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 B

man at the mall. Though misguided and risky, his quick peek at Miranda’s phone was actually his attempt to
help
himself regain his sense of security.
    As I’ve noted, people need a sense of security to function in daily life. The drive to find it is especially heightened when you are scared of losing your partner. This can trigger you to reexperience the same primal panic you might have felt as an infant, when every danger threatened your survival and you desperately searched for your parents to comfort and protect you. In other words, when you sense that your partner might not be there for you, you can feel—at a core level—
scared to death
. Or when you try to change in ways that conflict with your attachment style, which is designed to keep you safe, you are likely to instinctively return to your familiar attachment behaviors—even if those behaviors (like Vito’s) are counterproductive and fly in the face of your conscious commitment to “do better.” This way of understanding behavior is not always intuitive and can be confusing. So let’s take a closer look.

Self-Deception
    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