Today was a lot of work both professionally and personally. I had therapy yesterday and my mind is busy with thoughts. Therefore, a break from our regularly scheduled programming. I will continue the vacation recap tomorrow.
I exported my blog from dreamwidth.org to this platform today. They did not offer an easy export. You can export a month of entries at a time and in XML or CSV formats. Not formats you’d expect for text. Give me a markdown file please. But with a stroke of good luck, I stumbled onto this tool CSV to MD. This script did what I needed. Older posts will eventually make their way here, but at the moment they are sitting in draft mode.
I have been thinking of attachment styles. It is inconceivable to me how much of an effect childhood experiences have. Despite paranoid-reading several books on parenting. It should be no surprise. They are called the formative years, after all. They establish the model by which we navigate life.
Of the three types of attachment (anxious, insecure, and secure), I find myself teetering between anxious and insecure. This might all be obvious. To me, it comes as insight. It makes sense that an insecure attached child would grow up to have people-pleasing tendencies. Their entire childhood is discovering answers to make sure their parents stay / return. Doubly, when the household has other deficiencies. Unsure if this implies that insecurely attached children all come from broken homes, but it is looking that way to me. After all, the child is making decisions to put his/her interests and wants aside to cater the parents’. Compliance and compromise become core values.
Compliance, because as an insecure attached, there is a primal fear of abandonment. You do not ask for things or feel immense shame when you must. You do things as asked, often regarded the “good child”. You are responsible for yourself. You may display adult tendencies as a pre-teen.
Compromise comes as a comorbidity of compliance. Your opinions and interests do not matter. You cave to others’ requests. You are exceedingly accommodating despite personal costs.
You do this not because you want to. But because you know otherwise you will be cast out. You cannot be a burden. You carry with you a foreboding ball of anxiety. You’ll be found out. People will realize that, at your core, you are bad, unwanted, and unloveable. You are ashamed.
It is difficult to work past these things. It was a slow process for me. I am unsure that knowing their origins would have helped speed the process of healing. It may have helped in the initial identification of the issues. Which, I find is among the hardest steps.
This modeling of the world is pervasive. It impacts how we interact with friends, romantic partners, and even at work. At work I found myself compromising my values and thoughts to avoid confrontations. I found this damaging in romantic relationships. Insecure attachment makes you a target for folks who are happy to do the taking in a one-sided relationship. What’s worse is that you won’t want to leave it, because you harbor a deep need to be wanted.
Can we change our attachment styles later in life? I should hope so. I have successfully worked through many of these. A few were hard earned through personal self-reflection and work, others by working with a therapist. I have changed as a person while working through these. My perception of the self has changed.
Yet I don’t know if you can change your core values? Has mine changed? Hard to say.