Amir Levine
Attached
They score lowest on every measure of closeness and personal relationships.
Less willing to engage in self disclosure,
less comfortable with intimacy,
less likely to seek help from others.
A strong belief in self reliance can be more of a burden than an asset.
In romantic relationships, it reduces your ability to be close,
to share intimate information,
and to be in tune with your partner.
Many avoidants confuse self-reliance with independence.
It’s one thing to stand on your own 2 feet, it’s another thing to diminish the importance of getting support from other people, and we cut ourselves off from an important lifeline.
(Think about politics for a moment. That person who thinks everyone should just be able to be self sufficient, forgetting that we live in a society that is interdependent. )
Self-reliance forces you to ignore the needs of your partner and concentrate only on your own needs, short-changing you of one of the most rewarding human experiences.
It prevents you, and the person you love, from the joy of feeling part of something bigger than yourself.
Avoidants have a generally dismissive attitude toward being connected.
When something occurs that contradicts this perspective, they are prone to ignoring it, or diminishing its value.
People with an avoidant attachment style don’t always translate the many verbal and nonverbal signals that they receive and can’t read the cues. They appear to lack empathy.
You train yourself to not care about how the person closest to you is feeling.
You figure that this is not your task; they need to take care of their own well-being.
Instead of looking out for one’s own needs, you can shift to a more secure mindset if you open up and allow yourself to see the needs of the people around you.
“The person that I’m with is the problem -everything is fine with me.”
It creates distance between me and my current partner and confuses them.
It makes them think that you’re truly craving closeness -when in fact, you are driving it away.
Even though you’ll probably never get back together with your phantom ex, just the knowledge that they’re out there is enough to make any new partners seem insignificant by comparison.
Not wanting to look inward, while believing that we all have the same capacity for intimacy, you conclude that you’re just not “in love” enough and so you pull away. Again
Your partner protests and feels hurt, which strengthens your conviction that she is not “the one.”
You believe that once you connect with “the one” you will effortlessly connect on a totally different level. No work is necessary; it will magically work out.
The belief is - I can’t find happiness because of other people -when in reality it is me that is getting in the way.
They rarely seek inside of themselves for the reason for the dissatisfaction, they more rarely seek help or even agree to get help when their partner suggests it (couples counseling).
Change is not likely to occur without a deeper experience of empathy and acceptance or looking within.
Their life is about a life of struggle -involving the constant suppression of a powerful attachment system using the deactivating strategies that we talked about previously. (Suppression is actively and consciously pushing down the feelings. Repression is pushing down those feelings without realizing you’re doing it. )
It really is all about self-awareness, (but they’re gonna call it being “woke”.)
RSS Feed
