Insecure in Love: How Anxious Attachment Can Make You Feel Jealous, Needy, and Worried and What You Can Do About It (13 page)

As discussed in chapter 6, self-kindness means being kind to yourself. It means wanting to feel good in the moment, but also wanting what’s best for yourself in the long run. It is an important motivation behind maintaining a healthy lifestyle. And it is essential to enabling you to offer yourself compassion when you are upset by your perceived inadequacies, mistakes, or failures.

Below are various ways in which you can express self-kindness. Some of them are proactively caring for yourself while others are more focused on offering yourself compassion when you struggle.

Stay Strong in Body

People who struggle with anxious attachment are often too quick to give up caring for themselves in favor of trying to earn the love of others by caring for them. While being nice to others is a positive quality, you hurt yourself when you don’t keep up with taking care of your own body. So make it a priority to:

• Maintain a healthy diet.
  
• Get sufficient sleep.
  
• Exercise regularly.
  

By caring for yourself in these ways, you nurture the physical and emotional strength to enjoy life and face challenges effectively.

Feed Your Spirit

Research has supported the idea that it’s important to nourish your connection to something larger than yourself, whether you call it God, nature, humanity, or anything else. This includes examining your fundamental values, considering what is most meaningful in your life, and finding a sense of awe in the world around you. It is often thought of as a search for the sacred—sometimes within the confines of religion and sometimes as part of a more personal journey.

Such a search can help you cope with the uncertainty and seeming randomness of life, providing a way of dealing with events beyond your control (for instance, work responsibilities prevent your boyfriend from meeting you for dinner) and with overwhelming events (a long-term girlfriend leaves you). It can also help you face your mortality.

You can nurture this aspect of your life in many ways, such as praying, meditating, attending religious services, studying religious texts, communing with nature, developing compassion and love, and doing good deeds. You might also nurture a sense that everything in the universe—including you—is interconnected, and so try to live in harmony with the universe.

Exercise: Find Healthy Ways to Comfort Yourself

Life can be hard. Really hard. And sometimes you just need some comfort. Unfortunately, too often people try to comfort themselves by relying on unhealthy behaviors, such as emotional eating, isolating, drinking, shopping, or gambling. To help guide you in a better direction, make a list of healthy ways to cope that at least sometimes work for you. For instance, you might include going for a walk, exercising at the gym, meeting with a friend, watching a movie, reading, praying, meditating, listening to music, or taking a bath. Place this list in an accessible place so that you can refer to it whenever you need to. But if you are really stuck in problematic ways of coping, seek professional help.

Exercise: Practicing Gratitude

Research has shown that people are happier and more grateful after keeping a gratitude journal in which they write at least three things they are thankful for. Some research indicates you should do this daily, while other research suggests once a week is better. You need to find the frequency that is best for you.

A slight variation of this exercise is to focus on
qualities about you
that are positive. For instance, you might note that you improved your performance in some way at work, which highlights your caring, persistence, and effort there. Or you might focus on the fact that you were kind to an upset friend, or were sensitive enough to notice a beautiful sunset. This can help you develop more awareness, and eventual acceptance, of your positive attributes.

My personal experience with patients who have kept a gratitude journal is that they often followed a general pattern. They benefited from it most when they completed it daily for eight weeks. At first, they often had difficulty in even thinking of things to be grateful for. But then they transitioned to being able to do it more easily, but with conscious effort; to having it occur to them as they experienced things they were grateful for; and finally, to having gratitude be a part of them rather than something they had to try to do.

Exercise: Let Friends Warm Your Heart

Social connections are an important source of happiness, offering direct benefits that are also opportunities for personal growth.

An easy way to begin developing friendships is to focus on people you have a shared interest with. Pursue your interests, getting involved in clubs, organizations, or classes. It’s particularly helpful to find activities that give you an opportunity to see people on a regular basis. Then, show an interest in those people, or others around you. As a friendship develops, be open to doing things together and just having fun.

Focus the most energy on a few friends (maybe one to three people) who are good to you and seem to have your best interests in mind. As you feel emotionally safer with someone, share a bit more about yourself, including your feelings and thoughts. And really listen—so that you can get to know and connect with your friend. Also, listen
not just with your ears, but with your heart
—for how your friend feels about you. Pay attention to how her interest in, and acceptance of, you feels, how it seems to almost physically warm your heart.

If you tend to dismiss or minimize what you have to offer your friends, get out a sheet of paper and draw a line down the center of it. Then do the following:

Title the left side: “Friends.”
List your friends down the left side of the page. You can list anyone who seems to like you, from your dearest friend from childhood to a recent acquaintance.

Title the right side: “Valued Qualities in Me.”
Down this side of the page, list what you think these friends value in you. For each friend, ask yourself, “Why does he want to be my friend?” You might jot down words they might associate with you, such as caring, giving, honest, funny, enjoys the same activities, helpful, offers good advice, or good listener.

Consider your list of valued qualities.
Read the qualities one at a time, letting them each sink in. Allow yourself to feel good about being valued and appreciated. If you find yourself minimizing or dismissing these things, that’s okay. You may need time to adjust to them and accept them—much like how your eyes take time to adjust to seeing anything when you move from the darkness into the light. You might also find it helpful to practice seeing yourself through your friends’ eyes.

Keep this list someplace easily accessible.
Look it over frequently. Actively remind yourself that you
are
appreciated—that you are, in fact, worthy of love. Also, make sure to look at this list when you are feeling particularly vulnerable and flawed. At these times, you might even want to confide in one of the friends listed, with whom you feel emotionally safe.

Exercise: Loving-Kindness Meditation

Your continued struggles cry out to be comforted by true love and acceptance. This reassurance is offered—at least somewhat—by loving-kindness meditations. Such meditations encourage you to see and feel the sense of personal worth that comes with secure attachment. They have also been shown to increase feelings of social connection (Hutcherson, Seppala, and Gross, 2008). With practice, you will be able to “feel the love.”

In preparing for the following loving-kindness meditation, plan for a few minutes of undisturbed time. To help you gain a sense of mastery, it’s best to start briefly, such as with ten minutes. Then you can work up to about twenty minutes. As you complete this meditation, approach it with a gentle, positive intention. Acknowledge distractions when they arise, then return your awareness to the exercise. If you have difficulty with the meditation, make note of this struggle and give yourself praise for working on this difficult task.

Sit down and settle into a comfortable position.
Close or lower your eyes.

Bring your awareness to your breath.
Follow the flow of your inhale and exhale for several breaths.

Bring your awareness to the heart area of your chest.
Remind yourself that all people want to feel safe, happy, and at peace.

Repeat the following to yourself:

May I feel safe.

May I feel healthy.

May I feel peaceful and happy.

May I feel loved.

Recite each of these phrases slowly, allowing them to wash over you in a way that you can truly absorb. You might even want to repeat particular phrases or words to help you with this process. For instance, you might repeat the phrase “May I feel loved” several times slowly. Remember, this is a wish, not a command.

After you are able to connect with this meditation for yourself, you might want to offer it to others—family, friends, acquaintances, or even people you’ve never met. The more you practice this, the stronger your sense of compassion will grow.

If you have great difficulty in really feeling these loving wishes for yourself, consider first offering them to someone you already feel loving toward, such as a friend, a child, or a pet.
Bring a clear image of that person (or animal) to mind so that you naturally feel a lightness. Now slowly recite the phrases for that person or animal.

May he feel safe.

May he feel healthy.

May he feel peaceful and happy.

May he feel loved.

After completing this heartfelt love offering, remind yourself that all people want these same feelings. Remind yourself that “all people” includes you. Now try the meditation with a focus on wishing these for yourself. If this proves too difficult, recognize and appreciate your efforts just the same.

Complete this meditation by returning awareness to your breath.
Allow time to sit with the peaceful, positive feelings that accompanied the wishes of love and kindness.

The practice of compassionate self-awareness is important for improving your romantic relationships and feeling better about yourself. Though developing this is a challenging process, the variety of exercises in chapters 6 and 7 offer specific ways to increase your self-awareness and self-compassion. Use your uplifting dreams for the future, as well as the pains of your present and past relationships, to motivate you to persist in your efforts. Return, as needed, to the exercises you think will help at any particular time. Along the way, you will have moments of insight, and you’ll experience times when you make better choices that enable you to enjoy more moments of happiness in your life and relationships. Take the time to appreciate these. Remember that a fulfilling life is one that you appreciate in the moment, even as you continue toward a better future.

PART FOUR

Lighting Up Your Love Life

Chapter 8

Finding that special someone can seem straightforward—
Funny, romantic, fit man seeks same qualities in a woman for a lifetime of friendship and love.
But it rarely is—after meeting this Prince Charming, you might wonder about his definition of “fit” or “romantic” or even “funny.” But even more problematic than other people’s baggage is your own—as I’ve detailed in earlier chapters.

However, you don’t need to remain stuck in these dilemmas. Instead, as you develop compassionate self-awareness, you’ll find that you are in a better position to find someone who is a good fit for you—not an objectively perfect mate, but a person who can accept and love you for who you really are, be emotionally available to you, and can warm your heart. And just as importantly, it can help you to walk away from bad situations. It makes this possible by helping you to clearly see what you are looking for in a relationship and follow through on that vision.

To succeed in relationships, as in any aspect of life, you must know what it is you want. While you might stumble upon a good relationship out of dumb luck, it helps to be clear about your goal. You can use this clarity to point you in the generally correct direction and to guide you along the way.

In broad terms, what makes for a secure attachment in childhood also makes for a secure relationship in adulthood. So you can think about relationships as having the following three basic characteristics:

Emotional availability:
Children need their parents physically and emotionally close to help them feel secure, but adult relationships are more dependent on the partners being emotionally close. While separations and long-distance romantic relationships can cause a strain, they are not necessarily deal-breakers. However, partners must accept and be responsive to each other’s needs. When your partner remains emotionally distant or hostile, you will probably feel alone, rejected, or abandoned, and may question your value as a person.

Safe haven:
Just as a child runs back to his mother when threatened or upset, partners in a healthy relationship turn to each other when they need reassurance or support during difficult times. Because life always includes at least some pain and tiring obstacles, it’s important to have a partner who can offer comfort, help, and respite from those difficulties. People who know they have this trusted “port in a storm” are less overwhelmed by life’s challenges. Unfortunately, if your partner is dismissing or critical, then you won’t turn to him; or if you do turn to him, you will ultimately feel rejected.

Secure base:
To feel fulfilled in life and truly loved in a relationship, it’s important for people to be able to pursue their heart’s desires—or even simply to be able to explore what those desires may be. Healthy relationships are ones in which partners encourage and support those efforts.

As you think about these qualities of a healthy relationship, remember that both partners need to work together to create them. Partners need to be open to accepting and being accepted, which is essential to emotional availability; to comforting and being comforted, ensuring a safe haven in times of trouble; and to encouraging and being encouraged, making the relationship a secure base from which to explore the world. Although you are probably more concerned about a partner being able to offer these “gifts” to you, it is equally important for him to be able to receive them, because an open give-and-take dynamic nurtures relationships. Similarly, it is essential that you are capable of offering and receiving these things.

While these remarks provide a sense of what you want to aspire to, they are short on details for how to pick a partner who is good for you and how to proceed from there. For guidance on this, read on.