Insecure in Love: How Anxious Attachment Can Make You Feel Jealous, Needy, and Worried and What You Can Do About It by Leslie Becker-Phelps Read Free Book Online Page A

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    Depending on your attachment style, you will feel primal panic more or less often; and you will be more or less effective in managing it. The same is true of your partner, if you have one. The result of these different experiences has a huge impact on your relationship. In the next three sections I discuss how the anxious, avoidant, and secure attachment styles affect people’s emotional experiences and how they manage those experiences.
    Anxious and Overwhelmed
    When a child experiences primal panic, it raises her levels of the stress hormones adrenaline and cortisol. At the same time, it also lowers her “cuddle hormone” oxytocin, which provides a sense of trust, safety, and connection. Feeling overwhelmed, she reacts by protesting—crying, or being demanding. In essence, she is screaming for help. If her caregiver is inconsistent in soothing her, she remains primed to protest—to keep screaming for help until she gets it. This tendency characterizes those who are anxiously attached.
    In its extreme form, these children mature into adults who are prone to panic at any hint of distance from their partner, and possibly even others, such as family and friends. They become desperate to feel close to the other party again and try to regain their partner’s attention by intensifying their distress (a hyperactivating strategy). But even with a supportive partner, their fear of rejection can interfere with their feeling comforted.
    If you can even somewhat relate to this, you might also sometimes find it hard to disentangle your emotions. Instead, you perceive them as a single distressing experience that you cannot begin to communicate or address. In an effort to cope with this, you might fall back on maladaptive behaviors, such as overeating, smoking, drinking, or even drug use.
    When attachment-related anxiety is a problem, people experience a number of other problems in their relationships that you might relate to. For instance, your fear of rejection might prevent you from directly addressing any conflicts or differences of opinion with your partner. It might also be so consuming that you are unable to imagine the world (or your relationship) through your partner’s eyes. As a result, you might have trouble feeling empathic and supportive of your partner (or others). In addition, you might have trouble truly relaxing enough to fully enjoy other aspects of your relationship, such as your sexual desires—and just having fun.
    When relationships don’t work out, people with attachment-related anxiety can experience a need for an attachment figure that’s so intense that it practically seeps out of their pores. They may protest angrily, blame themselves, feel a greater attraction to their former partner, and even become preoccupied with that partner, despite knowing that a relationship with that person is destructive for them. In addition, they can struggle with feeling that they’ve lost a part of themselves.
    Fortunately, if you are sometimes overwhelmed with attachment-related anxiety, you can change this. In chapter 5 I discuss how to develop a more secure style. Also, you can soothe your distress by choosing a more secure partner; someone who can comfort you. Research suggests that a supportive spouse can help an anxiously attached person feel less anxious and depressed, and feel greater satisfaction in her relationship.
    Exercise: Can You Relate to
“Anxious and Overwhelmed”
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    Think about how much and in what ways you relate to the use of the hyperactivating strategies described in this section. Be aware that fully exploring this could take you months (or even years). But, for now, I’m just suggesting that you explore the following questions as much—or as little—as you’d like in order to gain some understanding of how your attachment style affects your emotions. If you do not have a partner now, think about it in relation to a previous partner. You might also find it helpful to identify and