Anxiously Attached: Becoming More Secure in Life and Love

The mother I internalized was anxious, depressed, and full of fear.

I am going to be abandoned. I am unlovable. I will be rejected if I show my true self. I am going to be humiliated or embarrassed. I cannot trust others. I am not good enough. I have to work hard to earn love. I need people, but I can’t rely on them. It’s my job to keep other people happy. Other people are always taking from me. The world is an uns

we become so attuned and empathetic to our partner’s needs that we neglect our own, often out of fear that asking to have our needs met will lead to rejection or abandonment.

Meanwhile, our ANS is spending way too much time in sympathetic arousal, leaving us almost continually afraid of loss and abandonment. We bring this legacy into our adult relationships, tucked away in our subconscious, until it becomes activated with the prospect of intimacy. Now, everything we never learned about how to connect rises to the surfac

When left unexamined, core wounds that are formed in childhood and the embodied relational patterns attached to them will continue to control our behaviors from behind the scenes of our adult lives.

We are always on guard for any sign that we could possibly interpret as potential abandonment because the pain of our early losses is like a tension spring just waiting to be released.

open the door to recognizing that you are in pain and fearful, and deserve support in healing the wounds that drive these ways of reacting in a relationship.

Our focus is to identify our wound, to look at where it came from, and to connect to and heal the pain and fear that keep the thoughts and behaviors in place. Until we are able to do this, the patterns getting repeated in our relationships will continue to follow a very similar script.

Driven by fear and desire, these behaviors will continue until we get a response that reassures us the relationship is intact. Even though our partners have now responded, Little Me’s core wounds are not healed by this temporary return, so inwardly we remain on guard for the next sign of possible abandonment. It is very hard for Little Me to find t