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

Author:Leslie Becker-Phelps [Becker-Phelps, Leslie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781608828173
Publisher: New Harbinger Publications
Published: 2014-05-31T22:00:00+00:00

Chapter 6

Developing Self-Awareness

As I’ve explained, you have good reasons for maintaining your attachment-related anxiety—it can feel like a matter of survival. If you try to reduce this anxiety, your resistance will naturally run deep. This is true even if you consciously want to change and would be healthier for it. So if you are intent on improving your relationship, or searching for one, approach it diplomatically. Expect inner resistance and plan to persist. Instead of trying to overpower (or bully) yourself with demands to be different, try to “make friends” with your experiences. As with any new friends, you will earnestly try to get to know and understand them. Also, remember that those aspects of you that are holding on to attachment-related anxiety are trying to protect you—so engage with them sensitively.

Begin by opening yourself up to the idea of changing. Then you can move on to becoming more aware and accepting of your emotions, gaining awareness and perspective regarding your thoughts, and increasing your ability to mentalize. The sections below offer ways to develop in each of these areas. Try the exercises that seem to touch on where you need to—and are ready to—grow. Do them in whatever order seems to be most helpful, and repeat exercises as you see fit. Be alert to a strong desire not to do an exercise or to an aversion to thinking about some particular section. That could be a misguided effort by your unconscious to protect you, and might reveal an important area that you need to work on. So give serious consideration to what that section is addressing and to trying the exercise in it.

Resist the temptation to “push through the book” without really absorbing what the exercises have to offer. Feel free to work on any particular exercise for a while, or even to return to that exercise later after reading on.

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