Dealing With Attachment Anxiety
Goal
To decrease attachment anxiety.
Introduction
If you’ve identified that you experience attachment anxiety, complete the relevant exercises in this lesson.
Clinging to Others Exercise (Narang, p. 15)
strong>Instructions: Reflect on a time when you were younger than 10 years old and desperately wanted somebody’s attention, and you could not get the emotional responsiveness you needed. Maybe you had been physically hurt or were very emotionally upset about something, and you needed soothing.
Set an alarm for three minutes from now, close your eyes, and re-immerse yourself in the details of the painful thing that happened at that moment in your life and the seeking of attention or affection afterward. Keep remembering until the alarm sounds, playing the whole scene slowly, and try to remember all of the details of that event. Also include anything you saw, smelled, heard, tasted, or touched during this event (i.e., engage your sense for the sake of making the memory as vivid as possible). Then, reflect on these questions.
- What stands out to you the most about how you felt at the time of the event?
- Coming to the present time, how did you feel just now while remembering the time when you were trying unsuccessfully to get attention and affection?
Replay the scene again for another two minutes.
- Did anything new stand out to you this time?
- When you sought attention and affection after the distressing situation, what response do you wish you had gotten?
Next, speak that wished-for response gently and warmly to yourself. Say it a few times to yourself, and say it as if you deserve that love and warmth.
Experiencing Feelings Exercise (Narang, pp. 23-24)
Instructions: Strong emotions can feel like crashing waves and can cause you to feel as though you must fix them immediately in order to avoid drowning in their surge. You may also feel compelled to escape or mute those surges of emotion by scrambling too intensely toward people who support you or toward something that either distorts or numbs you (e.g., drugs/alcohol, excessive entertainment, etc.). Since scrambling in fact often works-that is, it relieves or prevents the emotion for a brief period of time-any of these behaviors may take on an addictive, repetitive quality. They relieve or prevent your pain for a moment, so you scramble back toward them again and again.
In reality, while muted feelings can get stuck and last for years (e.g., in many cases of depression), intense moments of emotional pain, if the emotion is allowed to fully develop, tend to last 30-90 minutes. For example, after a strong bout of crying, emotional intensity often reduces quickly on its own. Reflect on this question:
- Are the assumptions that you cannot tolerate the intensity of the emotions you are experiencing and that your pain will not pass on its own true? How do you know?
The feeling that you cannot bear an emotion is real in that the feeling exists, but in regard to factual accuracy, the thought that you cannot bear the emotion is probably inaccurate. Consider this question:
- Think of a time when you handled an extremely painful situation in your life, survived the pain, and then noticed the pain fade away on its own.
The opposite action of scrambling is to stay. Staying ought to feel natural as opposed to intentionally pushing your discomfort away and might include crying, creating art with the emotion in mind, writing about the pain, meditating to let the feeling fully evolve, jogging while gently contemplating your pain, or any number of activities. If after some time the nature of the pain does not become clearer and you don’t come out of the pain, you should take a break and distract yourself, but make that distraction a conscious and time-limited decision instead of doing something on impulse. Staying involves lingering and delving more deeply into the nature of your thoughts and feelings in order to experience yourself. Understanding where you are and what you need at a moment in time can serve to guide you into effective action as needed.
Giving Exercise (Narang, p. 41)
Instructions: Do you regularly experience emotional pain due to feeling deprived and in need of more love and nourishment from the world? Consider that you yourself have important gifts to give and that you may be neglecting to give them when over-focused on feeling in need. Create an inventory, using the table below, of what you have to offer and see whether or not you are actually giving those things.
Examples might be a sense of humor, sewing, cooking, the capacity to inspire, computer savvy, mechanical know-how, emotional support, stories, and paintings.
| My gift | Do I offer this gift? | Where do I give or want to give this gift? |
|---|---|---|
What reasonable, highly specific commitment can you make about where you will newly give one of the above gifts? Here’s an example: “I will use my sense of humor with my co-worker at work tomorrow because he will likely receive my sense of humor as refreshing or enlivening.”
Connectedness Plan Exercise (Narang, pp. 54-55)
Instructions: Your long-term social connectedness is largely within your control, so it’s time to get active. Be a little stern (not harsh, but firm) with yourself and make a plan, guided by the following questions:
What three things can I do in the next 24 hours to increase interactions with others? (e.g., talking with a friend, logging onto a social media website and searching for additional friends, etc.)- In the long-term, what two communities would I like to join or build further closeness with? (e.g., spiritual, hobby-based, etc.)
- How will I get closer over the long-term without being too intense or rushing it?
Tip: If you continually build in short-term fixes for your loneliness, it will allow you the calmness and relief from distress to implement your long-term plans effectively.
Next Step
Learn how to set effective goals as part of your connectedness plan by watching the following video:
