Daughter Detox

by Peg Streep

  I didn’t confide in anyone, not even my boyfriends, until I was in therapy in my early twenties and I began to realize that my mother’s lack of love for me reflected on her, not me. That perception, while immediate, didn’t change the way I interacted in a consistent way because I still wanted and needed her love. Ironically, it was only after my book Mean Mothers was published (I was 60!) that a college roommate confessed that she’d had a cruel and withholding mother. We’d shared a room the size of a closet and had been friends that sophomore year, but never said a word about our mothers. We only broke the code of silence 40 years later.

  As you begin working on distinguishing how these old patterns work in your present, think about the role the code of silence plays in your life and what you might learn by confiding in a friend if you haven’t. A good therapist, of course, can be the ideal confidante. But keeping the silence can both feed your sense of shame and impede your ability to distinguish the patterns.

  RECALIBRATING YOUR EMOTIONAL GPS

  I keep dating and choosing men who end up treating me exactly as my mother does. It starts out great, but eventually I feel as lousy about myself as I did when I lived under her roof. Can this be fixed? How can I stop? I want to be happy but I don’t seem to know how .

  ~Kim, 3 5

  There’s nothing more dispiriting than a failed relationship, especially if you keep recreating your childhood in your intimate relationships. How do we end up choosing people who treat us as our mothers did, when we’re trying so hard to get out from under? Why do we find ourselves in the company of friends and lovers who seem to be so attentive and appealing at first and then reveal themselves to be very different? Why aren’t we drawn to caring and kind people instead of controlling and manipulative ones?

  The truth is that each of us is drawn to what we know, even if what we know and have experienced makes us unhappy. We all gravitate toward the familiar (see the shared root with the word “family”?). For a securely attached individual whose primary connections taught her that people are loving, dependable, and trustworthy, this is just dandy. But for those of us who are insecurely attached, the familiar can be dangerous territory.

  A study by Glenn Geher suggests that all of us tend to choose a romantic partner who is similar to our opposite-sex parent. In his research, he not only asked participants to self-report on how their romantic partners were like their opposite-sex parents across various categories but he also interviewed the parents as well. The shared characteristics he discovered between his subjects’ partners and their opposite-sex parents were robust, and not merely coincidental. Needless to say, when romantic partners were like parents in good ways, relationship satisfaction was high; when the similarities were related to negative characteristics, however, relationship satisfaction was low. So marrying Dad isn’t really a foolproof option.

  When we meet someone new, it’s not just our unconscious models that are in the room or at the bar; there are conscious assessments, too. So the question remains: How do we end up marrying Mom if she’s been critical, unavailable, manipulative, or high in narcissistic traits? That’s exactly what Claudia Chloe Brumbaugh and R. Chris Fraley asked: How do insecurely attached people attract mates? After all, we all want a securely attached partner—one who’s emotionally available, loving, supportive, dependable—not an insecure or clingy one, or someone who’s detached and uncommunicative. How do we get roped in ?

  The researchers suggested that what happens is a combination of misreading by one partner and a fair amount of strategizing and even dissembling by the insecure partner. They point out that anxiously attached people may seem fascinating at first; their preoccupation with themselves may easily be confused with self-disclosure and openness, which facilitates a sense of connection. Similarly, an avoidant person may come across as independent and strong. In a series of experiments, the team discovered that avoidants—despite the fact that they don’t want emotional connection—actually made lots of eye contact and used touch more than securely attached people in order to seem more appealing in a dating situation. Avoidants also use humor to create a sense of sharing and detract from their essential aloofness. Although the researchers didn’t use Kim Bartholomew’s distinction between fearful and dismissive avoidant types, it’s clear that the fearful avoidant—who both wants and fears emotional connection—would be the hardest to read and identify. Eventually, though, the leopard will show his spots.

  Our working models of relationships not only shape how we act but how we remember acting, actually skewing our recall, as Jeffry A. Simpson and his colleagues discovered, which makes it even harder for couples to get along when the working models of two romantic partners are different. After measuring the attachment orientation of each individual, Simpson’s team had each member of the couple identify a significant conflict in the relationship and, choosing one from each list, had the couple engage in a conflict-resolution discussion, which was then videotaped. Right after the discussion, each person rated how supportive or emotionally distant he or she had been. They were then asked the same question one week later. What the researchers found was that the more distress there was in the conflict discussion, the more the individual’s working models acted as a filter. Anxious people rated themselves as being more supportive when they remembered the discussion than they did initially; avoidant people reported themselves as being more emotionally distant. “What individuals respond to in relationships is not what they actually said or did during an interaction with their partner,” the researchers surmised. “Rather, what they respond to is memories of the interaction filtered through their working models.” This research explains why it is that if we have, indeed, partnered with someone whose internalized scripts are very different from our own, the discord is likely to be endless, with little resolution in sight without some kind of intervention.

  Some questions to ask yourself:

  ♦ Is there an underlying pattern in the relationships I choose to be in?

  ♦ Are my reactions and responses basically the same in every relationship no matter how different the person is?

  ♦ Do I tend to be attracted to the same kind of person over and over again?

  ♦ How long do my relationships—whether they’re friendships or romantic liaisons—last? Do they tend to end in the same ways?

  DISTINGUISHING OTHER PEOPLE’S ATTACHMENT STYLES

  Our working models don’t just act as a filter on memory as that study showed; they’re fully operational every time we connect with anyone. Our understanding of someone’s motivations, our interpretation of their words and behavior, our reading of their emotions and motions are poured through the sieve of our working models. Unless you begin to be aware of your own attachment style—anxious or avoidant—you are working from cue cards in a language you don’t speak. If your relationships aren’t working for you, the chances are good that you’re choosing the wrong partners without understanding why.

  Unfortunately, both the limitations of our working models and the cultural depiction of romantic love often interact on an unconscious level to insure some pretty disastrous choices and consequences. From Romeo and Juliet to Fifty Shades of Grey , romance is portrayed as all-consuming, obliterating the boundaries between yourself and the other. But as science knows, a healthy, sustaining, and truly intimate relationship depends on two people being at once both interdependent yet capable of autonomy. Paradoxically, as the work of Brooke Feeney has shown, by being both dependent and autonomous, people actually become more empowered and independent, setting goals for themselves they might not otherwise have .

  There’s evidence that this interdependence isn’t just metaphoric or a matter of living lives that are intertwined on many practical levels. As Daniel Wegner and his coauthors write, “But on hearing even the simplest conversation between intimates, it becomes remarkably apparent that their thoughts, too, are interconnected. Together, they think about things in ways that they would not alone.”

  These relat
ionships are those of partners who have a secure base. They are skilled communicators, want intimacy and closeness, are good at managing and defusing conflict, can manage their emotions, and aren’t given to game-playing. The sad truth is that the insecurely attached daughter, especially if she is looking for Passion and Romance (accompanied by the strains of “Someday My Prince Will Come”), is not likely to be attracted to someone securely attached. That reasonable and stable way of dealing with things can, when filtered through the sieve, look dull, passionless, and even boring; secure people don’t create a lot of drama and, all too often, insecurely attached people mistake drama for passion or excitement. Instead, absent conscious awareness, it’s much more likely that the unloved daughter will be attracted to someone who’s insecurely attached himself. Even if she is attracted to someone secure, without awareness there’s unlikely to be a happy ending.

  Much of relationship stress—not to mention discord, fracture, and rupture—can be understood as the result of people with very different attachment styles getting together. Put two securely attached people together and you can cue the violins and, all things considered, they are good to go. Of course, this doesn’t mean that they won’t ever disagree or fight, or that they will necessarily stay together forever. It does mean that they have a home court advantage in terms of being able to communicate, a shared goal of needing and wanting real intimacy, and are less likely to engage in some of the more toxic behaviors—demand/withdraw, belittling their partner, making criticism highly personal, and the like—that bedevil relationships and are, according to John Gottman and other experts, the fuel for divorce.

  But combine one securely attached person with an anxiously attached person and get ready for some real challenges and don’t forget to fasten your seatbelts. That was the case for Mike and Susie, who had been dating for two years. Mike had been doing his best to quell Susie’s constant need for reassurance and her anxiety about whether he really loved her. When his work required him to travel ten days out of every month, Mike suggested they move in together as a sign of his commitment. But living together didn’t help. Susie would call or text him during working hours, even though he’d told her he couldn’t respond. When he didn’t answer, she would get progressively more wound up. Their arguments became constant, covering the same ground over and over—with Susie complaining that she wasn’t important to him, that she needed to hear from him immediately, and Mike saying that he was doing all that he could and that she was being crazy and that he felt suffocated—until, finally, Mike moved out and ended the relationship. Of course, the ending might have been different had Susie understood how her own emotional history animated her present. She might have recognized her behavior as prompted by old triggers rather than things Mike was actually doing or saying.

  A secure man may initially be attracted to an avoidant partner—she may seem fiercely independent, even mysterious, and a challenge—but will conclude, sooner or later, that the thrill of the chase isn’t worth it and that his needs aren’t being met in terms of intimacy and sharing.

  But the real tinderbox of mismatches is that of the anxiously attached with the avoidantly attached. It’s a predictable disaster in the making, with one person reacting with super-charged neediness, clingy behavior, angst, and protest anger and the other—already inclined to keep at a distance in relationship—feeling the need to run for the hills, while being content to play the game at least for a while. The avoidant may like the feeling of control or the rush of power that pushing a needy person around can give some people. Each person in the relationship in this case locates his or her need for intimacy—and understanding of what constitutes closeness—at opposite ends of the spectrum.

  Luckily, there’s no shortage of excellent research and information on attachment styles, and perhaps the key to either disentangling yourself from a “bad fit” relationship or seeing if it can possibly be salvaged is understanding the motivations that underlie the behaviors of the anxiously and avoidantly attached. Here are some of the characteristics that science has discovered:

  Anxious and avoidant people have sex for different reasons: That’s exactly what a study by Dory A. Schachner and Phillip R. Shaver clarified. Previous research showed that avoidant people were less likely to fall in love, more likely to play games and manipulate, and preferred noncommittal casual sex. Additionally, an earlier study by these authors showed that while avoidants were likely to try to poach someone else’s guy or gal, it was only for the purpose of short-term sex and self-aggrandizement. In this study, Schachner and Shaver hypothesized and showed that avoidant people would be motivated to have sex for status-related reasons or to maintain control. In contrast, anxious individuals were motivated to have sex because of their fear of abandonment and need to feel valued by their partner; in this scenario, having sex is a way of tamping down fear and feeling cared for.

  It’s interesting that, albeit for wholly different reasons, both the anxious and the avoidant see sex as being about the self, not the partner or the dyad. That observation is borne out and underscored by a study conducted by Gurit Birnbaum and others.

  They experience sexual activity differently, with different consequences for relationship: The Birnbaum study looked beyond the motives for having sex and focused instead on how the anxious and the avoidant experience sex, and how, for each, sexual activity connects to relationship. In this case, the participants ranged in age from 17 to 48. What’s interesting about this line of inquiry is that, as the authors note, while it’s true that empirical evidence links sexual satisfaction to the quality and stability of a romantic relationship, clinical evidence suggests that “harmonious couples can have relatively distressed sexual interactions whereas other couples have turbulent relationships but great sex.” They go on to write that a theoretical framework for understanding the role sex plays in romantic relationship, particularly the interplay between sexual activity and relational problems, appears to be lacking, and they suggest that attachment styles might provide one. The results were illuminating. Their first study had participants self-report scales of attachment orientation and then answer questions about sexual experience, relational issues, sex-related issues, and feelings and thoughts about pleasure. They found that highly anxious people reported focusing on their own needs while wanting their partner’s emotional involvement but also reported aversive feelings during sexual intercourse and doubts about being loved. Avoidant people reported low levels of pleasure and pleasure-related feelings, and strong aversive feelings during sexual intercourse; they, too, were focused on their own needs. In the second, smaller, study, 50 participants kept a diary for 42 days, reporting on both sexual activity and relationship quality each day, as well as their feelings and thoughts after having sex. Not altogether surprisingly, a good sexual experience, especially among women, decreased relational anxiety while a not-so-good one increased it. Either way, the authors noted that, for the anxiously attached, sex functioned as a barometer for the quality of the relationship. That wasn’t true for avoidants, for whom both good sex and bad sex alike did not affect their view of the relationship. This led the researchers to conclude that avoidants have sex for “relationship-irrelevant” reasons. So much for trying to increase a feeling of intimacy with an avoidant.

  People who are insecurely attached are diminished by connection, not made stronger: This is perhaps the least discussed aspect of the bigger differences between the securely attached and those who aren’t. As the work of Brooke Feeney makes clear, securely attached people who can depend on their partners actually become more independent and more able to take chances and risks because they know they will have support if there’s a setback. For different reasons, the anxious and the avoidant don’t experience this kind of personal growth through connection.

  Another study found similar results, this time focusing on energy. The researchers posited that because securely attached people are more skilled at managing negative emotion and because managing negative emotion
uses up energy and self-control, the securely attached would be more energetic. In contrast, the insecurely attached are using their energy to deal with triggers and activations of the attachment systems—whether that’s “I’m being abandoned!” or “I’m being encroached!” Using primes on participants—visualizing either a securely attached person or an insecurely attached one—and then having the participants write about the experience and report on how energetic they felt, the researchers confirmed their hypothesis over a series of experiments.

  This actually makes perfect sense. Just spend a few minutes visualizing what you feel like with an emotionally demanding or withdrawn person compared with someone who is available and grounded, and check your own energy levels. Yes, it’s exhausting to either deal with emotional outbursts on the daily or do cartwheels 24/7 to get someone’s attention.

  Questions to Ask Yourself About Sex and Intimacy

  ♦ Think about your own reasons for having sex and the role sexual connection has played in your present or past relationships. Do you and partner argue about how much (or how little) sex you have, and has this been a pattern in previous relationships?

  ♦ Do you get anxious or feel rejected when your partner doesn’t seem to want to make love? Or, alternatively, would you rather not have as much sex as your partner demands?