THE ANXIOUS HEARTS GUIDE: Rising Above Anxious Attachment by Rikki Cloos is a wonderful guide to learn all about anxious attachment and how to understand it better and be able to become a more secure attacher in relationship.

My favorite excerpts from the book are below:   (The author was discussing their life)- I bought a journal and wrote daily for years. I read over 60 books on relationship psychology, self-esteem, self-compassion, and interpersonal conflict and communication, all in the first two years after my divorce. I devoured the content produced by leaders in the field of relationship dynamics and self betterment. On a daily basis I pushed myself physically and mentally until slowly, little by little, I noticed that I began to think and feel differently about myself and the relationships I was in.

 

 

Be mindful that your own behavior is pushing away the very thing you seek.

 

Relationship anxiety is at the root of our suffering.

 

If parenting were 100% to blame, siblings would share the exact same attachment style and they most certainly don’t.

 

Our attachment Styles can also come from traumatic bonding experiences we have as teens or adults ( abandonment, abuse, bereavement, divorce, infidelity, etc.)

 

 We worry that our relationships will end, and our relationships end because we worry too much.

 

The insecurely attached person is not a control of their day or mood or well-being. They are stuck in a boat adrift on the sea of their significant others’ moods, hoping for calm waters but feeling completely thrown about whatever emotional storms arise.

 

 It’s one thing to be attuned to your beloved’s mood. It’s kind to be sensitive to their needs, even loving to feel great empathy or have a desire to lift them up, but it’s another thing entirely to be personally at the mercy of their changing moods. This is one of the Hallmarks of codependency; an unhealthy, excessive emotional or psychological reliance on a partner.

 

The insecurely attached are often tragically bad at noticing/ labeling our feelings because we work so hard to avoid them. Unfortunately, avoiding them  means that we don’t know what we’re feeling. And if we don’t know what we’re feeling, we can be inadvertently controlled by our emotions. Your actions and words are shaped by these feelings whether you realize it or not.

 

 Thoughts and feelings have ways of flavoring everything we put out into the world. They can leak out into our relationships even when we think we’re hiding them well. Awareness and acknowledgment, then, is a logical first step.

 

Name a couple of very positive traits that define you! Now write down the opposite of what those things are. These are probably traits that you absolutely can’t stand in other people. There is your shadow. It’s the opposite of what you value, the things that we can’t tolerate in others and certainly can’t tolerate in ourselves. 

 

Anxious attachers tend to use other people to regulate their emotions. This is not only extremely unhealthy, but it feels terrible to experience. In this position, we find ourselves completely at the mercy of someone else to calm us, pacify our upsets, and make us happy. When we allow others to dictate how we feel, we have effectively given up control over our own emotional state. 

 

A romantic relationship can’t survive under the weight of a person without other healthy connections to lean on. If you need your lover to also be your soul confidant, therapist, adventure buddy, downtime, and shoulder to cry on, that is simply too much to ask of a single person! 

 

Our romantic partners were never meant to be our everything. In fact, no one can be that for us. 

 

We’ve got to quit drinking the Disney- happily- ever- after- Kool-Aid and wake up to how unhealthy it is to expect someone to fulfill all of our needs. How would you feel if your partner were unable to be happy without you? When would you have time to pursue your own interests, build your career, nurture your friendships, or simply be alone to unwind? You wouldn’t! You’d be a prisoner, tasked with keeping your partner happy at all times. 

 

Think about it this way: how free are you to be yourself, with all of your unique interests, needs, quirks, and flaws if any of those things threaten your lover and your only friendship?

 

If your lover is the only person you have in the world, you will be completely paralyzed by the fear of upsetting/ losing them or driving them away, and will thus be unable to be your true self in their presence. How miserable is that?

 

Passion is fueled by both partners maintaining an independence, separateness, or otherness. Our partners need to have some curiosity and mystery about us in order to want more. Togetherness, intimacy, and deeply knowing one another is wonderful; it breeds comfort and security and love. But passion? That fire can be stoked by nurturing a vibrant, fulfilling life in the hours/ days away from your partner which will spark their imagination and curiosity.

Esther Perel has a wonderful TED talk on this called: The Secret to desire in a long term relationship. 

 

Ask yourself how does this friendship make me feel? If you’re spending lots of time with someone who criticizes you, competes with you, makes you feel anxious or exhausted, makes fun of you, or you find that your other relationships are suffering because of that person, you may be involved with them for the wrong reasons. 

 

Try shifting your focus to what the friendship feels like. Do you feel drained by their presence? Are you walking on eggshells? Do you have to be on guard around them? 

 

The relationship with our significant other, should be one of,  if not the healthiest one we involve ourselves in.

 

 Did you abandon yourself or your interest in favor of spending time with your lover?

 

We’ve only got so much time. But perhaps even more finite than our time is the energy we’ve got to spend. You can have all the time in the world, but with no extra energy to pour into the things that are important to you, time is worthless. So let’s think of your precious energy as gasoline in a giant tank. Now let’s find the holes. In which areas of your life are you leaking energy? 

Here are some severe drains on your energy:

• Working a very mentally taxing job
•  needy family and friends
•  regularly engaging with people who drain you instead of energizing you
•  avoiding bills/ repairs/ health issues because they feel scary or overwhelming
•  mindless social media scrolling or binge watching videos
•  wallowing in self-pity, making excuses, and/or giving into your anger regularly
•  filling your body with highly processed, sugary, or convenience foods
•  avoiding regular exercise
•  loneliness resulting from neglecting your friendships
•  boredom eating/ mindless snacking
•  refusing to set goals for the day/ month/ year
•  escaping your problems through excessive alcohol/ drug/ electronics use 

 

Anxious attachment comes with a profound mistrust of ourselves. We don’t feel confident in our ability to soothe ourselves when unpleasant emotions pop up. To cope, we find comforting distractions in other people. Even more unhealthy, we sometimes find someone who does the comforting for us. 

Learning to self soothe is, unfortunately, a matter of putting yourself in uncomfortable situations over and over again and slowly coming to trust that you can handle them on your own. iLttle by little you’ll start to feel more confident that when discomfort rears it’s ugly head, you have the power to stand up to it and stare it down until it passes. Learning to love your own company is a major step toward living your best life. 

 

It’s all well and good to be connected with the people around you, but if you’ve got no idea what you want, you’re in danger of losing yourself and other people’s wants.

 

 Self-abandment, the idea that our wants/ needs aren’t important, is a hallmark of anxious attachment and also a killer of intimacy! 

 

Chasing what you really want, and investing your energy into moving towards those things, is the only way to get to your best life. Are you making time and energy deposits daily into a situation that looks different from what you hope for? If so, you’re actively creating a life that you don’t want. In order to build that best life, we need to put all of our energy into building something that matters to us. 

 

Anxious hearts, make yourself a list. on that list include just a handful of things that are very, very important to you about how you relate to someone romantically. These should be things that you want for yourself that make your life better.

 

The trick is to pay attention to how things feel. Let that be the guide for what you want.  When you figure out what you want don’t take your eyes off of it. And don’t let anyone tell you that you shouldn’t want that thing.

 

When we can learn to find the beauty, joy, and happiness and even the most mundane things in our lives, we will truly be living our best life, no matter what our circumstances.

 

A Hallmark of anxious attachment is low self-esteem. So pack up your pity party and let’s get to digging.  What do I notice myself doing in relationships that causes me trouble? What patterns do I notice in my relationship history that I wish would stop repeating? 

 

When we pursue love without intentionality, our unhealed trauma often leads the way. 

 

Our discomfort around the boundary violations may come out in strange or unexpected ways. It comes out in our passive aggressive comments, our lack of effort, our feelings of powerlessness; you may find unexplained health issues popping up- got trouble, aches and pains, or insomnia.

 

Carl Jung, the father of analytical psychology said “ All mental illness is an inability to withstand discomfort”.

 

Try to lean into and accept discomfort rather than trying desperately to escape it. If you can withstand discomfort, it doesn’t have as much power over you. It also means that discomfort won’t define your ability to be happy or hold you back as much.

 

The research is clear on why insecure attachers (anxious, avoid it, and disorganized alike)  can’t seem to drum up the interest for those unfortunate “ safe”  choices and find themselves in volatile/ toxic/ roller coaster relationships over and over again.  Put simply, an activated attachment system (the warning bells) feels like love to us. 

 

The prime reason for our broken “picker”  is the fact that the highs and the lows of an activated attachment system feel like love for the insecurely attached. The turbulence is familiar- it is likely how you felt as a young child attaching to your parental figures, or when you were forming early romantic attachments. because of this, it is what you identify with “ love”.

 

For us insecure attachers, our early attachment figures were perhaps distant, inconsistent, critical, unreliable, or otherwise not attuned to our needs. Our warning bells rang constantly in our heads around (or when we thought about)  our attachment figures. For this reason, we learned to associate anxiety and worry with love. It also taught us that love and attention is something that we need to earn through good behavior; Something that we must remain hypervigilant about lest it be taken away. From that young age, an activated attachment system began to feel  like “home”  for us. And without knowing why, we grew to seek out those alarms when selecting romantic partners. 

 

Practice heeding your attachment alarms for what they are- red flags. 

 

The “spark” That we typically run toward is not a good indicator of compatibility at all. 

 

Did you know that your brain has a hard time telling the difference between what you experience and what you imagine? 

 

If someone runs away when you state your needs, that’s the universe carrying away what isn’t good for you. Don’t follow. 

Learning self compassion/ emotional regulation, assertiveness, breaking our difficult patterns, and healthier communication with our loved ones is huge. 

 

 Anxious attachers are notoriously conflict-avoidant, passive, and lack the ability to assertively address problems directly to the people we love. 

 

 Do you remember the term “protest behavior”?  It was describing our unhealthy attempts to express unhappiness or unmet needs. This unhealthy behavior is killing our relationships. With assertiveness training, we can learn how to directly express our needs to our partners in a way that commands both attention and respect. This eliminates the need for protest behavior. The benefit is multi-layered: we get to act in a way that makes our partners respect us more, we develop trust in and respect for ourselves when we take charge of making our needs known, and we also grow intimacy within our relationship by letting our partners into our inner world of needs and desires.

 

We’re looking for someone who won’t shy away from a partner who has needs. We’re looking for people who celebrate us having needs, who encourage us to state these needs, and communicate with us about needs in a healthy, open way.

 

 Your goal here is to be so real about your needs that the people who can’t handle them will naturally fall away. It may be tough to let them go but trust that you’re doing yourself a huge favor. We’re throwing the small fish back. 

 

After all, can you really imagine yourself finding long-term happiness with someone who doesn’t want you to need anything?

 

 But to an anxious attacher, preserving connections and preventing abandonment (even with deeply incompatible partners) can quite literally feel like a matter of life or death.

 

Living inside a mind that’s screaming out for connection at all costs can make it very tough to separate your wants/needs from someone you feel that you need to connect to. Self-abandoning (giving up our identity, needs, and wants)  can be second nature for anxious hearts.

 

A really healthy example of a way to manage conflict is- The way that they gave each other space when one was upset with the other. There was no fighting over relentless attempts to make negative feelings go away; they simply took time and space for themselves to calm down and recollect their thoughts and then brought the issues back up when they came back together calmly and knew what they wanted to say.

A securely attached person is:

• Confident without flattery or external validation. Comfortable in their own skin and rocks solid about their worth.
•  Good at self-soothing
•  Affected by but not defined by other people’s actions/words/feelings and are able to regulate their own mental experience independently and healthily.
•  Driven by love to help their partner feel better
•  Able to helpfully disagree or think differently than their partner
•  Capable of feeling worthy and lovable on their own
•  A good communicator. They do not communicate their needs through passive aggressive remarks, sarcasm, pouting, acting out, attention seeking, whining, begging, or deceit.
•  Open to intimacy and connection. They refuse to self-abandon in order to get it. 

 

 

It’s an unfortunate cruel twist of fate about being an insecure attacher: secures can feel boring to us. Here’s why: insecure attachers are accustomed to anxiety, uncertainty, and drama in love. It is the turbulent, but familiar environment where we first learned about love. Those uncomfortable, unstable feelings are our “Spark”.  Without our “ Spark”, we quietly move on to the next person, unaware of the peace we’ll be missing out on. 

 

It’s one of the magical, sustainable things about a connection with someone who is secure. it takes some time to build, but once it’s there, you can count on it being more real, durable, and stable. 

 

Boundaries are kind, healthy, and bring people closer to you. Knowing that you’re being authentic and not people pleasing allows others to know you fully… the real you. It allows trust to build between two people. 

 

One excellent way to combat negativity bias is to redirect our focus on the good. Pay attention to the ways that someone shows you love. Journal  the sweet/ kind/ loving things that your partner does for you. Take note of the positives within the relationship so that you can combat the negativity bias. 

 

 When we are consistently met with empathy, understanding, and validation, it frees us up to do our own inner healing work. And we may find our relationship anxieties melting away. It doesn’t get much more secure than that.

The idea that a relationship can make us better and stronger (rather than constantly stress us out) is what all this healing is about. 

When you create the kind of life for yourself that helps you meet many of your own needs, you simply require less of your partner. This creates an environment where they’re freer to approach and love you in the ways they can. 

 

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