Have you ever wondered why your relationships keep repeating the same unhealthy patterns?
You always seem to choose someone who seems great at the beginning. But, after a while they seem to lose interest.
You can literally feel them emotionally distancing themselves from you.
Once or twice could just be a case of bad luck. When this cycle happens repeatedly in one form or another, you might be wondering, if it’s you and why this keeps on happening.
Often our attachment style is what helps us to understand how we do relationships.
It also shows us how we might feel in a relationship and the type of person we seek out.
Here are five signs that you have an insecure attachment. See which one(s) you connect with the most.
You feel lost when not in a relationship
When you think about how much time you’ve spent not in a relationship, you realise it’s not much time at all. You’ve been in some form of romantic relationship for all of your adult life.
When one relationship ends, you’re already into the next.
It’s not your intention to get into anything serious, but that seems to be what happens anyway.
At times, there’s even some overlap where the previous relationship isn’t entirely over yet.
You just love the idea of love and finding The One.
You’re devastated if a relationships ends
Breakups are always hard, but for you it seems to take a lot longer for you to get over the hurt.
You replay parts of the relationship and scenarios in your head. Trying to understand why it all came to an end. You look for signs to see if there was anything you could do differently.
Somehow you think that it’s all your fault and you did something wrong, or you just wasn’t enough.
You idealise the relationship with all of the good times. Totally forgetting or glossing over how much you felt unloved, uncared for and unappreciated.
You social media stalk them for a bit, and feel crushed when you see them moving on with their life as though you don’t even matter.
You lose yourself
When you have an insecure attachment, you tend to lose your identity pretty quickly.
As soon as you get loved up, you put everything into being with this person because once you’re in, you’re all in.
Over time, you stop doing the things that were just about you and focus on meeting the needs of the relationship.
You spend less time with friends and spend all of your energy in your love bubble.
Before you know it, you’ve lost touch with friends, you’ve stopped socialising and anything that used to resemble self care becomes a rarity.
You avoid conflict just to keep the peace
When you perceive conflict as a negative thing and haven’t learned how to communicate effectively, you can avoid having difficult conversations.
Particularly if you worry about the relationship potentially coming to an end if you bring up a concern.
When you fear the relationship ending or the person becoming unhappy, you turn into a people pleaser.
Never wanting to start a fight or cause friction because you don’t feel confident that the relationship is able to withstand the conflict. Instead of being open about how you feel, you deny anything is wrong.
When you let things go, you build up resentment that comes out in one big explosion, often taking your spouse by surprise.
Rigid or Porous Boundaries
The B word. Yes, boundaries. When you have an insecure attachment style it often means that you also struggle with relationships.
Since boundaries are often a sign of healthy relationships, this is often an area of challenge.
We aren’t always modelled good boundaries.
In other words, the grownups around us were not very good at showing us what healthy boundaries are.
When the adults around you are not familiar with the importance of boundaries, it can cause children to lack the emotional and physical support needed. It can mean there are too many rigid rules where it’s difficult to grow. Or there aren’t any rules at all, which can leave children feeling unsafe.
As we get older and develop our own relationships, it’s a pattern that follows us into our own experiences of love, work, friendships and relationships. As we are relational beings by nature, it pretty much impacts every part of our social interactions.
It can mean you don’t know how to set a boundary to set your limitations. Or, your boundaries are so rigid, it stops people from being able to get close to you because you have such harsh and impractical rules.
Have you realised you have an insecure attachment style and want to feel less anxious about relationships so you can feel calm and attract the right type of relationships?
