Confidence and how to avoid emotional danger

Emotional danger, attachment disorder and personal danger and the connection explained.

Your attachment style affects your nervous system. So, if you are unaware of the territory and the potential effect this can have on your quality of life as well as the quality of your relationship, this can lead to an unnecessary detrimental effect on your trauma sensitivities. 

If you suffer from residual early childhood trauma or complex post-traumatic stress disorder, you are quite likely to run into inter relational problems in your romantic relationships, as this is where the expectations of intimacy are at their highest level.

These go hand in hand when you are managing disappointment or feeling a threat. However, this can result in what can be seen by your partner as belittling of the trust and safety in them, which has accumulated within the relationship. This can be totally unproductive in what is the mutual desire for intimacy and real honest communication, deepening the love and the commitment and the relationship viability.

Managing disappointment properly - without ‘protest behaviour’ - when you feel your partner is failing you is a really helpful awareness as this is a protest about an unmet need, and it comes from the well of the primal and more immature responses.

There can be almost equivalents of childhood stamping of feet, huffing a lot, crossing of arms, pouting, peppered with adult door and cupboard slamming as well as silences. These are lower conscience behaviours mimicking mostly how we behaved as children, but what lies underneath this is feeling shut out or shut down and, basically, hurt.

We go on to somewhat more sophisticated versions of protest response, like freezing the other out around the home or delivering acerbic responses to questions. However, the pattern is about the same trauma of the unmet need, and here the conversation exchange is not honest because the cause of the ‘truth ‘ delivered is about the unmet demand.

Not getting our attachment style and history met can feel really quite traumatic and is often a knee jerk response and a trigger to an early trauma issue, whereby the current one (although, seemingly unrelated) can evoke emotional deja vu.

Others cannot read your mind and unless you communicate honestly, which does involve risk, the path to real intimacy is a different one from your reaction but rather from your learned and informed response.

In fact, for sure what a lack of understanding and knowledge does here in relationships is the opposite of what is so needed, as it alienates one from the other and leaves you both nursing your individual needs in no man’s land!

Awareness is key here as none of us can change what we are not aware of. So, learning about your attachment type and also those of others can radically minimise misunderstandings, unnecessary breakups and even divorce. And in turn, it can give us all a much better opportunity of achieving a deeper and more lasting intimacy that gives us both peace and happiness.

For those of you who wish to learn more about how to manage your relationships better, I run courses on how to have better relationship harmony.

Enquiries can be made through my Life Coach Directory profile and you'll also find my contact details on my website.