Overcoming Insecure Attachment

8 Proven Steps to Recognizing Anxious and Avoidant Attachment Styles and Building Healthier, Happier Relationships

Tracy Crossley

• Publisher: Ulysses Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781646042685
• Topic: Psychologie
• Subtopic: Zwischenmenschliche Beziehungen in der Psychologie

The definitive guide for defeating anxious, anxious-avoidant, and avoidant attachment issues; dealing with the drama triangle;and building stronger, more successful relationships. Written by a behavioral relationship expert, Overcoming Insecure Attachment provides actionable steps on how to overcome insecure attachment styles and the problems they spawn with self-value, self-awareness and self-responsibility. Going beyond what traditional attachment theory books focus on, readers will follow eight proven steps that they can customize and organize in the way that best suits their unique needs, all the while being bolstered and championed by Tracy Crossley's friendly, bold tone. Permanently stop fear and anxiety from smotheringthe way you live your life, and stopsettling for relationships that aren't right for you. Overcoming Insecure Attachment will teach you how to break down your subconscious beliefs and create emotional connections with yourself and others for a happier, better life.

CHAPTER 1 Insecure Attachment and the Drama Triangle

HOW CAN YOU BE THE PROBLEM?

It may be hard to see yourself as your own problem. It may be shocking, because you identify yourself as “having it together”—you always excel in some way. Perhaps you’re an overachiever, an overgiver, a “Dear Abby,” or a control freak (it’s cute, right?). You might think, “This is who I am. I’ve worked hard to get here. I have my act together. It’s everyone else.”

In fact, the last thing you want is for others to find out you’re not this perfectly amazing person all the time. What? You might be screwed up like the rest of us? You might very well have worked your ass off to get to this place of appearing good enough that no one will criticize you or find fault with you. You might wear a coating of Teflon—“Don’t mess with me!”—or be Mother Teresa’s stand-in.

If so, you know that it takes a lot of work, and things are never perfect. Even if you try to do everything right, the tulips keep coming up crabgrass. This standoff with life causes you distress and anxiety. You just keep trying harder, thinking harder, working harder for that solution that eludes you. You’ve read every self-help book under the sun!

Maybe you’re married, but you and your spouse are leading separate lives, cheating, or constantly at each other’s throats. Or you tell your partner again and again how you want to be closer with them, but it never happens; emotional distance is a fact of your history. Avoiding emotions altogether could be your calling card, if you’ve been single for the past decade. Not happily single, but having given up, becoming numb and telling yourself all the endeavors, friends, and little critters you have are good enough. Nothing you do seems to change your outcomes, your relationships, or the patterns in your life.

The reason your life is at a stalemate is because you are not seeing yourself accurately. You think you have your act perfectly together, but you have problems all over the place. If you fear being outed as less than the picture you portray, you obsess over every little detail gone wrong, blaming everything and everyone around you when life does not go your way: “My boss gave me the wrong instructions!” or “I followed the recipe, it’s total crap!”

You are not living with FOMO (fear of missing out) but FIFO (fear I’m found out). The people in your life can’t know anything about the screwed-up you. What if they used it against you? Stopped loving you? Stopped thinking the world of the amazing you? How would you feel without that validation from others?

If you were to see yourself accurately, you’d come to see that you are really your problem. Your perfectionist, people-pleasing, problem-solving ways; your need for control, fear of being found out, insistence on having your way, unhappiness with others—all of this is on you.

If you’re confused about how you affect your own life and why things look as they do, you’re not alone. Knowing what you are doing intellectually can still leave you unaware of what you are doing emotionally, physically, and verbally.

In the old days, I’d break off a romance with someone who I felt wasn’t meeting my needs. My needs ranged from dictating our dating schedule to having a partner commit to me in my time frame. At the time, I had no idea why this was important to me. All I knew was that I was trying hard, and I was making sacrifices for him with my time and commitment, so I expected the same from him. Whatever he did or did not do, I seemed to overreact. I did not like feeling bad, needy, or out of control, and I expected the guy to fix it. In trying to control how I felt and change him, too, I would break up with him to win my way. The idea was to make him afraid of losing me. So, in a dramatic fashion, I’d expect him to make me promises based on my being right and him being the problem child.

Can you say bad strategy? Never mind that it did not really work. I felt full of anxiety all the time. If it were the game of Battleship, I would’ve lost all my ships. I could not see that controlling, pushing, arguing, and oscillating between being a helpless victim and a rescuer was not solving my problem. All I did was react and go down the dark rabbit hole of self-loathing. I felt like I was losing my marbles. I kept at it for years. Part of me truly believed that if I bugged a man about his flaws or bought him enough books, it would all work out in my favor.

As a human being, it is hard to see yourself clearly. Other people may offer opinions or criticisms, but they never really capture what is happening inside of us at a deeper level. Often, it is only through seeing how we react to life that we gain any knowledge of ourselves and see that our reactions come straight from our conditioned preferences. We may believe that these preferences are a truth, but they are just habits.

The key is to learn why you have the preference. You have a deeper motivation as you go through daily life, one that has nothing to do with your reactions but everything to do with why you have a reaction in the first place. This motivation comes from how you felt about past events, and from your perception of yourself in those events. For example, you might hate being stuck in the rain without an umbrella, because of what happened when you were drenched before an important event in your life. Therefore, you always have the umbrella with you—even on sunny days. Your motivation drives your behavior. Without knowing your motivations, you can’t know yourself.

Paying attention to what you do and why you do it will give you some insight into how you are the biggest barrier to your own happiness. Your feelings impact your thoughts, and your thoughts impact your feelings. How you see a situation outside of your body impacts both your thoughts and your feelings. You then have a reaction to it. You do this throughout the day about a variety of things. Take a moment and scan how many reactions you have in a day, whether to other people or to situations beyond your control. If you pay attention, you might notice yourself making judgments about everyone you meet.

Most of this mental chatter is not something you actively notice, but it does impact you. You might also notice that you get uptight. This tension or anxiety is a reaction, too. When you pay deeper attention, rather than drawing conclusions established from tension, you might notice other feelings, too—possibly even pain.

Seeing your own reactions to daily life is the first step toward solving your problems. Before you can take the road to happiness, you must first discover where you are.

WHAT INSECURE ATTACHMENT MEANS FOR YOU

As a baby, you didn’t choose your parents. It was not like you could flip through a catalog for the perfect parents. You went home with your primary caregiver. Some of them were not very self-aware; in fact, they may have bordered on abusive or been outright abusive, dismissive, or anxious. Or they may have attached to you in an overprotective manner. The deal is, they may have screwed you up a little bit. It’s not anything you can’t reverse when it comes to painful conditioning. That’s why you’re reading this book. In this book, being screwed up is like being a cool kid, because you are the star, and now you are moving on to a whole new script.

One thing to understand about insecure attachment or the other concepts discussed in this book is that they are all just conditioning. You learned these counterproductive ways of avoiding happiness long ago. The good news is that because you learned it, you can unlearn it, too.

Attachment is one of many facets of parenting. It describes an aspect of the emotional relationship between a parent and child. A securely attached child feels assured that his or her caregiver will meet their needs. In 1969, psychologist John Bowlby developed the theory of attachment. He suggested that early childhood attachment to caregivers gives a child the foundation for their self-worth and their feelings of importance and consistency in relationships, intimate and otherwise.

So, your parents either provided you with a secure base or an insecure base, and this established your own models for how the world works, emotionally. In 1970, Mary Ainsworth, a psychologist who teamed up with Bowlby, followed up his theory with an experiment of her own, called the “Strange Situation.” The Strange Situation involved mothers and their infants, who were between the ages of 9 and 18 months. Over eight sessions, the children were either left alone in a room, with their mother, with a stranger, or with their mother and a stranger. As their mothers left and reunited with the children, their reactions were observed and their attachment styles noted, along with other behaviors. This experiment led her to suggest that securely attached children would respect themselves and their needs, while insecurely attached children would feel unworthy because they had developed a negative self-image. Psychologists theorized that attachment styles would continue to affect how children emotionally adjusted through adolescence and into early adulthood. These early life patterns are what you may have carried forth into your adult life.

Well wait, couldn’t I be a securely attached kid?

Maybe. Secure attachment permits children to trust others, themselves, and what life brings. These kids have the secure foundation needed to discover, bond, and openly communicate with others. They grow up with a strong sense of well-being, motivation, and safety. Having this base gives them a feeling of trust. They are not initially suspicious, wondering what a person wants from them. These kids aren’t doing a balancing act on a cup while juggling bowling pins for attention. They feel confident in how they assess the world and their place in it.

This ability to trust makes a huge difference when it comes to handling change. These children are able to adapt, cope with stress, and be emotionally resilient. All of this adds up to a solid foundation for building emotional intelligence. Securely attached kids more easily gain the four branches of emotional intelligence identified by John Mayer and Peter Salovey in 1990. Mayer and Salovey were the first to create a framework in exploring and defining an emotional intelligence with four branches, as follows: first, the ability to perceive emotions in oneself and others accurately; second, the ability to use emotions to facilitate thinking; third, the ability to understand emotions, emotional language, and the signals conveyed by emotions; and fourth, the ability to manage emotions toward a goal.

By providing attention and recognizing their children’s material and emotional needs, securely attached parents lay a strong foundation for self-esteem in their kids. Trust, empathy, understanding relationships, and knowing how verbal and nonverbal communication work come easily to these kids.

Sounds great! Sign me up!

Now, let’s take a short walk to the other side of the street, which could be your side of the street.

Here’s the down low on insecure attachment: inconsistencies in the actions/reactions of a caregiver will affect the quality of attachment in the child, especially actions and reactions that are repetitive behaviors. Perhaps a parent, or both Mom and Dad, were fundamentally dysfunctional because of their own upbringing. Maybe one or both were emotionally distant, or maybe they were emotionally dependent on you, the child. Yes, right up in your business! Maybe they did not trust you to decide on anything you really wanted, and/or they overprotected you, living your life for you and shielding you from all disappointment. You would not have learned how to deal with life on life’s terms. Or perhaps you lost a parent or both parents early in life. Even an extended stay in the hospital for you or a parent, or a job where they weren’t around much, would affect your style of attachment.

If they were clueless as parents, you didn’t learn much in the areas of boundaries or emotional safety, either. Basically, they caused you considerable emotional distress and you needed to find a way to survive, so you got your own map and compass together. You learned to avoid your emotions, because they felt hard and painful. Negative feelings can be big, even overwhelming, to a little body. So “fuhgeddaboudit” to those old emotions! Phooey, who needs ’em? You found safety in a rejecting environment by building defensive mental strategies, which relieved frustration and pain and toned down your intense emotional states.

Now, before I continue, let me point out that this book is not about blaming Mom or Dad. The point in understanding attachment is to give you a clearer idea of where your problem started, how it has affected you, and how to resolve it.

As an insecurely attached child, you might have been inconsolable much of the time, rejecting of your parent, or you might have turned yourself into a self-contained little adult. That’s what I did, and my mom called me her “little soldier.” If your childhood was like mine, your main strategy to protect yourself might have been to never do something as dangerous as showing any desire or need for closeness, warmth, affection, or love. Crying in movie theaters or in front of others was very scary; it attracted the wrong attention. You still wanted to be physically close to your parent, but you became emotionally detached. You needed validation but couldn’t get it from the dysfunctional parent, so you sought it in school, through friends, or in other ways. You knew that you had to go elsewhere to gain a feeling of belonging and acceptance.

Even as very young children, we insecurely attached kids had to learn to sidestep our troublesome feelings as we caught on that our caregivers showed little or no interest in truly getting to know us or understand how we felt. This left us with a bottomless pit of emptiness inside. I was that kid!

We carried these strategies into adulthood, and now the reality of getting emotionally close to others can have us breaking out in a cold sweat. We think that getting close to others emotionally should come with a guarantee that no one will get hurt or be left out, but that’s a fantasy. A lot of us insecurely attached children end up single our entire lives or settling for unfulfilling relationships, never sure if we made the right choice or feeling we had no choice. The emptiness inside is pervasive. We become gifted at developing strategies for both getting attention and avoiding attention altogether.

Strategies can be helpful in business when it comes to developing goals, but not so much for getting love and attention. In fact, we may end up being quite successful in our work, gaining validation and allowing us to keep our emotional distance with the world. For many, insecure attachment meant your intellect took over and saved the day. You got through by striving for something beyond just being you. You might have become an overachiever, a high performer, or a people pleaser, doing whatever you could to avoid negative consequences. You got your act together and you kept it together! But does being in this type of control serve you now? How happy are you?

If you were insecurely attached as a child, you can’t grasp what it feels like to be responsible for how you feel. It’s not your fault. It’s your conditioning. You never learned, so you don’t have the right tools. You may not know how to take emotionally inspired action, or how to stop being in a state of reaction to life and the people in it. Whether you anxiously run toward what you believe will fill you up or appear to avoid it, you have the same result: lack of real connection, happiness, and love.

Here’s the deal: To get to the other side of the street as an adult, you want to see yourself as the place where all your answers reside. All of them are inside of you. Trust that you will learn how to stop seeking problems outside of yourself, along with all the other behaviors you’ve used to avoid your own answers. Let’s start here, today, with “you are screwed up (and it’s okay).” You are your own answer now!

CHOOSING TO SUFFER IN THE DRAMA TRIANGLE: FROM VICTIM TO RESCUER TO MARTYR TO VILLAIN

Now, let’s pull back the veil to see what else is going on. The drama triangle, also known as the Karpman Drama Triangle, explains a lot. In fact, you will see the drama triangle not only in your own life, but everywhere! It’s in movies, songs, TV shows, your friends’ relationships, and so on. It is a socially acceptable way to be dysfunctional.

What is it?

Originally introduced in 1968 in “Fairy Tales and Script Drama Analysis,” by Stephen B. Karpman, MD, the Karpman Drama Triangle is an upside-down triangle with three positions on it. In the upper-left corner is the persecutor, in the upper-right corner is the rescuer, and in the bottom is the victim. Several variations have emerged; my own variation is that the rescuer is also the martyr, because each is the flipside of the other.

What do the points on the triangle mean in relation to this work?

The triangle represents the dynamics we have unconsciously chosen to participate in, in relation to others. It shows how the balance of power shifts between people in conflict and points out how individuals show up to interact in daily life. All three points on the triangle illustrate a lack of personal responsibility when in a struggle with other people.

Unfortunately, these points on the triangle are not only dysfunctional, they are emotionally draining and potentially harmful to those involved. Those who find themselves cruising on the triangle will shift positions, depending on the situation, without even realizing it. The victim feels they need a persecutor and someone to rescue them. Needing someone and being disrespected by them at the same time causes some victims to become the persecutor, but then, feeling bad, they want to rescue the person they just persecuted.

Going from each of the positions—from persecutor to rescuer to victim, in any order—makes it difficult to know what you are doing. You don’t know why you’re doing it, either, because you learned the moti...