L
Yeah, it was much the same for me.
Here are the attachment levels Neufeld put forth, that children need to move through while growing up in order to feel a strong attachment to their parents. There were good things about my mom, and it was incredibly important to her that everyone around her feel loved - but sometimes (usually) we were more an extension of that reality she wanted to project than we were individuals within it to attach to. I wonder sometimes if I even made it to stage two.
Here is the highest level of attachment (the descriptions at the link above are mediocre, so here's the one put forth by Neufeld himself in his book
Hold On To Your Kids):
To feel close to someone is to feel known by them. In some ways, this is a recapitulation of attaching by way of the senses, except that being seen and heard are now experienced psychologically instead of strictly physically. In the pursuit of closeness, a child will share his secrets. In fact, closeness will often be defined by the secrets shared. Parent-oriented children do not like to keep secrets from their parents because of the resulting loss of closeness. For a peer-oriented child, his best friend is the one he has no secrets from. One cannot get much more vulnerable than to expose oneself psychologically. To share oneself with another and then be misunderstood or rejected is, for many, a risk not worth taking. As a result, this is the rarest of intimacies and the reason so many of us are reluctant to share even with loved ones our deepest concerns and insecurities about ourselves. Yet there is no closeness that can surpass the sense of feeling known and still being liked, accepted, welcomed, invited to exist.
I included that^ just because I think it's beautiful. I don't imagine a great many kids actually get that completely, but personally I see it as a hyperbolic bubble of what I
didn't get.
And anyway, Mate's theory (iirc, in his book
Scattered) is that ADD/ADHD is a consequence of attachment milestones getting missed, particularly those before a child can talk. I think? Organic attachment provides security, and lack of attachment and its consequent insecurity causes a sort of vigilant distraction. In my case, at least, I can see it being true.