If the avoidant avoids, the anxious preoccupied chooses a partner that is forever on the verge of leaving them or treat them inconsistently. You’ll remember from my previous post that the dismissive tends to thrive in these hot/cold relationships, where they constantly withdraw from a partner who’s about to come too close for comfort. Well, this is what makes these two types of attachment styles so compatible. Now let’s be clear: this is not compatibility as in things are going to work out for the best, it is the kind of compatibility where one enables each other’s dysfunction. Who else is going to make you constantly feel obsessed and anxious other than someone who constantly dismisses you and turning cold whenever you need to go deeper into the relationship? We can call this dynamic a match made in hell.
In order to feed their anxiety, these people will tend to constantly try to connect to a kind of person who is about anything but intimately connecting. This circumstance allows them to constantly feel “less than” one way or another. Their self-esteem and self-worth is derived from this interaction where they are constantly shown that they are worthless because everything they try to do is met with disengagement and rejection. Of course, when you are this person and when your inner awareness is that you’re a failure and a no good, you’re going to cling to whatever relationship you do happen to have, no matter how pathetic and unfulfilling, because in your mind, nobody could ever want anything to do with someone as diminished as you are. Not only that, but the avoidant person will immediately come back to being hot – either sexually or back into engaging with their partner as soon as they feel that that partner is slipping away. So the preoccupied person feeds off these rare moments when they ARE given those crumbles of connection.
The only so-called tool these people have, is to be master controllers. They will be nit-picking every single circumstance that will feed their need for constant anxiety and preoccupation. They will be unable to zone into any type of truthful interaction unless it is the way they want it, when they want it and as long as they want it. And unfortunately, despite the fact that they affirm they want a deep connection, they only are after the parts that keep making them feel insecure, fearful, rejected, trashed. As for the avoidant or any other type of attachment, the only value is in the continuation of the familiarity, not in the actual healing of patterns.
The more they cling to their impossible relationship, the more they are met with a cold shoulder. They cannot understand that their own neediness is what enables the disengagement from the partner. Or, can they? What I have noticed is that, even if they do become aware that their relationship is dis-eased because of their own pushiness and clinginess, they simply are unable to change the way they function, because their comfort zone is one where they need to be abandoned and rejected constantly so that they bathe in their own anxiety.
One thing that tends to happen is that, very often, all this anxiety will translate into disease. They will often come up with inexplicable symptoms that no doctor can solve, they tend to have sudden mood swings where, as soon as something works in their life, they will sabotage it one way or another. This can also sometimes translate into remarcable shocks: accidents, loss of loved one or of income, property, etc…
One way to sabotage your relationship if you are an anxious type person is to gain control. Every single minute you will either demand attention from the partner either through “negative” interaction (which can be a disease, constant calling for closeness of some sort, hyper-sexuality) or “positive” interaction where you will make yourself simply a super valuable commodity for that person. These people can look like superhumans, where they end up doing anything and everything for a partner that ends up still not loving them. The problem is, these people do not do the things they do because of how much they love their partner, but because, by being a bigger and bigger part of that person’s life, they can seemingly control their partner not leaving them. (How do you leave a person who does everything for you?)
Another type of sabotage is overt or covert jealousy. They will not only be incredibly jealous but also produce circumstances where they want to trigger their partner’s jealousy, which, for them, is a form of validation and reassurance that they won’t be left and that they’ll keep being part of this dysfunction.
People with this attachment style tend to end up not having a life of their own and will often work along their partner’s business, or have the exact same hobbies, they will tend to want to know everything their partner knows, from the way they chose to eat to the way they perceive a movie or a book…
These people often become suffering shadows with very little personality of their own, no personal income or very little, periodically getting sick or having some type of personal drama that keeps the partner from leaving them.
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