Free 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 Page A

thoughts, and actions of each partner can help to provide important insights. Consider the following example:
    Jill
feels
hurt that Paul doesn’t spend time with her on the weekends and instead hangs out with his friends. She
thinks
he doesn’t care. She expresses this by crying and telling him he’s selfish. Paul
feels
attacked,
thinks
she is overreacting, and
reacts
by withdrawing. Jill
feels
hurt, and the cycle repeats.
    With this in mind, think of a conflict that tends to repeat in your relationship. Now consider the following questions related to it. (Although these questions assume that you are the one initially upset, you can modify them to accommodate your partner initiating the conflict.)
    As the conflict is going on…
    FEELING: How are you feeling about what’s happening?
    THOUGHT: What are you thinking about your partner?
    ACTION: How do you express the problem?
    FEELING: What do you imagine your partner is feeling on the receiving end?
    THOUGHT: What do you imagine your partner is thinking about you?
    ACTION: How does your partner respond?
    Note how the interaction continues and how it finally ends (for instance, there is an explosion; or both of you withdraw). For the questions about your partner’s experience, it can be helpful to ask your partner what he was feeling and thinking—but only if you can talk about this productively with him. Otherwise, try empathizing with him to imagine his responses; or ask someone you trust for help.
    Review Your Patterns
How do you and your partner affect each other’s feelings and actions?
What patterns do you notice?
How does this interaction reinforce your beliefs about how worthy of love you are?
How does this interaction reinforce your beliefs about how emotionally available your partner is?
    At an appropriate, calm time, you might want to talk with your partner about this exercise, sharing the insights it’s given you. You might also ask your partner about how the interactions affect his sense of being worthy of love and his sense of how emotionally available you are.
    There is a lot here to make sense of within yourself, as well as to try to work through with your partner. So this is an area that you might find helpful to spend some time reviewing. You might also find it helpful to think this through a bit now, then return to it again at a later time.
     

Summary: Gaining Perspective
    In this chapter, I have shown how your attachment style, self-verification, and the confirmation bias combine to keep you repeating old patterns. They distort your perceptions and support frequently counterproductive ways of viewing yourself and your partners (past, present, and future). That’s a lot to try to understand and really absorb. To fully get it, you need to spend some time turning it over in your mind. And you absolutely need to apply it to how you’ve lived your life, and continue to do so.
    In the next chapter, I lay out more of the nitty-gritty about how it’s possible to know all of this information in an abstract and still be blind to your problematic ways of interacting in the world. This understanding can help open your eyes to ways you can break the pattern and establish happier, healthier relationships.

Chapter 4

Overcoming Obstacles
    Even when people are aware of their relationship patterns and are motivated to change, they often unconsciously undermine their attempts at self-improvement. For instance, Vito loved Miranda and knew that his intense (and unjustified) jealousy upset her. He worried that he would drive her away, so he committed himself to placing trust in her, especially after she yelled at him for snooping on her cell phone. One week later, though, he impulsively picked up Miranda’s phone to see if she had been texting other men. With her just in the next room, this behavior appeared blatantly self-destructive, but that was certainly not the intent. This happened only one day after he saw a former girlfriend happily holding the hand of a