Attachment: the Foundation for Romantic Relationships
Adam Young
You are relational at your very core. Marriage is the adult relationship. It is about the emotional connection. It is about the perception that your partner is not there for you emotionally. Most marital fights are protests over emotional disconnection.
Underneath the content of the fight, you are asking your spouse: Can I count on you? Are you there for me? Do I matter to you?
[Book suggestion: Hold me tight]
The strength of emotional connection:
1. Your spouse's attunement to your needs and desires.
2. Their responsiveness to your needs and desires.
3. Their engagement to your needs and desires.
We have an innate need to be seen, taken seriously, and responded to. Do you feel like your spouse sees you? Do you feel that they knows about your needs and desires and wants to respond to them?
If they aren't available, you are going to feel aloneness and helplessness. The AMYGDALIA fires when emotional connection with your partner is lost.
Why do marriages fail? It is NOT because of conflict. It is because of decreasing emotional responsiveness.
Attachment is a BIG Deal in marriages:
1. Avoidant Attachment: When your caregiver is often unavailable, dismissive, or rejecting of you. You were forced to calm yourself and regulate your own emotions despite being unable to do it. The child's needs are frequently not met and communicating their needs will have no effect on caregiver. This is terrible for a child. Children need interactive regulation. They need comfort. Child becomes deeply self-reliant. They don't need anyone. Others aren't available. This child does not avoid closeness. It is not a menu item for them. There is no one there for them. "If I don't ask for help, they can't reject me. If I don't ask for help, it will go better." Since his needs and wants rarely seem to need, he soon stops even expressing his needs and wants. So, in marriage ...
1. More comfortable with emotional distance than connectedness.
2. Their bodies have been trained to not need a human to regulate them.
3. They tend to feel needed but not wanted. True mutuality is foreign to them.
2. Anxious Attachment: A child will develop this attachment when caregiver is inconsistent or intrusive. Caregiver may or may not be available. Sometimes mom is there. But often they are to into their own issues. Never knowing what to expect, this girl develops a sense of anxiety, uncertainty, about whether she can depend upon mom or not. This develops an uncertainty of all other people being safe for me. For a child, inconsistency is absolute terror because children are utterly dependent upon their caregivers.
1. She is a 40-year-old woman who experiences franticness when there is relational distress.
2. And then they have great difficulty regulating that franticness and anxiety.
3. They believe that unless they dramatically express their pain, it is unlikely their partner will respond.
4. They are plagued by a deep fear that they are going to be abandoned.
5. They habitually ask for proof / reassurance that they are connected.
6. Anxiously attached adults anticipate relational failure. THEY ARE ALLERGIC TO HOPE.
7. Anxiously attached adults feel too needy. They don't deserved to be loved the way they want.
8. They often make misapraisals of partner's feelings and intentions.
EVERYTHING CONNECTS BACK TO YOUR FAMILY OF ORIGIN! The limbic brain registers harm more deeply than everything else. How do you know what you got? Look at the BIG 6! (And remember: parents only had/have to get it right 33% of the time to get a secure attachment.)
If you couldn't say OUCH with your parent, can you say it with your OUCH with your spouse! You need repeated experiences of repair to feel secure.
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