Insecure in Love: How Anxious Attachment Can Make You Feel Jealous, Needy, and Worried and What You Can Do About It (7 page)

People’s attachment styles and attachment-related behaviors are so much a part of who they are—and can be so strongly motivated by primal panic—that it is extremely difficult for them to recognize all the ways in which they self-verify, even when they know to look for this bias. Sometimes their bias can be so all-encompassing that it prevents awareness of problems even when they become glaring.

For instance, some anxiously attached people turn to alcohol as a way to soothe their distress after feeling rejected. Even when this unhealthy coping crosses the line into alcoholism, they often don’t realize or acknowledge the full extent of their problem because that would only upset them more. Sometimes they remain in denial even after repeatedly being caught driving drunk. Similarly, many anxiously attached women blame themselves when they are verbally abused and beaten by a partner—something that happens all too often—and so they choose to stay in that relationship. For those on the outside looking in, it can be incomprehensible how those suffering can’t clearly see the problems and solutions (for instance,
Just stop drinking
, or
Leave the bastard
).

Even more maddening to onlookers is the on-again-off-again acknowledgment of problems. For instance, consider Linda. She thought she had “everything”—loving husband, wonderful kids, no financial worries—but she was depressed. She was also angry with herself because she didn’t think she had any right to be unhappy. Yet even in our first session it was clear that she felt her husband didn’t respect her, and that she’d devoted her life to him (and others) so much that she didn’t do anything for herself—and so she felt deprived. When I repeated her words to that effect, she responded as if she was hearing it for the first time. “I just said that, didn’t I? Wow.” But only a few minutes later, she was again lamenting that she didn’t know why she was so unhappy.

She clearly did know on some level that these struggles existed, or she couldn’t have told me about them. But she also couldn’t let them reside fully and comfortably in her consciousness. So, in a sense, she knew them but didn’t know them. You experience this when you sense that something conflicts with your attachment style or challenges established patterns of your identity, yet don’t fully acknowledge it. It’s a protective way of distancing you from a psychological threat or emotional pain (a dynamic often referred to by therapists as “dissociation”). You can also get a sense of “knowing-but-not-knowing” in this way: Consider someone who received attention as an infant only when she became highly emotional. Based on this early experience, she might continue a pattern of being overly emotional with others well into adulthood. Although she’s aware of being an emotional person, she does not consciously know that’s her way of getting close to others—which contrasts with Linda’s partial awareness of why she was unhappy. I call both of these knowing-but-not-knowing experiences the
invisible known
.

(I have adapted this term from British psychoanalyst Christopher Bollas [1987], who introduced the term
unthought known
to specifically describe those experiences that people can’t remember because they originate prior to about age three.)

When you struggle with understanding why it’s so hard to change the ways you act in relationships, consider thinking about your past as a way to tap into the invisible known. Because patterns are established based on previous experiences (with childhood often having a strong influence), people sometimes respond to present situations in a way that only makes sense when one considers their past. In the case of Linda, she spent her childhood trying unsuccessfully to please her mother, who treated her harshly. With this information, it was not hard to understand how she developed a style of being extra nice to people and working hard to avoid their wrath. While her “niceness” helped her to make many friends, it also frequently left her feeling unimportant. Not surprisingly, she struggled with the invisible known and was unable to talk honestly to her husband about many concerns between them—concerns that piled up over the years. Eventually she became distressed enough to seek therapy.

Unfortunately, when you have unhealthy ways of coping or relating to others, your attempts to fix problems and cope often become a vicious cycle. They make things worse—and perpetuate the closed-loop patterns discussed in the last chapter. Linda’s situation is a good example of this. She responded to her fear of rejection by being extra nice, but this led to her feeling unimportant and rejected, which she responded to by trying even harder to be nice. Similarly, the problem drinker uses alcohol to calm his distress, which leads to more problems and more distress. He responds by again trying to numb himself with alcohol, thus starting the pattern over again—even as his marriage falls apart and his ability to function at work deteriorates. And as any excessively perfectionistic person will tell you, the harder he tries to get everything right, the more problems he sees with his performance.

You might wonder, “Okay, I get the whole
invisible known
idea, but why can’t people just change once these experiences are pointed out?”

This seems logical—like being able to open a safe once you’re given the combination. But it’s not that easy. The very complexity that enables you to develop your identity, so that you can function relatively easily in your life, also frequently makes such simple solutions ineffective. People often have conflicting thoughts or beliefs, or get feedback that clashes with their beliefs; and such conflicts cause inner tension that psychologists call
cognitive dissonance
. It’s an extremely uncomfortable experience that people unconsciously go to great lengths to avoid. In their book
Mistakes Were Made
, psychologists Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson explain, “In a sense, dissonance theory is a theory of blind spots—of how and why people unintentionally blind themselves so that they fail to notice vital events and information that might throw them into dissonance, making them question their behavior or their convictions” (2007, 42).

To understand how this affects your attachment style and relationships, remember that you establish your attachment style to feel safe and secure in the world. This way of being begins to form in childhood and is strengthened through daily experiences over a lifetime of self-verification and confirmation bias—your attempt to
prove
that you are who you think you are (for instance, unworthy of love) and that others are who you think they are (for instance, available attachment figures).

To clarify, consider an anxiously attached woman with low self-esteem. She might momentarily feel good about her boyfriend complimenting her, but this will create cognitive dissonance. So she will quickly revert to viewing herself negatively, complete with an assortment of reasons to rationalize why she’s “undeserving”—all of which resolves her dissonance by self-verifying (and reinforcing) her negative self-image. This is how cognitive dissonance and self-verification work together to block change.

To complicate matters, how people feel about past events can keep them from letting go of those events and cause them to act in unhealthy ways or to struggle with certain situations. For instance, the fact that a woman intellectually knows that she was sexually abused as a child does not magically relieve her of the emotional pain from those experiences, any more than knowing that someone hit you over the head with a brick can heal your fractured skull. So she might try to avoid thinking about those experiences even as she continues to feel uncomfortable with physical intimacy. In situations like this, when people are compelled to avoid emotional pain or the reasons for it, they are left to exist with the invisible known—which has its own nagging pain—and to blindly repeat problematic behaviors or experiences.

While it might seem to make sense to advise yourself to “just let it go; it’s in the past,” this advice is useless—or worse. No one
wants
to feel upset; believing that you are purposely torturing yourself only adds to your pain.

Even people who are characteristically avoidant and relatively good at denying emotional pain still have to contend with the invisible known when it becomes so painful or destructive that they are forced to face it. For instance, Laura was a stay-at-home mother who used self-discipline to maintain structure for herself and to help her to impose structure on her family. However, as her children grew older, they began to challenge her control and she began to lose her temper. Their emerging independence unleashed her emotions (which she had always done her best to suppress) and her self-doubts (which she had rarely even acknowledged to herself). Her distress made it impossible for her to remain comfortably self-reliant and revealed just how alone she had felt in her marriage. Somewhere deep inside, she had always known that she felt distant from her husband—and that she, in part, created this divide.

The now-you-see-it-now-you-don’t quality of the invisible known makes confronting it difficult. To fully acknowledge and question it, people must persistently challenge the rules that they
implicitly
live by, such as expecting that others won’t truly love them and be there for them. For instance, Laura was able—over the course of therapy—to acknowledge that she never fully trusted her husband to be supportive, so she had usually dismissed his caring gestures and thought more about how he let her down. As she risked being vulnerable by sharing this with her husband, she found that he was understanding and also wanted a closer relationship. By opening up to experiencing yourself and others differently, you can begin to loosen your firm grip on the past and heal from old hurts. This can help you change how you relate to yourself and others in the present.

Exercise: Revealing Your Invisible Known

In the last chapter, you completed the “Observe How You Self-Verify” exercise, which helped you to identify ways in which you self-verify. Review your answers or complete the exercise again.

Now, for this chapter’s exercise, we’ll take it a step further.

Make note of a theme or two that you chose to focus on.
Read the themes that you identified when completing that exercise in the last chapter. Then reconnect with your observations of how you self-verified to play them out.

Ask yourself:

• How did you feel as you challenged your selective attention, selective memory, and selective interpretation (for instance, tension, discomfort)?
  
• How did your bias affect your beliefs about yourself?
  

Revealing your invisible known.
You might find that you can see your bias, but then lose your awareness of it as you get sucked into the bias itself. For example, you might see that you tend to dismiss your partner’s true caring as his just meeting an obligation. But rather than allow yourself to recognize that your bias keeps you from being open to the possibility of his love, you might get caught up in proving to yourself that he doesn’t really love you and that he might leave at any time. Seeing your bias and then having it disappear is evidence of the invisible known. It’s just like a magic trick—now you see it, now you don’t!

Practice this exercise again and again with different examples of the same themes. Repeating it will help you become increasingly aware of how your invisible known directs your feelings and behaviors. It will also help you to see your part in your relationship problems.

It can be very helpful and enlightening to share your observations, thoughts, and feelings with someone supportive in your life—maybe even your partner. Journaling about them can also help.

When people with an anxious attachment style overperform in an effort to prove their value, they are often simultaneously trying to hide their fear of rejection, their sense of feeling flawed, and other struggles related to themselves and others. Each time these problems recur, they are unconsciously shoved into the proverbial closet, away from awareness (as mentioned earlier, many therapists refer to this as
dissociation
). Eventually the “junk” (and problems related to it) pushes to come out—much like the popular cartoon of a bulging door of an overstuffed closet. People react to their growing distress in many ways, such as experiencing depression, anxiety, insomnia, general fatigue, or chronic back pain. They might also overeat, abuse alcohol, or shop to excess.

Even when you can recognize intellectually that a particular bias causes you distress, you may not pay much actual attention to it. Instead, you experience a sense of knowing that it is “just the way things are.” You might “know” that you are unlovable, and you might also “know” that others won’t reliably be there for you. As Robert Burton (2008) effectively argued in his book
On Being Certain: Believing You Are Right Even When You’re Not
, people’s sense of knowing is beyond their control and cannot be easily argued away. It’s a powerful pull for them to remain as they’ve always been, even when they are engaging in self-defeating behaviors.

For instance, highly anxiously attached people with low self-esteem can listen to advice on how to build themselves up; they can think positive thoughts; they can invest themselves in a multitude of ways to feel good—but often all to no avail. On a deep level, they “know” that they are unacceptable in some essential way. Remember, they developed their identity over time, and it provides them with a sense of safety. But eventually many of them feel so much distress that they are forced to consider that something must change—even if they don’t know what it is.

Even avoidant people, who tend to maintain an in-control manner, are sometimes pushed out of their comfort zone by severe and chronic stressors. The feelings of being alone and vulnerable that they have defended against their whole lives fail them, and so they are forced to attend to emotional pain. At these times, they are sometimes willing—if not exactly eager—to try something different.

So whatever your attachment style, you are likely to challenge the status quo only after feeling significant distress or emotional pain. By taking the risk of really seeing and challenging current biases of yourself and others, you become free to consider new perspectives—a difficult feat given that the purpose of your attachment style is to keep you feeling safe and sound in the world. One of my patients shared an insightful quote to explain why she finally came to therapy after years of struggling with this conflict: “And the day came when the risk to remain tight in the bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.” (The source of this quotation is unknown, though it has sometimes been attributed to Anaïs Nin.)