Briana MacWilliam – Disorganized Attachment 101
Disorganized Attachment 101 course is for the “Spice of Lifer” that struggles with both anxiety and avoidance in push-pull relationships, who are ready to call in a soul-shaking partnership, in only 5 days, without having to spend a ton of money on experts and gurus, or spend years in therapy with no tangible result.
LET ME GUESS: YOU WANT A HEALTHY, SECURE RELATIONSHIP…
You’d like to have an emotionally available partner, who passionately loves and respects you. Bonus points if your partner is a good listener, unthreatened by your needs, and knows how to express themselves honestly and openly in return!
BUT THERE’S A PROBLEM…
To experience emotional availability in your relationship, you need to understand how to communicate your own needs from an emotionally authentic place, without triggering your partners emotional defenses.
And typically, that means understanding both of your unique “love maps”-your way of giving and receiving love.
If you are a Spice of Lifer, that means understanding the impact of developmental trauma may have had on your attachment style. It also means learning how to recognize and honor your emotional boundaries in love, and how to apply what strengths you have, in a way that serves you, rather than depletes you and gives your power away.
But you’re not a therapist, and its likely you struggle with knowing how to manage your feelings without getting overwhelmed, or shutting down completely and pushing away the people you love.
You don’t know how to express yourself without feeling too exposed or too vulnerable, and so you might wind up sabotaging your relationship, so you can stop anxiously waiting for the other shoe to drop. You tend to experience relationships as power dynamics, thus, when you fall in love, it feels like losing control.
As a result, you fall into a painful, push-pull pattern in relationships that leaves you with emotional whiplash.
YOU MIGHT STRUGGLE WITH…
- Behaving erratically in moments of distress, or even with no apparent trigger
- If you’ve suffered abuse, you may offer unusual explanations or justifications for the abuser’s behavior
- When asked to convey details of your relationships, your story might be fragmented, and you may have difficulty expressing yourself clearly.
- You may struggle to self-soothe, and have difficulty allowing others to help soothe you as well.
- It may be difficult to open up or to seek out help, and then you struggle to accept when help is offered.
- You may view the world as an unsafe place, and have pessimistic beliefs about the possibilities for love.
- In conflict, you may tend to vilify your partners and assume your partner has a malicious intent towards you.
- You may be prone to severe black-and-white thinking, and struggle to sustain ambiguous feelings for very long without taking action to find relief, which might look like acting out in various ways, including sexual infidelity, ending a relationship on a whim, or picking up an addiction, for example.
- They tend to overgeneralize minor issues, assuming even the smallest disagreement is a sign the entire relationship is flawed and never going to work.
- The assertion of personal boundaries is received as a criticism or a threat to the relationship security, and so they may treat their partners with hostility, or emotional withdrawal, if a partner attempts to assert their boundaries.
- But the hardest thing for the Spice of Lifer, is that they usually attract other partners with insecure attachment styles, and so each partner is constantly feeling triggered, because for the Spice of Lifer, their attachment figures are considered a source of both comfort and threat.
- It feels like there is no way to relax into a partnership, or regard any conflicts in the relationship as opportunities for deepening intimacy.
- Because no healthy relationship can be sustained like this, for the Spice of Lifer, it proves their deepest fear, which is that they are inherently helpless and unworthy, and relationships are really just a game of power dynamics; control, or be controlled.
UNTIL NOW, THAT ONLY LEFT YOU WITH CERTAIN OPTIONS:
1. Read every self-help book under the sun, and spend hours (if not years) talking around in circles in counseling or therapy, spending beaucoup bucks and wondering how you’ll know when its working…
2. Manage to accomplish a lot of insight, but still attracting the same kind of partners over and over again, failing to see a real change in your FELT experiences…
3. Accept that this is as good as things are going to get, or…
4. Try something radically different, and think outside the box.
If you’re leaning towards #4, my self-directed online course, Disorganized Attachment 101: 5 Days to Support the Spice of Lifer in Love, is just the ticket for you!
IN DISORGANIZED ATTACHMENT 101 COURSE, YOU WILL LEARN…
- Attachment theory and 10 Ways the Spice of Lifer sabotages their relationships
- 4 Essential emotional boundaries that take the Spice of Lifer from confused to clear, about the line between personal boundaries and conditions of love
- Transforming trauma in the body, for Spice of Lifers
- The truth about Narcissism, and Borderline Personality Disorder and disorganized attachment, plus the best treatment options
- A focus wheel and guided visualization to transform the fundamental fears of the Spice of Lifer
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