I have spent most of my adult life on the edge when it comes to relationships. Consistently being controlled by anxiety and living in fear that everything is false and going to go wrong.
It was only more recently when I experienced another failed situationship with someone, that I started to do a lot of work on myself internally and addressing the areas of my behaviour when I’m with someone and also what the root cause is. I’ve always been aware of the fact that I suffer from the ‘anxious attachment’ relationship style, but I never really took the time to internally investigate why I was so stuck in this mindset of living in paranoia that if something isn’t happening how I want it to or how I expect, that everything is wrong.
I came to learn that I have always found myself drawn to the drama. It was only when I recently read a self-help book about getting to the bottom of overthinking that I realised that due to my entire adult life being constant toxic situations and unknown events, I was naturally drawn to those areas because let’s be honest, when it’s the only thing your brain has ever known – rejection, toxicity, looking for problems in the silence, you naturally feel like it’s something you have control over. My brain is afraid of experiencing anything different to that.
Any man who has dated me over the past ten years, may express the same story, that I was a bit much or I couldn’t trust them properly, I was always overwhelming and overanalysing every message and movement. These men would not be wrong. Don’t misunderstand me though, some men I’ve dated were bad eggs for me, they weren’t perfect, however I was bringing some of this on myself because I was drawn to emotionally unavailable or toxic men. It’s all I know after all, why would I even try to beeline for anything the opposite of what I’ve known?
It’s all about the pattern really. Our brains are programmed to stick to what is comfortable for us. With anxiety, I naturally overthink the situation I’m in. I have lost count of the number of times I have got myself all worked up over a conversation or situation that I have imagined. Not to mention that 95% of the time said imagined situations didn’t even happen.
It is not worth the broken sleep nights or the physical nausea to try and overanalyse something that’s out of your control.
It’s hard to break out of an anxious mental cycle though, as I said, our brains are programmed to want to overthink and overanalyse every single scenario, so we then feel like we are ‘prepared’ or in control. But the hurtful truth of the matter is, we never are.
You can’t get rid of anxiety. It’s part of who you are. So I’m not here to stand on a box and tell you how you can overcome anxious attachment in some quick easy steps. What I have done though, is found some ways in which I can overcome certain obstacles to retrain my mind to loosen those attachment strings a little, and understand what control I do and don’t have.
I can’t control what situations or events happen to me, but I can control how I react to them. That’s the big secret, it’s not being in control of what happens, it’s being in control of how you address and behave with what’s happening.
I did a few months of CBT last year, one thing I loved about the exercises was that they didn’t sit and tell you: ‘you’re worrying over nothing, don’t worry twice’, there was an exercise that I’ve started practicing regularly now.. When the anxiety gets a little overwhelming. You write out your anxious thought, then you write out what the facts are backing up your thoughts, you then write facts against those thoughts. The best part though, is after you’ve weighed out those facts and addressed how they make you feel, there is a final question ‘if my anxious thought does happen, how will I overcome it?’. That there is the important part, because you get to write out how you can (and will) overcome that situation. Once you have managed to sit and remind yourself that you are perfectly capable of moving on, weight lifts, and you’re able to handle the situation a lot better.
Remember: we can’t control what happens, we can control how we deal with it.
One final note, if you’re like me, and can get a bit dramatic when your anxiety and overthinking levels are hitting the roof, you might find yourself tempted to let out that rage and message the friends/family/person you’re dating with that reaction. Don’t do it. Pause. One thing I’ve started doing is using my Notes app, if it’s really getting to me and I can’t calm myself down, I write out all of the frustrations and what I want to say to that person on the notes app. I’ve got it out of my system. So my brains had that release, but I keep it in my notes app and tell myself I will only paste it into a message later when I’ve calmed down and the other person hasn’t proved me wrong in that time frame.
Of all the ‘notes’ messages I’ve written, there’s been over 50, I’ve sent zero.
I think I’ve gone on enough now. So I will leave this blog post here with one final message…
It’s not about eliminating our anxiety. It’s about taking power over the control it has on us.
Positive, Yet Cynical 