#attachment #insecurity #jealousy #romanticrelationships #controlinrelationship #attachmentbehaviour #couplescounselling #attachmenttrauma #limerance #healyourself #insecureattachment #earlytrauma
In the early days of a new relationship, it's all exciting and consuming. Partners cannot get enough of each other and feel intoxicated and full of desire. This is a time for dreaming, passion, showing your best colours and loving everything about the other. This phase is called limerance and lasts usually between 6 months to a year. In this stage, also frequently referred to as the 'honeymoon' the focus of both partners is to establish the relationship and attach with each other. In this process partners may neglect other aspects of their lives, their friends, their hobbies even their sleep, to put in the time and effort into creating this new and exciting partnership. In this process, a partner who is insecure may show a lot of eagerness and romance which the other partner may find attractive and may lead to feeling 'in love', ignoring the potential for being controlled or overly intruded upon. When the dust settles, people try to find a sustainable rhythm and equilibrium between the relationship and their other responsibilities and interests, work, social lives, hobbies,. The balance between together-separate is renegotiated. At this point, at the face of less 'merger', a partner with insecure attachment may become fearful of being left. This is a phase of testing the relationship, a time when both partners begin to notice what is different between themselves and the other and what they may not like as much about the other, a time when the partner moves form a projection of our fantasy to becoming a real human to us, with strengths and vulnerabilities. What is a normal process in the transition from limerance and towards enduring and deep love, to the insecure partner may feel and look like abandonment and rejection, that their partner has got bored, or doesn't like them as much any more and may be seeking to disengage or even to find other love interests. This insecurity may lead to clinging and other unhelpful behaviours, like demanding to know where the other person is at all times, demanding very frequent contact, complaining, being intrusive, expressing jealousy or even more covert controlling/coercive behaviours that seek to keep the other person from pursuing their own lives. This isn't always with malicious intent. In fact in many cases, people are aware of their own separation anxiety and can account for it but feel unable to resist the behaviour. This behavior is attachment signalling and it is designed to maintain psychical proximity to the attachment figure (love partner) and to reduce separation anxiety. Although we are grown up, romantic relationships are attachment-based and trigger historic patterns of attachment in a person. These patterns come from relationships with parents and other original attachment figures but also previous partners. What we learn about relationships from our early life and the responsiveness of our caregivers to our needs, can be encoded non-verbally in procedural memory, and stored in the body in physiological reactions, anxiety, emotional dysregulation,, flooding with stress hormones like cortisol. This can then be triggered by and become an involuntary response to any threat of separation from our attachment figure (partner). People are more likely to know they are anxious because their previous partner had an affair or was uncaring and critical, than to consider that it was because their parents were inconsistently available or because they suffered abandonment as a child.
What looks and feels controlling may be a desperate attempt from your partner to regulate their overwhelming feeling of fear. This fear is often based on trauma and can feel like overwhelming anxiety, like fear of death. Flooded by cortisol, the person who feels this way may struggle to reason how they feel and soothe themselves because they have never been soothed (early trauma) and because they don't have the words to describe their experience. A securely attached person, can miss the other when they are not together but is able to go and explore and enjoy other experiences, and other relationships from the comfort of the secure base of the romantic relationship. They have a positive outlook on life, and believe that things will turn out for the best and that if they don't, they are still OK and can survive the disappointment. They do not interpret all clues and behaviors to mean they will be mistreated, rejected and left, on the contrary, they look for plausible explanations to misattunements and they are likely to believe their partner when they say they need some time alone or they are meeting with a friend. An insecure person has a negative bias/frame of reference and they interpret the same clues to a more destructive end; they may think they are being lied to, or their partner has had enough of them when they ask for time alone. It is not uncommon for people to be attracted to partners with different attachment patterns to your own. Each combination can produce different potentials and challenges. What is important is open communication and taking ownership of your feelings. As the anxious partner, assuming you believe that your partner is a loyal, honest and caring person and has not given you any real reason to think otherwise, you need to find ways to give up trying to alleviate your anxiety through control; this strategy in the long term will lead to resentment and ultimately may bring about the feared abandonment. Even if it doesn't, it is unlikely to result in any positive model for relationship where both of you can flourish and be happy.. Instead, you can let your partner know how you feel, take ownership of your own worries, ask for reasonable/appropriate re-assurance and look after yourself. Your emotional wellbeing is your own responsibility. Make sure you have a good support system, maintain your own rich and vibrant life, and even engage with individual therapy to help you understand and heal the wounds from the past so they don't cause you and others more wounds in the future. As the partner who feels controlled and over burdened, you do not have to do anything you are not comfortable with, just to pacify your partner. You can be compassionate and still keep your boundaries healthy, say NO to what you don't like and YES to what you do want for yourself, and remain invested in the kind of relationship that works for you and your life. Relationships always involve compromise and negotiation, but this does not mean being stifled or compromised. Couples counselling can help support both partners in this process, giving people the opportunity to explore how they are experiencing the relationship, explore what they want our of it and how their past history may play out in their present. The goal is always to create healthier and more sustainable patterns of relating and more fulfilling and long lasting relationships. More information on Adult Attachment Patterns here.
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