Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Leaving Loneliness A Workbook - Building Relationships With Yourself and Others
Leaving Loneliness A Workbook - Building Relationships With Yourself and Others
This publication is designed to provide accurate and authoritative information in regard to the subject matter
covered. It is sold with the understanding that the author and the publisher are not engaged in rendering
psychological or other professional services. If expert assistance or counseling is needed, the services of a
competent professional should be sought.
Conclusion
INTRODUCTION:
Important Information and How to
Use This Book
Loneliness is quite painful, especially when it lasts a long time and seems so
hard to change. Have you ever been among people, even those whom you like,
and still felt alone, inadequate, and separate, or just unable to connect with them
in a consistent way? Loneliness is something everybody experiences, but chronic
feelings of loneliness are not typical to the human condition and do not need to
remain typical for you. If you do experience chronic feelings of loneliness, you
may need to work on something psychologists refer to as your attachment style.
By doing so, you are likely to find it easier to be kind to and truly aware of
yourself, and in turn relate in a more satisfying way to others. Imagine having
relationships that are strong, satisfying, and stable. This is possible once you
(and then others) see who you are, but it will require some patience and work.
My goal is to help you develop a clear framework, by learning about
attachment styles (in just two more pages, you will already read the bullet-
pointed sections defining these attachment styles). With that clarity, you can
approach the work on your loneliness with precision. Part of the pain can be that
it is hard to understand why loneliness continues to be your experience over time.
Lacking that understanding can leave you feeling hopeless to change it. Why do
others seem to be able to have fulfilling relationships when you are not? What is
it they have that you yourself can develop? It is not attractiveness, money, or
power, since many people with all three are quite lonely. Developing answers to
these questions builds hope, and gives you the power to begin building toward
that kind of satisfaction with your relationships.
This workbook presents a step-by-step approach to build success in
relationships. Initially, you will work to improve existing problems you may have
with your attachment style. Next you will build your awareness of and
responsiveness to yourself, a precursor to having healthy, strong relationships
with others. You’ll then be prepared to work on building satisfying relationships
with others later in the book. Though some suggestions are included, superficial
tips to meet people are not the focus here. If it were that simple, you would
already be surrounded by loving relationships. Rather, this workbook focuses on
activities that help you create the deeper, lasting internal changes needed to build
ongoing satisfaction with your relationships.
Let’s identify who is most likely to gain from this workbook. You are likely
to benefit from this workbook if you are having repetitive problems forming or
maintaining satisfying relationships, not if you are lonely due to a specific and
temporary life circumstance such as adjusting to a recent move or divorce. If you
are committed to making your own changes, not demanding that others change to
make you happy, you are very likely to benefit from this book, because you are
ready to work on yourself. If you do need the support of therapy because you are
deeply in pain, this book cannot take the place of therapy, though this book may
be extremely helpful used in combination with that therapy. That is, this book is
intended for those having mild to moderate challenges with loneliness, not for
those who are feeling helpless or hopeless. Also, you will get the most benefit if
you move slowly while doing the exercises in the book, truly experiencing them,
instead of skimming the book. Working through this book is not to be solely an
intellectual exercise, but rather an experience putting you in greater
communication with yourself. That deeper method of approaching the book is
likely to help you with your loneliness, whereas skimming the book intellectually
is unlikely to produce life changes.
There is one other caveat about completing this book, important enough for a
separate paragraph. You may feel warm and content after completing some parts
of this book, particularly regarding some exercises in Chapters 4 and 5.
However, this is not a feel-good workbook per se. This workbook is about
helping you to spot and address issues that keep you lonely, and that is not mild
material. Completing some portions of this workbook may evoke feelings of
sadness, and you may feel defensive at other points, both of which may actually
signify that this book is helping you get in touch with the problems which
currently trap you. If so, remember your motivation for working through this
book, or if desired, you may decide to stop or to seek therapy to support yourself
in completing the exercises. I add this caveat so that you can begin informed and
prepared. If you begin with the expectation of seeing problems within yourself
and your relationship history, but maintain some joy in having something you can
do to address those problems, you have a great mindset with which to approach
this work.
This book is a synthesis of modern theory and research on human
relationships, integrated with ancient Eastern philosophy. I will cite my sources
at times, not only to give credit, but also because I want you to know that the
strength of this book is not based on merely my personal theory about how to
build your success in relationships. On the contrary, without the work of those
cited, this book could not exist. The activities in this book flow from cutting-edge
integrations of several theories and related research, but those theories and the
related research themselves are already established. First I will introduce the
important theories you need to understand to build your success, and then I’ll add
the integration.
What is attachment style? Attachment style refers to a characteristic pattern
that we repeat in approaching our social interactions. It is a broad concept with
many implications, but to nail down some specifics, it includes how easy or
challenging it is for us to trust that others will be there when we truly need them,
how well we are able to share our experiences with others to engage their
interest, how willing we are to both accept and offer others emotional help to
feel better, how able we are to soothe ourselves instead of unleashing excessive
emotion on others, how confident we are of the good intentions of others close to
us, how skillful we are at identifying those who would hurt us and closing off to
them without closing off to everybody else, and how much we are able to bond
with others based on truly getting to know each other instead of solely based on
being of service or receiving help, among other things.
We will not be discussing a lot of psychological terms in this book, but the
few we will focus on are crucial to your development of a clear framework
within which to understand and work on your loneliness. Let us then describe
what ‘Secure Attachment’ is, what you will be working towards, and also the
attachment problems of ‘Attachment Avoidance’ and ‘Attachment Anxiety’ that
you will be working to remedy on your path toward attachment security.
Able to ask for emotional help when in high distress, and is also ready to
provide emotional help for others.
Relationships grow and develop gradually, and if they must end because
the relationship isn’t working, the relationship likely ended gradually as
well until the conclusion of unworkability was reached at last.
Preoccupied with whether or not others truly care about him/her, and
whether others would be available in his/her time of need. This leads to
continually testing others to check.
Often feels in need of others for emotional support, and sometimes feels
it is impossible to get enough of that support. In times of need, may lean
on others without also being an active part of helping oneself. May forget
to express gratitude about help already provided, out of fixation on the
feeling of wanting additional help.
May not see one’s own important strengths and what one has to offer the
world.
Intensely pulls people close when feeling lonely, and may abruptly push
somebody away when feeling vulnerable about being uncomfortably
close.
Able to relate when there is a job to do, help to give, or a clear topic of
discussion. In a more informal social setting (e.g., lunchtime at work, a
party), may have great difficulty starting or maintaining a conversation
with others. Struggles with the small talk needed to start new
relationships.
Often wants to share him/herself with others, but just doesn’t know how.
These bulleted points provide examples of some of the specific issues the
exercises in this book will help you to target. Try to avoid getting caught up either
in self-criticism or in being overwhelmed, since you are reading this book to
identify the problems and then work toward solutions in a clear, structured
approach. Attachment Anxiety and Attachment Avoidance should be viewed as
dimensions. That is, almost everybody, including those securely attached, has a
little attachment anxiety or avoidance. Those with more attachment anxiety or
avoidance often find themselves lonely, and some do have very extreme amounts
of attachment anxiety and/or avoidance. It is common to have an attachment
problem, part of the motivation behind writing this book. Approximately 40% of
adults are not securely attached.1 If you relate to one or both of these attachment
problems, the encouraging news is that people routinely build Earned Secure
Attachment. Earned Secure Attachment is the same as Secure Attachment, except
that one works to build it in adulthood. For example, a study of attachment style
in adults showed that 66% of adults in a short-term (i.e., approximately five
months) attachment-oriented therapy shifted their attachment style toward greater
health, and about a quarter developed Earned Secure Attachment in this short
period of time.2 This workbook focuses upon helping you place yourself on the
path to Earned Secure Attachment.
Here is how the book is organized. First, in Chapter 1, you will classify
yourself as having Attachment Anxiety, Attachment Avoidance, or both. Based on
that decision, you will complete Chapter 2, Chapter 3, or both, to work on the
chosen attachment problem. After addressing the attachment problem head on,
you can move on in Chapter 4 to begin building a strong relationship with
yourself, learning to both tune into and respond to your own needs. In Chapter 5,
you are then ready to work on building secure relationships with others. You may
be tempted to jump straight to Chapter 5, but based on what you now know, how
might you see that as another example of your attachment challenge? Without
building a solid foundation, the progress made by going straight to Chapter 5 is
likely to be weak, and so I encourage you not to cheat yourself of all that you can
gain by working through the earlier steps.
At this point, make a decision based upon your true interest. If you would
like to inform yourself about how attachment style originally forms in infancy,
and if you want to add more depth to your understanding of Attachment Anxiety
and Attachment Avoidance, continue with the rest of the introduction. The
remainder of the introduction will also discuss how and why mindfulness is
incorporated to some exercises in this book. If this does not interest you, or if you
are highly eager to get started, please move to begin Chapter 1.
Why Mindfulness?
Another significant theoretical influence throughout this book is mindfulness, and
that is because mindfulness mimics emotionally responsive parenting. You might
remember the earlier discussion that in forming Secure Attachment, it is the
child’s parent who labels and thus helps the young child to recognize his/her
emotions and emotional needs (e.g., “You look sad. Would you like a hug?”), as
well as physiological state and physical needs (e.g., “It looks like your stomach
hurts. Let me get you some Pepto Bismol.”). In this developmental path—which
this book seeks to help you recreate—the basis for Secure Attachment and the
confidence accompanying it is that the parent repeats this responsiveness
countless times throughout the day. The parent is primarily the giver, following
the child’s cues about needs, and the child, while responding to the parent’s
attention, is primarily the taker of emotional nourishment. The secure child thus
has confidence arising from the emotional and physiological self-awareness
his/her parent has provided, from developing the ability to sense his/her own
emotional or physiological state and needs accurately and being able to help
him/herself and to seek or allow others’ help. The child then naturally applies
his/her own openness and emotional responsiveness toward others and is able to
both give to and receive from his/her peers. As an adult, that confidence remains,
and the adult becomes strong enough that when becoming a parent, he/she is
ready and able to be primarily the giver in that relationship, while remaining
attuned to his/her own needs and seeking to nourish them (e.g., a walk alone, a
“date” with a spouse, calling family to come help, an occasional night out with
the guys or coffee with the girls, etc.) where possible.
Mindfulness similarly is focused on helping you, moment by moment, to be
aware of what you are experiencing, including your thoughts, emotions,
physiological experiences, and related needs. Mindfulness can be defined as
becoming aware of and engaging your current experience to be alive right now.
Experiences with mindfulness can be used to help you create now what you
needed from childhood—this ability to tune into your emotions and physiology.
Thus, mindfulness helps you to become quite aware of your experiences in the
case of Attachment Avoidance, and helps you unpack and dissolve highly painful
emotions which you are already aware of but are overwhelmed by in the case of
Attachment Anxiety. As noted earlier, this ability to tune into and respond to your
own emotional and physical experiences leads to becoming confident. That is,
mindfulness practice can help you create parts of yourself that were missing due
to early attachment problems. Mindfulness creates changes in the brain, likely
similar to those changes that Secure Attachment brings. For example, research
found an increase in brain mass in areas of the brain believed useful in building
emotional stability, learning, and memory, after only eight weeks of a focused
meditation program.6 This research is similar to findings about early parental
emotional support predicting increased mass of the same region of the brain later
at school age.7 Mindfulness mimics in many ways a good emotional relationship
between child and parent, except that in mindfulness, the sensitive, attuned
relationship is one you develop with yourself.
Your relationship with yourself is the foundational relationship you have as
an adult. In building the quality of this relationship with yourself first, you can
then greatly increase your ability to build satisfying, stable, loving relationships
with others. This is a practical workbook intended to help you move along this
path toward a deeper connection first with yourself and then with others.
Practical Examples of Attachment Issues in Daily Life
Exemplifying a challenge with Attachment Anxiety, consider John, who is dating
Sandra. Sandra has fallen head over heels in love with John, but John is always
checking. He checks to see if she talks with other men. When her phone rings, he
is uneasy until he knows who is calling her. Does she respond to his texts quickly
every time? Does she answer all his calls? Is she seeking contact from him as
often as he does from her? On and on. The fundamental question is: Do you really
love me, can I be secure with you, and if so, how do I ensure that it remains true?
John’s energy is consumed by wanting to protect the love he receives from
Sandra, and he feels compelled to take routine action to ensure that he will still
have it. This checking and uncertainty about her love builds a high level of stress
and emotional intensity within John, and Sandra over time likely begins to
distance from him because the intensity overwhelms, upsets, and at times injures
her.
After John annoys her with too much bugging, he tries to repair, perhaps by
being excessively submissive for a time or perhaps by buying her something. It’s
possible that John’s behavior might reflect a problem within Sandra; for example,
he may be aware of reasons she cannot be trusted, or perhaps she has weak
emotional presence that makes him feel desperately in need of more of her
attention. However, if this has been his repeated pattern with different partners, it
is John who needs to examine his internal insecurities, or he is doomed to have
all of his energy consumed in seeking and continually checking to ensure a
guarantee of this love from others, unfortunately exhausting both himself and the
woman, and pushing her away.
Additionally, the possibility exists that when John is finally close with
Sandra and can stop worrying about whether she’s sticking around, he will
provoke an argument or otherwise push her away and engage in a cycle of pulling
her in and pushing her away, unable to find a level of closeness at which to get
comfortable. This last issue of the push-pull may or may not be present for John.
Either way, John is struggling with Attachment Anxiety that is damaging his
relationship.
In example of another attachment challenge, Attachment Avoidance, Alma is
a hyper-competent shining student and employee. Alma always gets things done,
with excellent detail and consistent follow through. She is extremely focused, at
times at the expense of her creativity. Alma takes the good qualities of a strong
work ethic to the extreme, beyond healthy levels. She is prone to get snappy and
overly aggressive at times. She needs a lot of structure, and when left with a
vaguely defined task, she gets anxious or angry until she can define it or get
definition from somebody else. She’s great at tasking, and she might also be great
at going out on the town, but she is not good at all at being still. In her
relationships, she rarely asks for any emotional support. She is nearly always the
emotional giver, though she’s more able to give advice than true, deep listening.
She’s always in control and is frequently surrounded by needy, perhaps chaotic
individuals who perceive themselves as dependent upon her help.
Alma is not skilled at receiving emotional support (or compliments), and
when help is offered, she doesn’t know how to use it. When she does access
support, it may not be with a soft or gracious air of appreciation, because she
feels upset at violating her self-concept by accepting support, or, alternately, she
may find herself saying “thank you” fifty times to somehow try to repay the
helper. It is easier for her to receive emotional support if: 1) She perceives it to
be simply the other person’s duty to help her in that situation, or 2) She made that
help occur or paid for it, or 3) she dismisses or minimizes the extent of the help
she just received.
With the Attachment Anxiety example of John discussed above, a
conversation with him could reveal a lot about him—often too much too soon
thanks to his feelings of desperation about wanting others around and available.
In contrast, with Attachment Avoidance, Alma would be difficult to get to know.
She is reluctant to be vulnerable, never wanting to appear weak to herself or to
others. This is the source of drive for her hyper-competence, always feeling
compelled to be in the know, being of service to others without accepting help,
avoiding her own vulnerability. She may be viewed by others as very sweet, but
upon getting to know her intimately (as in a romantic relationship) she is more
likely to be viewed as tense, emotionally distant, and perhaps critical. This is
how she is toward herself as well, being her own harshest critic.
Alma commonly resists getting closer to others out of fear of feeling
inadequate or being judged or viewed as inadequate by others. Thus Alma’s
public behavior is commonly predictable and staid (unless she is perhaps
drinking or has another “excuse” to loosen up) and is especially predictable once
she is beyond her twenties. She inhibits spontaneity out of fear of being
perceived negatively (especially as weak) by herself and others. She feels
trapped, as though she cannot be her true self, and by inhibiting full expression of
herself, she may not be able to interest either herself or others. With all this pent-
up frustration, she may occasionally burst from the pressure and become a regular
wild child, the opposite extreme, but she will then quickly return to her narrow
range of behavior. However, even if she is routinely bubbly and the life of the
party, the tell-tale feature is that nobody really knows her intimately, and this is
why even if she has many friends, she is still extremely lonely.
Let’s apply this understanding of attachment to consider how people might
respond to their relationships with others, given an ambiguous social situation.
Let’s say that you arranged to meet a close friend for lunch, and the friend never
showed up or answered his/her cellphone.
A Secure Attachment style of responding might be to assume your friend had
something suddenly come up and wanted to meet you but could not, or that
perhaps your friend forgot because sometimes he/she is scatterbrained. You might
also be concerned that your friend had an accident on the way over; these
possibilities are unrelated to questions about whether or not your friend truly
cares about you. If and only if this happens several times with the same friend,
with no satisfactory reason given, do you, as a securely attached person, distance
yourself from this friend.
A high Attachment Anxiety style of responding might be to focus on
wondering if you had done something to upset your friend, or on remembering
“signs” from the past suggesting that your friend didn’t really like you very much,
then becoming either very fearful that you have erred in the friendship or
excessively furious with your friend. You might then call or text excessively,
frantic to learn the reason for the no-show and/or to vent your anger.
An Attachment Avoidance style of responding might be to think, “Screw
him/her, I’m done with him/her. I won’t waste my time,” and to ignore your
friend’s calls later that day in a cold and premature cutoff.
In all three situations, you would feel some anxiety about the reason for the
no-show, but the three styles would lead to very different interpretations of your
friend’s behavior. Considering this as just one example of many situations in
which there are multiple ways to interpret others’ actions, jot down a few
thoughts: How do you think that a Secure Attachment style of developing
hypotheses about others’ intentions promotes stable, consistent relationships?
Notes
1 Howard Steele and Miriam Steele, Clinical Applications of the Adult Attachment Interview (New York:
Guilford Press, 2008), 6.
2 Linda A. Travis, Nancy G. Bliwise, Jeffrey L. Binder, and Lynn H. Horne-Moyer, “Changes in Clients’
Attachment Styles Over the Course of Time-Limited Dynamic Psychotherapy,” Psychotherapy: Theory,
Research, Practice, Training, 38 (2001), 149–159.
4 David J. Wallin, Attachment in Psychotherapy (New York: The Guilford Press, 2007), 19–20.
5 John M. Gottman, The Science of Trust: Emotional Attunement f or Couples (New York: W. W. Norton
& Company, 2011), 199.
6 Britta K. Holzel, James Carmody, Mark Vangel, Christina Congleton, Sita Yerramsetti, Tim Gard, and Sara
W. Lazar, “Mindfulness Practice Leads to Increases in Regional Brain Gray Matter Density,” Psychiatry
Research: Neuroimaging, 191 (2011), 36–43.
7 Joan L. Luby, Deanna M. Barch, Andy Belden, Michael S. Gaffrey, Rebecca Tillman, Casey Babb,
Tomoyuki Nishino, Hideo Suzuki, and Kelly N. Botteron, “Maternal Support in Early Childhood Predicts
Larger Hippocampal Volumes at School Age,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 109
(2012), 2854–2859.
8 Jonathan F. Mattanah, Frederick G. Lopez, and John M. Govern, “The Contributions of Parental
Attachment Bonds to College Student Development and Adjustment: A Meta-Analytic Review,” Journal of
Counseling Psychology, 58 (2011), 565–96.
9 Meifen Wei, David L. Vogel, Tsun-Yao Ku, and Robyn A. Zakalik, “Adult Attachment, Affect Regulation,
Negative Mood, and Interpersonal Problems: The Mediating Roles of Emotional Reactivity and Emotional
Cutoff,” Journal of Counseling Psychology, 52 (2005), 14–24.
10 Mario Mikulincer, P hillip R. Shaver, Omri Gillath, and Rachel A. Nitzberg, “Attachment, Caregiving, and
Altruism: Boosting Attachment Security Increases Compassion and Helping,” Journal of Personality and
Social Psychology, 89 (2005), 817–39.
11 Daniel Goleman, Emotional Intelligence: Why it Can Matter More Than IQ (New York: Bantam Books,
2005), 7.
CHAPTER 1:
If you are determined to understand the work you will be doing for the rest of this
book, and to approach that work with precision, I strongly encourage you to read
the book’s introduction. You will never be alone once establishing Earned Secure
Attachment to yourself and others. The first step in doing this is to correct
existing problems with your attachment to yourself and others, and then later in
the book, after removing your obstacles to security, you will work on building
that security. Your specific type of obstacle will be identified here in Chapter 1
and will then be addressed in either Chapter 2 or 3, depending on which chapter
is tailored to your obstacle.
Starting with Your Strengths
Doing a workbook implies that you are already powerful. Why? Because
otherwise it would be useless to complete a workbook, since you cannot build
something from nothing. You begin with something, as everyone does. This book
will help you build on your existing wisdom and shave off the ‘shadows’ of your
existing wisdom. Shadows are the downside or problems associated with any of
your strengths (e.g., sometimes being really skilled at offering [or receiving] help
can also have a shadow, meaning you are weak at the opposite).
What strength exists in you that prompted you to buy this book or that prompted
somebody to buy it for you?
When you faced very difficult times, how did you get through them?
Approach this workbook from a place of strength, knowing that you have the
confidence, the openness and humility, and the care for yourself to accept and
address problems you are having.
Writing the (Attachment) Story of Your Life
Thus Far
This exercise is one of the most important activities in this book, to write about
your attachment history in great detail and to begin making sense of the primary
relationships of your life. Here you will do a narrative writing, essay style,
enlivened with your history. The purpose is to write the story of your attachments
to parents/caregivers, lovers, and significant friends. In doing this, you will
become more aware of the responsiveness you have received and also where you
may have not had the closeness you needed. This will also inform you about how
your style of attaching has developed, especially as you write about relationships
with your parents.
To maximize the benefit, write about these people in their full complexity
and color. For example, “My childhood was great; my parents were a happy
couple,” is incomplete. Be much more detailed if you can. For example, “My
mom was kind to me, and when I was hurt physically or emotionally, she listened
to me. The exception was that when kids bullied me at school, she couldn’t seem
to handle listening to it and she’d just tell me what I should do. This might be
because my mom was bullied herself as a little girl…” With that level of detail,
this activity can be quite useful in setting the tone for your work in this book.
Get a few pieces of paper so that you’ll have room to write anything you
feel is relevant. As you prepare to write the detailed story of your attachment life
thus far, here are a few seed questions to help stimulate your thoughts in writing
your story:
Think of a time when you were young and you were physically injured or
your feelings were hurt. When you cried, how did your mom respond? How close
or distant were relationships in your family of origin (i.e., the family you grew up
with)? When people in your family were sad or angry, did they talk about it with
each other, and in how much detail? When people in your family were angry with
each other, how did they resolve that anger? Did you look forward to bringing
friends home, did you typically prefer going to their homes, or was it a mix? How
did your mom/dad/other important adults make you feel very cared for? What
was the one thing that your mom/dad/other important adults did that hurt you the
most?
Skipping ahead wouldn’t allow you to gain from this activity. See if you can
take your time and write or type some things about your attachment history on
separate sheets of paper.
After you’ve written your attachment history, here are a few more questions:
1) Looking over the attachment history you just wrote, what are you feeling?
Write about those feelings.
2) What good habits did you develop from past relationship patterns (i.e., with
parents/caregivers) that you continue using in present relationships?
3) What bad habits did you develop from past relationship patterns (i.e., with
parents/caregivers) that continue in present relationships? For example, if you
received little support, you may now feel as if you don’t need any and find
yourself unskillful in knowing how to ask for or receive help from others.
Someone with a hyperemotional mother may be a caretaker of others, or could be
excessively logical as a balance to dad’s explosive emotionality, etc.
4) Choose the relational bad habit you listed above that you would most like to
break. How would you like to work at breaking it? Be as clear and detailed as
possible.
Identifying Your Challenges with Attachment
(This ke y activity de te rmine s if you should comple te Chapte r 2,
Chapte r 3, or both.)
Please read the descriptions below and see what best describes your style of
approaching your very closest relationships (primarily parents, romantic
partners, or long-term close friends). Focus on your general pattern of how you
approach close relationships, not, for example, solely the way you approach your
current romantic relationship, but based on how you generally approach your
romantic relationships. Please look at the descriptions below and consider which
best describes how you currently approach your closest relationships. The
descriptions of both Attachment Anxiety and Attachment Avoidance may describe
you, only one description may describe you, or possibly neither will describe
you. In addition to reading the summary descriptions below, please revisit the
bullet points in the introduction describing Attachment Anxiety and Attachment
Avoidance.
Attachment Anxiety
Do you worry a lot about your relationships and/or fear losing people’s love or
your place in their lives? When new people enter your life, do you feel you can’t
get close fast enough? Would others describe you as intense in relationships? Do
you find yourself feeling comfortable in a relationship one day and worried and
insecure the next? Do you worry about others leaving your life, or find yourself
working really hard to keep them in your life? When others actually do get close
to you for a sustained period of time, do you find yourself pushing them away
and/or becoming disappointed in them? Do you tend to have “combustible”
relationships where you are intensely close to people, and then huge fights ensue?
When it comes to romantic love, do you find that you fall in love often for short
periods of time?
If the majority of the descriptions provided by the questions above capture
the flavor of your experience of relationships, then after completing the rest of
Chapter 1, you should complete Chapter 2 of this workbook, entitled ‘Activities
to Address Attachment Anxiety.’
Attachment Avoidance
If you are habitually lonely and have trouble letting people see your
vulnerabilities, and yet you look at your childhood and are tempted to say
something vague and general along the lines of “My childhood was fine,” “My
parents were good,” or “There were some problems, but it wasn’t bad and I’ve
moved on,” without any further description or detail, your attachment problem
may fall in this category. That is, those with Attachment Avoidance commonly
lack detailed memories of their childhood experiences.
On a different note, do you have a much easier time giving help than
allowing yourself to receive help? Is your role in relationships frequently to be of
service versus letting others get to know what you think and feel? Do people tell
you that it is difficult to get close to you? Do you feel unrealistically
invulnerable, putting yourself in risky situations others would not because you
feel as if you are unlikely to be injured?
If you feel embarrassed about something you have done, do you lock it away
and avoid telling the closest people in your life about what happened? When you
are upset, do you find that you rarely seek out others to share your feelings with,
or is your life constructed so that you don’t have people in your life who are
close enough to share with when you are upset? Do you become overly upset
when you are not competent at a particular task?
If you have avoidance in your attachment style, it is still possible that you
may have many people in your life, and perhaps even be thought of as lively and
outgoing in group social situations, and yet you may feel quite lonely because you
are unable to share your true thoughts and feelings with anyone.
With Attachment Avoidance, you may either have few people around
(especially in your thirties and beyond) or may be the energized life of the party
(especially in your twenties or earlier). Either way, you are lonely and feel
starved for closeness, despite a sea of plenty at your door, due to not knowing
how to drink of that sea because those people do not deeply know you. If these
descriptions capture the flavor of your experiences in relationships, then after
completing the rest of Chapter 1, you should complete Chapter 3 of this
workbook, entitled ‘Activities to Address Attachment Avoidance.’
What do you know about how your mom formed that style, likely beginning early
in her own life?
Is your mom more or less securely attached, compared to how securely attached
your maternal grandmother appears to be, and if they are different in their levels
of security, how do you think that difference came to exist?
How does the information you have given above relate to how you developed
your own attachment style?
Notes
1 Vivian Zayas, Walter Mischel, Yuichi Shoda, and J. Lawrence Aber, “Roots of
Adult Attachment: Maternal Caregiving at 18 Months Predicts Adult Peer and
Partner Attachment,” Social Psychological and Personality Science, 2 (2011),
289–297.
CHAPTER 2:
What was it that you just did or wanted to do in those fifteen minutes?
Did you actually do it?
If not, how did you create barriers that stopped you from doing it? What is a
solution to those barriers? If you did it, how did it feel to do it?
Tomorrow, if you ask yourself the same question, “What do I need to do?”
there may be a different answer. The point is not “Do these several particular
things, and you will be happy forever.” Rather, the point is that you must ask
yourself on an ongoing basis what you truly need in a given moment in order to
then provide that for yourself.
Back in your daily routine, the usual painful, repetitive thoughts and feelings
may plague you. Neither force the thoughts away nor roll along with the confusion
or drama generated by that racket. Acknowledge that thought or feeling, touch it
lightly, without putting yourself down, feeling you must solve it, or getting lost in
how big the feeling seems. Instead, just acknowledge your thought or feeling and
move back to what you now want to be doing for your survival, pleasure, or
whatever you want to attend to (whether it’s work, listening to music, cleaning, or
anything else). If that feels odd to you, try to notice that feeling too and then let it
loose versus getting obsessed with it. This style of holding a thought or feeling
loosely may be outside your comfort zone, and so having discomfort while
holding loosely and then letting it go means that you have just done something
right.
Why Do I Feel Desperation and Cling to
Others?
If you find yourself clinging to others in desperation, seeking their affection to the
extent that you let yourself get steamrolled, or perhaps just putting yourself in the
lower power positions in most of your major friendships to ensure you don’t lose
them, this activity is for you.
Remember a time when you were quite young (e.g., younger than ten years
old, or even younger than five, if a memory is available) and desperately wanted
somebody’s attention (commonly that of your parent, but perhaps someone else),
and you could not get the emotional responsiveness you needed. Maybe you had
been physically hurt or were very emotionally upset about something, and you
needed soothing. The event may or may not have been objectively big, but your
need for soothing sure was large.
Get a timer or alarm (perhaps on your cell phone), set it for three minutes
from now, close your eyes, and re-immerse yourself in the details of the painful
thing that happened at that moment in your life and the seeking of attention or
affection afterward. Keep remembering until the alarm sounds, playing the whole
scene slowly, and try to remember all of the details of that event. Also include
anything you saw, smelled, heard, tasted, or touched during this event (i.e.,
engage your senses for the sake of making the memory as vivid as possible).
What stands out to you the most about how you felt at the time of the event?
Coming to the present time, how did you feel just now, remembering the time
when you were trying unsuccessfully to get attention and affection?
If anything new stood out to you this time, write that below.
When you sought attention and affection after the distressing situation, what
response do you wish you had gotten?
Ne xt, speak that wished-for response you just wrote of in the question
above gently and warmly to yourself. Say it a few times to yourself, and say it as
if you deserve that love and warmth. Notice that nobody else can currently give
you this love specifically tailored to your unmet past needs. You are uniquely
able to do so.
What if I Don’t Really Need as Much From
Them as I Think?
You may generally believe only others’ actions have the potential to make you
feel safe, secure, complete, or happy. Everyone feels this way from time to time,
but if you feel this way most of the time, this exercise is for you.
2) What is it that I believe I still now need from my mom (or other primary
caregiver during your childhood), based upon how I currently interact with her?
3) Sometimes I feel that if I cannot have these things listed in the above questions
from the people I care about, I do not know if it is possible to be happy. In truth,
how would I support myself to continue on my path in life if another person could
not or would not give me what I would like from him/her? That is, if the person
mentioned in question one, as well as my mom/dad, were gone from my life, how
would I approach getting those particular needs met?
To be crystal clear, I am not suggesting that you do not need others’ love to
grow and thrive. You do. However, as an adult, the first love must come from
within yourself. Knowing that you are a good and valid human being, knowing
what your needs and satisfactions are, and taking the responsibility to fulfill many
of those needs and satisfactions yourself are indeed precursors to being truly
loved by others and, for that matter, to truly loving (versus merely needing)
others. You must actively love yourself to feel secure and confident in yourself,
that you may allow others to know you closely enough to love you.
What If I’m More Scared of
What I Can Do Than of What I Can’t Do?
What you commonly do may not be working well, and so you bought this book to
try new things outside your comfort zone so you can expand into a bigger and
more satisfying life by achieving a deeper understanding of yourself and how to
work with your emotions. What if your problem is not that you are limited and
needy, but that you are an unlimited fireball of energy, scared as hell of all that
you could become and by the ambiguity of not knowing what you will be? What if
not facing that fear compels you to stay in the small, familiar zone of unwittingly
torturing yourself with a painful but familiar flood of emotions rather than
exploring the unknown, ambiguous vastness of what you are to become?
You may have gotten attention only when you were sick, weak, or injured.
You may have needed to be very loudly in distress as a child to coax your parent
to leave their own thoughts and pain to notice you and provide you with attention.
To gain affection, you may have thus unknowingly begun to identify solely with
your weakness, believing it was true and accurate about yourself that you were
helpless, as you unconsciously steered yourself toward feeling distress, over and
over again, in order to gain those precious drops of affection. If somebody does
not want to provide that care when you are feeling distress, you may reflexively
view them as cruel and resent them. By now, after years of presenting yourself to
others in this way, you may fail to realize your strengths. In fact, to consider
feeling strong might even feel terribly risky, because in the past, to be strong
meant to risk losing affection and attention. Now is a different time. Now, as an
adult, if you build the strength, it is likely to attract many people to you.
It is not your fault you are in this position of being scared to grow and
expand, letting go of all the resentments and obsessive thoughts, letting go of
feeling lost and in need of care, in favor of diving into whatever is now and next.
However, it is yours to work at shifting these habits that currently give you an
excuse not to push yourself into more ambiguous and expansive territory, as life
is really short. You probably want to have a more satisfying and fuller experience
of your life before it is over.
In current times, would you lose the affection and attention of important others in
your life by becoming emotionally strong? If yes, whose would you lose?
What is the biggest life purpose (e.g., a large goal in your life) that you would
like to take steps toward fulfilling?
Imagine feeling strong and confident, fulfilling that purpose. Describe this
feeling.
If you walked around continuing to feel purposeful in this way, how might you act
differently, in ways that would attract others?
We are all strong and we are all helpless at different times. We may need
help when we are upset, and we need to celebrate our strength with others.
However, in adult life, we are generally happiest when the bulk of others’
attention comes to us based on their responses to both our contributions and who
we are (i.e., our strength), instead of primarily from helping with our needs.
Reprogram yourself on how you want to gain others’ attention by repeatedly
reminding yourself to take actions that feel purposeful to you. In this way, you can
feel both confident and loved.
Healing Your Deeper Emotional Injuries
Attachment Anxiety suggest that in childhood, you probably needed to sort of
wrap around your primary caretaker like an emotional pretzel to get those
precious few drops of attention and emotional responsiveness. Sometimes it was
available and sometimes not, but regardless, you had to work pretty hard for it.
You had to stay vigilant for the times it was actually available and seek it then.
Perhaps you had to become physically or emotionally sick to gain the emotional
presence and responsiveness of your parent/caretaker. In any case, you wanted
attention, you had some idea that it was occasionally but not routinely available,
and you may still today have no idea if you can consistently get it. The exercise
below is primarily intended for those who have been anxious in attachment for
many years, not for those originally avoidant who are now anxious on the way to
Earned Secure. For the latter folks, see the parallel exercise in the Attachment
Avoidance chapter of this book (the activity there has the same title), which is
intended for your own original wounds.
1) Please consider how in your childhood you learned to distrust that attention
and emotional responsiveness would flow freely and consistently toward you.
While later experiences may have strengthened this belief, try to find the early
experiences that shaped it (i.e., the roots of learning this with your primary
caregiver/s). Write about it (or draw if you prefer).
2) What was the single most painful instance of failing to receive emotional
support, or of being dismissed and/or criticized when you deeply needed
support?
3) If you could explain the damage that resulted from the parent or caregiver who
wasn’t consistently or sufficiently emotionally responsive to you and he/she was
capable of listening, what would you tell him/her about the injuries caused by the
events you wrote of in response to questions one and two?
4) What do you wish he/she would say back to you in response?
5) Now hold yourself: put your arms across your chest so that each hand is
touching the opposite shoulder. Tell yourself the most important things you wrote
in question number four.
Finally:
Respect your wounds. Do not demand that they disappear immediately, or they
may plague you indefinitely. Respect that the wounds and their aftermath exist
for now. The more you reflect on the damage done and on how you can be a
good, nurturing parent to yourself to repair this damage, the more likely you
are to succeed in repairing your old wounds and avoid stepping into situations
that create fresh ones.
The Person/s Who Was/Were Really There
for Me
As a child, who did you go to for comfort when you were emotionally upset (e.g.,
after an argument with a friend, being criticized by a teacher, or when having
problems with family)? This person may have been a family member, a distant
relative, family friend, friend, teacher, clergy, etc.
To answer the following questions, think in detail of a specific time you
went to that person for support, comfort, and/or encouragement. To maximize the
power of this exercise, before answering the questions below, first close your
eyes for about three seconds and remember the details of the incident and of
going to him/her for support. Replay the incident in your vision and ears, in vivid
detail, like a movie. Then answer the questions below.
In that incident, what did you need from the person at the time you were upset?
That is, why did you go to him or her?
Were you able to be specific in telling or showing him/her what you needed?
What was he/she able to be and do that kept you coming back when you were
upset?
Experiencing Versus Addicting
With anxiety in your attachment, you may often have huge emotions that leave you
scrambling to do something with them. When those emotions crash upon you like
waves, you may feel that you must fix them immediately or you will drown in
their surge. You may also build strong repetitive habits constructed in the service
of trying to escape or mute those surges of emotion.
These habits may look sort of like an addiction, based on your panic about
those waves of emotion. You may scramble too intensely toward people who
support you, or toward something that either distorts or numbs you (e.g.,
drugs/alcohol, excessive entertainment, such as hours and hours of TV or Internet,
etc.), or you may do other things that are harmful to you (e.g., pursuing excessive
work accomplishments if they are rooted in the need to avoid emotion) as a way
to diminish the intensity of these feelings. Because this scrambling in fact often
works—that is, it relieves or prevents the emotion for a brief period of time—
any of these behaviors may take on an addictive, repetitive quality. They relieve
or prevent your pain for a moment, so you scramble back toward them again and
again.
In reality, while muted feelings can get stuck and last for years (e.g., in many
cases of depression), intense moments of emotional pain, if the emotion is
allowed to fully develop, tend to last 30-90 minutes. For example, after a strong
bout of crying, emotional intensity often reduces quickly on its own.
Take a Moment to Consider: What If You Simply Stopped Scrambling?
What is this scrambling rooted in, but in the pair of assumptions that you
cannot tolerate the intensity of the emotions you are experiencing, and that your
pain will not pass on its own. For reflection: Are these assumptions true, and
how do you know?
The feeling that you cannot bear an emotion is real in that the feeling exists,
but in regard to factual accuracy, the thought that you cannot bear the emotion is
probably inaccurate. Give an example of a time you handled an extremely painful
situation in your life, survived the pain, and then noticed the pain fade away on
its own.
The opposite action of scrambling is to stay. Stay with what? Stay with
whatever your experience is, in this case pain, until it changes. This requires faith
that it will pass and that you can and will work to tolerate it until it passes.
Staying might be crying, drawing with the emotion in mind, writing about the
pain, meditating to let the feeling fully evolve, jogging while gently contemplating
your pain, or any number of activities. It matters not exactly what you do; what is
important is that staying feels as if whatever you are doing is natural versus an
activity you are grasping at and clinging to in order to push your discomfort
away.
Staying does not mean getting lost in emotion. If after some time the nature of
the pain does not become clearer and you don’t come out of the pain, you should
take a break and distract yourself, but make that distraction a conscious and time-
limited decision, not habitual automatic behavior. The key is that staying is an
aware process of tuning in to and responding to your emotions and needs,
versus grasping automatically out of vague or acute panic at something that
becomes a drug.
Consider the behavior of distracting yourself. This can be done reflexively,
such as grabbing at a person, a video game, etc. This can also be done by choice,
in conscious attunement with yourself (e.g., “I have been writing/meditating/etc.
around my pain and sitting with my pain for a while now, and I am finished for
now and need the distraction of TV or the support of calling a friend.”).
In contrast to choiceful action, in which you have attuned to your emotions
and needs, addiction is reflexive action…you just do it as if compelled, often
before you even really know the extent of the emotions driving you toward that
behavior. Staying involves lingering and delving more deeply into the nature of
your thoughts and feelings. You are experiencing yourself. With that more
thorough assessment of where you are and what you need at a moment in time,
you can guide yourself into effective action as needed. Narrate as you guide
yourself. For example, “I’m sad and don’t know why, so I’m going to draw for a
while. Now looking at my drawing, what do I notice? OK, now it has been some
time and I’ve had enough, so now I want to distract myself and call my friend.”
This narrating is a key element in helping you enact your chosen responses to
pain that are attuned to your needs and self-loving versus repeating
addictive/reflexive responses to pain, which harm you.
When have you known happiness in your loved one’s absence (e.g., before ever
meeting him/her)?
In addition to painful feelings, what of who you are continues to exist even when
he/she is gone? Who are you in his/her absence?
If you are in distress and he/she cannot or will not help, how will you either self-
soothe or express and release the painful emotions inside you?
When you are in the pain of longing, your right hemisphere and
limbic/reptilian brain are active. That is why art can be useful, as it allows these
nonverbal areas of your brain to “speak” and release. The above activities,
which are aimed at coping and rational thought to give you data that you had
experiences of happiness prior to even meeting them, help you create balance to
these emotions, working to activate the orbitomedial prefrontal cortex.2 This area
of the brain is involved in both emotional processing and rational decision
making. That is, it is useful to both allow the emotional brain a method of
speaking to release the pain and then to activate an area of the brain that bridges
emotional processing and analytical/rational processing, to help shift out of
painful emotion.
Why Do I Get So Upset
When I Feel Ignored or Misunderstood?
In reading this chapter up to this point, you should be starting to see themes in the
sources of your pain and to understand why it is exceptionally painful and
infuriating for you when you feel unheard or misunderstood. Your reactions to
feeling misunderstood or ignored may thus also be very extreme, damaging
otherwise viable relationships.
Early on, you in fact did need highly accurate reading of your emotions,
needing your parent/s to have the presence of mind and emotional space inside
themselves to detect with accuracy what you were feeling, and then to respond to
your emotional needs of the moment. For example, if you were sad as a two-year-
old, you needed Mom/Dad to label the sadness (“oh, you look sad”) to show you
that you had them for emotional companions, then to help you express and release
your pain, next to help you with problem solving (if still necessary), then finally
to pull you toward a positive emotional state. Mom/Dad read your feelings,
understood you, and then responded accurately to your needs based on that
accurate reading of your feelings (e.g., echoed with a sad voice that you were
sad, mirrored your feeling and met you in it, helped you talk about and release the
feeling, and then shifted to try to soothe you and lift your spirits). If you did not
receive that emotional support, if your emotions were either ignored or
perpetually misunderstood, you were left with an important need unmet, resulting
in an ongoing trigger for anger when being unheard or misunderstood.
Now as an adult, you cannot expect to have a “mother/father,” someone with
this deep and single-minded focus on you and your needs. You must become your
own parent, reading your own needs and feelings and responding accurately to
your needs. How? Let’s get started.
Who did you really need to understand me accurately when you were young?
As an adult, how can you do a better job of identifying your emotions, especially
when the feeling is still small, before it gets huge after being unattended for too
long?
How can you slow down and learn about the emotion you are feeling, asking
yourself questions about it as an observer, instead of either flying into action
before you fully know what you are feeling (e.g., trying to avoid the feeling), or
simply getting lost in a huge feeling?
Do you have any internal resistance to the idea of taking care of yourself in this
way? If so, please describe that here, especially noting anything you fear losing if
you take care of yourself.
I Get Really Mad When Others Don’t See
Things the Way I Do
How do you feel when others disagree with your point of view? Do you become
really hurt and feel invalidated, or do you become easily angry? If you
experience either one, this activity is for you.
By now, hopefully, you are beginning to understand that much of the anxiety
in your attachment style is likely to have arisen from not having your emotions
accurately heard and responded to by your primary caregiver in childhood. You
and your primary caregiver were probably not emotionally in sync. Given that,
you are prone to easily feeling misunderstood and have a strong reaction to that,
as discussed in the activity immediately preceding this one.
In early childhood, successful attachment requires that your primary
caretaker is on exactly the same emotional page as you are when you are upset,
and then once he/she meets you in your distress, which calms you a bit and
allows you to express and ventilate the feeling, he/she can then move you toward
sharing a happier emotion. His/her ability to notice and then share your emotions
was key to you developing a secure attachment with her/him.
However, as teens, and especially as adults, while successful attachment
continues to require the ability to now mutually tune in to each other ’s emotions,
it also requires that each person is able to be him/herself. That is, while two
adults need to be capable of sharing the same emotion (e.g., joy, sadness) at
times, they also must each have room to be different from the other in order for
both to feel secure.
The reason that it is necessary to allow for difference and uniqueness is that
an adult relationship is no longer a hierarchical relationship, where an adult
serves to meet the needs of a child. Adult relationships with adult peers are
reciprocal, mutually meeting each other ’s needs, and peer relationships do not
inhibit the expression of who each one is, in contrast to the need for adults to
inhibit their own personality expression at times when more powerful (e.g.,
parental, supervisor) than the other.
For example, generally it would be odd if your parent told you about his/her
sex life, while it would not be odd if your friend told you a couple of things about
his/hers. Your parent would at times inhibit full expression of who he/she is
based on the power differential, because part of his/her role as a parent is to
meet your needs, whereas a friend carries relatively less of that responsibility
and would be less likely to be inhibited out of taking care of you and sharing your
own emotional experience.
Now, applying this to daily life, if your early emotional needs were unmet,
you may feel inclined to demand that others be the same as you, because where
they differ may make you feel extremely unsupported in who you are. Since you
didn’t get enough sharing of emotional experience early on, you may crave it now
in the extreme. Thus, while differences in point of view can be difficult for
anyone, for you these differences may provoke an extremely large reaction, due to
how unsupported you feel. This may make it extremely challenging to accept
more adult forms of Secure Attachment in which it is remains necessary at times
to share the same emotional plane, but it is also necessary at many times to have
distinctly different emotions and beliefs while permitting each other those
differences.
1) What was the nature of the disagreement the last time I got really angry at
somebody for having a point of view different from my own (maybe you can think
of an incident in the last week or two)?
3) If I had it to do over, how would I have taken care of and soothed my distress
to avoid overreacting? In particular, what could I have said to myself to talk
myself down from my distress?
5) The next time I become angry about differences, I plan to have a calming
internal dialogue to talk myself through it instead of just reacting on impulse.
What commitment can I make to myself now about how I will handle it the next
time I know I am having an excessive reaction to a difference of opinion, in order
to avoid unnecessarily damaging my relationships?
Describe the feeling you had as you sensed that the interaction was coming to an
end. Encourage yourself to provide some detail in your response, not merely a
one-word answer.
What things were you wishing he/she could provide for you (e.g., relief from
loneliness, listening to you and responding to your thoughts and feelings, an
excuse to avoid doing other things you need to get to, a feeling of safety, etc.)?
That is, what need/s motivated the effort to linger?
Based on the question above, is there anything among your responses that you are
willing and able to provide for yourself without anyone else being present? It
may not be as satisfying, but it may still be very useful. Example: If your need is
for responding, you could provide it yourself by saying your feelings and thoughts
out loud and responding to yourself.
Why Can’t I Seem to Make a Decision?
One characteristic frequently accompanying Attachment Anxiety is difficulty
making decisions. With your ambivalence about connecting with others, you
surely face some similar crises of confidence when making other types of
decisions as well.
What’s the answer? Examine your ambivalence. You may feel that 100
percent of you wants to move forward into a particular action plan, but in reality
your unspoken needs and desires in conflict with that action plan will stop and
frustrate you from taking that action. Thus you must get to know that internal
conflict so that you may then devise an action plan that includes all of you, to
dissolve your hesitance. You will learn a process here to help you clarify the
nature of your internal conflicts so you can work through your areas of
ambivalence. Let’s work the process below with a sample to help you practice.
Regarding the above decision, name two decisions/directions you could take.
Consider Direction A:
List all problems with taking this direction (i.e., what do you lose?).
Consider Direction B:
What are the problems/costs of taking this direction (i.e., what do you lose)?
Every difficult decision includes losing or giving up something in order to gain
something else. Thus you must first know what you are giving up or losing to
decide whether you are willing to absorb this loss. Once you decide which loss
you will accept (and doing nothing, of course, brings its own costs), you can
move forward with much less ambivalence. What is meaningful and/or painful to
you about the losses associated with Direction A?
What is meaningful and/or painful to you about the losses associated with
Direction B?
Are you more willing to accept the losses associated with Direction A or
Direction B, and why?
Action Plan
Is there a realistic way of combining Directions A and B to avoid the most
painful of the losses? If so, how?
After meditating: What if even though it includes emotional pain, your experience
is important and shouldn’t be covered over with busyness? What are your
thoughts about that possibility?
What is the next step to cope in a manner that allows you to be more present with
your experience, without overwhelming you with emotional pain?
Gratitude
Do you feel that you complain or whine too much? Do others tell you that you do?
If you spent your early years wrapping yourself in a pretzel around your parent/s
to extract precious drops of their presence, affection, and attention, you got used
to being in a scarcity mind-set, the belief that there is never enough for you,
because truly, you never got enough of them. It was an accurate mind-set for you
at the time, and that’s why you became that pretzel. You did what you needed to
do in order to increase feelings of security and being emotionally attended to.
However, how does that attitude of scarcity, the belief that the world is
insufficiently attentive toward you and under-nourishing of your needs, affect you
now? How many people who are sources of potential nourishment are turned off
and turned away by your attitude that they are not doing enough for you, even
though they often may actually be giving more than what is being reciprocated by
you? Are you aware in the moments where you are truly emotionally full, or do
you just generally assume that you are still hungry? Are you able to notice and
perceive these moments of feeling full?
Perhaps you need to construct or refine that internal “sensor” that tells you
when you are emotionally satisfied so you can learn what it feels like to be
satisfied and thus can become more precise and skillful at pursuing exactly that
which satisfies—also stopping that pursuit when you are satisfied. By learning
when you are emotionally hungry and when you are emotionally full, you become
more skillful in seeking when you are hungry and halting the seeking when you
are full.
Perhaps the opposite of feeling as if you do not have enough is a feeling of
appreciation for what you have. What do you have? It can be difficult to notice
this before the “my life sucks” voice takes charge of you, as that voice may be
pervasive and strong. So slow down and try to find your voice, which can speak
to what you do indeed have:
Speak to any personal qualities or life circumstances you have that others would
be genuinely thrilled to have.
Without qualifying your answer in any way, what is the one thing (i.e., this could
be anything, tangible or intangible, including a possession, a relationship, free
time, a skill, etc.) that you currently have that you are most grateful for, and why
are you grateful for having it?
Reflecting on the two questions above, how difficult or easy was it for you to
steer your mind toward gratitude? If this was a difficult task, what feelings and/or
thoughts interfered?
If it was difficult to steer toward gratitude, wrestle with the challenge for a bit.
Most importantly, consider this question and develop as clear an answer as you
can: In what way does it pain you to let go of the perspective that you have little
to be grateful for?
What fears are activated when you feel that people are too distant from you? That
is, what are you afraid of feeling if you become too separate? If needed, think of
an example from your past to jog your memory.
Now think of a time when somebody got close to you and you may have
unconsciously (or intentionally) pushed him/her away, if pushing others away is
an issue for you. Try to recapture those events like a movie, in a step-by-step
manner, scene by scene. What was the fear/s that led you to push that person
away at that specific moment?
The more you are aware of your fears, the more you have the power to address
them in more functional ways (e.g., by saying soothing things to yourself,
assessing the rational reality of your fears, distracting yourself, etc.) to prevent
longterm destruction to your relationships that results from acting on short-term
emotions or on emotions you are not yet fully aware of or knowledgeable about.
The next time you notice yourself fearing emotional distance, how else would you
like to handle it instead of becoming overly pressured and demanding contact
with the other person?
The next time you notice yourself fearing closeness, how would you like to
handle it instead of engaging in actions that may perhaps push someone away
(e.g., have you ever simply talked yourself through the fears in the moment and
soothed yourself then and there, or perhaps at some point you calmly explained to
the other person that you needed an hour or a day for yourself but would
reconnect soon afterward)?
What Makes Me Strong?
To become and remain consistently strong, you must learn what your basic needs
are and work toward taking care of yourself to get those needs met. So far you
have done several exercises on listening to yourself in the moment, thus becoming
responsive to yourself moment by moment, and meeting your needs as possible
when they arise. This activity is different. This activity is about your ongoing
needs, those that do not change a lot moment by moment or even from one month
to another. My biggest physiological needs:
Growth:
Recreation:
2) If I have only ten to fifteen minutes, what are my favorite fun/refreshing things
to do with that time?
1) Being realistic, how much money do I need to save (or put toward debt) each
month to feel satisfied?
2) What skills do I have or want to build that would make me feel more secure at
work?
3) If I have a need to feel physically secure, how do I prefer to build that feeling
(e.g., building muscle or self-defense skills, doing cardiovascular activity to
strengthen my heart, getting a dog, installing alarms, etc.)?
All these things you listed are not meant to make you feel bad if you don’t
currently do them for yourself. In fact, that way of thinking is to be avoided if you
are serious about becoming stronger. Rather, simply practice seeking these
elements of your life when they are available, because you have noted above that
they are important for your self-care.
Giving What I Have of Value to the World
An antidote for the emotional pain of feeling regularly deprived and in need of
more love and nourishment from the world is to remember that you yourself have
important gifts to give and that you may be neglecting to give them when over-
focused on feeling in need. Let’s take stock and make an inventory of what you
have to offer and see whether or not you are actually giving those things.
Examples might be a sense of humor, sewing, cooking, the capacity to inspire,
computer savvy, mechanical know-how, emotional support, stories, paintings, or
anything that might make the world a better place for others.
What reasonable, highly specific commitment can I make about where I will
newly give one of the above gifts? Example: I will use my sense of humor with
Juan and Sara at work tomorrow because they are likely to receive my sense of
humor as refreshing or enlivening.
My Commitment:
My Rotation Between Idealizing
Others and Being Disappointed
You may find a person you think is truly wonderful and think that at last you have
found a kindred spirit, and yet you may later realize that you can see only how
he/she fails and disappoints you. If a person seems so incredibly wonderful early
in your relationship, it probably means that you are projecting qualities onto
him/her that this person may not have, or you have not gotten to know the person
well enough to see who he/she is as a whole. What I mean is, you may have a
need (e.g., closeness, someone of like mind, nurturing, etc.), and because you
need this and also have an assumption that the need must be met outside of
yourself, you may construct delicious dreams that another person has these
qualities, before you know who the person truly is. When you attribute non-
existent qualities to others, or attribute qualities to them that you do not yet
factually know whether or not they have, this act is projecting.
Most people do a little “projecting” when they fall in love at the beginning
of a new relationship. The question is, when you pull back those projections and
get to know the person for who he/she truly is, is there enough left of what you
want and need to warrant continuing the relationship?
Taking this common instance of projecting to more of an extreme, if it is your
habitual pattern to project extensively onto others, you can become caught in a
cycle of immense joy at meeting the person you feel can finally fulfill your needs,
and then sadness or disappointment and anger arise when you realize later, as
his/her true personality becomes apparent, that the person is not what you thought.
1) Continue to build the ability to both recognize and fulfill the majority of your
own emotional needs and expectations. To make the relevance of this point clear,
let’s do this exercise. Think of the last person who fits this pattern, where
initially you thought he/she was terrific, and later you did not.
2) If you meet somebody new and immediately feel that you “know” that person,
take a step back. Yes, you may have a feel for some of who he/she is, but try to
catch yourself in the act of projecting (i.e., attributing qualities based on who you
want the person to be). “Oops, am I projecting again?! Yeah, I do wish this
person was similar to me in these particular ways/dissimilar in these other
ways, could totally understand me, would be so selflessly loving, or whatever
the thing is that I wish for, but also, my fantasy and needs aside, let’s learn
more about who this person truly is. He/she is not here merely to meet my
needs.”
The purpose of this exercise is not only to avoid getting disappointed or
angry, but also to allow the new person in your life to be the person he/she truly
is, rather than expecting him/her to be whoever you need or wish him/her to be.
If you are tempted to project needed qualities onto somebody new in your life but
would like to try to more accurately get to know him/her, make a start by
answering these questions:
Based on behavior and speech I have actually observed thus far, how is this
person similar to me?
The purpose of this activity is definitely not to suggest that you should stay
in a dark relationship where none/too few of your needs are nourished. The point
of this activity is to know who this other human being actually is, instead of
seeing the person you wish he/she was. In this way, you are also less likely: 1) to
get stuck in a relationship with a very dark person by distorting your vision to see
this person as better than he/she is, 2) to turn a salvageable relationship into dust
by assuming that if you have any unmet need, you must demand that the other
person change in order to meet it. In reality, no relationship can meet all of your
emotional needs, and as you become clear what those needs are, you must meet
some of them yourself.
Repairing a Recent Interaction That
Damaged a Relationship
When having high Attachment Anxiety, you may struggle with the following sort
of internal conflict. On the one hand, you wish to be close to another, gaining
his/her support and perhaps approval and/or nurturance as well in order to build
your own comfort. Because this is a lot to need from a relationship and because
dependence can feel scary, you may be on guard that the relationship may become
damaging instead of nurturing. As a result, you alternate between seeking that
person and distrusting and/or condemning him/her. Obviously this pattern can and
does damage relationships.
If the above more or less applies to your relationship with a particular
person, consider what you can do to repair the last problematic interaction in a
style that the other person is likely to understand and feel good about receiving.
That is, the act would be intended not solely to get you off the hook but to truly
increase his/her contentment. As a caveat, efforts to repair only work before a
relationship has passed that point of no return, and everyone knows when a
relationship has gone beyond that point. Beyond that point, you have no choice
but to let go and learn what there is to learn and grow from. Below, consider a
relationship of yours that is beginning to darken but has not yet reached that point
of no return.
What was the nature of the interaction where you were either too demanding or
pushed this person away?
What do you genuinely regret about how you impacted the other person and/or the
relationship during that particular interaction?
Consider this calmly: How will you attempt to repair the interaction?
What comfort/support do you need to give yourself to help you take this risk of
attempting repair?
What will you do to make your own positive intent unambiguously crystal clear
to the other person, making it obvious that you are doing it for him/her and the
relationship instead of merely to make yourself feel less worried?
How will you talk yourself through your emotions if, despite offering your brave
and skillful efforts to repair the relationship, that person does not receive your
actions/speech well? That is, if the person is unable or unwilling receive you,
how will you soothe and care for your painful emotions?
Why Do I Ask for Help When I Already
Know What to Do?
You probably do not ask for needless help on purpose, but do you find yourself
frequently seeking advice or help when you already know the answer? If so, get
suspicious of your feelings of helplessness. You may be downplaying your
awareness of your own competence. If this occurs outside of your conscious
awareness, you may frequently weaken yourself in order to bring others closer to
you, in this case to “help” you. It is one way in which you may ensure that you
receive some measure of care or support, but at the steep cost of diminishing your
faith in yourself.
In this way, you may momentarily reduce your Attachment Anxiety by taking
control of bringing others closer, while simultaneously allowing that closeness
only in a structured format to prevent fears of excessive closeness (i.e., helping
you solve a specified problem, but not getting to know you in a deeper way). You
may temporarily resolve anxiety by bringing them closer, but not “too” close. If
this way of seeking others did not carry the cost of damaging your faith in your
competence, this would be quite an elegant solution to address your attachment
anxiety!
There is an alternate method to increase closeness in building attachment
security: imagining that others’ purpose is not primarily to be there for you
(except in your genuinely distressing moments), but rather that they are to be with
you, simply as one valuable and unique human ever more deeply meeting another
unique and valuable human. This takes the pressure off of others to fulfill your
demands in order to prove they are there for you and removes your worried
question about whether you can count on them. Instead, the end result is that you
actually get to mutually enjoy being together and to get to truly know each other
instead of merely being codependent, with one needing to be repeatedly helped
and the other needing repeatedly to give help.
Practice not settling merely for getting people to do things for you to
demonstrate their loyalty or availability. Rather, practice simply being able to sit
and get to know each other: hopes and dreams, day-to-day hobbies, what each of
your daily lives look like, etc. Don’t settle for proof of willingness to help when
you could have much more of who they fully are. You could truly know each other
at a more nuanced level. This can activate fears of rejection, since they are not
close to you only in the “safe” area of helping you but also by coming to truly
know you. While the risk for getting hurt by rejection is higher, the potential for
vastly greater satisfaction in having a deeper and more stable connection is also
much greater.
The next time you want to place a demand upon someone (out of feeling
need for them) or become powerfully disappointed in them for failing you,
consider instead how to have a lighter discussion about your interests and theirs,
and see if you can spend time getting to know them first instead. People are much
less likely to disappear on you if you demonstrate strong interest in and come to
know a great deal about who they fully are, while also showing who you are, at a
reasonable pace that is not too fast. So consider putting this in practice. Pick a
person today, and when you start to ask him/her for help with something, instead
fill that need for contact by getting to know him/her a little more deeply.
I normally tend to act helpless with (fill in name) so
that he/she will demonstrate that he/she is there for me by helping me. Instead, I
commit to seeking that contact in a more secure, more vulnerable manner, by
getting to know him/her better. The questions below refer to him/her.
What does this person like about me? That is, making educated guesses about the
other person’s perspective, what draws him/her to me?
What hobbies and/or interests do you have that you could practice talking with
others about?
If you took steps to improve your physical health (e.g., jogging) and/or emotional
health (e.g., meditating), how could that healthy behavior be a source of
connecting in a conversation?
What healthier style of dealing with this situation can you non-reactively, calmly
commit to (e.g., asking the person to adjust behavior patterns, ending a bad
connection in a nonreactive manner, setting healthy boundaries to create
appropriate distance with this person, being more active in social problem
solving versus being reactive by only waiting to see what the other person will
do, distracting yourself from the problem, etc.)?
As you finish this exercise and begin establishing new, healthier habits toward
connecting to others more with your strengths, what is the main thing that you will
remember from this activity?
Practice
Before you ask any loved ones for help, you should try to partially pull yourself
together first, just a little bit, in order to prevent “spilling” emotions all over
them, or you may eventually lead them to burn out or inadvertently push them
away while you feel progressively more helpless. In order to gain a little
emotional steadiness, try the simple, well-tested method of taking a few slow,
deep breaths to calm your thoughts and emotions, with full exhalations, and then
ask yourself what type of help you truly need and would benefit from. This is one
way to approach seeking help as an empowered person.
Ask yourself this question: What is the actual nature of your need from
another person when you are in emotional pain? Perhaps you feel that ninety-nine
percent of the time you feel that you want excellent advice, which you hope will
somehow work to extract your pain, as the equivalent of emotional tweezers.
Maybe you feel that asking for advice is the only legitimate way to ask for help.
Seeking perfect advice may sound as if it is what you want, but actually, what do
you truly need? Sometimes you indeed may need or want advice, but if you are in
high distress, the first thing you probably need is help to manage that distress.
Distress can be reduced simply by knowing that somebody else understands
what you are experiencing; in other words, that somebody else feels you. Later,
you may need help with advice or solutions, but often, once the distress is
reduced, no further help is needed from others.
1) Who should you seek when you need emotional support and understanding?
Whomever you list should be someone who actually has this capacity to hear you
emotionally and has demonstrated it in the past, not somebody you merely wish
had this capacity.
2) It helps to be very clear when asking for support so that the other person
knows what you need, and it may also be helpful that what you are asking for is
specific and thus limited, instead of overwhelming him/her. For example, “Do
you have a few minutes? I’m really upset right now. It’s not advice that I need,
but it would feel a lot better if you just knew what’s happening and if I just
knew that you know.” To make it your own, practice below by writing a sample
dialogue of how you would ask someone close to you for support, both by being
direct in what you are asking for and by not overwhelming him/her even if you’re
overwhelmed. Then imagine saying it with a voice tone that would be most
productive in this dialogue, versus using a tone that panics the other person and
thus may lead him/her to throw a barrage of unwanted “solutions” at you.
3) In the relatively less frequent situation where you genuinely need problem
solving or advice, whose judgment in decision making do you trust? That is,
practice discriminating whom you seek when you need support and listening,
whom you seek for advice, and whom you trust for both support and advice.
Remember, after they listen, you may feel, based on habit, that you need
more. You probably don’t need more at that time. To keep the conversation from
getting sloppy and burning them out while disempowering yourself, after you
have received your support, thank them and then don’t ask for more in that
conversation (e.g., don’t move on to discuss other sources of distress in your
life, and don’t solicit advice just to keep the support train coming, if advice is
not what you really needed). You needed them and they were there for you, so
now develop the joy of recognizing that you have received enough. You might
also shift to end the conversation, talk about their lives, or just discuss fun things
you or they are doing or are interested in.
Sometimes I Just Want to Hurt People: Why
Is That?
You probably only feel this intensity of anger if you yourself feel hurt. If you are
hurt, this does not give you the right to lash out with that anger. However, the
emotion gives you the information that you need to search for the origin of the
painful feeling so that you can find it, understand it, and then accurately take care
of yourself to heal the wound.
Take a moment to trace back: While there are likely older reasons in childhood
for your tendency toward anger, focus on the present. When did the most recent
episode of this feeling begin?
At about that time, who did you feel either misunderstood you or did not care
about you, and what action/s of theirs did you interpret in this way?
You know that you are sensitive to rejection and feeling misunderstood, so
while whatever happened probably did involve emotional content of some type
for the other person as well, he/she did not necessarily intend the full extent of
what you feel. To help comfort yourself with the realistic possibility that the other
person had intentions different from the ones appearing to you, give a few
plausible alternate interpretations of the intent behind his/her behavior:
If you absolutely know how he/she intended his/her behavior (e.g., because
he/she told you outright of that intent), then the question becomes how to attend to
your wounds as a necessary prelude to letting go of your tension and anger so that
you may move on. If this was the case, please describe how you will engage your
right brain (e.g., drawing, singing, crying, etc.) so that you can release this pain.
If this person is truly routinely uncaring or aggressive, how would you like to
address him/her about this? If he/she is likely unwilling to change, how will you
change your boundaries with him/her? Alternately, if the problem is not his/her
aggression or lack of caring, but rather your own tendency to incorrectly assume
others are uncaring, how can you work at changing this habitual assumption?
In Pain with Loneliness? Calm the Emotion
and
Make a Plan to Rescue Yourself
All the distress about wanting people to be close to you can leave you grasping
aimlessly, and very ineffectively, at other people, and sometimes at the wrong
people, to meet that need. Both you and they may experience this grasping as a
very painful experience. You may respond to that pain by grabbing even more at
others, without adding anything to either their lives or your own (except for
momentary gratification and anxiety reduction). They respond to that grabbing by
eventually pulling away, leaving you even more lonely. On the off chance that
they come closer, the other side of your ambivalence may rear up, and you may
push them away.
There is a solution. For the moment, tolerate the emotions associated with
loneliness and just breathe through them. Take a moment for that.
Next, start making a plan. This plan will guide you whether you are in a
calm moment or in an emotional storm. Consider this to be your roadmap. It may
be hard to commit to a plan, but isn’t it more difficult to commit to the absence of
a plan (i.e., overwhelming loneliness without a plan)? Your long-term social
connectedness is largely within your control, so though you may wish your social
life to simply be here now and already developed, get active to make yourself
happier by increasing your social network. Be a little stern (not harsh, but firm)
with yourself and make a plan.
First, write down a few plans for now (i.e., within the next twenty-four
hours). Would you like to log onto a social media website and search through the
lists of your existing friends to add more? Would you like to join a meet-up group
that shares some interest of yours (e.g., hiking, live music, etc.)? Are there
friends you should reach out to with whom you haven’t spoken in a while, and if
so, what emotional tone could you offer to those conversations? Is there a gym or
yoga class, cooking class, car repair class, et cetera that you would like to take
part in, where you are at minimum working in parallel with people, and optimally
working collaboratively on a project with others? Consider what you want, and
move to develop your own plan for the immediate future.
A plan for now: In the next twenty-four hours, I’ll do these three things to
increase interactions with others:
The plans above can stave off pangs of loneliness in the short term. What
about the long-term future? Think of the above plan as akin to coping, to give you
time for your longer-term plans to pan out. For the longer term, consider what
communities you would like to move closer to. Maybe it is a spiritual community,
or perhaps an artistic or engineering group you’d like to engage with. To create
both meaning/purpose and social connections in one place, would you want to
volunteer, as plentiful research indicates that it builds happiness? Whether it’s
volunteering, basket weaving, meditating/praying, or rebuilding engines, you
have interests. It is easier to get to know people in the context of a shared
activity.
For illustration, consider: Is a first date easier at an empty restaurant staring
at each other or going out and doing something like exercising, playing, or
watching a movie, etc.? Similarly, it is typically easier to join a community under
low interactional intensity with a shared activity rather than hoping for an
amazing instant connection complete with a six-hour conversation (and
frequently, an equally intense/volatile end to the connection).
In the long term, what two communities would you like to join or build further
closeness with:
How will you get closer over the long term without being too intense or rushing
it?
How will you get closer over the long term, without being too intense or rushing
it?
A plan is important, but easy to forget. Where will you put this plan to avoid
forgetting it?
CHAPTER 3 :
Comple te this chapte r of activitie s if you ide ntifie d your attachme nt struggle
as be ing with Attachme nt Avoidance in the activity in Chapte r 1 e ntitle d
“Ide ntifying Your Attachme nt Challe nge s.” Othe rwise , if you just comple te d
the Attachme nt Anxie ty chapte r but don’t ide ntify with the de scription of
Attachme nt Avoidance , skip the se activitie s and move ahe ad to Chapte r 4,
on building a Se cure Attachme nt to yourse lf.
Attachme nt Avoidance include s qualitie s such as be ing e xce ssive ly se lf-
sufficie nt and goal orie nte d, providing e motional he lp but not re ce iving
e motional he lp, possibly having skill and e ase with surface social contacts,
but struggling to build intimacy in re lationships (the re ason for the
e xpe rie nce of lone line ss), failure to prioritiz e re lationships re lative to work,
as we ll as unaware ne ss of many of your e motions and thus having difficulty
providing for your e motional ne e ds. Eve ry single quality of the se may not be
pre se nt, so de pe nding on the particular flavor of Attachme nt Avoidance you
are working on, all activitie s in this se ction will not apply to you, but many
will. Se le ct those that fit be st with your ne e ds.
Having avoidance in your attachment means that you generally avoid
intimacy or are simply unfamiliar with how to build it. You may have few
relationships or a plethora of relationships, but among those relationships are
few/none where you spend a great deal of time with and know these individuals
at a deep level. You may experience a longing for connection, but it is difficult
for you to form deeper, satisfying connections. Emotional responsiveness was
probably not sufficiently available for you, and you might like to think that this
dearth did not affect who you are socially today. However, if you are generally
lonely today, it appears that dearth did affect you, and no, that certainly does not
mean that you are weak. You may have learned early from a tense, depressed, or
angry/abusive caregiver that people are emotionally weak or possibly even
dangerous. Thus, at that time in your childhood, you developed a coping response
where you closed off from the world and provided for your own emotional needs
as best you could.
As a result of remaining in your own world, not having had much practice
how to work with others in synchrony, you may currently feel more comfortable
when social situations are structured (i.e., they have a clear agenda or purpose)
than when they are unstructured (e.g., a party). In addition, you are more often the
provider of help than the recipient, because providing help confirms your sense
that you are the strong one (i.e., the one in control), and also because providing
help is a clear and structured (and thus comfortable) way to have interactions
with others. It is probably difficult for you to relax when receiving from others,
unless it is help you have paid for.
These habits are not so terrible, but you are doing this workbook likely
because you must build more balance and allow others closer to you so that your
loneliness may diminish. It is likely that you are yet unaware of the subtle,
repeated little things you do that keep people at a distance and fail to bring them
closer. I hope this chapter helps you gain power over the choices you make daily
about keeping others out or pulling them closer.
Understanding Your Goal at a Gut Level
It is easy to write, and to read, about Attachment Avoidance. Let’s make sure you
have an experience of it—to actually understand what it means, at more than just
a surface, cognitive level.
Think of a tough/hard song, hopefully one you have listened to often. Hum,
sing, scream, or rap it for a minute or two, out loud if possible, or in your head if
conditions truly do not allow it to be sung out loud.
What worries you about how you feel? For example, would you be scared to
have this feeling all day at work or school? If so, what is the concern (i.e., what
is the bad thing you fear happening)?
This chapter is intended to help you experience more of the feelings you get
from this second song while you are with people, to help you become closer with
them. As you do get closer, if you closely tune in to yourself, you will note some
fear. However, once you know the fear is there, you can address it. Obviously
there are times where it is important to be harder instead of softer (e.g., when you
are under attack by someone who doesn’t want to know you but simply wants to
hurt you). However, the point here is to build your underdeveloped muscle; that
is, your ability to soften. A human who cannot harden is incomplete, as is a
human who cannot soften. You need both of these, skillfully applied in the right
context, based on what the current situation calls for.
Being a person striving toward long-term happiness, do you think you need
relatively more of the ability to soften or relatively more of the ability to harden?
Why?
Our brains are wired more for survival than for contentment. If you wish to
increase your contentment, you must train your mind accordingly, stepping
gradually but surely outside your comfort zone in doing so.
Happiness and Sadness: Accepting
All Emotions as Part of Life
Happiness and sadness are both part of life. Trying to be happy all the time
means avoiding the painful but necessary emotions (e.g., sadness, anger) in life.
Since deep relationships, as well as a life fully lived, include powerful positive
and negative feelings at times, failing to allow the experience of negative
emotions often translates into needing to avoid deep, intimate relationships.
This activity is about practicing acceptance of the more painful emotions in
your life, which are necessary and valuable to feel. Another benefit of working
on this is that if you accept some sadness, and thereby experience and ventilate
some of that emotion, it is less likely to gradually build into a crushing tidal wave
that crashes upon you.
If you are not used to giving your negative feelings much weight, or if you
are used to ignoring or minimizing them (e.g., “It’s not really a big deal”), you
may not pay close enough attention to them, and thus you may not know that you
are in need of care in the moment. You may notice the need for care later, but by
then you would not understand why you are suddenly feeling so emotional, or
why you are feeling so obsessed with finding comfort in such things as a person,
drink, perfectionism, something to buy, or another addiction—something outside
of yourself.
Do you tend to minimize the distress of yourself and others? For example,
are phrases like “it’s no big deal,” “eh, whatever,” and “oh well, what’s done is
done, can’t worry about it now,” frequent flyers in your thoughts and dialogue? In
small doses, these thoughts can come in handy to cope with life’s ups and downs.
However, if overused, they can make you weaker as you fail to notice when
something in fact is a big deal for yourself or others, and that the emotional
distress calls for recognition and soothing. If minimization is overused, you
undermine the value of the information your feelings provide in pointing you
toward the precise self-care you need.
Do you think you overuse the sort of minimizing phrases above? Would others say
you tend to fail to acknowledge your needs and take care of yourself?
After the storm (e.g., tears, sadness) comes the calm. You can be depressed or
anxious for months or even years if you do not face your emotions directly, and
yet ironically when experiencing those feelings directly and fully, you probably
do not remain sad or angry for very long. When you are able to allow your
sadness to get big enough that you can cry, how many minutes does it typically
take afterward for you to feel calm?
What is the single biggest source of sadness that you prefer to avoid thinking
about?
Now allow yourself five minutes to think freely about that thing, to be sad, or to
experience anything else that comes up. After five minutes (perhaps set an alarm),
try to cope effectively through distracting yourself by doing
if needed, at that time.
I Am Already Enough, Even Before
Improving More
If you have high Attachment Avoidance, it is likely you were raising yourself
emotionally, and probably were also used to being largely of service to your
mother or father during childhood. You were likely meeting the need of others
from an early age, instead of getting your own met. Thus being the sturdy hero for
weaker others has become your habit and your need. Alternately, perhaps your
family simply had a very stoic style.
Either way, you may have developed an excessively strong sense of
responsibility. This orientation to life has its benefits. You probably take on
anything you choose to take on with good intensity and effort (for example, in
using this book to work with yourself). However, this orientation may also leave
you without an internal gauge to measure when you have done enough and
become enough, as you are simply used to going on and on in your work to
improve yourself and whatever you are working on. Though this is energizing for
a time, it is ultimately exhausting. Too much passion is ultimately as exhausting
and deflating as too much disinterest. Also, you may have gotten used to doing a
bunch of tasks or jobs at the expense of taking unstructured time to get to know
who you are.
What are your fears about resting? That you will get lazy or will not get to
the goal you are hoping for, et cetera? The intent of this workbook is not to have
you be mediocre or accomplish less. It was created to assist you in loving
yourself and living now, as you currently are. Also, when you accomplish things,
wouldn’t it be wonderful to experience the pleasure and satisfaction of those
accomplishments before merely moving on in your mind to something else that
you must do? You deserve a moment to stop, taste that pleasure, and take a bow.
What have you accomplished today? (If you think you have not accomplished
anything, think again until you have it.)
Stay with that thought about what you have accomplished for a moment. Resist
any temptation to skip it. While keeping these accomplishments in mind, ask
yourself these questions:
How does it feel to have accomplished these things, even if there were other
things that you may not have gotten to? What encouraging things can you say to
yourself about these accomplishments?
When you were a child, did you have to support my mom or dad emotionally, as
if you were her/his parent? If yes, how does that relate to your current
dilemma of always needing to be bigger/stronger/faster?
If you have trouble sleeping because of all the ambitions on your mind, repeat
this to yourself in your own words: “I am enough. I have done enough today. I
have gotten enough from this day. I have permission to rest.”
I Am Smart, So Why Am I Not Happier?
With avoidance in your attachment style, you feel (and probably are) very
competent—in the areas where you are competent, that is. For example, you may
be a really good problem solver. You can analyze problems, take them apart, and
figure out what to do with them. This is a valuable strength. However, when you
are challenged with excess loneliness and painful emotions and relationships,
you probably similarly figure that the solution lies in focusing, persisting, and
analyzing the problem until you arrive at a solution. Here’s the problem: What if
your analytical mind does not possess the total solution?
Your intuitive mind, which you are apt to trust less, has relevant wisdom, but
in times of trouble, that is probably exactly the part of you that you tell to take a
hike so that you can get “serious” and down to business about solving the
problem with the help of your analytical mind. Roughly speaking, your analytical
mind is located in the left hemisphere of your brain (i.e., the left prefrontal
cortex), while your pattern-perceiving, emotionally aware mind is located in
your right hemisphere and in your limbic/reptilian brain. So if you are trying to
address emotions and relationships, which side of the brain do you figure would
be better at doing so?
The above explains why you can analytically determine and verbalize a
thousand things to describe how you came to be in this kind of emotional distress
without feeling any relief or improvement at all. In this weaker approach to
problem solving, your left brain completes the unemotional analysis based on its
limited knowledge, while your right hemisphere, with its broader intuitive
wisdom, lies silent, dormant, and underutilized.
Solution: give the analytical brain a rest for a moment and call your right
hemisphere into active duty. For example, draw without form. That is, pick up
crayons and draw. See what comes out, even if what emerges is merely scribbles.
This type of unstructured creative activity gives your right hemisphere a venue to
speak about the emotions existing within, even if and in fact because the linear
path from there to a solution is not obvious.
Alternately, ask yourself how you feel (i.e., sad, mad, joyful, jealous, etc.)
about different aspects of a problem you may be facing (i.e., again remember to
address what you feel, not what you think). Sing a little, dance a little, draw, or
otherwise take a moment to leave yourself some creative open space, right now.
Your right hemisphere will thank you for noticing it and allowing it a voice at
last! Much of this section on attachment avoidance is in fact intended to help you
balance your use of your brain by calling the right hemisphere into “active duty.”
In summary, you lean on your analytical left brain too much and assume that
logic is the only factor in the path to solution. By devaluing the element of
emotions in understanding yourself and in making decisions, you have
unintentionally failed to include key information you need when making decisions
about your life. Practice contacting your right hemisphere and your more primal,
limbic brain through taking in the arts and by expressing your own arts (however
awkward it feels at first) so that your brain may become complete and balanced,
and all parts of it have the opportunity to “speak” and ventilate.
Getting to Know the Right Hemisphere of
Your Brain
As noted in the discussion above, your right hemisphere, which is rich in
neuronal connections to your limbic, emotional brain, may show itself more
easily in abstract drawings, unstructured writing about your day, dancing or
singing. Given that, let us do something where you can quickly check out your
right hemi in motion and begin to understand its pervasive impact and presence.
First, think of a routine task you tend to strongly dislike and put off (e.g.,
some aspect of housework, some type of paperwork, calling a certain family
member you feel obligated to speak with, etc.).
Which stations do you think are most likely to relax and open your mind (i.e., not
to soothe you to sleep, but to relax and open you)?
Try the stations you just listed above, soak in the music for a few minutes, and
then start the task you also listed above that you normally avoid. What did you
notice about the differences in how the stations impacted your ability to move
efficiently and effectively into the task?
Which station was the most effective for helping you to relax, stop fighting the
task, and move into getting it accomplished?
How did that station impact your thoughts and emotions?
How do you make sense of this? What is your understanding of the impact of the
right hemisphere on what appears at first glance to be solely a left hemisphere
activity (i.e., planning and tasking)?
It is possible that you want to erase this effect of the right hemisphere so that
your left hemisphere alone is in control. This is a futile battle, since it is a battle
against reality. However, you can make friends with your right hemisphere and
become proficient in helping it express itself. Eventually, as your sophistication
with this hemisphere grows, you can choose to include some of its input as you
make decisions, and you can be kind to this part of your brain by effectively
expressing and releasing it (as through art and music) when it has distress without
the words to ventilate that distress.
Finding Your Satisfactions and Pleasures
If you identify with Attachment Avoidance, you probably move so fast that you
have a difficult time finding deep, lasting satisfactions. In addition, as noted in
the exercises above, it may take an extra moment to listen for the wisdom of your
emotions, intuition, and right hemisphere, whereas if you make decisions too fast,
you lose all of that valuable input from yourself. Once school is out and obvious
goals no longer come along, you have to construct your own goals, and this is
where you may lose out on satisfaction by flying into random, constant motion
and/or getting very anxious and jaded about life not having purpose. For example,
you may rush into something you are not wholeheartedly interested in just to fill a
void and perhaps also to prevent the stillness that allows painful emotions to
enter your awareness.
Everyone gets sensations or feelings that tell them they need to have
something or do something. However, if you move too fast in response to that
feeling rather than slow while listening and letting what you actually need
become clear, you will just jump into some action that does not scratch your itch.
Imagine feeling vague discomfort and jumping into action to clean the house and
finish projects, not realizing that what you truly need is something totally
different, such as, say, to find a way to have more time with your best friend. An
organized space is nice, but it would not be the same or as satisfying as getting
what you really wanted, leaving you to fly into other aimless action trying to
silence the remaining vague discomfort. It’s better to know you want blueberries
than to just leave it at generally wanting fruit, later feeling vague dissatisfaction
as you eat an apple. Take the time to develop clarity about your needs before
taking action, or you will be continually hungry for satisfaction despite working
very hard for that satisfaction.
Similarly, distractions, while great for momentary rescue from intense pain,
rarely satisfy when overused. Anything you charge out to get before knowing
what you actually need is simply a distraction and/or addiction if done
repetitively. Instead, find what you actually love and need, and by doing so, find
your voice. Here’s how: The next time you have that feeling of vague need or
discomfort, before you know it, you will feel the tension that you “must” go do
something. It will not be a light energy of wanting and going to get. Rather, it will
be the tense energy of grabbing at something to try to end the sensation of unease.
So then, stop. Don’t move. Breathe. Ask yourself, “What am I actually feeling?
What’s going on? Am I sad or angry or anxious or…? What is it that I actually
need right now?”
It is almost a guarantee that if you stop in this way to take the time to reflect
on what you actually need and only then fly into action, your actions will now be
geared toward your actual need and thus will satisfy you much more than those
repetitive, automatic distractions or addictions. Those actions, post self-
reflection, are now an expression of who you are, instead of just being about
cutting off unpleasant feelings.
Practice the above repeatedly when you feel the impulse to prematurely fly
into motion, and ask yourself to be still for a moment. During that pause, ask the
useful, targeted questions. What are you feeling and thinking? Based on that,
what do you actually need, or what do you need to do? Allow the answers to
come rather than grabbing hard for them and watching the answers slip through
your fingers.
Getting Comfortable with Change
If avoidance is currently a strong part of your attachment style, chances are you
have greater difficulty than most in dealing with change. See whether or not the
following sounds like you so you can decide if this activity applies to you: I like
to master, even over-master, tasks and skills as a way to build my confidence. As
a result, I do some things incredibly well, and yet my world becomes limited at
times because I do not take on many new challenges (e.g., new social
experiences). I engage in intense repetition, and do gain mastery through this, but
at the cost of failing to try new things. As a result, I sometimes stay with the same
activities (e.g., a job) long beyond the time that my interest has waned. I protest
at changes, fighting them wherever possible.
Some changes should be fought if they violate your basic values, but if your
habit is to fight change as a rule, or if you are more disturbed than most by
change, please read on in this activity.
How do you embrace change? Well, first you must remove barriers. What
are your barriers to change?
For example, if you perceive change as a threat to feeling secure and
confident because you must learn something unfamiliar that you have not yet
mastered, or if you fear you will not be able to adjust, then you can start to
understand your barrier to working with change. If you tend to “catastrophize”
that all is lost and irreparable damage has been done, each time the winds of
change blow, you again have your answer—this time that your negative
expectations about change make it more traumatizing for you. There are many
other barriers to embracing change.
Think of the last major change you encountered (pick one that did not challenge
your most basic values) as a memory aid to have in mind when answering these
questions:
1) What is your biggest barrier to embracing change? That is, what are you most
afraid of happening, or afraid of losing, when something changes?
2) What thoughts/self-talk could you use to soothe that fear (e.g., evidence of
major changes you have adjusted well to in the past, knowing how you would
recover if you or someone/something you loved were injured by change)?
3) Think of a time when a massive unwanted change came that you coped with
well or that initially bowled you over but you recovered from. What was the
nature of that change, and how did you cope and/or recover? What helped you do
that effective coping and recovery?
4) Think of a time when an unavoidable change came and you held on tight trying
to fight or stop it. What impact did that effort have on your body and mind?
5) How can you predict when you will be powerless to prevent change, versus
situations where you might prevail if you persist?
7) How would you like to cope with and respond to unavoidable changes?
When Asking for Help Does Not Mean I Am
Weak
Ask yourself this question: “When do I ask for help?” If the word “never” sails
off your lips, this activity is for you. Consider asking for help to be kind of like
eating Brussels sprouts. It may not go down smooth, but it sure makes you
stronger at your core, and it truly is good for your health.
What is strength? What is weakness? Well, a central tenet of this book is that
strength endures over time, more like steel that flexes than the brittle twig that
looks strong for a moment but then is snapped by a strong wind. Strength does not
arise solely from kicking or pushing yourself harder. Think about this: If a house
looks like a strong fortress to others from the outside but lacks structural support
beams on the inside, what happens to that house over time? How does that house
without sufficient support hold up in an earthquake or a tornado?
I remember a colleague who was working very hard coordinating a mental
health program. Everyone liked her because she was fun and energized.
However, she was also a perfectionist and stressed herself a great deal about
doing a flawless job. Her fatal error was that she pretended to everyone as if she
was feeling great, even as the effects of her stress had begun to accumulate.
Finally, she became exhausted and weak. She snapped at people; the quality of
both her work tasks and her professional relationships deteriorated. She became
completed demoralized and left—not only the job, but also the profession.
Imagine if she had just acknowledged to her very understanding supervisor, “I am
really stressed, and I need to talk about it.” The world needs your skills, and for
you to offer them consistently, so you need to maintain yourself in a manner that
keeps you strong.
It is good to push yourself, sometimes, to test your limits and spread your
wings, but how do you know when you are ultimately weakening versus
strengthening yourself? How do you discern when you are going too far? You
probably came to this book because you were exhausting yourself, pushing
yourself, and not seeking enough connection and support. Maybe you just didn’t
know how to effectively seek enough support to maintain your strength. Let’s help
you clarify your thought process.
What is the most burdensome responsibility that you are currently carrying alone,
and what makes it so burdensome?
If you get disappointed and don’t get what you need, how will you cope with
being disappointed?
How will you respond to your pride, which may tell you that you should not want
and do not need help?
What is your biggest social fear (e.g., being rejected, disrespected, ignored,
mocked, not measuring up in some way, feeling humiliated about not knowing
how to connect, etc.)?
If that fear came true, what do you imagine is the worst thing that could happen to
you?
If the fear has comes true, how will you go about recovering?
Do you fear turning in a less than strong performance (as at work)? If so, how do
you fear others’ opinions of you would change if you began to falter in the
standards you have set for yourself?
If you find yourself fearing being unneeded and wind up helping others
compulsively, consider this: If nobody was highly dependent on you (e.g., for
concrete assistance, for entertainment, for money or sex, etc.), what is it about
you that would keep them coming back? If you currently feel the answer is
nothing, how do you want to change your view about your value so that you can
answer this question differently a year from now?
As a follow-up question to the last, again only if your fear relates to being
unneeded: In addition to help and assistance, what do you think keeps people
bonded over time? Please be detailed and specific as you respond.
What types of safety do you need from yourself and from a relationship that make
it easier to share your true thoughts and feelings with another person? What is in
your control in building that safety you need in order to be freer and to truly be
yourself?
If you want to further develop your own qualities that bond others to you over
time, even when they generally need little from you, what is your next step?
(Completing this book is also a significant step in that direction.)
Healing My Deeper Emotional Injuries
“Now hold on,” you might say. “Things might not have been perfect, but I would
not say I have been injured.” If you have Attachment Avoidance, you probably
have injuries that you do not initially see, and thus do not attend to. Unseen but
powerful, they may control your ability to get closer to other people, outside of
your conscious awareness and control.
You can take the power back from this insidious, pervasive influence. Doing
so requires acknowledging the possibility that you might have some emotional
damage, so that you orient to the focus of doing the work to start healing the
wounds. Avoiding this work leaves you wide open to taking in the human
equivalent of strays, and they will indeed do what strays do—they will bite you.
Certainly, they cannot nourish you, except perhaps by giving you the fleeting
pleasure of being briefly powerful in feeling as if you have the capacity to help
them. If you do not work on this issue, you may remain in a position of wanting to
save others, thus attracting weak strays that eventually sap you dry. Worse,
distracted by the dramas created in being with such people, you won’t get to
know yourself deeply, and thus neither will anybody else.
Having Attachment Avoidance suggests that sometime in your childhood,
your primary caretakers showed you that they were either too intrusive or angry
to be worth getting their support, or they were consistently incapable of giving
you warmth and affection. Perhaps they even had a little warmth, but the cost to
you of getting it (e.g., denying your own personality and becoming exactly who
they wanted you to be) was too high.
Perhaps your primary caretaker was downright emotionally or physically
abusive (incest more commonly predisposes one to develop anxiety in attachment
rather than avoidance), or maybe he or she was so morally repugnant as to
disgust you into keeping a distance, despite your emotional needs. For example,
if your father had warmth for you but was violent with your mother, your disgust
with his abusive behavior toward her could have precluded you from opening
yourself to any warmth he possessed for you, even if you were lonely.
2) Regarding the story you wrote above, if you could tell the person who hurt you
about the pain he/she caused you, what would you say?
3) What made that person incapable of responding to you in a warmer way (e.g.,
he/she was brought up harshly and/or abused, etc.)?
4) How did this experience, and perhaps others like it, lead you to stop trusting
that love and warmth would be available to you?
5) Instead of seeking affection from this person, what did you turn to when you
needed comfort (e.g., obsessing about a desired girlfriend/boyfriend, possessions
you wanted, food, alcohol or cigarettes, etc.)?
6) Travel back now, with the wisdom and wider experience you have today, and
talk to your younger self. What supportive and encouraging things would you tell
your younger self, and how would you help your younger self understand the pain
you experienced back at that time (e.g., helping yourself understand parental
limitations that had nothing to do with you, helping yourself see a larger world
filled with others capable of being supportive, etc.)? What you would say to your
younger self?:
As a physical expression of support, hold yourself, rub your hands across
your chest and stomach, and let each hand come to rest on your opposite elbow.
Squeeze a little—giving yourself a good hug.
How Do I Let My Guard Down?
How do you know if your guard is up? If a woman/man rejected you, is there
somebody you would soon call to discuss your pain with? If you got a bad
performance evaluation at work, or received a low grade in school, is there a
specific person you would turn to in order to talk it over with? The operative
word here is “would” versus “could.” If you are least likely to talk to somebody
at the very moment you need to, that’s a good indicator your guard is up.
However, if your guard is up, there are also other missed opportunities where
you could have told somebody a little something about yourself, on a smaller
scale than the scenarios just discussed, to bring you and the other person a little
closer.
You probably have difficulty sharing your thoughts in the moment, winding
up feeling stuck where you want to say something but don’t know what to say.
Others miss out on the pleasures of experiencing your spontaneity, whether you
would want to discuss fun or trouble, but are not allowing yourself to. Being
more analytic, you probably have a sense of how to determine with whom you
can let your guard down, so the bigger challenge is how to actually let it down.
Let’s work on that.
1) Look back a couple of activities to “Naming My Social Fears.” What did you
list in the first question when you named your biggest social fear?
That fear is likely a big cheerleader for keeping your guard, or defense, up
in order to keep others out. You need to gradually face your fear with those you
find trustworthy. Try to avoid any temptation to make sudden, massive changes in
the way you construct your boundaries with others, to avoid shocking them or
yourself, but it is time to push yourself gently to gradually make these subtle
shifts.
2) How and with whom can you take small risks to face that fear you named
above?
3) If you get hurt, and those risks don’t happen to produce the results you want on
the first try, what would you say to both encourage and comfort yourself so that
you might later feel willing to experiment some more?
4) Letting down your guard basically means being more spontaneous with your
thoughts, feelings, and reactions in the moment, dialing down your filter a bit so
your speech and actions increase in genuineness and authenticity. In so doing,
others get to know you better. It means risking some negative social reaction to
you as well as knowing how to pick
yourself up if your speech/behavior is poorly received. Who in your life is a
good model, striking the balance between spontaneity and reserve that you would
like to cultivate in yourself?
6) Knowing that your “plan” to avoid pain may have some utility but inhibits your
spontaneity when overused, how can you loosen your grip on it when in a social
situation?
Resolve now that you will allow yourself to be freer and looser in social
situations. Resolve to build your willingness to tolerate the tensions inside you
that are required to be open in social situations.
What Part/s of My Physical Health and
Needs Have I Been Neglecting the Most?
Place a check next to the physical need/s that you have been neglecting:
Eating three meals a day/eating a diet that includes enough healthy food
What can you commit to doing as a next step toward addressing the physical
need/s you noted above?
Speedy Surface Interactions and
Slower, Deeper Communication
Do you find yourself speeding through interactions even when you would actually
like to get to know your conversation partner better? If so, this one’s for you.
You probably feel comfortable with structure, a clear role, and a clear job to
do in the conversation. Your motto might be “so what” or “what’s the point,”
frequently jumping ahead to find the functional purpose of the conversation,
perhaps finishing others’ sentences aloud or in your mind. However, a purpose
you may miss is that the value in some conversations is to get to know the person
in front of you and let him/her get to know you, not merely discussing actions you
are or will be involved in.
To slow down and let yourself be known, you can consider the need to find a
way to contain the anxiety that this slowing down may cause you. You also need
to anticipate your mind wanting to rescue you from this anxiety with temptations
about other things (anything else) that you suddenly and urgently want to go do, or
thoughts telling you that it is silly or not worthwhile to linger. Don’t trust that
lying mind. Stay!
Many find it helpful when beginning such an interaction, where the purpose is to
get to know each other, to work at:
2) Remembering the other person is friendly and not heavily evaluating you
(unless proven otherwise)
3) Continuing to breathe
5) Getting curious about what it feels like to connect with this other person
Try this, and then come back and answer these questions:
1) What was the hardest thing about staying present in the conversation?
2) What was I anxious about when I slowed down to stay in the conversation?
3) What helped me manage that anxiety so I could stay a little longer in the
conversation?
Shame
Shame is a broad and interesting topic. In some cases shame can be useful,
namely when we violate the code of conduct we hold ourselves to. However,
when we are avoidant in attachment, our shame is often outsized and
dysfunctional, and we are rigid and unforgiving of ourselves as well as becoming
our own worst and loudest critic.
Excessive shame may be keeping you distant from yourself and others. This will
become clearer as you work through this section. For now, without filtering your
thoughts or hesitating, answer the following question for yourself: What thing that
you have done or what personal characteristic are you most ashamed about?
Shame keeps us distant from ourselves because we do not like and accept
some part of ourselves that we must then keep hidden from others. The more
shame we feel, the more of ourselves we do not allow ourselves to see and
accordingly do not allow others to see. We may also be extremely critical of
others when they themselves have this “dreaded” characteristic.
Take a moment. Let the answer come to you rather than trying to grab for it, and
just consider this question: If you listed an event above, how can you forgive
yourself for this event while taking steps so that you will not do it again? If it was
a quality you listed above, how can you work at healing this unhealed area in
yourself that you are ashamed of while accepting its presence in an unhealed state
for now? Try to disengage from this book, and when the answer arrives, come
back and record it below:
What is the prescription you have been pushing upon yourself? That is, define the
ingredients of your behaviors/thoughts/emotions that would make you “good” if
you were following them:
Therefore:
What is your response to the possibility that you are already fundamentally good
and that if you allowed yourself to follow your intuition more often (not reactive
to raw emotion, but rather responding to your emotion-informed intuition), you
would be stronger and healthier for yourself and others than when you are trying
to fulfill what you are “supposed” to be?
What do you lose in letting go of the idea that you must work hard and improve if
you are to remain or become a worthwhile human being? It is not nothing that you
lose…it is something. For you, what is it?
As you envision the possibility that you do not have to do something more or
become something else in order to already be fundamentally good, how do you
feel?
Why Do I Work to the Point of
Insanity to Be Competent/Perfect?
We all wish to feel confident. We all want to feel that we have a place in this
world and something valuable to be and to offer. Those who received the
emotional attunement, attention, and responsiveness they needed to become
securely attached during childhood have natural confidence. They do not work
very hard for confidence, but rather simply possess and emanate it. Securely
attached people are thus often emotionally calm enough to learn well. A well-
researched rule in psychology about learning and performing well is that people
must be just a bit anxious in order to be motivated, but not so highly anxious as to
become disorganized in their thoughts. Securely attached people are generally
operating within this window of optimal anxiety, which is ideal for learning and
performing tasks well.
People with Attachment Avoidance, if not feeling manifest anxiety, have
defenses working hard to prevent them from becoming directly aware of their
anxiety, though ultimately there is a great deal of anxiety skulking around just out
of view. They also pressure themselves tremendously to perform well, and take
failures particularly hard. In contrast, those with Secure Attachment reap dual
benefits when it comes to confidence: 1) They simply feel confident (but not
arrogant), even when they are totally incompetent at a given task. This is because
their valuation of themselves, their sense of self-worth, is not excessively
dependent on competence. 2) Because of this calm, self-loving approach to even
domains where they are incompetent, their minds are still calm and clear enough
to learn, paving the way for them to become rapidly competent at tasks at which
they were previously incompetent.
With Attachment Avoidance, the emotional attunement and responsiveness
needed by the child was not available, and given that the parent/s was not able to
provide this soothing, the child learned to do this for him/herself. But a young
child is rarely as effective at soothing him/herself when distressed as a well-
functioning parent would be. For example, when was the last time you saw a
five-year-old crying in distress who was able to talk himself through how upset
he was, mention how hard it was to deal with what he was dealing with, give
himself a kiss and hug, and finally bring himself into a positive emotional place?!
If the parent cannot do it for the young child, the child simply learns to pretend
that everything is fine and that he/she is not really that upset anyway. He/she
makes do by ignoring his/her true experience.
Studies show such children are highly physiologically reactive to stressors.
They only appear on the surface to be calm, but do lack conscious awareness of
their stress, and thus are unable to respond to effectively calm themselves. As a
consequence, they do not develop awareness of their stress nor the skills to
soothe that tension, and as a result they do not develop sturdy confidence in
themselves.
People with Attachment Avoidance commonly work to master the outside
world as a solution of how to avoid awareness of internal self-doubt, and thus
they work extremely hard. If they want to avoid experiencing real self-doubt, they
must be certain to become strong enough at their daily tasks so as to feel flawless
in executing them and thus confident. Since this confidence is built solely upon
performance, it is fragile. One failure may result in questioning one’s entire self-
worth. Perfection must therefore be absolute.
While this of course does leave those with Attachment Avoidance quite
skillful in their areas of expertise—a genuine strength—it also leads to
reluctance to try new things that they will initially be unskillful with, and also
leaves them feeling like a hamster on a wheel…no matter what they do or
accomplish, these accomplishments are just never enough to fully silence their
self-doubt.
2) Without straining or turning this new plan into something you must do just
right, what internal self-talk could you use to gently ease back from your
perfectionism?
As your security grows, you will naturally be less harsh with yourself. What
you can do for now is gently ease away from perfectionism, beginning to build
confidence in a different and more robust way by attuning to and responding to
yourself.
Imagine a world where you enjoy being competent, but do not feel you have
to be in order to feel good about yourself. You could allow yourself to fail and
encourage yourself to try again out of an inner feeling of being sure of yourself
and valuing yourself, regardless of your achievements. You could allow yourself
to be sad without feeling weak, and you could also encourage yourself and gain
others’ support so that you don’t simply remain sad. Imagine for a moment having
this love for yourself and freedom from pressure.
If you are able to imagine this world, you now have a sense of how you will feel
as you develop Secure Attachment. That feeling can be yours much of the time.
Briefly describe the feeling you had:
If, on the other hand, you felt resistance to the imagining part of this exercise,
please answer these three questions: 1) What do you worry you might lose if you
were to imagine in the way the exercise encourages? 2) Describe, in contrast,
what you lose by continuing to push hard for perfection. 3) Are you more willing
to lose what you described in response to question one or two, and why?
Lightness and Levity
Let us now take the preceding discussion on perfectionism one step further. In the
strain imposed on you by attempting to be perfect and in striving hard to “ensure”
that both you and your life will be all right, there is an additional common
casualty…humor. If you are excessively driven, that unceasing laser focus
prevents humor. Everything your thoughts focus on feels extremely important, and
this intensity creates drama for you. You speak with intensity. You walk straight
ahead swiftly without looking around. You bury yourself in your work and
projects. You may also ignore attempts others make to reach out to you…those
attempts may not even register in your awareness because you are so intensely
focused. Again, many ways of thinking and living can be emotionally healthy if
not prolonged (e.g., when facing a deadline), but if excessive focus is your
general way of life, then your days, while intense, are exhausting and probably
ultimately unsatisfying.
What would it be like to care very much about something, but nonetheless
keep a light spirit about it? Have you ever done this?
Describe an example where you cared deeply about something, but maintained a
playful attitude in how you thought about the topic and also in how you discussed
the topic with others.
Describe the experience of that lightness. That is, what were your emotions, how
did your mind feel, what was the associated level of stress you felt, et cetera?
What are your worst fears about what would happen if you were lighter and more
gently playful on a more frequent basis? Are they likely to come true, and if so,
can you prevent that?
If you were lighter and playful in attitude more often, how do you imagine your
life might actually change?
A lot of practice may be needed to lighten up. Don’t give up, and don’t get
serious and kick yourself! Just keep gently reminding yourself to inject that levity.
I Am Not Here Simply to Be a Hero. My
Purpose in Life
Is Not to Emotionally Rescue Others or to
Be Somebody Else’s “Tool”
One thing that breeds Attachment Avoidance is growing up with messages that
you need to take emotional care of a parent. For example, if your mom became
overly dependent on you as her confidante or savior through her troubled times,
then this activity is for you. To effectively evolve, you will have to understand
how you got sucked into being a “tool” (perhaps by your parent/s), where your
job is perpetually to be a rescuer for others, and then to leave that pattern
behind. Otherwise you will have helpless, weak, or possibly even parasitic
people clinging to you, sapping your energy, leaving you without the energy for
and focus on maturing to the point that you can ask yourself what you want. You
work hard, so that work needs to be directed toward things you find satisfying
in life. If not, in time you will simply burn out your body and mind.
How much control did you actually have in saving that person from his/her pain?
When we could not succeed in rescuing a parent from distress in the past, we
often still try to fix it in the present. If you could have saved her/him, you would
have. However, if you couldn’t, as is generally the case, who have you been
trying to save more recently in your life? That is, who in modern times have you
substituted for that parent and are now trying to rescue?
Do you allow highly needy people close to you, to provide you with fresh
opportunities to finally “get it right” and successfully rescue them?
As a final note, this activity should not be construed to mean that we should
not actively seek to meet others’ needs. We do need to meet others’ needs, but we
must also attune to ourselves to know when we have done enough for them,
regardless of whether or not they are improved. Also, listening to the others in
your life so that you accurately know what their specific needs are (versus doing
things for them with no attunement to what they are actually asking for), and then
stopping after you have done what you deem a reasonable amount is the
recommended approach you should strive for. If you help out of love for them
instead of out of a need to at last feel powerful by successfully rescuing, you will
know when to stop instead of exhausting yourself, and you will provide the kind
of help that expects them to participate in being helped and thus actually leaves
them stronger.
A Very Different Way of Relating to Others
The previous exercise showed you that you may not be simply a “tool” to provide
for others’ needs. If that is how you have often been with others, well then, what
else could you become?
You could become a person who is not excessively involved in helping or
rescuing, nor getting helped or rescued. Instead, you and another person could
simply be two humans meeting, being curious about each other, and reserving
helping behaviors for times when one of you is in genuine distress, without using
it as the primary way of interacting.
What are some fun and/or meaningful things you might like to do with somebody
else?
What are some things about your activities, hobbies, or background that might
interest others (e.g., you live in the city but grew up in the country, you love
cooking, you secretly love to listen to sappy music, you like to build model
planes, etc.)? You might, for example, mention a couple of these things while
doing one of the fun activities you listed above, when there is a place in the
conversation that it fits.
I commit that while doing that thing, instead of being silent, talking about
solely superficial things, or talking only about my goals, I will instead let them
get to know just a little more about who I am, my background, and/or my non-
work-related interests.
The point of this workbook is getting to know yourself, and the point of this
activity is working on sharing that new knowledge with others in order to build
more social contact based on getting to know each other, instead of building
social contact based only on being “of use” to the other.
Continue to Help Others, but with the Right
Intention
The purpose of this exercise is to help you learn how to help others in a way that
leaves you rejuvenated instead of exhausted, as well as helping people in a way
that helps them feel their own power and become stronger. It is about learning to
help in a way that is based on wanting to give, versus giving based primarily on
your dependence on the need to feel strong and effective.
While you are not here to be somebody else’s tool, you can continue to be
helpful in this world. You are probably good at helping others, and it can be a
good source for you of feeling connected to the world and seeing what you have
to offer. The difference is the intention behind the helping, and this issue of the
importance of intention cannot be overstated. The kind of helping discussed in the
“tool” exercise was the kind of helping that began when you were a child helping
your parent, reversing the normal parent-child hierarchy, having inappropriate
power in the home, and losing respect for the effectiveness of your parent/s. That
kind of helping ends up being done for the feeling of power/control it gives, as
well as the assumption that others do not have the wisdom you have—it is a more
arrogant form of helping. You came to it honestly, but if you are ready, it is time
for a change in your style of helping others.
The kind of helping in this exercise is different. This kind of helping has
respect for the skills and (possibly buried) wisdom of the person being helped.
You can offer something that benefits him/her, but you do so with respect for
his/her autonomy and voice in how you help him/her, to the full extent he/she truly
is mentally capable of participating in being helped. Most essentially, in this
style of helping, you do not need him/her to be dependent on you or to praise you.
In contrast, in this style of helping, you already know that you are strong and thus
are not reliant on the person’s adulation to demonstrate your strength to you. It
may feel nice, but you are not dependent on reassurance that you are smart, wise,
attractive, physically strong, and/or otherwise valuable. So why do you help
then? Simply because the individual needs it, you care, and it does not overtax
you to do so. It may pain you to see him/her in discomfort, so you help.
As a simple personal example, I give to charity, but there is a particular way
I do so. Whereas I once focused on giving to agencies that simply gave resources
to people in need, I now emphasize those agencies that give microloans that
people can use to build a business and then repay the loan. In this way, I can
relend the same money many times to help many people. I have the resources to
help, and since I give in a way that encourages others to pull from their own
skills, I get the resource back to re-loan, rather than exhausting my resources in
providing that help. Also, my resources go a long way as I re-loan the same
money again and again.
1) What is an example of a time when you have given in this healthy style, where
you gave from a place of already feeling strong and solid versus needing the
helped person to feel dependent on you in order to feel strong yourself?
2) Describe a time when you engaged a person’s own skills and wisdom while
you helped him/her. That is, consider a time where instead of taking over in your
way of helping, you actually helped that person to become stronger in the process
of helping him/her.
3) What are some examples of how you would like to give in the future?
Remember, this style of helping others is meant to help you feel lighter and
give you the satisfaction of helping someone come to his/her feet, instead of
fostering his/her ongoing dependence, which eventually bleeds you dry and
leaves him/her weaker.
Repairing Angry Interactions
If your evaluation of yourself depends primarily on your accomplishments, you
may work extremely hard to gain them, and you may also have some excessive
pride about successes. The tension created within you by the obsession with
accomplishing can breed tension and snappiness with yourself and others. The
good thing is that this means you will get to practice repairing your relationships.
Secure attachments are based not simply on smooth interactions but rather, on the
quick and thorough repair of the relationship after conflicts. For example,
marriage research3 has found that happily married couples are not those without
conflict, but rather they are those whose conflicts are followed by swift and
thorough repairs.
Everyone makes errors in relationships, and everyone experiences conflict
in close relationships. Some patch the resulting holes, and the trust growing from
those efforts leads the relationship to become stronger. Some never make the
repairs, clinging staunchly to being “right,” valuing facts and righteousness over
love and the need for compromise, fearful of losing power and the chance to
“make a point.” Attachment Avoidance is fear-based. Fear can be overcome (and
I know how you like that!).
Think of someone with whom you have been angry recently.
How can you accept the other person’s perspective for what it is, without that
acceptance meaning that your own is “wrong”? That is, how can you allow both
points of view to coexist?
What did you do wrong in the interaction? (The other person may have done
wrong as well, but this activity is focused on you, so do your best to remain open
instead of getting defensive.)
When and how will you attempt to make repairs with this person?
If this person does not accept your attempts to fix things, how will you cope with
the pain you may feel?
I Am Me and You Are You
As discussed previously, you may have been in a position during childhood
where few of your emotional needs were focused on and met, and in fact, you
may have been caretaking a parent whose emotional health was impaired,
resulting in a reversal of child and parent roles. If so, one thing you learned was
that your point of view was often the healthiest in the home. However, if you
carry that view into the world at large as an adult, it means that whenever you
have even low-level anxiety, you may try to resolve the anxiety by taking over a
situation. While your own competence is a wonderful strength, the problem is that
at a gut level you may carry the unconscious assumption that others are simply not
competent enough to collaborate on arriving at a solution.
Similarly, if there is a difference of opinion, you may continue to feel—as
you may have often felt rightfully in childhood—that you are “right” and that the
other person is wrong. We all do this at times, but with avoidance in your
attachment style, you may do this more often and more intensely than someone
with a more secure attachment style.
The problem in adulthood is that everyone you encounter is not your
(minimally competent) parent. Rather, many people are competent and wish to be
treated as such with respect to their right to have a differing opinion. Also, if you
require that others must always agree with you, you may become surrounded by
dependent people who eventually will sap you dry of energy, as you unilaterally
“help” them repeatedly. Also, you cannot be known for being your authentic self
when others are that dependent on you for some form of help on a constant basis.
If your main function is to help dependent others, it is hard to be known as an
individual and the full person you are.
Finally, for relationships to continue and strengthen over time, there must be
room for two people to exist, and that means allowing different points of view to
stand, accepting that two people need not agree on everything, and that attempts at
converting each other to the other ’s point of view should be avoided.
1) In addressing pride, try to set aside any self-criticism about it, and begin with
being open with yourself about that pride. In particular, describe your beliefs
where you feel that you are stronger/smarter/know better than others.
2) Have others been angered or hurt by this pride? If so, who and when?
3) Do others involved with you tend to become less competent over time because
you coddle them too much and take over complete control?
4) What do you think you may lose when you do not listen to differing points of
view others have to offer?
5) When someone has a different point of view and you do not convert him/her to
your way of thinking or allow him/her to convert you to his/her way of thinking,
what else can you do to consider this different point of view while also holding
on to your own?
6) Can you think of a time where you held on to your own point of view but
allowed that opinion to become better by letting another influence it and improve
it a little? Spend a little time considering this, as it is a tough question. If so, what
was your opinion originally, whose influence did you allow, and how did your
perspective become stronger/more nuanced and complex?
7) If you allow others to influence you at times, how do you still remain “you?”
(Hint: who is the one deciding whether or not to allow you to be influenced at a
given point in time?)
Allowing others to retain their own points of view without feeling that this
threatens your own point of view is important in helping your relationships
sustain and be close over time. No one wants to be taken over by another. In
order to have a relationship, there must be room for two people to exist. In the
words of a pair of experienced couples’ psychologists (who are also married to
each other), “When two become one, then there are none.”4
Social Coping
If your attachment style includes a lot of avoidance, this exercise is probably
going to be a little challenging. It is also likely to be extremely useful to your
happiness and to that of others who care about you.
1) Think of the last two highly stressful situations in your life. What were they,
and what made them stressful?
2) What were your primary responses to the stressors (e.g., turning to friends for
help, becoming angry and arguing, focusing more on work/school,
running/working out, drugs/alcohol/cigarettes/extra caffeine/overeating, drawing,
reading, pretending the problem does not exist and trying not to think about it,
TV/computer, etc.)?
3) Were you able to fully describe the situation and your thoughts and feelings to
somebody as you were moving through it—describing it as the person living it on
the inside (e.g., including feelings) instead of as an outside newscaster reporting
on it (e.g. just the facts, with no depth)? If so, who did you talk with in that more
in-depth style?
How do you imagine that this response of withdrawing affects relationships with
others close to you? Are they hurt by being shut out or pleased not to have to deal
with your distress, et cetera? What do those reactions say about how they feel
about you? How do you feel about their reactions?
If you tend to become irritable with those who could be your support system
when you are stressed, what would you like to do instead to cope with the
pressure you feel?
What is your biggest concern about asking for others’ support when you are
stressed? Do you have experience to give you data in speaking to the accuracy of
that concern?
Social Prioritizing: Deepening Select
Relationships Instead of Having Light
Relationships with Dozens
Is everybody your “best friend” who “knows me really well”? This one’s for
you! Okay, you have loads of social energy and people really like you. That’s
great. However, you are likely avoiding deeper discomforts with all the noise.
As fun as it is to pop around, if your phone stopped buzzing from texts and calls,
or if you had nothing to do on a given night, you just might panic. “Be stuck with
MYSELF! What?!” Well, having fewer but truly close friends is akin to not
hiding from yourself, for those people know you well enough to reflect back who
you truly are. You see yourself when you are with them, because they know who
you are. This can be scary if you are not yet sure that you like who you are.
When you have a few very close relationships with family and/or friends,
you are not likely to feel lonely in the way you do when you have a large number
of people with whom you only loosely associate. To be known so closely, and to
know them as closely in return, means that you have support and love, not in
theory but in a form you can feel. This is good to work toward, as feeling this
love builds strong confidence to accomplish your dreams and to be of use to this
world, which sorely needs your services.
One point to clarify as well is that simply discussing your “skeletons” and
neuroses with friends does not make these relationships deep enough to be truly
fulfilling. What deepens relationships is that you do some living with each other,
living shared experiences, not (solely) that you bared your soul at the coffee shop
but then each of you went to your separate homes. Bringing people into your life
is different than having them spectate. If both of these things occur (i.e., living
shared experiences together and also hearing about each other ’s distinct lives),
then the depth is strong. In regard to hearing about one another ’s lives, the more
that the discussion includes information about what made you happy/sad/angry,
any shame/inadequacies or confidence you felt, or anything about YOU (versus
merely details about others or the situation), the greater the depth of that
conversation.
Answer the following questions for yourself: If I was really ashamed
because I had done something bad, who would I tell? If I were in the hospital,
who would I most need to see? For who do I reciprocally do inconvenient favors
(e.g., take him/her to the airport, show up for his/her family events and stay a
good while, watch his/her children, etc.)? Who am I willing to be upset by, and
who am I willing to upset, both of us knowing even during the conflict that we are
each willing to be upset and that our relationship will continue to remain strong?
Who do I spend more extensive time living some life with versus just the rare and
brief moments of a meal or coffee out at a restaurant?
If you have answers to these questions, those are the relationships that have
greater depth. If you do not have answers or have to think long and hard on this
exercise, pay particular attention to deepening some of your relationships. That
deepening can be done, provided that you prioritize this development.
If you had specific people in mind for the preceding questions, why do you
not focus your time and energy primarily on those people? You may be afraid to
put all your eggs in a few friends’ baskets, afraid you could eventually lose them
somehow, and where would that leave you? Similarly, when dating, it is possible
that your boundaries may be poor, wanting to leave other doors cracked open
“just in case,” so others are already attracted to you if you later need them. Your
partners may get very injured by you in this way, especially if they see your true
demeanor in action. Being known only in a limited manner, without depth to your
relationships, means it is natural that you would become lonely and then even
more in need, which would just keep you spinning faster to stay in surface contact
with dozens of pals.
What is the antidote? Well, for starters, simply try to be aware of this
tendency to cultivate a huge number of relationships, which may keep you from
deepening any of them. Engage further, more deeply, with fewer people. Try to
develop relationships where you can answer “yes” to the questions posed to you
earlier in this exercise. Take your time so that the development is gradual and not
jarringly sudden for your people, but also use your strong skills of being
methodical such that you are on the lookout for and take the opportunities to get to
know those people better when opportunities appear.
Getting Curious about Yourself
With avoidance in your style, you may get immersed in your own activities, and
when you are upset, you may get immersed in anger or sadness. However, you
may not have sufficient curiosity about how that emotion was constructed. For
example, you may think to yourself, “I am sad because I can’t have the girl/guy I
want, because my mom/dad/friend/boss/job is not the way I wish, because I am
so lonely, because people I don’t want to bug me keep bugging me,” et cetera.
However, at that point, you think you are in distress merely because you cannot
have what you want, and if you stop here, you could continue to obsess forever
and get nowhere, losing the opportunity to get to know yourself better. Everyone
makes decisions and needs to make some changes so that their lives fit them, but
if you are constantly obsessing about a new change you must have/must avoid,
then this exercise is for you.
If you are to truly develop a satisfying life and existence, you need to go
beyond that statement of believing you are in distress merely because you cannot
have what you want or because you have what you don’t want. The driving force
toward lasting happiness should be building a gentle but persistent curiosity, a
desire to get to know yourself in more depth. Take the example, “I am in pain
because I cannot have the girl I want,” and continue digging more deeply. “Why
do I feel I need her? What is it that she can do for me? How do I imagine I would
feel differently if I had her? What experience inside me am I hoping to create by
being with her? What have I been missing in my life that I needed that I am trying
to replace by having her? If I feel she is such a good match, what does that say
specifically about qualities in a woman that draw me in?”
I think you get the idea. You might think, “And then, so what?! If I still
haven’t got the girl/guy/friend/promotion/respect I want, who cares about
knowing myself?” Well, this part is important to address. This exercise, and in
fact the exiting of Attachment Avoidance, requires the faith that you already have
everything inside yourself to be happy. This is not because you can do a thousand
things to build that happiness, but because if you simply could fully be who you
are, your basic nature is happiness. If you know yourself truly, you would not
have to grab hard at anybody or anything to feel content.
Questions about your feelings, preferences, needs, et cetera can serve to
help you know yourself in much more depth. You also may come to realize that
once you know your needs, there are many roads to Rome instead of obsessing
over only one thing you “must” have. For practice, try it:
Great, now as in the example from paragraph two of this exercise, try asking
yourself questions in the space below about the “you” in your obsession, and then
respond with as much clarity as possible (e.g., Why do I feel I need to have/need
to avoid this? What feeling inside am I trying to produce by getting this/avoiding
this?).
Now let yourself drop pushing for what you want for a few minutes. Forget
about what you want, forget about anything you want, and practice being in the
present, tuning in to your senses of vision, touch, taste, smell, and hearing. Actual
living happens only in the present. That is why hoping for or fearing future events
is not living.
You May Be Terrible at Surrender:
Why You Need to Learn How
Are you always driving toward goals? Are you unable to stop moving? Do you
exhaust yourself at times in the pursuit of your goals? Do you have difficulty
sleeping because of all the plans in your mind? Do you jump into your work
before you have all the information you need? Do you fail to seek others’
expertise when you should?
These qualities are the flip side of some things that really may work for you.
If you are not extreme in the above qualities, you may get a lot done, you may
build many skills out of your independence, and you may be a skillful planner.
However, if you are aiming to build strong relationships with yourself and others,
you cannot always be driving at goals, or you may miss getting to know yourself
and others in depth.
To be balanced, you need to be skillful both in driving forward and also in
surrender, and you must learn how to tell when each style is needed. For
example, if you are going to sleep and having a hard time doing so, does it work
to actively push yourself harder to go to sleep? Imagine if, instead, you just said
to yourself, truly meaning it, “I’ve done/thought/felt enough today, and now I
surrender to my pillow.”
If you are facing a deadline at work, it might be professional suicide to
surrender. Perhaps you need to push hard and make sure you hit the mark. Even in
this scenario, however, you might be more successful if you open yourself to
assistance, information, and the wisdom of others you work with. If your
response is, “Well, how could they help me?” then this is a good question, so stay
with it to see if you can envision ways that they could help.
The skill of surrender is built upon a foundation of having confidence in
yourself that you will expel somebody or something from influencing you
negatively if they repeatedly hurt you or are otherwise generally toxic. In this
way, you build confidence that you will rise again, understanding that a
temporary toxic influence will not destroy you before you are able to recognize
and then expel it.
1) Close your eyes and think, “I open myself to the influence of others, to being
changed by others. If somebody is toxic for me, I can always close myself to that
person’s influence. Therefore I open myself.”
2) Picture a person you know from experience who is routinely harmful to you.
Now say to yourself, “I will not allow that person to continue to injure me. I have
stripped that person of his/her power to harm me. I may have compassion for that
person, but I will not allow him/her access to my heart.”
3) Picture a person who you believe, based on experience, is likely to be
nourishing to your emotional and/or occupational success, someone who you
have not yet brought close to you. Now say to yourself, “I will bring this person a
little closer, not changing my style toward him/her drastically, but I will seek this
person a little more, or allow him/her to seek me. This person is not the answer
to all my problems, and I must not fall into that delusion, but I do want to open the
space to allow some of his/her nourishment to reach and affect me.” What
feelings does this thought pattern elicit within you?
Action Step: Regarding number three (above), what steps can you gradually take
to allow or bring that person a bit closer to you? How will you protect yourself if
that person should turn out to be more harmful than nourishing?
Practicing Receiving from Others
Every relationship involves taking from others and giving to others. The giver
benefits from the experience of giving, and the taker gets to experience having
others meet his/her needs. To be balanced people, we need to be skilled in both
giving and receiving.
With Attachment Avoidance, you would likely be much more comfortable
with giving than you are with asking for help and intentionally receiving from
others. However, in failing to receive, you deprive others of the chance to give,
fail to let them taste their own strength, and ultimately wind up emotionally and
physically exhausted and perhaps resentful that some keep taking from you. Also,
you deprive yourself of what it feels like to receive care from others. The disease
of continuing to unilaterally “over-give” is that others come to believe they must
depend on you more than they truly need to, and so they may then become ever
weaker, ever more dependent upon you, while you find yourself becoming
exhausted over time.
Consider this: Who is too dependent on me, and without being drastic, what
action/s can I take to slowly reduce the support I am overproviding, to allow
them the space to find their own two feet to stand on?
In what ways can I feel potent and powerful, besides having others be overly
dependent upon me?
What help do I need from others right now (e.g., listening to me, some specific
form of more active support)?
How can I clearly and non-defensively let them know what I need?
Learning to Cry to Prevent Becoming Truly
Weak
People with Attachment Avoidance often avoid anything that feels as if it were
weak, perceiving it as indicating a character flaw. However, taking a few
moments to express and release fear or sadness prevents you from breaking down
emotionally and physically. If you are carrying unreleased emotional pressure
without expressing and releasing it, then eventually you will exhaust and injure
yourself. There is also another reason for vulnerability—it allows for you to get
to know yourself, and for others to get to know you as well.
If you know you are capable of helping another person carry a piece of
furniture, then you know you are able to carry furniture—but you know nothing of
the person you are. If you know you can get fifty errands done in a day if you
organize yourself well, then you know that you can be efficient, but you have
learned nothing on a deeper level of yourself. The point here is not to stop doing
errands or helping others (except when it overtaxes and exhausts you, when you
should indeed examine your intention in providing the help). The point is that you
must also get to know who you are, not solely what you can do. Surrendering
yourself allows you to get to know yourself, since in those moments of peace and
vulnerability, you can see what exists below your defenses and beyond your
action.
Crying is a very particular type of surrender, as it acknowledges that you
have been open and vulnerable to the world, have allowed the world to touch
you, and in that interaction, something hurt you. You typically cry as an outgrowth
of being hurt by your experience in interacting with the world. If you are in
contact with the world, then at some point, something will mildly or significantly
injure you. The only way to prevent these injuries is to wall yourself off from the
world, which results in being emotionally distant and impenetrable. Often this
looks rigid, as you become hard and defensive, resisting input from those in the
world. You may then have no problem in wanting to influence the world, but
resist being influenced by it, perhaps because this exposes your vulnerabilities,
which may feel intolerable to you.
This stance lacks the confidence that you can tolerate the discomforts of
being vulnerable without falling apart. If you refuse to risk injury, you are
refusing contact with the world. If you resist contact, you also lose the joy,
richness, and satisfaction of having deeper connection with others in the world.
Crying is a way to acknowledge pain, to be with it, and often you loosen and
lighten up afterward. You also become available for connection with yourself and
others again soon afterward. You have repaired yourself, so to speak, done the
work that was necessary, and now you are ready to rejoin the world at a more
intimate level. Often crying only lasts a few minutes at a time, and yet the benefit
to your ability to be open can be quite immense and lasting.
What might help the tears come (e.g., pictures that remind me of a situation,
particular music, recapturing a memory with full detail, etc.)?
Now see if you can help the tears along by gently but firmly focusing on your
last response, and just let yourself go into it. If you can dig into the sadness but
tears do not actually flow, this is still great, as the point is to facilitate a real
softening to your wounds, however large or small the wound.
What Actually Makes Me Strong?
To become and remain consistently strong, you must know your basic needs and
take care of yourself. You may be tempted to think that having no needs is what
makes you strong. After all, old habits die hard. In truth, everyone has needs, so
failing to know them and provide for them over time can leave you emotionally
and physically weak and injured.
So far this book has contained exercises about listening to yourself in the
moment, thus becoming responsive to yourself moment by moment and meeting
your needs as much as possible. This activity is different. This activity is about
your ongoing needs, those that do not change a lot from moment to moment or day
to day.
Growth:
Recreation:
2) If I have only ten to fifteen minutes, what are my favorite fun or refreshing
things to do with that time?
2) What skills do I have or want that would make me feel more secure at work?
3) If I have a need to feel physically secure, how do I most like to build that
feeling of physical security (e.g., building muscle or self-defense, alarms, etc.)?
Anything you wrote above is not intended to be used to whip yourself into
shape if you are not doing them. Rather, these are things to refresh in your mind
from time to time so that you remember to seek them when they are available
because they are important to your physiological and emotional self-care.
Your Voice Tone
Your voice tone may be a great indicator of your energy level, your mood, and
your connection to yourself and others.
When people are genuinely and deeply excited about something, how do you
recognize that in their tone of voice? When you are really involved and intrigued
by a conversation with somebody, how does your voice sound?
With Attachment Avoidance, some people tend to drone on, and their voices
can sound like a monotone, one-sided lecture, devoid of inflection and hooks for
someone (including the speaker) to hang onto. Others may have a voice that
sounds like a jackhammer, with no regard for the person on the other side, merely
obsessed with trying to accomplish their agenda and thus appearing loud,
verbose, and pressuring. You probably know somebody with a jackhammer voice
tone, so what do you do when that tone approaches you? Sometimes you may
want to be a jackhammer yourself, but make it a conscious choice and be aware if
you are overusing that approach and pushing people away with that pressure.
A voice with the purpose of connection is neither a tool to manipulate nor a
pressure on someone to help with one’s agenda. It is also not a dull voice that just
keeps talking for the sake of talking. When you are interested in what you are
saying and also interested in and genuinely curious about the person you are
saying it to, your voice will likely take on a full quality, including emotion and
inflection, and your speech will become more interesting to yourself and others.
For practice, spend a day observing your voice tone, and then answer these
questions:
When was my voice tone dull and monotone today? Thinking back, what led to
my disengagement and lower level of energy reflected in that voice tone (e.g., not
keeping my mind in the present, fear of judgment, fear of rejection, genuine
disinterest in my conversation partner, etc.)?
What is memorable to me about how others reacted to my voice tone (or to shifts
in my voice tone), or alternately, about how I did not tune into their reactions?
When did my voice tone sound animated and full of life, without seeking to
convince others toward my plans or desires?
Why was my voice tone so lively?
My goal regarding my voice tone is
Why Do I Pretend to Myself That Things Are
Not Dangerous to Me, When in Fact They
Injure and Exhaust Me?
Do you stay in relationships with hurtful people because you assume you can
handle the relationship? Do you take on work that depletes you to the point of
exhaustion? If there is a dangerous confrontation occurring in the mall or street,
more than what you can handle, do you nonetheless move toward it or fail to
move away? Do you pretend to yourself that a health issue is smaller than it is
and thus fail to get medical attention? These are examples of dangers, emotional
and physical, that the title of this activity refers to.
You may feel compelled to have and/or develop a sense of mastery with all
that you do. After all, if your parent wasn’t available for much emotional help,
you had to handle your distress and many other needs by yourself at a young age.
Thus the idea that anything was beyond you would have caused you to panic,
because help was not available, and so you could not allow yourself to realize
that anything was beyond you. As a result, the idea that you have limits, or that
which you cannot handle, may feel almost ridiculous. However, while doing so
much on your own has left you more skilled and competent in some areas in
comparison to your peers, there may be a catch. You may be unskilled at reading
when a situation is truly beyond you, either because the situation requires others’
help (e.g., lifting something heavy, a project at work needing others’ input, etc.),
or because there is simply a situation you should not involve yourself in (e.g.,
connecting with an unstable person as a romantic partner). Unfortunately, you
assume you will be fine, since you often make it so. How can you become a more
skillful judge, deciding in which contexts this mindset shows admirable courage
and fortitude, and in which circumstances this mindset has become a
dysfunctional distortion of reality that places you in danger?
What it would take to shift to reality-based thinking is to know that you, in
fact, are more competent than many in handling a large variety of situations.
However, there are situations you may not be able to handle alone, and some you
cannot handle at all. That is, the shift will come if you build skill in identifying
and classifying these three types of situations.
1) How can I tell the difference between a task or situation I can handle alone
and one in which I need help? (Give examples of past situations, if possible.)
2) What are some early signals that I may have ignored in the past that let me
know I should avoid or get out of a situation/relationship because I cannot handle
it with or without help? (Again, use current or past examples if possible.)
3) If there is a situation I cannot handle alone or cannot handle at all, how can I
make peace with that reality, to prevent entangling myself in exhausting or
dangerous situations?
Why Do I Stiffen Up So Quickly and Intensely
in Arguments?
The tendency to stiffen and rigidify obviously prevents a dialogue. Two people
behind bunkers cannot solve a dispute, except with heavy artillery that could
destroy one (or both) of them. If two people care about each other, the quickest
and most satisfying road to conflict resolution, in the words of married couples’
psychologists Robert and Rita Resnick, PhD, is to melt instead of rigidify. In
other words, they must be able to express their needs and point of view and then
calm themselves enough to remain open to hear those of the other person.
Why is the tendency to rigidify frequently so pronounced in those with
Attachment Avoidance? There are a few likely suspects. First, if your caregiver
was extremely pushy and imposing and overly forceful in making you swallow
his/her perspectives, values, and beliefs, it may feel as if taking anybody’s point
of view into consideration is a threat to your identity and your survival as an
individual. You may reflexively feel threatened when anybody has a different
point of view, and before they can try to “force” theirs on you, as your history
would tell you they will try to do, you close up as a precautionary tactic. Another
possibility is that you may feel weak if you cannot convert others to your point of
view, because as a child, you were more competent than the adults, and thus you
are accustomed to being in control, threatened when you cannot be.
Alternately, you may simply be used to being the only person who protects
you and looks after your survival, and so you have faith only in yourself and do
not trust others’ desires to include wanting your happiness (and you may select
friends and partners who are too injured/weak to focus on your happiness).
Either way, learning how to “melt” is the only way to form deeper relationships,
as the other person needs to know he/she will have a voice and be able to
survive in the relationship, just as you need to know that. When starting a
discussion, you each need to know that both of you will get out psychologically
alive!
Who was the last person you stiffened up with too much when you were in a
discussion with him/her?
Thinking about it for a moment, what fear led you to stiffen? (You may be tempted
to refer to a feeling of anger/frustration that drove it, but try to keep digging until
you get to the underlying fear.)
If you were to explain your point of view so the person would know your
perspective, instead of angrily demanding he/she change his/her behavior or
point of view, outline how you would have explained your point of view in more
relaxed style.
How would the other person have likely responded to your more relaxed style of
giving your perspective instead of demanding a particular behavior from
him/her?
Take a moment and make a mental commitment to yourself and your closer
relationships that you will practice melting and describing your feelings and
point of view versus merely stiffening, demanding the others change, and pushing
for what you want. If you truly have selected friends/partners too weak to have
interest in your needs, commit to challenging yourself by bringing stronger people
closer to you.
On Long-Distance Relationships, Porn, Social
Networking Replacing Live Contact, and
Other Forms of Pseudo-Contact
Wary of the messiness of close contact and all the emotions that close contact
brings? Well, you could hang out exclusively on the Internet, creating
relationships that are inherently distant, and get sexual gratification in a
controlled manner and from a distance. A fantasy from a distance can feel safer
and more longed for than the messiness of real life up close. Of course, you have
not resigned yourself to these limited forms of contact forever, or you would not
be reading this book. However, you may need to develop a healthy suspicion
about how you minimize risk of discomfort and vulnerability by living life from a
distance.
So now, try saying this to yourself: If things get uncomfortable and messy,
and even if I get hurt, it’s not the death of me. If I feel ashamed, if I get rejected, if
I fail in some way, I will get back on my feet. If I am not in control, I will be
okay, and if I do not like how the relationship goes and it truly cannot be fixed, I
will leave and be okay again. I will reduce my dependence on emotional distance
for maintaining my comfort, and instead I will open myself to the discomfort and
risks of increasing intimacy.
How could closer, more intimate contact improve your quality of life? Why do
you deserve those improvements?
What are the emotional risks to you of seeking and getting closer contact?
What are the emotional risks of not seeking closer forms of contact?
If you took one step toward making closer contact with someone, who would you
do this with, and what would that step be?
Less Analyzing, More Experiencing
Do you live in your head with endless thoughts, ruminations, planning, and
problem solving? Do you theorize endlessly about why somebody did what they
did, why you said/did what you said/did, or about how some phenomenon in the
world works? Then this activity is for you.
In a sense, this topic also comes down to the idea of surrender, as this pull
to “know,” this feeling of compulsion to figure out the world, keeps you trapped
in a need to control and in analytical thinking, and deprives you of the opportunity
to live in the present and experience the world around you as it is happening,
Right Now.
At any moment, we have thoughts and feelings, and our senses are seeing,
hearing, and touching something (e.g., the couch/chair with our bottom). If you
relate to the first paragraph of this activity, then you privilege awareness of
thoughts and pay too little attention to the other possible input. This activity is
practice in rebalancing where you place your attention instead of always giving it
automatically to conceptual thoughts (and the intense emotions they may stir up).
Finish the following statement with feelings, sights, sounds, smells, or
tactile sensations, rather than merely conceptual thoughts (if you are obsessing on
a thought, then speak that thought and move on, back to these other sensory
inputs):
Repeat at least five times, finishing the sentence each time with things you notice.
What, if anything, was the impact of this activity upon the speed and intensity of
your thoughts?
When you have a problem to talk about and solve, intense and repetitive
thoughts (e.g., “How am I going to fix this? What if I try this, or what if I try
that?”) may temporarily be exactly what you need. However, if you are always
grasping to do or change something and forever problem solving, those grabby,
intense thoughts have taken you over and become a problem. If your obsessive
thoughts are whipping you in their fervor, practicing releasing your grip on those
thoughts by becoming more present, as in this exercise, is the answer. Expect to
practice this ‘releasing’ many times before it becomes comfortable and
automatic.
Finding Better Solutions: First Sit and Listen
to Yourself, and Only Then Move into Action
In childhood, you built a belief that you had better have all the answers, and you
assumed that the answers were all inside your analytical mind. However, your
accumulated wealth of history and experience, and your emotions have wisdom
too. These experiences encoded in your memory comprise what is commonly
referred to as intuition. Intuition is not mystical, since it is rooted in your history
of experiences. Though you are not always aware of it, this history of learning
remains with you in what is known as implicit memory.
What if you are frantically searching your rational mind for answers that it
does not possess? Then you wind up a mess of spinning thoughts, looking
furiously for answers that are not there. If this sounds accurate, this exercise is a
good fit for you.
Step into a more powerful way of finding solutions. You probably have
solutions to a current problem inside yourself (e.g., via your implicit memory), or
know what you need to seek in order to get to solutions. Your analytical mind
may not be where that answer resides. You need to find a way to let the larger
you (i.e., the ‘you’ that has intuition, a history of experiences, your emotions)
speak, so that the knowledge of this larger self can become known to your
conscious, analytical mind. Your analytical mind becomes useful only when the
important data (i.e., your implicit learning, your emotional response, and perhaps
input from other people) is before it. That is, the relevant data must be present
before they are analyzed. Yes, here we go again with that ‘integrating
limbic/emotional brain with the left prefrontal-cortex’ stuff. Well, just refreshing
you from earlier sections!
Remember, the accumulated wisdom from all of your past experiences is
held in your implicit memory, meaning you can solve problems quickly and with
great skill, not even knowing how you knew the right answer. This implicit
learning has a depth and power that your analytical reasoning does not, and this is
the reason that intuitive choices can be made extremely well. Weave your
intuition and your analytical reasoning together, and you become an extremely
strong problem solver. Also, your decisions then include a larger percentage of
the totality of all that you are, and thus your decisions can be made with higher
certainty.
Address a problem in a manner inclusive of your intuitive accumulated
wisdom by taking a moment to try this exercise:
If you have a problem that your mind is revving high in trying to find an
answer to, do this instead. Sit cross-legged, get comfortable, and count your
breathing to relax your emotion and distress (typically, count four seconds on the
inhale and six seconds on the exhale). Counting gives your mind a non-painful,
non-frustrating place to focus. When your emotions and frustrations feel soothed,
do not get up, but rather, continue sitting.
Now, begin thinking about the situation. Keep your thoughts slow. Do not
press for solution; do not be premature in this way. Instead, acknowledge those
obsessive demands to know the answer now, and then let your tight mind lighten
up by releasing those thoughts. Just think about the details of the situation and let
them fill your mind. Immerse yourself in the entirety of the situation. Then ask
yourself, “What do I feel? What do I want? What do others involved want?”
Again, don’t jump to solution or get up too fast—sit.
Stay with the situation and how you feel about it. It will be time to get up
when you feel no urgency to get up. You may not have a solution instantly upon
getting up, but now you are open to the fullness of the situation, and when you do
create your answer, it will be more complete, truer to the person you are, and true
to your entire mind and brain. Your conclusion will be much more powerful.
In summary, a pressured approach is only useful once you already have the
plan in place for what you are doing. Then, if desired, you can push through to
work out the details. But when you need to be creative, as in finding solutions to
challenging problems, it is extremely rare for pressure to be useful. Rather, you
need a spacious, open, playful mind open to possibilities that are not already in
your thoughts. That spacious, open mind is calm enough to allow your implicit
learning, your emotions, and your rational thoughts to be heard, to comingle and
work together in a synthesis leading to answers that represent a larger totality of
you.
From Compulsive, Unsatisfying
Busyness to Purposeful Activity
This activity is about making the transition from being constantly busy but
unsatisfied to pivoting so that your sense of purpose in life becomes central, and
as much as life allows, purpose guides your action.
Of course your daily life can be busy with mandatory demands, and if so,
this is all the more reason to be determined that your own vision will also have
power in determining what actions fill your day. Similarly, even when free for a
few moments of mandatory demands, you may nonetheless fill yourself with all
kinds of things you “must” do and fill your day with lots of action and minimal
satisfaction. That is, even when you have the possibility of time, you may not be
using it well. Filling the day with any “to-do” that comes to you is much less
satisfying than making choices about what you want to do with your time.
Becoming present, meaning that your mind is where you are physically,
whether you are doing the dishes or listening to music you love, is the first step to
a purposeful life. Notice your senses of hearing, seeing, touching, tasting, and
smelling, and sense what input from the world is coming to you. If you are
present, you are living, even if you are doing the dishes. What does the water feel
like on your skin? What are you seeing and smelling, whether pleasant or
unpleasant? Even if it does not feel good to be doing the dishes, but you remain
present, you are living.
To make active decisions about what you want to be doing in your life at this
very moment, first you must be living. Making satisfying decisions requires
building the strength to be present, particularly when you are experiencing an
unpleasant feeling. “I am willing to be present, even when that means I feel
something that displeases me. I will work to stop fleeing elsewhere in my
thoughts or working furiously to make it better.”
Being present does not always mean being still and quiet. Being present
means being what you are at the moment. If you are still, be still. If you are
thrilled, be thrilled. If you notice the green on the tree outside your window, then
notice it. Whatever you feel inside, and whatever is around you in the world,
being present means noticing and attending to all of your senses instead of either
being exclusively in contact with your thoughts or being only engaged in attempts
to change your world. To be present is to engage with the experiences you that
you are having at this very moment, which opens your fountain of energy.
Let’s practice building some presence now. What are your senses
experiencing right now? What would you like to do with the gap of time you have
available right now? Would you like to continue reading? Is there something else
you would like to move to? Check with yourself to see. Before you do that thing,
read just one more paragraph.
Practice becoming present and asking yourself questions about what you
want and need throughout your day. This will take you off of “autopilot.” Maybe
you will see that you need a brief walk during your workday. Who knows what
you will discover about yourself if you only get curious and ask. In getting
present and then asking yourself what you would like, you will develop a better
understanding of yourself and thus gradually make your life your own. Even if
you cannot have the experience you would like in the moment, you gain the
understanding of yourself and what you would like so you can begin to organize
your life accordingly.
For example, if you learn you like to take a walk during the workday, you
may have overscheduled the day on which you become aware of the desire for a
walk, but maybe by next week, you will be able to create small gaps in your
schedule to allow for this. Unless you realize you have been missing the
opportunity to write/watch movies/visit your child’s school/hike in the forest (fill
in the blank), you won’t be aware of the need to create time to do so. As you
become more aware of knowing what satisfies you, you can construct your life
accordingly to the full extent possible.
What things that feel great to do and celebrate who you are do you need to make
more time for?
How/when could you make time for them on a routine and automatic basis?
Beyond Constant Problem Solving
Is your mind constantly solving problems? We all have problems we should work
to solve; however, this activity refers to addressing a mindset obsessively
focused on problems and solutions. Do you have an obsessive approach to life,
always goal-directed and planning, without much rest? Is your approach so
strongly in this direction that you lose sleep, consumed and invested in planning
to finally make things “work out”? Is there a persistent worry (or desire),
something you feel you must fix in order to be okay that you think about more and
more and more, searching yourself for solutions? In the earlier activity entitled
“Finding Better Solutions,” you worked on how to engage your emotions and
intuition, not solely your rational logic, to more effectively create satisfying
solutions. That activity’s purpose was finding more complete and satisfying
solutions. This activity is different. This exercise is an introduction to getting off
of your hamster wheel of constantly focusing on problems and possible solutions.
If you constantly focus on problems and possible solutions, your mind is
tricking you. You are settling for working very hard on the controllable world,
blocking awareness of your real fears about the ambiguities and bigness of all
that is unknowable and uncontrollable. Forget those little problems you tend to
fixate upon for just a moment. Take a brief mental vacation from planning, and
see where you go with these questions.
How does focusing on solving more mundane issues protect you from being
overwhelmed by these bigger fears?
In terms of these things you are actually most afraid of, discuss in more detail
what the worst thing is that could happen.
Enjoy the peace, lightness of mind, and self-awareness that comes from
knowing your actual fears. By remaining aware of your true fears, you do not
need your obsessive thought process to guard you from these deeper fears. Allow
yourself to have these deeper fears. They belong to you. You can be aware of
them without being overwhelmed but for a brief initial moment.
Responding with Logic When Logic is
Appropriate, Responding with Emotion
When Emotion is Appropriate
If you have significant avoidance in your attachment style, you will typically be
much more comfortable responding to yourself and others with logic than
emotion, leading, however, to a pent-up reservoir of unexpressed and
unventilated emotion within you, visible to you only at the tip of the iceberg as
tension. At times, others truly need you to respond with emotion, not with the
relative safety of logic, or they too get pent up with emotion. They may come to
you for help to acknowledge their emotion and to provide a place for them to
release it.
When people come to you with problems, what do they want? Sometimes
they want problem-solving help and advice. However, often they want you to
listen to them, to understand what they are going through, because knowing that
you understand their emotion decreases the intensity of their pain. How can you
tell the difference (hint: the clues to what they need are rarely in their words and
often in their actions, voice tone, and body language)?
How can you tell, based on their body language, when people need emotional
support/genuine listening instead of problem solving/advice?
2) How were you able to express/ventilate that emotion? What method/s did you
try, and of those, what worked best to release it?
3) What did experiencing the emotion do for you, either as you experienced it or
afterward?
Then, the next time you are upset with a friend, family member, or lover, see
if you can express that feeling mostly from your side versus focusing on
correcting, fixing, and/or blaming that person. Let yourself be upset, but keep
your words primarily about you instead of telling your friend or lover how he/she
is bad or wrong or needs to change, as described in the scenario above.
1) Was I able to be purposefully vulnerable (i.e., talking about my pain and the
description of my hurt versus focusing on proving how wrong the other person
is)? If not, how will I coach myself in order to improve my game the next time I
try this approach to an argument?
2) In order for two people to understand each other accurately, what is the power
of getting to truly know and also value the other’s perspective and to have
him/her understand my perspective and all the emotions inside me, instead of
merely trying to force him/her to change?
Notes
1 Marinus H. Van IJzendoorn, “Adult Attachment Representations, Parental
Responsiveness, and Infant Attachment: A Meta-Analysis on the Predictive
Validity of the Adult Attachment Interview,” Psychological Bulletin, 117(1995),
387–403.
3 John M. Gottman, The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work (New
York: Three Rivers Press, 1999), 130.
4 Robert Resnick and Rita Resnick, “Two Become One and Then There Are
None: A Couples Therapy Training Workshop Series for Therapists,” Santa
Monica, CA. 09 September 2012. Conference Presentation.
Chapter 4:
How did your life history and experiences up to that point set the stage for you to
make each mistake?
When we make big mistakes, we are usually trying to meet a legitimate need in a
poor manner. For example, marrying a nutty partner might, among many other
possible reasons, be due to wanting to ensure having another ’s love consistently
by marrying someone who is highly dependent. Likewise, staying in a lower-
level job than one is qualified for could be due to wanting to feel highly
competent at one’s work and thus being reluctant to take on risks or challenges, et
cetera. These are a few examples of ways that people may strive to meet
legitimate internal needs through unhealthy choices. In regards to the two
mistakes you listed above, what legitimate needs were you trying to satisfy when
making each mistake?
How can you get each of these two legitimate needs met in healthier ways so that
in the future you are less likely to make the same mistakes?
To deeply understand the person, consider his/her life history and the immediate
context for his/her actions. As you understand it, how did he/she come to do the
thing that hurt you?
In order to prepare to forgive, you may need to first release some related
distress. For example, you might write your story and crumple it up, or you may
tell your story to an empathic friend/family member and ask him/her to simply
listen, or you might simply calmly repeat to yourself, “I forgive him/her,” et
cetera. Ask yourself, “What do I need to do in preparation that will help me
forgive this person/people?”
What is the first step you must do to develop forgiveness for the thing listed
above?
Do that first thing now, or if it is not reasonably possible, make a plan about
when you will do it (try not to put it off without a clear plan). If not possible right
now, when will you do it?
Forgiving does not mean that you are forgetting the injury or its significance,
or that you would necessarily let that person close to you if you suspected he/she
would harm you again. It means that you release your focus upon that matter and
upon blaming the injuring party.
Developing Your Complete, Detailed,
Balanced
Attachment Narrative: A Powerful Tool
One of the most powerful methods in developing Secure Attachment is clarifying
and developing your attachment narrative. This is one of the most important
activities in this book. While you did a similar activity in a slightly different
manner at the beginning in Chapter 1, by now you have reflected more and can
revisit it with more awareness and in a more specific manner. This activity is
useful to do many times in your life, helping you build progressively more
awareness.
Try to respond in a way that is reflective instead of reactive, and highly detailed,
more akin to writing a movie screenplay versus a skeleton outline. Since it is
most important to reflect and contemplate, write your responses only after
reflecting on your answers. Consider also that, especially if you avoid thinking
about your childhood in depth, this may take a while for you to get to detail, and
that when you do get to details, this activity may bring forth some new emotion.
How will you care for yourself if painful emotion arises (e.g., calling someone
supportive, distraction with media, exercise, a bath, mindful breathing, just sitting
still with the emotion)?
What was it like to be you in your family as a child? Were you lonely, or were
you social with your family? Did your parent/s express believing in you?
What was your relationship like with your mother when you were a child, and
what is it like now?
What was your relationship like with your father/other important caregiver when
you were a child, and what is that relationship like now?
Who in your young life was most supportive of you (e.g., friends, extended
family, teachers, clergy, neighbors)? If people beyond your parents or siblings
were powerfully encouraging, describe your relationships with them.
Describe the quality of emotional engagement you had available to you from your
parent as a young child (i.e., age birth to five years), at elementary school age,
middle school age, and also at high school age.
Were there significant separations from important sources of support (e.g., death
or incarceration of a parent, divorce, move to a new community where you lost
connection to a close friend or parental/mentoring neighbor, etc.)? If so,
remember that time period and describe what the separation/loss was like.
As you consider your relationship history in greater depth in this exercise, what
learning do you want to apply to your current approach to intimacy in
relationships?
How can you speak to yourself more kindly about each of these things you are
most insecure about? You do not have to be happy with those qualities of yours,
but certainly you can speak to yourself in a loving way when something triggers
the insecurity. To illustrate, if your fear is of being ‘dumb’ (or of being perceived
as such), and you made an error in calculating a waitress’s tip, you could tell
yourself that while you are embarrassed and upset with yourself for this mistake,
you will simply take more care and time to be accurate at the next tipping
opportunity, instead of berating yourself for the error. Please write a self-loving
internal dialogue you can use when the most painful of the insecurities you listed
in the previous question is triggered.
Take a moment to think and thoughtfully consider: If you listed a limitation above
that you want to improve, what concrete step(s) can you take to work on this
problem to become better in this area?
What is the internal/external obstacle most likely to get in your way in taking that
step, and how will you address it?
Meditation to Make Your External Support
Internal
Everyone wants a cheering section, those people who will encourage you, tell
you that you are doing well, coach you when you make errors, believe in you, and
soothe you when you are sad, hurt, or angry. The purpose of this exercise is to
take that desired external world and begin building it inside yourself. Imagining
that desired external world being present for you now is a large step toward
building that supportive world inside yourself.
Sit in a comfortable meditation posture, one that is loose enough to help you
feel relaxed but upright enough to help you be alert instead of sleepy. A common
method is to sit with your legs crossed, hands on your thighs or in your lap, back
fairly straight, head straight as well, eyes looking downward and slightly open or
closed. Try to avoid being either so loose that you get sleepy or so tight that you
feel tense or rigid.
Imagine all of the people who love you and who have ever loved you. This
could include those with whom you have some conflict, since those relationships
need not be perfect for you to bring these people into the room with you now.
However, if there is someone you feel would be unsupportive of you becoming
stronger, do not have him/her join you here.
Imagine all of these people looking at you and smiling gently, wishing for
you to become happier. Imagine that you have all of their support, and consider
how powerful this would be. See if you can allow them to give you this support,
and imagine yourself as the very willing recipient. Consider the feeling you have
now, and make this the object of your meditation. That is, stay with this feeling,
and if it fades, simply remember all those you’ve “brought” to the room with you,
and reflect on their desire for your happiness. Set a timer to do this meditation for
ten minutes, gently bringing your mind back to the topic of this support when your
mind drifts.
After the meditation, answer these questions:
Describe the feeling you experienced in welcoming their support into your heart.
Pick one of the most supportive people who you called into your meditation.
What would he/she do with you and say to you if you were in emotional pain?
Make a commitment to yourself now that you will do and say those things noted
above for yourself, as much as possible, the next time you feel emotionally
injured.
Consider this for a moment: How might you feel and behave differently if you
imagined several times throughout your day having this support you visualized
during the meditation activity?
Meditation for Self-Soothing When Upset
Read this first portion for context if you are not upset right now. If you are
upset right now, move to the next section of this activity.
A crucial task for someone serving as a secure base for you is to help soothe
you when you are upset. This section of the book is about helping you become
your own secure base, so this activity will help you build skills to soothe
yourself more effectively. When you are mildly upset, it is often great to simply
blow it off when you are able, and you can talk yourself down quickly (e.g., “It’s
okay, I’ll be all right,” or “He/she didn’t really mean what he/she said,” or
“He/she did mean what he/she said, but I am okay, and I think the best way to
respond is to…”).
However, when you are very upset, you must be there for yourself in a
stronger manner. This is extremely important in becoming securely attached to
yourself (again, as a foundation for building that security of relationships with
others in your life). If you are extremely upset, you must avoid blaming or
shaming yourself for being upset, and you should avoid lecturing yourself about
why you ought to not be upset. You also should release focus on blaming others,
as this is a time to be focused internally, upon yourself. This is a very important
time in which you must try to feel empathy for yourself that you are uncomfortable
and in pain. If you cannot immediately solve the problem causing your distress in
a healthy way, then you need to care for yourself by calming down enough so that
you can tolerate the amount of feeling that remains.
When you are emotionally aroused, you can have a difficult time thinking
clearly. In particular, as the amygdala, a primal emotional center in the brain,
initiates a chain reaction that leads to the release of stress hormones (preparing
you for a ‘fight or flight’ response), you are generally not in a good position to
make choices that you will be happy with later (unless of course the situation
actually is one of physical life or death). The amygdala is lower in the brain (i.e.,
it developed earlier and is more ancient) than your rational, planful cerebral
cortex, and threats are processed here in this more primitive brain, including
moving you to react to those threats, at times before the information even has the
opportunity to register in the pre-frontal cerebral cortex.
This makes sense, because in situations of actual physical danger, you need
to respond with the fastest reaction time possible, without excess analysis to
slow you down. Typically, however, you have a less dire situation, and it would
help you make a better decision to have not only the information about your
emotion but also input from the slower, planful part of your brain. In order to get
that planful input, you must calm the amygdala and what is called the sympathetic
nervous system, which is responsible for preparing you for fight or flight, to
provide the pre-frontal cortex the time needed for it to offer decision-making
input.
You need to activate the parasympathetic nervous system, whose job it is to
calm and slow you down. One of the most effective ways to shift activation from
the sympathetic nervous system to the parasympathetic nervous system is ancient
wisdom, and the method remains with us for good reasons.5 Simply stated, you
breathe in a particular way, which helps free you from painful emotion. This
method will be described in short sentences below. Again, people are not good
with logic and verbiage when deeply upset, so for the sake of effectiveness, we
should keep instructions very brief and to the point. When children are upset,
parents must learn the skill of delivering brief instructions instead of long
lectures that at best the child tunes out and, at worst, escalates the child into full
emotional crisis. When we are very upset, no matter our actual age, we all
become children emotionally, and we should care for ourselves as such, with
easy-to-follow instructions for ourselves.
Start with a caring dialogue with yourse lf; for example, “I am hurting. That is
sad. I will imagine that I am standing here rocking my infant self, rocking myself
as one rocks a baby. I deserve warmth and care.”
How can you best soothe this distress (e.g., more focused breathing, active
problem solving if the problem is solvable, distraction of TV, bath, go for a run,
call a friend, etc.), without taking reactive action in a way that causes you further
chaos and distress?
Another Option to Use When Upset: Coping
Thoughts
When upset, sometimes you need several options. Sometimes experiencing
distress is good, signaling a problem that you need to take active steps to solve.
Also, bearable amounts of distress can teach you to be patient with emotion.
However, possibly you do not trust your impulses at the moment because they are
too intense or destructive, or perhaps there is little you can do at the moment, or
perhaps the emotion feels too intense to stay with. This is when the above
meditation, and also the activity below, becomes useful.
If there is a problem you cannot actively solve, or cannot solve at the
moment, and the emotional distress feels too strong to simply weather the storm,
these strategies can help. If the breathing meditation above was not enough, you
can turn to coping by using the power of thoughts. Every one of us has to use
coping thoughts at times.
Altering your thoughts changes how you feel. Try to resist any urge to lie to
yourself by pretending the situation is better than it is. Developing true thoughts
that are also helpful and calming is more useful and more believable to you. For
example, you might gently repeat the thought, “Let go, let go, let go of it for now.”
You are not denying that this issue is important or that you feel badly about it. You
are just giving yourself permission to release focus on it for now. “This won’t
kill me” or “I will go on” are also useful statements for some people to use
toward calming down.
Repeat the thoughts above to yourself several times, with gentle, firm
determination.
After you calm down a bit, it may also be useful to find a good distraction (e.g.,
television, engaging in your favorite hobby, phone call, time on internet, etc.). If
so, just do it purposefully, knowing that you are distracting yourself for the
moment in order to regain balance by calling upon your calmer emotions.
Do you need to do something to cope with the agitation remaining in your body
and mind? Go run around the block. If that does not work for you, what else can
you do as a healthy physical release?
One More Option to Use When Upset: Art
Sometimes, rather than examining your mind (as in meditation) to learn more
deeply and accurately about the source of your distress, or just trying to contain
the distress (i.e., coping), you need to release, to purge the painful feeling inside.
This also helps clarify what that feeling is. Verbal release (as to a friend or
partner) is great, but if this is not fully satisfying, or not currently available, then
this activity may be for you. The next time you are deeply upset, try art to express
and release this pain. It is important not to impose ‘form’ by telling yourself what
you are supposed to be drawing, as you are trying to access your less linear,
unstructured right brain, not the structured analytic left brain. If the analytic brain
was the best hemisphere for this particular job, you would not need to use art in
the first place, as you could verbalize the nature of the distress and either fix the
problem or let the distress dissolve. Instead, just let your hand move and see
what emerges on the paper, drawing with your left hand if possible to let your
right hemisphere speak.
Preparation: Get colored art supplies, preferably crayons, or if you are
feeling adventurous, finger paints, along with appropriate paper (waterproof
paper is commonly sold where finger paints are sold). Have these supplies
available and ready for quick access when needed.
Action: The next time you are deeply upset and don’t know what to do with
all of that emotion, pull out the supplies. Get your paper and pick a color of
crayon or finger paint to begin with, and get to it. Just see what comes out as you
release yourself onto the paper, using your left hand if possible. Continue until
you feel done.
Afterward:
2) In order to integrate the right hemisphere’s mode of expression (e.g., the art
that it produced) with the left hemisphere mode of action (e.g., verbal, analysis),
take a moment to verbally describe what you put on the art paper. What emotions
do you feel as you look at the art? Is it jagged or soft, etc.? Just write down a few
descriptive, non-evaluative things that come immediately to your mind that you
notice about your art.
Is there anything from this activity that you would like to repeat at another time?
Addressing Those More Embarrassing Needs
of Your Body
Some of the body’s needs were addressed in earlier sections, but now let’s dig
into the funky stuff. Many people have a bodily problem that injures their social
confidence. Do you have a physical anomaly that is uncomfortable for physical or
social reasons (e.g., excessive sweating of the palms or armpits, excess
frequency of urination, a body odor problem, etc.)? You may spend much time
feeling discomfort about it or ashamed, but if you have not spent much time
tackling it, here is an opportunity to do so now.
What is the problem you face? Now, do some internet research to find out
about how others have gone about solving the problem you have. Who are the
expert doctors in your area on this issue? Perhaps make an appointment to see
your primary doctor and ask for a referral to a specialist that he/she views as
expert. Make your action plan. What are the next three steps you will take to
methodically address the problem (e.g., seeing a doctor and asking about a
particular treatment, taking some action you can do alone, etc.)? Remember,
your plan may work beautifully, and even if your early attempts do not yet solve
the problem, at least you will know you are working on taking care of yourself.
If I have been ashamed or critical with myself about this issue, how can I speak
to myself more kindly about my problem?
Ask yourself, “What are the things I want most from my evening so that I can
prioritize what I really need, and thus feel satisfied enough to later be able to
surrender to sleep? Is it social time? Is it setting up my home to better reflect my
lifestyle? Is it quality time alone, etc.?”
Specifically, how can you get some of these things during your day, or more
efficiently seek them in your early evening to prevent extended late nights?
Based on all of the above, what do you need to do in order to increase your
chances of getting more sleep?
Sleeping Well: Releasing the Day’s Intensity
Another common reason people have difficulty sleeping has little to do with
needing more from the day. Rather, they are having difficulty relaxing the mind, as
the mind is revved up and stuck in high gear with thoughts and emotions flying,
often revisiting the day, problem solving, or endlessly online, despite exhaustion.
First begin by expressing and releasing the thoughts and emotion. Describe the
tension you are experiencing. Go into detail:
How did these thoughts work for you? If not well, please rewrite the calming
self-talk in your own words.
Scan your body. Are your muscles tense anywhere (e.g., your face, your stomach,
your neck/shoulders)?
Release your tense muscles. Relax them simply by noticing each of them. If
they truly will not release, tense them first a bit more than they already are for ten
seconds, then release. Your muscles are then likely to comply with your wish for
them to relax.
Finally, come into your senses. Notice how the pillow feels against your
cheek, and the mattress against your body.
This activity is likely to help, especially if you repeatedly practice it.
However, if you still cannot improve your sleep, consider consulting a doctor. In
that way, you are being caring with yourself and will not allow your body, mind,
and mood to be injured by being chronically under-rested.
Secure Attachment Exercising
What is your purpose in doing exercise? Is there a way you can shift this to make
that purpose for yourself, if it is not already? For example, if your current reason
is to be attractive to others for either power or self-esteem, could you try on the
rationale that you would like to feel confident about being attractive because you
want to simply feel the confidence of being attractive? This may sound like
semantics or splitting hairs, but the point is that it is important to frame this in
terms of your own needs instead of solely on how it alters others’ impressions of
you or makes you ‘good enough.’
Okay, now it is time to run, swim, or lift weights, et cetera, adapting the
following principles, written here using running as the example. Get on the
treadmill or start your jog outdoors, putting aside any preconceived notion of
how far you will go. If at a gym, you may notice how fast or slow others around
you are going, but try to abandon ideas that you need to compete in some way to
prove your worth. Instead, tune in to your body and let it guide you by asking
yourself the questions below. Read and reread the questions before beginning the
workout so you can hold some of them in mind.
2) If my body resists as I start moving more quickly, I may need to slow down
until it is ready to stay consistent at higher speed. How can I talk to myself in an
encouraging way about this?
5) How will I encourage (rather than criticize/whip) myself to keep going? How
will I gently overcome any premature desires to stop?
6) What are my body’s signals when it is truly time to stop? Can I tune into those
signals versus listening only to arbitrary numbers about how far I “should” go?
7) If I ran less than usual on a given day but listened successfully to my body’s
cues about when it was time to stop, how will I encourage myself that this is the
correct approach to long-term fitness and strength?
What was it like for you to tune in to your body’s cues and to use these to guide
your exercise?
Which of the above questions were most useful for you to keep in mind? Why?
Right Now: What Do You Actually Want to
Be Doing?
Yes, Right Now. Part of attaching securely to yourself is to develop contact with
yourself at a given moment in time. You know what you need to do, the tasks, et
cetera. Some people stay incredibly busy their entire lives without doing much
that they find exhilarating or satisfying. Whether you have an hour, a day, or five
minutes at your disposal, this is a gap in your daily tasks that you can use to get
satisfaction. You have practiced this earlier in the book, and as a core activity,
let’s build additional familiarity with this skill.
It is easy to live life mindlessly. The structure of work tells you what is
expected and what to do, and you may be able to rest on that without adding your
own perspective to it. At home, you can turn on the TV, find something to clean or
other tasks, get a drink, or otherwise again run on autopilot (it is possible to do
all of those things mindfully as well, and to actually experience them). There is
plenty of structure and speed in our world that you can have things to do for
distraction, depending upon these tasks as the filler for your time that help you
avoid making choices about your life. However, the result of living life this way
exclusively, without taking the reins, without asking yourself what you desire, is
that time passes quickly in your numb state, you feel vague unease, and whether
active or slow, you do not get a great deal of satisfaction from your days. The
days roll on toward eventual death, without purposeful living and the satisfaction
it brings.
Given that you are reading this right now, you have at least a brief gap of
time at your disposal. Given that, at this moment, here is the action activity:
What would you like to do with the remaining time in the gap of time that you
have right now? Stay with this question until you have something in mind that you
are able to do at this moment in time, and then have at it.
From here, work to build a habit. Build familiarity with a question: “What
do I want out of the next hour?” until it becomes routine and a habitual question
to think of. You may of course have many tasks in a given day, but if you know
what you want, then on most days you will find a way to insert that need into your
day and address it. However, if you do not ask the question, you are unlikely to
pursue your satisfaction.
How would you word the question to yourself about what you want in the next
hour, to repeat to yourself and thus remain more conscious of what you want to be
doing/prioritizing at a given moment in time?
Practice reminding yourself of that question throughout the day, every day.
Then, among the ‘musts,’ the things you need to do outside of your control, you
can add activities and priorities that reflect who you are.
Music
Music unlocks a part of your brain that has very limited verbal voice. As noted in
the earlier exercise on using artwork to accurately contact and then release
emotion, your right hemisphere and limbic brain has knowledge expressed most
directly and powerfully through music and art. That was the reason for the
suggestion in the exercise that if you are upset and do not know why, pick up
crayons or colored markers, draw something formless, and let the feelings
emerge rather than using the left brain to analytically (and futilely) attempt to seek
them out. Similarly, exploring music is another method of deeply contacting your
emotional brain, connecting to this part of yourself that has limited verbal
language by giving it a musical method of “speaking.”
When you were a child, what did you do to create music? Maybe you hummed or
used a pencil to drum on furniture. Maybe you played an instrument, or maybe
you sang. As a child, how did you commonly make music?
However you made music as a child, do that thing now. If not possible due to
social constraints, consider when you will be able to do this, but if feeling
reluctance/caution, be especially sure to do it at that time.
What was the experience like of making music now, doing so in the same way
you used to in childhood?
Did you have any inhibition, minor or large, about making music? If so, what was
your concern?
How can you support yourself in maintaining some of this behavior of making
music (e.g., encouraging thoughts you could have, conversations with
friends/family who would be supportive, cultural events you could watch or
attend), so that inhibitions cannot stop you?
Finding Your Inner Artist
Work on this activity if you generally do not see yourself as artistic, as we now
shift toward building your internal dynamism, exploring hidden aspects of
yourself. Go to the local Target or art store and grab a few paints, a brush, and
some paper designed for painting (i.e., the kind that doesn’t easily soak through).
Turn on music that makes you feel open, relaxed, and free. Also, take a
moment to adjust the physical environment, leaving you space to move, with the
immediate surrounding not cramped by clutter.
Look out the window for a little inspiration and find something natural (i.e.,
earth, plant, tree, birds, etc.). Paint it. Paint poorly as an antidote to pressure, if
performance expectations creep in. Take your time, and let yourself get absorbed
in the doing.
You may say, “So what? What does this do for me?” Creativity is a spirit,
not a product or outcome. When you can temporarily ‘de-focus’ from goals,
plans, and desires (in this case, by looking at nature outside the window for a
moment), you can return to yourself more refreshed and creative. Evaluate not
your art itself, but rather reflect on your ability to cultivate a creative mind-set—
focus on the process.
1) How skilled are you at occasional detachment from goals, letting your mind
wander and becoming a little dreamy?
3) What are the benefits to your creativity of taking a break from task-oriented
activities, opening yourself to the world and experiencing the world?
4) Skillful artists may live in unfocused receptivity until an idea arrives, then
working with high focus and intensity to make that idea a reality. Do you need to
work more at building the muscle of disciplined focus or at the muscle of
allowing unfocused receptivity?
Finding Your Inner Handyman/Woman
If you are not very handy, try this exercise. To be secure, you need to be dynamic,
to build different sides of yourself. It is not that you cannot focus more on your
existing interests, but you also need to have some breadth to your skills if you are
to feel comfortable in a larger number of situations and contexts. Therefore,
assume that you will not complete this activity perfectly, that instead the purpose
is to build something new in yourself or strengthen a part of you that is under-
nourished.
Of those items needing building or repair, which is the one you could probably
accomplish yourself?
Are there risks to you physically in completing the repair, and if so, how will you
preserve yourself (up to and including choosing a less hazardous repair instead)?
What do you feel good about in how you approached the project?
What does putting your inner handyman/woman into motion do for your
confidence and/or emotional experience?
Remember, confidence means being able to take on and persist at things you
are not good at, assuming they are things you care to be good at, so that eventually
you can expand your skills into new areas. That is why you must give yourself
permission to fail if you are to grow.
Becoming Aware of Your Deepest Desires
The activity ‘Right Now: What Do You Actually Want to Be Doing?’ helped you
live in a moment with presence, tuned in to yourself and to what fulfilled you at
that moment. To go one step further, what if you could tap in to your deepest
values and live your life accordingly? That would certainly build and exemplify
Secure Attachment to self and lead to a strong long-term sense of satisfaction.
When needing less from others, it would be much easier to relate to people as
they actually are versus distorting your view of them to make them fit your vision
of how they should be (to become fulfillers of your unmet needs).
Acceptance and Commitment Therapy has demonstrated that defining one’s
values and then committing to living in accordance with them (i.e., taking daily
action that reflects those values) is a powerful method of reducing both anxiety
and depression.9
It can be difficult to tap into your values at times. What do you really want?
You may be preoccupied with details of tasks you need to complete, relationship
challenges, et cetera, and these details of daily life may cloud what you really
want to accomplish in this life.
As an antidote for that lack of clarity, imagine that you will die tomorrow.
The truth is you have no clear certainty that you will live through the night. An
earthquake or flood may destroy you. An intruder may kill you. Tomorrow, you
could get hit by a car and die. This is the raw truth. It is important to remember,
so you can avoid any imagined safety where you assume that you will live
indefinitely, and instead you can get on with living your life purposefully. If you
died tomorrow, what would you most regret not doing or not doing enough of?
Answer this question three times: If I died tomorrow, I would regret most
that I did not spend enough time and energy on:
Now imagine your life as you want it two years from now, including doing
those things above. You must take the time and patience to imagine your life in
great detail, starting with the moment you wake up. Is there anybody beside you?
Continue in full detail to imagine a day in the life you want to have in two years.
In doing this activity, it is best if you sit still, close your eyes, and imagine this
day unfolding.
Of the three things I noted above, which one is most important to me?
What I commit to doing today, toward the life I want in two years, including the
one thing I listed above that I most want to give time and energy to, is that I will:
Now, go do it. You deserve this life, so go do it. Be your own hero, and go
do that thing.
If it feels overwhelming to consider doing this action, what support do you need
to help you develop the sturdiness to pursue this one thing (i.e., encouragement
from friends/family/self, therapy, medication, spirituality, etc.)?
Seeking Satisfaction Instead of Solely
Searching for Comfort
In the activity above, you identified three of your deepest desires, things you do
not want to die without having focused upon more. The purpose of this exercise
is to help you overcome your barriers to going after your deepest desires.
Probably, you did not list comforts, such as more time watching TV, eating good
food, shopping, or eating more chocolate. Comforts can be fantastic, but if you tip
the scales so that you focus more on seeking comfort than satisfaction, you may
get uneasy, lose your focus, and become compulsively comfort driven, seeking
comforts and avoiding your life. Satisfaction is derived from pursuing the sorts of
things you identified in the previous activity. You need to find your own balance,
which may also change over time, about how much comfort you need and how
much satisfaction you need.
Another way to think of excess comfort seeking is as going into one’s
cocoon.10 Cocooning means that you do things in familiar ways, seek familiar
stagnations, and are pulled to them as if you are on a stretched rubber band.
There is nothing wrong with creating some routines and structure. However, your
days should also contain some freshness, doing things that you specifically
consider doing and desire to do. The cocoon for some may consist of speaking to
only some people at work but not to others, avoiding building new skills out of
fear of being bad at them initially, complaining about others, complaining about
weaknesses of oneself and others, complaining about life circumstances,
grabbing for power instead of talking out relationship issues, vegetating in front
of the TV, having stale repetitive conversations/arguments with friends/family,
spending excess time engaging in addictions such as alcohol, drugs, the internet,
porn, food, or pining for others. All of these activities, as examples (there are
many more), allow people to distract themselves from taking an active,
responsible role in both believing in and seeking their own true happiness and
taking the risks of vulnerability necessary to create that.
Searching out your satisfactions is much more vulnerable than cocooning.
Rather than looking to soothe and entertain yourself in the familiar cocoon, you
are actively engaging, making choices about your days. You may be taking risks
in trying new experiences or skills. There is no road map except the one you
create, which can be lonely and scary at first. That fear of taking control to build
your own road map to life can lead you to getting lost in drama, busyness, or
commenting on others’ lives instead of focusing on taking an active role in
creating your own life. However, loving yourself and developing security
includes taking an active role in building your happiness.
Some examples of what a familiar, if stifling, cocoon might consist of are
noted above. Now let’s see what your own cocoon is made of. Taking action:
Draw your cocoon on the next page (a poor drawing is plenty fine), and then
write words and phrases inside your drawing to indicate how your cocoon is
built (e.g., “I ignore my desire to change jobs,” “I rush home to spend mindless
hours on the internet,” “I clean more than is necessary in order to avoid my
painful feelings,” etc.).
Draw Your Cocoon, and the n write the words inside it as note d above :
Take a look at the words/phrases you filled your cocoon with. Pick a couple of
those words/phrases and revise them here, in accordance with how you would
like to evolve on that issue as you emerge from your cocoon.
As you start to leave the old, familiar, unsatisfying cocoon and look around
your new, freer world, possibilities seem to open up, and you will feel lighter
and freer. If something hurts, it is more likely to be a sharp, immediate, temporary
pain versus a lower-level, continuous and aching depression. You become “real,”
animated with the experience of living.
Take a look at your answers to the previous exercise regarding your deepest
desires. While giving yourself small comforts as needed, never lose sight of
those more meaningful desires, and remember from this activity how you plan to
methodically dismantle your cocoon.
Allowing Yourself to Build and Have a
Satisfying Life: Overcoming the Barrier of
Self-Criticism
Self-sabotage by method of self-critical thoughts can be a particularly vicious
part of one’s cocoon, so let’s do a particular exercise purely for this one element
that may be included in your cocoon if you relate to these issues.
Heavy self-criticism is tricky. It can appear that one is being quite moral in a
sense, or principled, by whipping oneself fiercely about one’s failings and
limitations. It is as if one is saying, “Well, I may not be seeking and creating my
own contentment, but at least I am doing something right by being mad at myself
for failing to risk seeking it!” There is a fundamental flaw in this argument. It
assumes that if we whip ourselves, we will in fact improve our contentment.
If you critique yourself gently, with sufficient specificity about where you
need to improve, yet with self-love, you are likely to improve. However, if you
whip yourself ferociously, your mind will become rigid and eventually
excessively comfort seeking. That is, this self-whipping is actually a sneaky little
distraction from truly taking responsibility for creating your own happiness. You
take on the false appearance to yourself of being moral by heavily criticizing your
failures, instead of actually taking responsibility by applying the bulk of your
energies toward growth and contentment. Excessive self-criticism then is actually
merely another avoidance of taking true responsibility for your decisions and life.
This truth should not merely be fuel for more self-criticism (e.g., “I am too
self-critical!”), as that again would be self-deception and avoidance of true
responsibility. The only correct antidote is to make a practice of gently but firmly
redirecting your thoughts toward building your contentment and satisfaction.
Period.
Do you have this issue? That is, do you tend to get caught up in self-criticism
instead of devoting that energy to making decisions and taking action toward your
contentment?
If so, what specific self-criticisms do you tend to repeat over and over again in
your thoughts?
What are the specific decisions to be made and/or action steps to be taken toward
your deeper desires, which you need to refocus your attentions on (instead of
staying in your comfortably unpleasant cocoon of self-criticism)?
Which Senses Are Most Satisfying to
Stimulate?
You probably do not often think of your senses, but it is through your senses that
you contact your world. If you did not have sight, sound, touch, taste, and smell,
you would have only your internal thoughts, without any input from your external
world. Fortunately this is not the case. Of course, you have your preferences
about which sense, or which method of contacting the world, gratifies you the
most. People are continually sensing, and so it makes sense (bad pun intended) to
spend a few moments considering which types are most gratifying for you.
Ple ase circle those se nsations that most ple ase you.
Visual
Viewing painting/sculptures
Panoramic movies
A gorgeous human body
Seeing the ocean, forest, or a wide-open meadow
Watching loved ones
Other Visual:
Auditory
Listening to music
Hearing your own voice (e.g., thinking out loud)
Listening to others’ undifferentiated voices in a crowd
Hearing the voice of somebody you love
The sound of rain pouring down
Other Sound:
Smell
Fresh-brewed coffee
A warm cinnamon roll
The scent or perfume of your lover
Other Smell:
Touch
Running your hand through sand
Touching trees or other objects of nature
Touching silk/satin
Being softly touched by or gently touching your partner
Other Touch:
Deep Touch
Having someone touch or hold you firmly
Holding/hugging yourself
Holding somebody else
Massage
Other Deep Touch:
List your three favorites of the sensations you circled above, and give a little
more detail about what each sensation consists of.
Sensory needs are simply another kind of need and satisfaction, though you
may not often consciously think of them. If you are not consciously aware of the
need, you are less likely to attend to it. Attend to sensory needs, and your
satisfaction and security will grow.
Locating Beauty
To be securely attached to yourself, you must build your capacity to be open to
yourself and to the world. This does not mean that you pull yourself, for example,
into physical proximity to somebody who can seriously harm you. In fact, you
must discriminate to be aware of what is likely toxic to you and, just as
importantly, to discern what nourishes you.
In truth, everything contains at least some beauty. Think of an unpleasant
person. What makes him/her so unpleasant? Think of his/her faults some more.
Now picture that unpleasant person as an infant. Even if he/she was fussy or
difficult, if you met him/her now as that infant, you would probably excuse the
fussiness as infant behavior and feel affection if you held him/her. Something
happened in the world, interacting with his/her genes, to create the unpleasant
person you know now in the present, but never forget that you would have felt
affection for him/her as an infant. Those beautiful seeds are still within him/her.
However, this is a more challenging route to locate beauty, since the mind may
resist finding beauty in situations and people you currently find unpleasant, so
let’s develop an easier route to begin with.
Use your senses to bring in the beauty of the world. Is there a place you can
look right now, hopefully some natural spot as trees or plants, perhaps outside
your window, which you find beautiful? After reading this paragraph, focus your
attention on that spot. Bring your eyes, ears, and sense of smell, if relevant, to this
spot. Sit back, breathe deeply into your abdomen (not shallow in your upper
chest), and use your senses to go out and meet this spot.
If you truly connect with the beauty in your world and focus on it, you will
become very open. It can even make you weep. Noticing the beauty in your world
helps you to relax, to let down your guard and be free, and to open up to yourself
and others. Try not to worry about being so open, as if something harmful
appears, you will adapt to it and act to preserve yourself. Thus, let yourself enjoy
the openness.
Chapter 5 :
3) Do I try to prove myself on the road (e.g., that I’m smart, strong, or that I do
not back down, etc.)? If so, what is a healthier way I can prove my strength to
myself?
6) Do I fill my drive time with specific dangers? For example, do I text while I
drive or drink to excess before driving, knowing it could potentially kill me and
others, but doing it anyway? If so, why, beyond convenience, do I really do this?
For example, am I being arrogant in trying to prove I am invincible and cannot
die? Am I passively not caring enough if I die?
As their highest social priority, what most people want from being social is:
How can I tell (by their behavior or by what I observe or feel) when somebody
truly cares about me instead of just wanting something from me?
You attract those into your life who already fit your expectations. In addition,
research suggests that once people enter our lives, they actually change their
behavior to match our expectations of them11 whether in a positive or negative
direction. Therefore, if you were to attract those with the three priorities you
listed above, how would you feel about that?
Is there a social priority (e.g., intellectual stimulation, love, travel partner, etc.)
you wish those around you had that you did not list in the first three questions
above?
To attract those with that sort of quality, you will need to begin noticing that
quality in other people so that your expectation shifts to assume that some people
do have that quality. Think again about people in your life. Who has at least a
little of that quality, and how do you know this?
Going forward, keep consciously looking for that quality in other people as
you watch and interact with them in the next few days. Begin training your mind
to expect that this quality does exist in people and to spot it so that you can begin
to attract more of that quality into your life.
Shaking Off Obstacles to Being Yourself in
Conversation
The purpose of this activity is to help you build freedom, spontaneity, and ease in
being yourself while in social situations. The purpose is not to do so in a way
that ignores the feelings and needs of others, but to help you overcome inhibitions
inside of you that have nothing to do with serving the needs of yourself or others.
Of your social fears, which is most significant? For example, “If I am myself then
people will reject me, won’t respect me, will say mean things to me and hurt me,
or will make me feel small, et cetera?”
In what ways do you defensively attempt to protect yourself from feeling that fear
(e.g., keeping distant to avoid getting injured, attacking others preemptively
before they can hurt you, being loud and making lots of noise on the surface to
prevent people from getting to know who you truly are, avoiding social contact,
having tons of social contacts but all of them on a surface level, etc.)?
The defense you listed above probably both serves and costs you, because while
it reduces your anxiety, it leaves you lonely and unable to make deeper contact
with others. What would you say the cost is for you in using this defense?
If you got hurt, as for example if the feared event from the first question actually
happened, how would you heal the wound created in that interaction?
If you opened up and relaxed and behaved more spontaneously as your true self,
what would most people think of you, and how would most of them treat you
(maybe you can remember a time when you did so)?
Remembering that life is relatively short and you do not have a lot of years
to be who you are, make a resolution that you will gently work to overcome your
fear that you may be more of who you truly are when social, for your own
enjoyment and that of others.
If You Get Anxious in a Conversation:
Reconnecting to Yourself
You may find during a conversation that you get shy and start to freeze and
withdraw from the conversation. Alternately, your anxiety may take the form of
speeding up your speech/dominating, and you just keep repetitively talking, and
talking more, with the end of your monologue nowhere in sight. Either way, it is
not a problem once you catch yourself. First, breathe and just notice that you are
doing that ‘anxious thing.’ Then remember that you are safe, and ground yourself
by remembering who you are (i.e., call specific adjectives to mind which
describe you). Keep breathing, and now step with your whole self back into the
conversation.
When you become anxious during a conversation, how can you identify this (i.e.,
what are the signs)?
What thoughts can you use to soothe yourself so that you can calm the anxiety?
1) Practice your posture while you are alone. Look in the mirror and notice
postures and facial expressions that make you look withdrawn/disconnected,
pleasantly engaged, and overly aggressive/intense. Practice postures and facial
expressions (e.g., eyes neither closing nor popped wide open but rather gently
open) signaling your willingness to be known and to get to know others. Spend
some time at this, becoming so familiar with the physical sensations that come
with these postures and facial expressions that they are easy to put in place when
you are with others and do not have a mirror.
4) Accordingly, keep the conversation alive. If you feel the desire to withdraw or
the pressure to impress, relax your posture first and then remind yourself, “I can
handle this, I am strong enough to cope even if I get rejected or fail to impress.
I want to enjoy myself right now, and I want to be curious about this person.”
Try it out, and talk about the experience. How was it?
In regard to the five steps above, where are you strong, and what do you need to
improve upon?
Bringing in People Who Balance You
Are you more emotionally changeable (identified more with Attachment Anxiety)
or more emotionally detached (identified more with the Attachment Avoidance)?
Though you have been working through this book, and are working to increase
security, this is a practice over time, and you will likely still have some
tendencies to be either emotionally in flux or a little emotionally detached from
others.
When some quality of yours is extreme, it often feels comforting to have
others in your life who are similar to you in that extreme. They validate your way
of seeing the world, so that you feel both understood and that your perspective is
normal. However, if you are to patch the holes in yourself and become more
dynamic, you also need to bring in people who have complementary strengths.
For example, if you have Attachment Anxiety and your emotions tend to be in
flux, and you become sad about a problem with a family member or friend, it
would be nice to have someone who really understands you on an emotional
level. However, after a little time being understood, it would also be great to then
talk to a friend who is a little more stoic than you and better at coping to help you
observe a model of how that person puts the emotion aside in order to continue
living and functioning well. Similarly, if you have Attachment Avoidance and can
be tuned out from your emotions, it will give you a fuller, richer life to bring
people into your milieu that see the emotion in life, appreciate art and music, et
cetera. Rather than continuing to glide upon the surface of life, these people could
help you learn how to engage with and experience your life more fully.
I am not suggesting bringing someone who is the opposite extreme of
yourself into your life! The difference between someone who complements your
strengths and someone who is the opposite extreme is a matter of degree. For
example, if you are working through Attachment Avoidance, don’t bring a
hyperemotional, sobbing person into your life. The connection with a person of
the opposite extreme might feel amazing for a moment, but this would not last
long. Rather, bring in a person who does show some emotion here and there, and
who has indeed cried at some point in the last decade.
When searching for people who complement you, would those people need to be
a little more emotional or a little more stoic than you?
Who in your life already has this quality in a way that is complementary, without
being extreme?
When is it most useful for you to talk to these people? That is, when do you most
need their complementary strength?
Keep your answer to the last question in mind and seek them out the next
time you need their type of strength. Having this awareness allows you to use
your available support more specifically and effectively.
Meeting People: Posture of Openness
Imagine that you are opening your heart to others. A physical stance of openness
reminds you that you are coming out of yourself to touch the world, to meet and to
be met. Imagine there is a string from the sky connected to your head to hold it
level so that you are looking neither up nor down but level, which allows you to
see the horizon. Next, straighten your lower back as you walk so that your chest
is just slightly outward, as if your chest is touching the world but without bowling
it over. As you hold that posture, repeat this thought to yourself, “I am ready and
wanting to meet those I encounter today. I am ready to be curious about others and
to let them meet me.”
You may think, “Why does my posture matter?” As an example, to respond
to this question, when you imagine a person who is currently depressed, how do
you picture his/her posture? Whatever your specific image is, you probably do
have an image. You can probably also imagine a posture for someone who is
arrogant, relaxed, etc. This shows you have developed an intuitive understanding
that posture is related to attitude and emotional state. Emotional state and attitude
do affect posture, and posture in turn affects attitude and emotional state.
The goal in building a posture ready to engage with others is to construct one that
is neither slumped and saggy nor excessively tense and rigid. Notice yourself:
Is your breathing deep and calm, some air reaching your abdomen, or shallow
and fast in your chest?
Is your gaze looking high enough that you can meet that of others, or are your eyes
either at the sky or ground level? Imagine a fishing string pulling up the center of
your head from the ceiling.
Are your shoulders back a little so your chest cavity can be open and facing
others?
Practice these by yourself so that you get used to how it feels to have a
posture that demonstrates openness and readiness to reach out and meet others
and have them meet you. By reminding yourself of this posture and building it,
you are also refreshing yourself throughout the day about your purpose of opening
yourself to others.
Meeting People: Emotional Openness
As you develop a posture with which to touch the world, as Thich Nhat Hanh
would say, you also need a mind with which to “touch” the world.2
There are reasons we retreat emotionally, often out of fear. We do not want
to be misjudged or misunderstood, stepped on, disliked by others, and so we may
present a false self (e.g., arrogant “expert,” comedian, etc.), withdraw, or simply
stiffen/freeze and present a cardboard version of ourselves. None of these types
of retreating ultimately nourish the other person in much depth, because there is
too little of us exposed for the other person to attach to. Thus, unless he/she
solely wants to use us as a “tool” for meeting his/her needs (e.g., for material
gain, for sex, for a consistently one-way listening ear), there is no reason for
him/her to further seek us.
Rather than working at being incredible at providing, becoming the “best
tool” for those who want to consistently use you, you could alternately open
yourself to balancing a reasonable level of providing for others’ needs while
adding the possibility of being liked genuinely for the person you are, and thus
risking the possibility of rejection. You could work at the practice of “making
friends with fear,”12 beginning to free yourself from fear so that you can become
vulnerable enough that others can truly begin getting to know you.
To assist you in loosening, opening, and risking rejection, you might use the
following self-talk: “I open myself to this situation. As I do, I am vulnerable. The
worst possibility is that this person/these people may not like me. If the worst
happens, I’ll nurture myself rather than kick myself about it. Now, with my open
posture and my open heart, I open myself to this situation.”
Obviously you use discretion and do not open yourself to a room of social
vultures, nor do you sit back forever and play safe. Rather, you decisively
conclude when there is reasonable safety, and then take your chances, ready to
pick yourself up in the event of injury. Also, you take social conventions into
account, so that as you release your own fears, you do not inspire unnecessary
fear in others.
To clarify, an open stance does not mean telling your life story to a mere
stranger. You do not inappropriately change the boundary with a new person so
quickly. You simply react to things in the moment (e.g., to what the other person
says) genuinely as who you are instead of reacting based on the motive of
producing a response intended to make the other person like you or think highly
of you.
This, of course, can require practice over multiple occasions, so encourage
yourself when you get a glimpse of this presence. If you tense up, take a moment
to breathe, ask yourself what fear is triggered, and then take care of yourself.
1) What is the nature of my social fear/s (e.g., being judged, not being good
enough socially, losing my reputation, etc.), regardless of the specific people
around me at a given occasion?
2) How do I respond when I experience these fears (e.g., stiffen like cardboard,
withdraw, become overly accommodating, become pushy, forceful, arrogant,
present a false self, etc.)?
Remember, if you stay open and you encounter trouble or pain, you will
likely have a sane response to that trouble (e.g., licking your wounds if a friend is
mean that day versus trashing the whole relationship, leaving the situation if
someone is routinely cruel to you and will not change, etc.). If you remember that
you have felt pain before, lived to tell the tale, and know that you can recover,
that fear of pain becomes less potent to stop you from connecting to others.
Meeting People: Replacing Self-
Does this person appear to enjoy his/her profession, and how could you tell?
If the conversation continues, you might learn about this person a bit more in
depth. For example:
Based on your direct knowledge or your intuition formed by what he/she had to
say, what do you imagine his/her dreams consist of?
Be ready to give others the same information about you. No fair becoming a
‘television interviewer ’ with others while hiding yourself. Also, you will be
lonely if you hide, even if you do learn about others.
Did you enjoy getting to know this person? If so, what did you enjoy about
him/her, and if not, what turned you off?
If you would like to meet people similar to this person (or if you want to avoid
people similar to this person), you need to know how to spot them. What sort of
behaviors or things a person says (or intuitive reaction that you have) would help
you know that his/her personality is similar to the personality of the person you
have described in this exercise?
This exercise involved two primary components: The first was replacing
some/all of your social concerns and anxieties with curiosity about the other
person. In the course of becoming curious about others, you can begin to develop
and/or hone the second component, mind mapping. The last question, and also the
two questions to which you responded based on “intuition,” are based on this
skill (i.e., mind mapping) of using the data in front of you (e.g., a person’s
behavior, body language, and statements, as well as how others who have known
the person over time seem to respond to him/her) to understand their personality
and to make intuitive guesses about what their thoughts and feelings may consist
of.
Advanced Topic: Mind Mapping Instead of
Projecting
People with a history of attachment problems tend to project onto others a great
deal. Everyone does this sometimes. To project means that you look at another ’s
behavior and interpret it through your own way of understanding the world,
instead of accurately understanding the intent of the other person. Higher
accuracy is based on understanding the other person’s intentions based on his/her
own way of understanding the world. Mind mapping involves making guesses
about the other person based on the other person’s personality and how he/she
views the world.
Example: John leaves the toothpaste cap off. His live-in girlfriend, Jennifer,
assumes John is selfish and does not care enough about her, or he would put the
cap back on as she desires. Jennifer ’s assumption could be accurate, based on
strong knowledge of what this behavior means when it comes from John. But
more likely she is projecting, placing her own purely imagined intent onto his
behavior.
The projection may come from a couple of places: Most likely she projects
meaning based on what it would mean if she did the same thing (if she left the cap
off, it would mean she did not care about him), but she could also project based
on past experiences (a past boyfriend did not care at all if she was displeased the
cap was left off, and generally did not care if he displeased her, and so at that
time the behavior was in fact a symbol of the old boyfriend’s lack of care for
her). Finally, she could also project qualities she dislikes about herself onto him
(i.e., “It is too uncomfortable for me to see myself as inconsiderate, so I cannot
see myself as inconsiderate, and instead see that quality in another person close
to me”).
The toothpaste example was benign, just to provide an example illustrating
the meaning of projection. Now let us imagine projections more likely to cause
serious and unnecessary harm to a relationship: A friend/partner interprets the
other ’s repetitive lateness as a sign of lack of love or respect leading to frequent
angry fights; a man projects that his girlfriend’s lack of interest in sex for the past
two weeks means that she may be interested in somebody else (because if he did
not want sex for two weeks, that is what it would mean for him, so he projects the
same meaning onto her behavior) and accordingly begins to demand to know her
whereabouts and starts checking her phone texting history. You can see how
projecting intent onto the behavior of others, instead of asking about their intent,
can and often does quickly lead to dramatic conflict, toxic to a relationship.
Even small projections can become much larger problems. If a co-worker
criticizes a small aspect of your work, does that mean he/she is: helping to
improve the work, concerned that the product will be worse if an error is not
corrected, a little socially awkward and unskilled at tact, subtly getting you back
for a minor offense of your own against him/her by trying to make you look bad in
front of others, et cetera? With so many possibilities, how could you know
his/her motivations?!
The truth could be any of these and more, but what if you projected or
assumed negative intent onto the co-worker when in fact he/she had no intent to
harm you? How might you unnecessarily interact in a way that causes anger
between you, perhaps spiraling into escalating conflict based on initially
projecting that the co-worker had aggressive intentions?
Similarly, if a man projects a woman has romantic interest in him based on
her smiling at him once, he may pursue her in an overly enthusiastic manner,
potentially embarrassing himself and her. Whether a projection causes pain or
elation is irrelevant; rather, it is the inaccuracy that is relevant. The inaccuracy
exists because the projection originates in one’s own interpretation and ways of
understanding, instead of being based in the other ’s thought process. Thus, when
the man smiles that way at a woman, he may himself be romantically interested in
her, but when a woman smiles at him in the same way, he would have to find
further ways to look at the possibility that she is interested in him, instead of
projecting that he ‘knows’ she in fact does have interest and thus jumping into
pursuit too intensely.
Why would attachment security problems lead one to project frequently?
When one lacks security, one is frequently focused on pursuing unmet needs
while trying to avoid getting injured, whether by clinging to or avoiding others.
Projections are often an attempt to predict the social world, whether to avoid
getting hurt or to reassure oneself that another person is perfectly suited to meet
one’s unmet needs. However, a secure person achieves harm avoidance by
getting to know the reality of the other person and using that accurate knowledge
of the other to avoid socially harmful situations where possible and pursues
getting needs met by accurately discerning if another can help meet them.
However, with Attachment Avoidance or Anxiety, one does not allow enough
closeness to actually come to understand the other person, and thus, where does
one go to find an interpretation of the other ’s actions but into one’s own mind, a
tragic if understandable mistake.
What is the alternative to projecting when trying to understand the meaning
of others’ behavior and when working to understand who they truly are? Mind
mapping entails truly understanding another person, what he/she thinks and feels,
and also making more accurate intuitive guesses about the intentions behind
his/her various behaviors based on the person that he/she is (instead of projecting
assumptions about what his/her intentions are based upon who you are and the
way that you think).
Example: John tells Sandra that he thinks she has made a mistake with part
of her project at work, and he tells her this in front of her co-worker. Sandra feels
humiliated. At first she feels tempted to project that John said this in front of her
co-worker on purpose because he wanted to embarrass her. Next she decides that
she may not be correct, but that since she is upset she must find out. She tells John
she feels humiliated and asks his intent. He tells her that he is sorry he is so rigid
sometimes, but he just wants the team project to be the best it can be.
The next time he critiques her work, she mind maps: She assumes now that
he merely wants the project to be its best and is not humiliating her on purpose.
Based on this, she approaches him, perhaps upset about the humiliation, but
responding to him effectively in a way likely to elicit his cooperation based on
what she guesses is his actual intent, reminding him that public critique causes
her pain, and asking him to give his suggestions one-on-one (thus asking him to
also map her mind that she is sensitive to public humiliation, and to respond
accordingly).
2) When intent is ambiguous, know that you may not know their intent, and
cope with that ambiguity until their intent becomes clear. Don’t let your
anxiety about not knowing force premature and false “understanding.”
3) If the situation allows for it, ask the person about his/her intent. Unless
he/she is established as a liar, try to take the response at face value.
4) When you ask about the intent, do so in an emotionally calm way, or their
answer will merely reflect reactiveness to your emotionality, instead of
accurately reflecting their actual thought process and feelings.
5) Use the information you have gained from them to more accurately interpret
their intent in similar future situations. Now you are mind mapping! You
are developing intuitions about their intentions, thoughts, and feelings
based on who they actually are instead of based upon your own
projections.
The next time you use these steps toward mind mapping, describe your use of the
five steps, as well as the outcome of using the steps:
Finding My Mentors
For those with Attachment Avoidance, you have been warming up to this whole
‘allow people to get to know you and influence you’ thing. Now it is time to put
that work together to step into the major leagues. The next step in this work is
allowing others to get close to you, see your flaws, and hence develop you and
make you stronger.
For those with Attachment Anxiety, you have been working toward realizing
your own strength, realizing when you have received enough help from others,
and using that help to strengthen you. The next step in this work is to practice
seeking help in this new, more empowered manner, resisting temptation to
become overly dependent.
Ask yourself this question: “Why does one have a mentor?” Your answer
probably has something to do with the fact that a mentor is better at something,
perhaps many things, in comparison to a mentee.
Now what is the difference between mentoring someone and teaching
someone a skill? Mentoring usually is a labor of deeper caring and responsibility
for the mentee. The mentor is not solely teaching a simple skill and telling you to
go fly. No, a mentor takes you on, coaching you each step of the way, giving you
feedback, encouraging you where you feel weak, and perhaps pushing you where
you are rigid or stubborn.
Why would someone be a mentor? Well, some would say giving is natural,
so once you have a special ability, you may feel inclined to share that so that it
may live on. Those who are willing to mentor are usually those who want to give
back to others.
A mentoring relationship begins when a potential mentee sees that somebody
possesses something special that he/she wishes to build in him/herself. The
mentee usually does not intend to become the same as the more skillful person,
but rather to integrate some of that person’s way of doing things into his/her own
self. After they get to know each other and the mentee senses that the desired
mentor may be willing to help, the mentee can ask the mentor for help in a domain
(e.g., an area of work, how to meet men/women, how to instill confidence in
his/her children, etc.). The relationship may, of course, also begin without any
such formal discussion.
If the general idea of potentially needing or being able to benefit from a mentor
distresses you, especially for those working through Attachment Avoidance,
describe, in a sentence or more, the nature of that distress:
Even if there is no associated distress, what self-talk would open you most fully
to the idea of needing and seeking mentor/s in your life?
If you are concerned you might excessively revere a mentor and become too
dependent, instead of having him/her show you how to build your own power,
especially for those working through Attachment Anxiety, describe your concern:
How would you work to stay mindful of the need to be empowered, instead of
becoming more dependent, through a mentor-mentee relationship?
How could you bring that person further into your life, so that you could attempt
to gain his/her mentoring?
What qualities and abilities of that person would you like to build in yourself?
Based on the above discussion, how would you define your work when it comes
to increasing appropriate vulnerability?
What is the next small step you want to take toward that work?
Secure Attachment Sex
If you have a lover, or someone who is perhaps on the way to becoming your
lover, this activity will be useful now. If you do not have a lover currently but
have had a partner in the past, this exercise may lead you to look back to consider
the quality of sex you were having, as well as considering anything you would
like to change about that in the future.
Secure Attachment kissing and touching means that there is an interest in
enjoying the sexual chemistry together, not merely in the sense of a pressure to
please yourself or the other partner, but rather in the sense of enjoying the
opportunity to be together in those delights.
If you are higher in Attachment Avoidance, you may tend to approach sex in
a greedy manner, as though the plate may not always have food, so to speak.
Being in “feast or famine” mode, you may figure that it is best to gobble the
current food greedily in case of famine. The sex may be hot, loaded with fun
tension, but ultimately not very intimate. Of course, you have a valid reason to
feel greedy. Your history was indeed one of emotional famine, so your desire for
hoarding or gluttony is quite reasonable, though in your adult life, this greedy
approach may also be quite destructive. The hope is to allow you to truly be
present and together with the other person during sex, thus enjoying each other.
Among some women with Attachment Avoidance, while they may have the style
mentioned above, it is alternately possible that the messiness of sex may stop
them from being interested in being touched. Being entered may feel like a chore.
If you have Attachment Anxiety, kissing, touching, and sex will provoke
hopes for and possibly also fears of closeness. As a result, some people find
themselves having more sex with those they do not know well, and later cutting
off sex once a partner gets too close as a self-protective mechanism to minimize
risk and intimacy. Sex like this can be wonderful and emotionally intense, but as
just mentioned, difficult to sustain with the same partner when the partner
becomes too close emotionally.
Working toward Secure Attachment sex: Try to bring your mind to where
your body is, away from any sexual performance pressures or “to-do” task lists.
Instead, practice truly being together with your partner, living the experience of
having sex together. How does he/she feel against your body? What feels great?
What feels less positive or upsetting? How do you know if your partner is having
a good time? How does your partner know if you are enjoying it?
What is the next step/s for you in working toward Secure Attachment sex?
How might the sexual experience change for you when you take that step?
How may taking that step change the sexual experience for your current (or
future) partner?
An Ongoing Checklist about Your
Relationship with Yourself
This checklist will help you evaluate the extent to which you are securely
attached to yourself and are giving yourself the care and attention you must have
to maintain good relationships with yourself and others. Consider it a
maintenance checkup to help you troubleshoot. Scan this activity to see if it looks
useful for you, and if so, consider repeating it monthly, scheduling a reminder
(perhaps in your phone), before continuing on.
1) How well are you doing at seeking love from others by being merely yourself
versus being sick/wounded to elicit “help” or by being solely a “tool” to help
them? If poorly, how will you improve in this area?
2) How well are you doing in working to meet the needs of both others and
yourself in your relationships with them? Is there a way you need to improve in
this area?
3) How well are you doing at taking care of your ongoing bodily needs (e.g.,
sleep, meals, some exercise, sex, etc.)? Are any improvements needed?
4) Are you noticing any medical problems while they are mild or moderate, and
then doing something about them before you become medically unhealthy?
5) How are you doing in taking care of your emotional health (e.g., avoiding
unnecessary escalation of emotionality in conflicts, actively approaching versus
avoiding important relationships, ending toxic/abusive relationships, doing things
you find fulfilling)?
6) Are you noticing and caring for your emotional health before reaching the
point that you are extremely distressed?
7) How are you doing at being strong, by recognizing that you have something to
give to others and being able to give it? If you are giving, what is it that you are
giving?
8) When you need support, how are you doing at asking for and receiving it? To
be specific, what kind of support have you asked for and received recently?
9) What are you doing that you find extremely satisfying? If nothing, what should
you now begin or resume doing?
Becoming Free
Thanks to your work in earlier sections (you must walk before you can fly), you
may be ready to begin the practice of transcending attachment. In contrast, when
you are feeling anxious, tense, or sad, you need to focus on your needs and on
seeking a higher level of security with yourself and others in healthy ways. This
has been the focus of this workbook. You will need to return to that work at
times, especially when you are highly stressed.
However, by now you are building habits that are likely to reduce your
ongoing insecurity, so now it may be possible during less stressful times to
consider what lies beyond building security. When you are aware of and are
actively caring for yourself, and when you are not anxiously preoccupied with
how your relationships are going, you become lighter and freer.
To do this activity, adapted from the Shambhala Buddhist tradition, you will
need to remember the instructions below (this is one reason that the instructions
are very brief) and move to an area where you literally can see the sky. The
purpose of this activity is to remind you that you are free and can relax at any
time.
Instructions (read them before beginning the experience): Take off your
shoes, and feel your feet firmly on the ground. Press into the ground. Feel the
solidness beneath you. Just for now, release your past down into the earth. Pause
a few moments here.
Next, look up at the sky and notice how vast it is. Release your future into
the sky. Then just be here and experience being present here in the wide open sky,
bringing your mind back here if it drifts, until you have had your fill of the
experience.
Without any past or future, you are present. Let any sensory experiences and
thoughts register and then pass right through you without analysis.
When you are present, you are free. You may experience pain, pleasure,
interest, curiosity, jealousy, visual/tactile/auditory stimulation, et cetera. That
part is pure and true. It is the analysis of the experience that drags you out of the
present moment. One spiritual master refers to the pure experience of what is as
“dot”10—a singular, unanalyzed pure moment of experience. Practice dot
experiences, being now. While not possible all the time, remind yourself to have
dot experiences throughout the day, when your mind has drifted too far from
present experience.
Re me mbe r: Dot
No Compromise Decisions
When you are moving to security and beyond, you make decisions that truly
reflect the self. Significant decisions are then not based on momentary needs or
emotions, but rather on who you are. For example, if you are unhappy in a
relationship or otherwise feeling dissatisfied, you might get generally grabby.
Give me more sex. Give me your willingness to do errands for me. Give me this
or that. When getting a car, “Yes, this will make me feel good, I’ll take this one.”
Then later you realize you have chosen a car that is too expensive, too cheap,
does not carry as many people as you need to carry, or does not have the
convertible top you wanted, et cetera.
When we are unhappy and rarely in the present, we are more likely to be
materialists. We grab for things as if they were drugs we need to make us feel
better. We grab in panic for something outside, instead of working with the pain
within. Thus, grabbing usually fails to adequately meet the internal need to
regulate our mood for more than a moment, and since we are so ungrounded
while grabbing, we also grab for things that do not even correctly meet our
material needs.
When you are moving to security and beyond, you do not need anything from
the car except simply for it to be the car you want, and so you make the choice
while connected to yourself, not choosing in a panicked or needy state. You then
get the car you truly want, which ironically is much more satisfying, even though
you were not in such need for it to bring satisfaction.
A secure state lets you stand back and listen to yourself. Then you pursue the
right experiences, things, and people. “This partner would suit me, her values are
similar to mine, and she is sexy. I’ll go after her to find out more about her and try
to convince her of my charms.” As an additional example, “The right pair of
shoes is not here, so I will not buy any here, but I will go someplace else another
day.”
What this means is that because you need less from anything you seek, you
seek it with more flow, more precision. This is because you seek it merely to fit
you instead of to fulfill you. “No compromise decisions” means that you make
decisions not out of grabbing at something for happiness, but because the
decision fits who you are. Who you are is thus completely included in the
decision, instead of compromising yourself in a desperate grab for happiness.
What is the last decision you made based on heavy need in which you
compromised your true nature just to grab at a little satisfaction now?
In that decision, how would you make it if you were desperate for happiness right
now? Take a moment to become calm and present, and consider how you would
make it if acting in accord with your true values/interests. Are the two answers
different?
Is there another way you could get a little harmless pleasure now, to leave
yourself some space to make the decision above in the direction of your true
values/interests?
Paradoxically, the less you need from each decision, the more likely you are to
make the decision in a way that satisfies you and leaves you lighter. If the need is
simply too strong, try to temporarily satisfy that need another way, so that the
bigger decision with long-term implications can be made under less pressure, in
a way that is true to yourself.
I’m Alive: Living Before I Die
Remember the recent exercise: Dot. Now imagine that you are not hindered by
any need to dull sadness or desperately grab at joy. Imagine that you can tolerate
all emotions with steadiness as they come, without muting any of them or clinging
to them. Now you are living life on life’s terms. With this freedom you gain, the
freedom of experiencing instead of distorting life as you take it in, you now have
tremendous room to move. You can do what you want to do; you can live life
according to your values, doing what is most deeply satisfying for you. You can
selectively grow those relationships that are truly nourishing for you, not be a
slave to continuing those that are merely a drug to alter your emotional
experience. As the founder of Gestalt psychology, Fritz Perls, used to say, you
can stand on your own two feet.
Everyone dies, of course, and what a problem it is if you die without having
ever lived. How do you ‘not live?’ You ‘not live’ by distorting reality in the
service of avoiding painful emotions and grasping for pleasant emotions. This
attempt to manipulate emotions prevents true ‘Dot’ experiences as well. How can
you have pure attention on your immediate experiences with so much distortion?
The key is to simply stop trying so hard to improve your emotional experience,
and instead to live in what is actually happening. Ironically, when you stop
working so hard to alter your emotional experience, you can actually begin to
live in ways with longer-term payoff, making choices that give you deep
satisfaction.
Meditate on the following: We are all going to die. I will not panic, because
that also takes me out of my experience. However, I will live as often as possible
before I die.
Openness to Experience
This issue of opening oneself to touch the world, along with the vulnerability it
requires, has certainly been a focus throughout the book. Let us take it up again
then, in a different way. We have talked about building confidence so you can
withstand a little pain without closing up and hardening, facilitated by the
confidence of knowing you will rid yourself of toxic relationships if people
repeatedly hurt you. Now that you have this, let us go beyond.
Get into your meditation posture. Whether in your own words or reflecting
on the following, set a timer to sit for ten minutes and tell yourself: “I open
myself to this world and the people in it. With my posture opening to the world,
with my mind willing to tolerate occasional pain in order to have connection with
others, I open myself, and I risk myself. I reclaim my natural role as a part of the
world, and I’ll stop pretending that I am separate from it. If what comes injures
me too deeply, I may close off to that specific entity, remaining open to all the
other nourishing experiences and people that my life provides.”
Notes
1 Daniel Siegel, The Mindf ul Brain: Ref lection and Attunement in the Cultivation of Wellbeing (New
York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2007), 171–172.
2 Thich Nhat Hanh, The Ultimate Dimension. CD. Sounds True, 2004.
3 Joan L. Luby, Deanna M. Barch, Andy Belden, Michael S. Gaffrey, Rebecca Tillman, Casey Babb,
Tomoyuki Nishino, Hideo Suzuki, and Kelly N. Botteron, “Maternal Support in Early Childhood Predicts
Larger Hippocampal Volumes at School Age,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 109
(2012), 2854–2859.
4 Michael Baim, “This is Your Brain on Mindfulness,” Shambhala Sun, July 2011, 45–48, 84–85.
5 Francine Lapides, “Healing the Heart and Mind: Using Neurobiology to Become a Better Therapist,”
Professional Psychology Seminars (Culver City, CA), April 30, 2011.
6 Andrew Weil, Breathing: The Master Key to Self -Healing. CD. Sounds True, 1999.
7 Grant J. Rich, “Massage Therapy: Significance and Relevance to Professional Practice,” Prof essional
Psychology: Research and Practice, 41 (2010), 325–32.
8 Wen-Hsuan Hou, P ai-Tsung Chiang, Tun-Yen Hsu, Su-Ying Chiu, and Yung-Chieh Yen, “Treatment Effects
of Massage Therapy in Depressed People: A Meta-Analysis,” Journal of Clinical Psychiatry, 71 (2010),
894–901.
9 Steven C. Hayes, Jason B. Luoma, Frank W. Bond, Akihiko Masuda, Jason Lillis, “Acceptance and
Commitment Therapy: Model, Processes and Outcomes,” Behaviour Research and Therapy, 44 (2006), 1–
25.
10 Chogyam Trungpa, Great Eastern Sun (Boston: Shambhala Publications, 1999), 6–10.
11 Hester de Boer, Roel J. Bosker, and Margaretha P. C. van der Werf, “Sustainability of Teacher
Expectation Bias Effects on Long-Term Student Performance,” Journal of Educational Psychology, 102
(2010), 168–179.
What is the most important thing you have learned about having a good
relationship with yourself?
What is the most important thing you have learned about having a good
relationship with others?