Trusting Yourself, Doubting Your Patterns
When addressing insecure attachment—or really when taking on any therapeutic work or behavioral change—a paradox tends to arise. The imperative to trust and validate yourself, your intuition, your gut, and your feelings comes up against the imperative to doubt your perceptions basically as a rule. Because you're trying to change how you look at things and behave as a result, everything about how you've felt and acted before needs to be called into question. But one of the things you need to change is your tendency to distrust yourself!
How do you build self-trust while essentially needing to doubt yourself?
To do this, we have to disentangle many concepts that tend to be tangled up for most people—definitely most insecurely attached people... and pretty much all triggered insecurely attached people.
How to Be on Your Own Side
“You have got to be on your own side. Not against others, but for yourself.”
- Rick Hanson
Standing by ourselves and our relationships at the same time is essentially the skill that builds secure attachment.
Insecure attachers of all types tend to stand by one or the other at a time—most often prioritizing self-protection over connection (whether we feel most protected by getting someone closer to us or further from us.) And yet, the strategies with which we attempt to protect ourselves typically exacerbate the very pain we're trying to escape and damage our relationships.
Standing by yourself isn't mutually exclusive to standing by your relationship because you and your partner are not adversaries. You can express your desire to feel better in the relationship because you care about things going well, and you know that both people need to matter equally for that to happen.
How do we learn to stand by ourselves in a way that adequately honors us without negating them in a zero-sum game?
Reconciliation: Should We? Why? How?
Reconciliation gets a bad rap. It sometimes doesn't go well, but it's unfair to say it's a bad idea wholesale. Most people would–at least in theory—like to move on, move forward, adopt a "never look back" attitude, and maybe even a "people never really change" mentality to help them get through the pain of breakups.
But people do change.
When people on the internet discuss reconciliation, they say that everything will be how it was if we try again, that people don't change, and that it's a kind of weakness to go "crawling back" to our exes.
But then, once we're in a long-term relationship and the type of content we follow shifts, we suddenly encounter the opposite message, th loving someone means being present to their constant changes.
Is Understanding Overrated?
It’s extremely human and reasonable to seek to understand and to wish to be understood by those we’re in close relationships with, and no one should attempt to suppress this desire. Feeling understood and understanding our partner as much as possible is a beautiful thing.
But, in some ways, might understanding be overrated? It’s a provocative yet important question.
Let’s first look at how it’s likely not overrated. Some degree of understanding is necessary. Two people who are perpetually baffled by one another couldn’t really work. It would be unbearable to be completely unable to comprehend one another’s feelings, behaviors, or perspectives. But I would wager such a degree of total non-comprehension between two people who were attracted to each other enough to get together at all is rare.
Amid insecure attachers, however, there is often an overly strong emphasis on understanding alongside a lack of other important things that create a sense of connection. There are aspects of what gets referred to as “understanding” that become conflated with other things, held too rigidly, or even used as collateral.
This article aims to point out common oversights and encourage a more expansive view of what it really takes to feel understood by another—and how to offer those things in return.
The Benefits of an Anxious-Avoidant Dynamic
There is a way in which the people in an anxious-avoidant dynamic rely on the dynamic continuing. Each receives a benefit from it and therefore actively invests in its perpetuation.
We may take this idea as an affront. How could that be? We’re so uncomfortable, so drained, so miserable. We’re angry. We feel let down. We’re always trying to make changes or else make a decision to give up. With all this discomfort and effort, how could we actually want things to stay as they are?
The truth is, most insecure attachers aren’t doing the very simple behaviors that would end the dynamic and solve the problem.
Let’s look first at how anxious partners reinforce and benefit from the dynamic, then how avoidant partners do the same.
Solving the Anxious-Avoidant Problem
Those stuck in anxious-avoidant dynamics are on some level subconsciously invested in them. When neither partner is focused on how they themselves contribute to it, or aren’t clear on how they actually contribute, they work as a team to make sure problems never get solved.
How can we pull our investment and begin to solve the problem?
Sometimes we can get caught thinking that if the dynamic were gone, everything would be easy. Not so. The dynamic blocks the Real Work of being in a relationship from even beginning. Stopping it in its tracks and getting on with this real work of loving long-term is imperative. Ending the dynamic can be swift, but the real work is a lifetime’s work. Never fear, however, as it’s also way more fulfilling than slogging through the tiresome push-pull.
If you are currently deep in an anxious-avoidant dance, this post is for you.