Need to know how someone else feels before you know how you feel?

Are you anxiously attached? Checking what’s going on with someone else just to determine how you feel?

So according to the environment you were born into and grew up in, your nervous system and how it responds to certain stimuli and your style of attachment are kind of binary. Any signs of early inconsistencies in the anxiously attached person, the AA's relationships prove to be provocative. Most especially, their romantic ones usually kick off hypervigilance. 

Romantic relationship beginnings are especially hard for this attachment type, as until they are as sure as they can be that the other person is committed, they will worry about how long replies take, or how much reassurance that has already been established is in the message content (i.e. number or kisses or emojis). They can misread the difference of rhythm like a hawk! They will want to fast-forward things if they like you, to the cosy bit, where togetherness has been established, and closeness is their oxygen.

If this is questionable or uncertain, this sparks off overthinking, intense focus and endless examination of minutiae, and so looking after, pleasing and fixing becomes an imagined way of preventing the abandonment they fear so intensely. In other words, the other person’s response is controlled or at the very least hoped to be.

It is a maladaptive survival behaviour. Nevertheless, it can be felt very intensely mostly because our first and strongest instinct is to survive, and that is what relationship survival looks and feels like to them.

It's pretty hard to feel safe and secure however while this is going on because it is so dependent on another person. Not to mention the fact that the other person will have their own issues, which the anxious person cannot be in control of, or predict.

Helpless, and anxious, with no security coming from within, the anxiously attached person will be likely coping with high levels of cortisol and rarely feeling centred, inwardly focused and relaxed. They might also have a feeling of a constant knot inside their stomach and likely also having stomach problems.

There will be so much outward focusing that their own needs will be unknown to them and all a bit of a mystery, whilst go-to behaviours will be about fixing and pleasing others to maintain and or ensure closeness. They are the pleasers.

How we can heal

So how do we begin to heal from being anxious about your attachments? Because being in this space is pretty uncomfortable.

Here’s how and what helps:

Being able to identify your own feelings and your own emotions

This has to be learnt – it doesn't come naturally to an anxiously attached person. 

Navigation of your own inner world is the right place to start. This is truly best done with a therapist who has a deep understanding of how you “got there”, and who can begin to give you the vocabulary and the tools to be able to experience who you are not in relation to others, but to yourself.

This sounds like it might be easy, but in my experience of helping others on this journey back to themselves and also to my own, it does not come “naturally” as l said at first. It involves unpacking enmeshed early relationships and creating a new sense of self, where previously the self only existed “through” others, or in spite of them.

Feeling separate from other’s moods as well as other’s feelings

Holding on when those you are in a close relationship with don’t get back to you straight away. Are you doing this by changing the worst scenario narrative of imagined rejection and abandonment, or over-reading and overthinking others' feelings and intentions? Where there is no felt sense of your own value at all, it is a lonely place.

Here the ”saviour complex” runs riot in your head and in turn your emotional response. As if you have to save to be saved.

Really look at your repeated patterns

You may find yourself in the same scenario again and again with someone who might look different and be a different person but, somehow, familiar feelings begin to surface – reminding you that you have been “here before”.

Your brain whirling around imagining, assessing everything that feels like a “threat”, a different tone of voice, fewer kisses or emojis in a text message... the possibilities or choices to which you might associate a feeling of threat to become a muddle you can’t unravel in your head, alongside a feeling of fear deep in your gut that you cannot calm or soothe. So you are “reading” all the time. 

This is exhausting.

Checking in with yourself

This is a really helpful thing to learn how to do when you are overthinking.

• Learning to pause.
• Learning to respond and not react.
• Learning how to question the narrative you have in your head.
• Learning how to change the “story.”

Breathing

Breathe in for four, hold for two and breathe out for five. This instantly separates you from your sympathetic brain and puts you into your parasympathetic brain where your reasoning capabilities live. It sounds kind of woo woo but it really does work!

Trauma response

When we are coming from a place of fear, we are always in a “trauma” response. Learning about this, what it means and also what it does to your mind and body can help.

What is a trauma response? Well, there are four: 

1. Fight – where we can become violent and want to fight and become very angry or aggressive or combative.
2. Flight – where we feel the need to run away as quickly as possible. This can be done in so many ways, by tuning out through reading or watching endless TV, sleeping all the time, literally running through exercise, or endlessly being on the move by travelling or being involved in endless events and things “to do” all the time and never being present or standing still.
3. Freeze – this can feel like you have literally left your body, experiencing depersonalisation, not being able to go out anywhere or get out of bed, or shutting yourself away, being immobilised in extreme cases, not being literally able to move and having what is known as a “frozen panic attack”, losing your ability to speak, to get the words out.
4. Fawn – becoming very agreeable to the person who you feel threatened by, by abandoning self or your own instincts and thoughts whereby hoping that the person who you feel is either moving away or distancing themselves from you, or being unkind or who might leave you, will then in turn stay or change their mind.

There are a couple more – faint is one of them – but l will deal with these four here.

They are natural bodily reactions to stress and what is perceived by us as individuals to be felt as “danger”. They are felt in the sympathetic nervous system.

Post being in one of these trauma states, and we all usually use one of them when we feel threatened, we may feel:

• exhausted
• confused
• a terminal sense of sadness
• disassociated
• anxious
• depressed
• shame and regret
• powerless to our own maladapted reactions and beliefs

We most likely will not be able to “name” the feeling even though it will likely be felt as familiar. And not very good.

Sadness is mostly felt in the throat and chest, anger in the head and the chest, and disgust in the mouth and the stomach. 

Trauma that is unprocessed and unresolved plays into our responses by feeding us a narrative that needs to be challenged and changed in order for us to be free of it. Otherwise, hypervigilance will override our peace and play havoc within our relationships, marring our chance of happiness.

'If they’re OK, I’m OK'. The trap of this.

• Emotional regulation.
• Learning to put the thoughts away.
• The concept of misinterpretation.
• What drives them?
• Allowing.
• Working on ways to calm and self-soothe and tolerate... 

...This all sounds like it might be a lot to accomplish to keep the anxiety of losing someone at bay, but it is entirely possible when you become aware of having this attachment style in the first place and then subsequently what you can do to calm it.

Often those who are anxiously attached are attracted to those who are dismissive attached though and vice versa! 

The best attachment type for them is the securely attached person, but in all honestly, these are out there, but rare.

Read up and listen to as much as you, there is such good advice and information out there, but if possible working through this with a therapist will be a wonderful investment you can gift to yourself.

I have worked with many people of both the anxious and the avoidant styles of relating and it is absolutely possible to have calmer happier relationships when you understand what causes the maladaptive behaviour patterns, which originate usually from childhood, and by also changing the narrative that comes from them.  

Take heart, things always change for the better when we discover that we are not alone and we can learn new ways that give us happier horizons.