Awakening, Part 2: The Chains We Call Love — Why Attachment Isn’t Love, and What It’s Quietly Costing Your Relationships
Think of one person, right now, who you genuinely believe you could not be happy without.
Now sit with this: you don’t need them. Not because they don’t matter — but because what you’re calling “needing them” and what you’re calling “loving them” are, more often than not, two entirely different things wearing the same word as a disguise. This could be the Needing vs Loving in Relationships that you need to become aware of sooner rather than later.
That distinction sits at the heart of Part 2 of Awakening, the series I’m publishing across the blog, the podcast and social media, drawn from the teaching of Jesuit priest and psychotherapist Anthony de Mello. In Part 1, we looked at how most of us are sleepwalking through an identity we never actually chose. Part 2 goes one layer deeper — into why that false identity is so hard to put down. The answer is attachment. And as with the last post, everything here is exactly what I work through with people, in far greater depth and privacy, inside the couples and individual solo retreats I run in Knysna, on South Africa’s Garden Route.
Love and Need Are Not the Same Thing
Here is a distinction we drew that I think about constantly, both in my own life and in the room with the couples and individuals I work with: love and need are not the same thing. Past a certain point, they’re opposites.
When you need someone in order to feel okay — when their mood decides your mood, when the thought of losing them makes your chest tighten — you’re no longer in a relationship with a person. You’re in a relationship with your own fear of not being enough, and the person simply occupies the spot where that fear lives.
And here’s the uncomfortable part about Needing vs Loving in Relationships: you cannot fully love what you need to control. The moment your peace of mind depends on someone behaving a certain way, some part of you starts quietly managing them, performing for them, watching for signs of danger. That isn’t love. It’s a negotiation dressed up in candlelight.
Closeness is dangerous. Codpendent. It’s that there’s a version of closeness built on fullness, and a version built on fear of emptiness — and they can look identical from the outside while feeling completely different on the inside.
Four Illusions That Keep the Chains in Place
Across decades of teaching we keep returning to a handful of illusions that quietly run most relationship conflicts. I see at least two of these in almost every couple and every individual who comes through a private retreat with us.
“If I change the outside of my life, I’ll change on the inside.” New relationship, new city, new chapter — we treat circumstances like a costume change that will finally produce a different person underneath. It rarely does, because the pattern’s operator — you — comes along for the ride. This is exactly why we go deeper into identity and pattern-work in 10 Masks of Personality.
“I have a basic human need to be loved and approved of.” What you actually have is a need to love, and a need to be free — needing to be loved the way you need oxygen is learned, not innate. Once you believe you need it, your entire personality organizes around getting it. That’s the birthplace of what I call, in The Paradigm Process®, the Pleaser — one of the loudest Ego Insurgents, quietly abandoning your own needs to avoid someone else’s disapproval.
“Other people have the power to hurt me.” They don’t have the power — it’s handed to them, usually without noticing, the moment their opinion of you becomes your opinion of yourself.
“I am the labels people have given me.” Successful. Difficult. The one who always leaves. The moment a label is taken seriously, a role is being performed instead of a life being lived — and maintaining that role becomes its own quiet prison.
Desire Isn’t the Problem — Dependence Is
I want to correct a common misreading of this teaching: the goal is not to want nothing. De Mello drew a careful line between desire and craving (or attachment), and it changes everything.
Desire is alive — energy, aliveness, the wanting that builds a good life. There is nothing to fix there. The issue is depending on the object of your wanting for your happiness. The Paradigm shift was turning a desperate craving into a preference: I would love this, I’ll work toward it, and if it doesn’t happen, I remain whole — versus I require this, and without it I am not okay. Same relationship, same goal, sometimes the very same marriage. Completely different nervous system running underneath it.
Why This Matters Most in Your Closest Relationships
In twenty-five years of this work — including inside marriages ending and marriages fighting to survive — I’ve watched the same pattern surface again and again: most conflict in close relationships isn’t actually about the thing being argued about. It’s two attachment systems colliding, each one quietly convinced the other person is responsible for their peace of mind. The fight about a text message tone. The recurring fight that always somehow becomes the same fight. Underneath almost all of it sits one unspoken sentence: you were supposed to keep me safe from feeling this, and you didn’t.
That sentence is about Needing vs Loving in Relationships is attachment talking, not love. And it is genuinely difficult to hear underneath it inside a fifty-minute session squeezed between work and school pickup — which is precisely why the deeper version of this work happens away from ordinary life, with real time and real privacy.
This is the exact work I hold inside Private Luxury One-on-One Retreats — deliberately structured for individuals, for couples working to rebuild trust, and for people navigating separation or divorce who want to understand these patterns clearly before carrying them into another relationship. Attachment researchers describe this same dynamic — the way early relational patterns shape how safe or threatened we feel in adult intimacy — which is very much the territory this retreat work moves through. For senior leaders and executives carrying these same patterns into high-stakes roles and relationships, the same depth of work is available through the Sovereign Mental Wellness Executive Retreats, and twice yearly through our flagship group retreat, Rewire Your Reality.
What’s on the Other Side of the Chain
On the other side of dropping an attachment is not less love — it’s more love, with the fear taken out of it. A heart no longer scanning for threat can finally see the other person clearly, sensitively, without an agenda.
In the Paradigm Process, I call this relating to life from the Sacred Self rather than from the Ego Insurgents. The Sacred Self doesn’t need anyone to complete it — which, counterintuitively, is exactly what makes it capable of real intimacy. It’s very hard to fully give yourself to someone while part of you is quietly using them to stay afloat.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is a Needing vs Loving in Relationships couples retreat, or divorce retreat helpful even if we’re not sure our relationship will survive? Yes. Many couples arrive broken and in tatters genuinely undecided, and the private, one-on-one nature of the solo retreat means the work can honestly explore either path — repair or a healthier separation — without an agenda pushing toward one outcome.
Can I attend a relationship-focused retreat on my own, without my partner? Absolutely. Many people do this work solo — during a divorce, after one, or simply to understand a pattern that keeps repeating across relationships — through our private one-on-one retreats.
Is this about blaming one partner for relationship problems? No. De Mello’s teaching, and the work built from it, treats attachment as a universal human pattern, not a flaw unique to one person. Most conflict involves both people’s attachment systems, not one person’s failure.
How is this different from couples counselling? Mark Lockwood works as a Life Strategist, addiction specialist, coach and author — not a clinical psychologist — using The Paradigm Process®, a framework built from over 25 years of experience that blends psychological understanding, contemplative practice, and immersive, private retreat work rather than weekly sessions.
Ready to Look at the Chain Honestly?
If any of this named a relationship, a pattern, or a chain you’ve been calling love for a long time, that isn’t something to feel ashamed of. It’s information — and it’s exactly the starting point for the work done inside a private retreat.
Enquire about a private couples, divorce-recovery, or solo retreat with Mark and his team →
Part 3 of this series, the final instalment, explores what’s actually left once the attachments loosen — presence, the death of the false self, and the walk home to the Sacred Self. Subscribe to the podcast and blog so you don’t miss it.
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