Insecure in Love: How Anxious Attachment Can Make You Feel Jealous, Needy, and Worried and What You Can Do About It (5 page)

To nurture a healthier way of connecting in romantic relationships, consider how your current or future relationship might be better if you had a more secure style of attachment. As you think about this, however, it’s important for you to know that you do not need to be the model of secure attachment to find happiness. But whatever style works for you, it will probably need to be closer to a secure one on the attachment-related anxiety and attachment-related avoidance dimensions. Fortunately, as I’ve mentioned, you can develop this more secure style as an adult. This process is what psychologists call “earned security.”

There are two basic pathways, and they intertwine. First, you must look to the outside world. You need to begin by developing a relationship with at least one emotionally available attachment figure. If not a partner, then you can start with someone else, such as a family member, friend, clergyperson, or therapist. It could even be God. Remember, attachment figures are those you feel you can turn to in times of distress and who are supportive of your attempts to expand your personal horizons. The more you experience feeling accepted and protected, the more you will believe that you are worthy of love and that capable others can be available to truly love and comfort you—giving you some “earned security.”

The second approach to developing “earned security” is to directly nurture a part of yourself that makes you more aware of your experiences
and
to respond to those experiences in a more accepting and compassionate way. I will explain in chapter 5 how together, as compassionate self-awareness, these two processes can help you open up to reassurance and acceptance by others, to feel their support even when you are alone (as mental representations of attachment figures), and to essentially be an available attachment figure to yourself.

The path to healthier relationships includes a more positive relationship both with yourself and with others. Teaching you how to achieve this is what the rest of this book is about. To start, I’ll help you to see more clearly how you perpetuate your current attachment style in everyday life—and what’s prevented you from choosing a healthier path.

PART TWO

Discover Your Potential: Being Worthy of Love

Chapter 3

Each morning, you look in the mirror with the sense that you know exactly who’s staring back at you. Rather than having to continually rediscover yourself—the high value you place on books and learning, or your preference for vanilla ice cream—you just
know
who you are. This is your identity, and you rely on it to support you each day just as you rely on the ground beneath your feet.

When you’re not confident about important parts of your identity—as is often the case with anxiously attached people—it leads to self-doubt. In addition, the more strongly you identify with some aspect of your personality, the more motivated you are to interpret your actions from that perspective and then continue to behave accordingly. As a result, your self-doubt or sense of inadequacy can drive you to be indecisive and self-deprecating. Although your self-perceptions and actions leave you feeling negatively toward yourself, you continue the cycle because at least it allows you to feel safe in being able to understand yourself and what you think you need from others.

It is equally important that you have a sense of predictability about the identities of other people. Imagine what it would be like to have no idea of whether each person you meet is the equivalent of Mother Teresa or Jack the Ripper. And so people tend to hold beliefs about others, rightly or wrongly, based on certain characteristics—man or woman, Caucasian or Hispanic, white-collar or blue-collar worker. On an even more basic level, we all have beliefs about human nature. For example, some believe that humans tend to be altruistic, while others believe that most people they meet are self-centered. Such beliefs guide the way we approach all relationships—from casual to intimate ones. For instance, you would probably invite a new friend to your home sooner if you are someone who believes that people are basically good rather than someone who tends to doubt people’s integrity or trustworthiness.

The need to view yourself and others in a particular way is especially important in relation to your attachment style because this is a fundamental way in which you interact with the world. Your brain “helps” you by providing a picture, based on your particular style, of what you expect to see in your partner and yourself. And it only takes a small amount of evidence to convince yourself that your attachment-related preconceptions are accurate, whether or not they are truly accurate or adaptive.

For example, consider Jenny, who has a preoccupied style of attachment. She feels inadequate, so she
expects
that her boyfriends will grow tired of her and then cheat. Even with her current boyfriend, Brian, who frequently expresses his love and often tries to reassure her of his commitment, she cannot give up her powerful need to protect herself from any possible abandonment. So when he showed up late for a date, she immediately interpreted this as a sign that he was probably hiding something—most likely a relationship with another woman. To her, this was also evidence that she was flawed and unlovable.

Psychologists use the term
confirmation bias
to describe the tendency of people to find ways to confirm their own beliefs. When people use this bias to confirm what they already believe about themselves (good or bad), psychologists call it
self-verification verification
(Swann, Stein-Seroussi, and Giesler, 1992). These processes operate mostly outside of awareness, so people can’t see how their beliefs cause them distress. It’s these unseen biased perceptions that cause people to repeat old patterns even when those patterns continually lead to pain and failure.

However, people sometimes become so unhappy with their lives or relationships that they begin to question their biases—opening up the possibility for change. For instance, Jenny had cried over many unsuccessful relationships, never understanding what went wrong. But she sensed that Brian really was a “keeper,” so she did some honest soul-searching. She admitted to herself that her fears of Brian leaving her did not make sense given his consistent caring and faithfulness, and she began to question and challenge those fears. Though it didn’t come naturally and took some conscious effort on her part, this led to Jenny being more and more open to trusting Brian and eventually to feeling she was lovable—after all, if
someone
could love her, then she must be worthy of love. For people who experience attachment-related anxiety, opening up to the possibility that they are worthy of love is especially important.

Challenging your tendency to self-verify and view your life with a confirmation bias is difficult, to say the least. However, you can start the process by learning what to look for in yourself.

It’s natural to think that you can change your style of interacting by just being on the lookout for when you self-verify or operate from a confirmation bias—for instance, by noting when you are unnecessarily self-critical or recognizing when you unrealistically fear rejection. While there is some truth to this, it’s important to understand that such observations can be unsettling, or worse. You’re likely to feel anxious, resist thinking about your observations, or just have a sense of something not being right. You are also likely to question these new, more positive observations rather than question your established biases. The reason is that they offer a perspective that challenges the very foundation of how you make sense of yourself and your relationship. As a result, they also upset your sense of comfort and safety in the world.

However, the more you can recognize your biases, the more you’ll begin to be more open to—and even search out—a more objective perspective. Slowly you will begin to see yourself and your partner differently.

As mentioned earlier, people are especially motivated to verify their self-perceptions of being worthy or unworthy of love. They self-verify by selectively paying attention to, selectively remembering, and selectively interpreting information (Swann, Rentfrow, and Guinn, 2003). Note how these three principles overlap, and all lead to the same result:

Selective attention:
People pay more attention to, and spend more time considering, feedback that confirms their sense of their own lovability or unlovability than feedback that disconfirms it.

Selective memory:
People tend to remember feedback that confirms their sense of being worthy or unworthy of love. Sometimes they don’t even process information that conflicts with their preconception, let alone remember it over time.

Selective interpretation:
People tend to unquestioningly believe feedback that confirms their sense of being lovable or unlovable. They think any feedback that conflicts with their preconception is due to a mistake or deception. They also interpret absent or ambiguous evidence as support for their self-perceptions.

As a person who struggles with attachment-related anxiety, you might notice that you selectively confirm that you are not worthy of love in the following way: You attend particularly closely to any evidence that you are needy, weak, or flawed in some way; and you downplay or fail to notice your strengths or positive attributes. Then you remember things your partner has said or done that seem to confirm that you are inadequate or flawed in some essential way, or that he is likely to reject or leave you. Meanwhile, you fail to remember the times that your partner told you how wonderful you are or stood by you through a tough time. If you aren’t in a relationship, you are likely to remember all the times you’ve been rejected, but fail to think about your lack of interest in others who have been interested in you, or about the relationships you have enjoyed even though they ultimately didn’t work out.

It can be difficult to gain enough perspective to see these biases and their effects on your daily interactions. So if you need to, spend some time reviewing and applying this section, along with the following exercise, to your life.

Exercise: Observe How You Self-Verify

Review the assessment of your level of attachment-related anxiety in the section “The Basics of How You Connect” in chapter 1. This will show your sense of your worthiness of love.

Answer the following questions to help you better understand how you
maintain
your self-perception of being unworthy of love (to the extent that you do feel this way). It’s an important step toward breaking the cycle. Complete it in relation to your partner, as well as to other close people in your life. Repeat the exercise daily until you have a natural awareness of these issues as you go through your days. Because the drive to self-verify can make this difficult to do, write out your answers as a way to stay focused and guide yourself. Hold on to them to help complete an exercise in the next chapter. You might also find it helpful to talk about this with a supportive partner or another person you trust.

Challenging Selective Attention

What occurred during the day that showed you that you are worthy of love, or that at least brings into question your self-perception of being unlovable? Pick one or two situations (for instance, your partner wanted to watch TV together, or a friend phoned you).

How did you feel in these situations? (For instance, happy, uncomfortable, confused, nothing.)

How did you think about these situations? For instance, did you dismiss or minimize this feedback? Did you doubt the honesty or competence of the person giving it? (For example, did you assume your partner wanted to watch TV with you only out of habit?)

Can you see how you are—or might be—self-verifying with selective attention?

Challenging Selective Memory

What good or positive things did you do today? (Everything counts; nothing is too insignificant.)

In what ways have family, friends, or even acquaintances shown that they appreciate you?

In what ways did your partner show that he or she cares about you?

Challenging Selective Interpretation

If you think someone has shown you in some way that you are unlovable, could you be misinterpreting the other person’s motivation or intentions? (For example, did you misperceive his tiredness as your being uninteresting or unlovable?)

Could you be making the feedback worse than was intended? (For instance, thinking you’re flawed and unlovable when your partner was just trying to talk about something that upset him.)

Are you downplaying your strengths and focusing on ways that you don’t live up to your own unrealistic expectations or to the achievements of your partner and others?

Consider your responses in each of the sections above on challenging selective attention, memory, and interpretation. Note how you self-verify in each of these ways. What themes do you see? For instance, you might become easily jealous; or constantly be preparing to be rejected; or frequently point out to yourself that you are inadequate, flawed, or not as good as your partner. You might also struggle with thinking your partner will stop loving you once he sees the “real” you. Or you might feel upset by your partner seeming to not really care about you. Write down in detail the theme(s) that you play out, and hold on to this to use in the exercise “Revealing Your Invisible Known” in the next chapter.

Just as people unconsciously use confirmation bias to self-verify how worthy or unworthy they feel, they also use it to maintain their sense of how emotionally available or unavailable their partners (as well as others) are.

Clearly, people who are preconditioned to think that others won’t be there for them will tend to see their partners as emotionally unavailable. So they see themselves as essentially alone, and they protect themselves by being self-reliant. What’s less obvious—and seemingly paradoxical—is that you can similarly experience yourself as alone when you believe that others
are
generally emotionally available. This is likely to happen when you have doubts about whether you are worthy of love, leaving you to think that those available others ultimately will reject
you
. So although you might think positively of your partner at the beginning of your relationship, these perceptions will probably turn negative over time, as you find ways to confirm that he really isn’t there for you after all.

Because of your preconceptions about your partner’s unavailability to you, you are likely to think that a problematic behavior on your partner’s part is due to a personality trait that won’t change, rather than the influence of a situation or context. For instance, if your partner doesn’t call from his job one day, you might jump to the conclusion that it’s due to a lack of caring, or even to a more malicious intent of playing with your emotions—as opposed to the possibility that he was particularly busy at work. The more anxiously attached you are, the more likely this will happen when you are in a bad mood. This will happen less when you are feeling good or are basically happy in your relationship. By contrast, if you have a highly avoidant partner, he will think this way even when he is feeling emotionally stable and your relationship is going well.

The bias toward seeing others as emotionally unavailable creates “blind spots.” You simply don’t “see” how you maintain your belief that your partner is unavailable. Just as with self-verification, your bias does this through selective attention, selective memory, and selective interpretation—but this time, it’s more about the other person.