, you aren’t pondering clearly. What that is doing is activating a previous wound.”
Like many therapy-culture concepts, there’s most likely a sliver of reality to what many of those influencers are saying. There are some people who find themselves overcome with nervousness about their companions in a method that’s finally unhealthy. However these messages find yourself offering simple cowl to forged actual issues—even your associate being an actual jerk—because the irrational hallucinations of attachment points.
More often than not, if you happen to really feel one thing is amiss in your relationship, it most likely is. Whereas claiming to assist folks higher perceive themselves and their relationships, therapy-culture influencers find yourself making it even more durable to know what’s actual and what’s nervousness. Generally, if you happen to’re feeling insecure, if you happen to’re continually apprehensive your associate now not loves you, you do not have attachment points—you are precisely perceiving that you simply’re about to be dumped. In these conditions, changing into obsessive about attachment typically seems like a type of self-directed brainwashing. Remedy tradition might invoice itself as a solution to convey therapeutic readability to the plenty, however really creating more healthy relationships—as Jessica herself finally learns—generally means placing your telephone down.
