S2 EP222 – Your Attachment Style
Episode Summary
Do you have fears of rejection and engulfment that underlie your relationship difficulties? Is not being controlled more important to you than loving yourself and others? Do you give yourself up and then resent the other person? You can heal these attachment wounds.
Transcription:
Hi everyone. Dr. Margaret Paul here with the Inner Bonding Podcast. Today I’m addressing the issue of the two most common problematic attachment styles that I see with my clients – the anxious attachment style, and the avoidant attachment style.
Most of us really want love and connection with others, yet often this is missing in our relationships. In fact, as much as people say they want love and connection, fear may come up and then the wounded self sabotages love and connection. And, there is a very good reason for this.
As much as you might want love and connection, you might also want to avoid that which you fear even more. You might not feel safe enough in yourself to risk loving another, and that’s because two major fears may get in your way and undermine a wonderful new connection with someone, or even prevent that connection from ever occurring. These two fears are what create the anxious and avoidant attachment styles.
The deepest fear is the fear of rejection – the loss of another’s love through anger, emotional withdrawal, physical withdrawal, or death.
The other fear is the fear of engulfment – of losing yourself through being controlled, consumed, invaded, suffocated, dominated, and swallowed up by another.
It’s the fear of rejection that creates the anxious relationship style, and the fear of engulfment that creates the avoidant relationship style.
These fears stem from childhood experiences, and from defining your worth externally through others’ approval, rather than internally through spiritual eyes of truth. You might feel too unsafe to share your love to the fullest extent with another until you heal these fears of loss of other and of loss of self.
Until these fears are healed, you might react in protective and controlling ways whenever they are triggered. What do you do when your fear of rejection is activated? Do you get angry, blaming, accusing, mean, or sarcastic? Do you comply, defend, explain, or teach? What do you do when your fear of engulfment is activated? Do you give in, shut down, withdraw? What are the controlling behaviors you learned to protect yourself from experiencing your fears? However you react in your different controlling ways, the result will be the same – your reactive controlling behavior will trigger your partner’s fears of rejection or engulfment. Now both of you are acting out of fear. Together you have activated the very fears and resulting controlling behaviors that lead to love, connection, and intimacy gradually eroding. Your relationship becomes unsafe as you protect against your fears.
Many of you might never have experienced a safe, loving relationship as children, and you might not have experienced this as adults because you might not have learned to stay open when your fears of being rejected and abandoned, or engulfed and controlled are triggered. When these fears are activated, if you focus on who is at fault or who started it, you perpetuate an unsafe relationship. Blaming another for your fears and for your own unloving behavior makes the relationship feel even more unsafe. As long as you believe that your partner is causing your fears and your resulting anxious or avoidant behavior, you are stuck being a victim.
Both of you end up feeling badly, each of you believing that your pain is the result of the other person’s behavior. You feel victimized, helpless, stuck, and disconnected from your partner. You desperately want the other person to see what they are doing that, you believe, is causing your pain. You think that if only the other person understands this, they will change, and you try in many ways to get them to hear you, see your point of view, and care about your pain.
Over time, because of controlling behaviors, fears of rejection and engulfment intensify, and whatever connection you had erodes.
The dual fears of losing the other through rejection and losing yourself through being swallowed up by the other are the underlying cause of your unloving, reactive behavior. These fears are deeply rooted. They cannot be healed or overcome just by getting someone else’s love and acceptance.
What’s necessary for love and connection to flourish is for each person to have a secure attachment style, which occurs when you each take responsibility for your self-abandonment that is the underlying cause of your anxious and avoidant relationship styles.
As you learn to love yourself and define your own worth, you gradually learn to stop attacking or withdrawing and to take loving care of yourself whenever your fears of rejection or engulfment surface. By practicing Inner Bonding, you can learn to create inner safety when you feel threatened rather than trying to get others to make you feel safe from your fears with your controlling behavior.
When your fears of rejection and engulfment are activated, do you react according to a deeply learned wounded program? Do you attack, withdraw, give in, or resist, or a combination of these. Your typical “fight or flight” reactions with each other create a dysfunctional relationship system.
As I state earlier, the most common dysfunctional relationship system is when one person has an anxious attachment style, while the other person has an avoidant attachment style. What this looks like is when one person attacks with anger and blame and the other shuts down, withdraws, or resists.
Sometimes, both people are anxious and try to control in different ways. Perhaps one person attacks and the other complies and give in, giving themselves up, until they feel trapped and then their fear of engulfment takes over, their avoidant style emerges, and they shut down, withdraw, or end the relationship.
Sometimes both attack and they fight a lot to try to control not being rejected, or both withdraw and create what feels like to them a safe distance from being controlled. Whatever the way the system shows up, love, connection, and intimacy are eroded.
Either person can start the cycle of the system. If one person withdraws or resists, the other may attack from the fear of rejection, while if one person attacks, the other may withdraw or resist from fear of engulfment. Or, if one attacks, the other may attack back out of fear of rejection. If one attacks and other gives in, the one who gives in may eventually feel resentful and attack back or resist and withdraw. If both have deep fears of engulfment, both may be withdrawn, and the relationship will feel very dead.
Each person’s protective, controlling behavior activates the other’s fears and protective behavior and they create a circular unsafe relationship system.
The way out of this unsafe system is for each person to develop a strong loving adult, capable of handling the fears of rejection and engulfment without reverting to controlling behavior. This means learning to not take rejection personally and learning to set loving limits regarding engulfment. When you have developed a powerful loving adult – through the practice of Inner Bonding – who no longer fears rejection or engulfment, then your learned protective behavior will not be activated. Over time, you become more and more secure due to taking responsibility for your own feelings and behavior.
Obviously, dysfunctional attachment styles can wreak havoc on a marriage. For example, Roger, 33, is a successful engineer. Married with one child, Roger called me because his marriage was falling apart. His wife, Laura, had recently told him that the marriage was over unless they got some help. She told him she just couldn’t take it anymore.
Roger and Laura were both on Zoom for their first session with me. Laura described what the problem was for her.
“Roger is never present – not with me, not with our daughter. He just does his own thing and doesn’t consider what anyone else might need. If I get upset or irritated, he completely retreats and waits for me to fix it. He can retreat for days at a time and the energy around the house is awful. I try to take care of myself, but I just can’t be around his negativity.
“On top of that, if I ask him to do something, he either refuses to do it, or says he will do it and then doesn’t, or ends up messing it up. I know he is competent because of the work he does, but he sure doesn’t act competent at home. The only time he is really interested in me is when I’ve completely pulled back. If I want anything from him, he retreats. I can’t live like this anymore!”
“Roger,” I said, “Do you know what Laura is talking about?”
“I know what she is talking about, but I don’t see it the way she does. I just feel like she always wants something from me. I end up feeling criticized and trapped a lot. I shut down to get away from feeling trapped.”
“Do you still feel trapped, now that she wants out of the marriage?” I asked him.
“It’s funny that you should ask that. No. As soon as she said she wanted out, all of my feelings for her came back. I can’t figure it out!” he said.
“Roger, was one or both of your parents controlling with you?”
“Yes, my mother. She was incredibly controlling,” he said.
“And did you learn various ways of resisting her?” I asked.
“Yes!” Roger laughed. He obviously got pleasure out of being resistant.
Roger had a deep fear of engulfment – a fear of being controlled and losing himself. As soon as someone wanted something from him, his terror of losing himself was activated and he automatically resisted. He did not even stop to ask himself if he wanted to do whatever it was the other person wanted. He did not stop to think about what he wanted or what was in his highest good. He just resisted. He resisted because not being controlled and protecting against his fear of losing himself was more important to him than anything. Not being controlled was more important to Roger than being loving to himself and to others. Not being controlled was his God. He had an extreme avoidant attachment style.
While Laura could certainly be controlling at times – as we all can – she wasn’t causing Roger’s resistance. His choice to resist rather than care about himself and others started as a small child and had continued into adulthood. As long as not being controlled and protecting against losing himself was more important to Roger than being loving, there was nothing Laura could do.
The real issue was that Roger had never developed a loving adult part of himself capable of thinking about what is best for him. He operated from a small child aspect of himself who automatically resisted engulfment in the face of Laura’s requests, just as he did with his mother. Until Roger was willing to do the Inner Bonding work necessary to develop a loving adult self, he would continue to respond on automatic, and Laura would continue to feel unloved by him.
The irony of the situation was that Roger was being controlled by his resistance. He was not deciding for himself what he wanted and didn’t want – he was just automatically resisting. He was not even conscious that he was choosing to resist.
Because Roger did not want to lose Laura, he was willing to learn and practice Inner Bonding. The first step was to become aware of his resistance.
“Roger,” I said, “I suggest that you consciously choose to resist rather than just doing it automatically. By choosing it, you will become aware of it. Are you willing to try this, or do you want to resist this too?”
Roger laughed. He could already feel his desire to resist doing what I asked him to do. But he did choose to try it.
Within a few months of practicing Inner Bonding, Roger was very aware of choosing to resist. He was also aware that it was no longer much fun. It was not making him happy. Roger decided that it was more important for him to be loving than to resist being controlled. He was on the road to healing.
Generally, the fear of engulfment is actually coming from a fear of rejection. The fear of engulfment is often hiding a fear of rejection.
For example, Jim was attending his first five-day Inner Bonding Intensive because he could not seem to commit to a relationship. He was lonely and wanted to be in a relationship, and he had no trouble meeting women he was attracted to, but as soon as he started to really like someone, he would find any number of reasons to back out. In his early 40’s, he was tired of this, but he couldn’t seem to break out of the pattern.
It soon became apparent that Jim was terrified of losing himself in a relationship.
He was a very kind-hearted man and enjoyed giving, but invariably he found himself giving too much – giving himself up. In time he would feel controlled, engulfed, and smothered in the relationship. He would start to feel resentful about giving more than he was receiving and would end the relationship. This same pattern happened over and over.
Jim was very aware of the fact that he kept giving himself up in relationships, but he believed it was because he was attracted to strong, controlling women. He never found himself attracted to timid women who gave themselves up. So he felt stuck.
He was stuck because he was operating out of a false belief that he was giving himself up because the woman was controlling. In fact, her behavior had NOTHING to do with Jim giving himself up.
Jim gave himself up because underneath his fear of engulfment was a deeper fear – a fear of rejection.
He feared that if he did not give himself up and do what a woman wanted him to do, she would reject him. His intent in giving himself up was to have control over the woman not rejecting him. But in giving himself up, he was rejecting himself, so he would always end up feeling resentful and rejecting the woman. He would start a relationship with an anxious attachment style, and then, when he felt trapped, he turned to an avoidant attachment style.
This pattern would start as soon as a woman became important to him. As soon as he started to really like her, he would begin to fear losing her. In order to have control over not losing her, he was willing to lose himself. But once he started to lose himself, he stopped feeling attracted to her.
The underlying issue was that Jim had never learned to handle the loneliness and heartbreak of rejection. Having experienced rejection early in his life from his parents, he was terrified of it.
As children, none of us can handle rejection well.
All of us had to learn protective ways of handling the pain of rejection. We learned to comply, resist, get angry, shut down or withdraw in response to rejection. We then carried these protections into adulthood, never learning healthy ways of managing the pain of rejection.
Jim was invariably attracted to women who used anger as their way to protect against rejection, while he continued to use compliance and withdrawal as his protections.
In order for Jim to sustain a healthy, intimate relationship, he needed to learn to manage the pain of rejection. We all need to learn to manage the loneliness and heartache of rejection in order to stay open and create intimacy in a relationship. No matter how good a relationship, there is always going to be some rejection. There is no such thing as a relationship where you never feel rejected.
In order to learn to manage the pain of rejection so that he would no longer give himself up, Jim needed to practice Inner Bonding so that he would stop abandoning himself in the face of his fear of rejection. He needed to develop a loving adult self who could speak up for him and help him to not take rejection personally, as well as who could bring in spirit to comfort the heartache. Jim needed to practice Inner Bonding to become strong enough to love, which means strong enough to keep his heart open in the face of rejection, strong enough to be willing to lose the other person rather than lose himself, and strong enough to be open to intimacy.
Jim did practice Inner Bonding on a daily basis, and he gradually learned to speak up for himself and not take rejection so personally. As a result, his fear of rejection diminished to the point where he was no longer willing to give himself up or withdraw in the face of a woman’s controlling, rejecting behavior. Jim is now happily married and looking forward to starting the family he always wanted.
In speaking to one of my clients about this, she thanked me for reminding her of (quote) “The most common ‘dance’ in my life – giving myself up to avoid rejection and then feeling engulfed.” (unquote) This dance has led many people, like Jim, to have a fear of commitment.
Did you have a secure, reliable loving bond with at least one parent or caregiver? Was one of your parents or caregivers consistently emotionally available and responsive to your needs? If not, then you likely have attachment wounds. Sadly, few people had parents or caregivers who were emotionally healthy enough to be loving parents with their children.
Bonnie asked me the following question:
“My mother used to leave me alone as a baby and then my parents divorced when I was only two. When my husband moved out several years ago, I felt immobilized and terribly afraid and alone and vulnerable…. How can I heal permanently from this early attachment wound so I can be strong and be in a healthy loving relationship?”
Fortunately, with enough Inner Bonding work, these attachment wounds can be healed.
If I were working with Bonnie, I would ask her “How are you treating yourself in the ways your parents or caregivers treated you? How do you leave your inner baby alone? Do you stay in your head, ignoring your feelings? Do you judge yourself as a way of covering over your feelings? Do you numb out your feelings with addictions? Did you give your inner child away to your husband to love and care for? The fact that you feel afraid, alone, and vulnerable indicates that there is no inner adult to love and care for your inner child, which is what creates the immobilization. Healing this anxious attachment wound means that you need to learn to be the loving parent to your inner child – the loving parent that you never had when you were a child.
“You might need to do this work with a therapist or facilitator. Developing a caring relationship with a reliable and supportive person is often key in healing attachment wounds. You might not be able to do this yourself.”
You perpetuate the woundedness by how you treat yourself, so developing your loving adult is essential to healing attachment wounds. The more you learn to see and value your beautiful essence and lovingly manage the very painful feelings from childhood, the more these attachment wounds heal. The patterns you developed in childhood to manage early abandonment are deeply programmed, and it takes much practice in being a loving adult to rewire the brain with loving behavior toward yourself.
Trish asked:
“How would you suggest I address the message I received from my mother that I shouldn’t exist? The depth of the pain is horrific. Loving myself, thinking of myself evokes no emotion in me.”
Trish needs to develop a personal connection with a spiritual source of love and compassion. She has been deeply programmed to reject herself and the wounded self cannot feel any love toward her essence. Love and compassion are not feelings we generate within ourselves – they are feelings we open to and invite into our hearts. Trish needs to develop her spiritual connection in order to feel the kindness toward herself that her inner child needs from her to heal. As long as she is rejecting herself, the pain of having been rejected by her mother will continue to be horrific, but in actuality, it’s no longer about the past. It’s about her current rejection of herself.
Vivienne asked:
“Are certain attachments necessary to have? Like a child wants love and care from the parents. I am learning to give love to myself and developing connections with my guides, but I often feel sad that my parents neglected my feelings when I was young and my attachment to get approval from others is always there. Any suggestions?”
Yes, we all needed love and care from our parents, and we continue to need love and care from others. But now that Vivienne is an adult, she needs to accept that others generally won’t give her what she missed out on as a child, so it’s her responsibility to give her little inner child the love, attention, care, and approval that she needs to feel secure and operate in a relationship from a secure attachment style. Therapy or facilitation may be necessary to support her in this. While someone cannot heal these wounds for her, they can certainly support her in the healing process. A loving relationship with a very caring, reliable, and supportive partner can also be extremely helpful with healing attachment wounds.
Healing occurs when we learn to see and value our essence and to treat ourselves the way we would treat a cherished child. Healing is supported when we receive help from someone who sees and values our essence.
A loving relationship can be extremely helpful in healing attachment wounds, but since we attract at our common level of self-abandonment or self-love, some personal healing may need to occur before you are able to attract a loving partner.
You don’t need to continue the dance that your wounded self might be doing from fears of rejection and engulfment. You don’t need to continue to operate from an anxious or avoidant attachment style. You can develop a secure attachment style by developing your strong, spiritually connected loving adult through a devoted Inner Bonding practice.
I invite you join me for my bi-monthly masterclass and receive my live help, which you can learn about at https://innerbondinghub.com/membership.
And, I invite you to join me for my 30-Day at-home Course: “Love Yourself: An Inner Bonding Experience to Heal Anxiety, Depression, Shame, Addictions and Relationships.”
And you can learn so much about loving yourself and creating loving relationships from my new book, “Lonely No More: The Astonishing Power of Inner Bonding” and from our website at https://www.innerbonding.com.
I’m sending you my love and my blessings.
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