Anxiously Attached: Becoming More Secure in Life and Love

When we get trauma-triggered in our close relationships, our Wise Adult shuts off, and we are seized by our Adaptive Child. We feel “taken over” and we want to push back. When people first learn about this Adaptive Child part of them, usually their initial instinct is to want to control it, to see it as bad.

The unconditional presence of someone who loves us hearkens back to the past and repairs our childhood sense of being unwanted. At the same time, no human being can or is expected to be fully and unconditionally present all the time. An individual…

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Obviously the people in these Good Mother roles must feel safe to you. What is happening is nothing less than a radical transformation, changing your self-image, how you are in relationships, and awakening the child states that have been frozen inside. If you developed a hardened defense structure and have taken on the critical voices of those arou

In my own case it has taken me a lot of work to connect with my own true feelings—my anger, jealousy, loneliness or sadness. The good news is that I have been able to do it. Being disconnected from our feelings is the result of abandonment.