Broken heart

When I was AP, I was terrible at getting over relationships. I'd ruminate and blame myself while recognizing it was over and I had to move on. That often came with seeing the person less, unless we were staying friends, and eventually enough time would pass that I'd be emotionally open enough to meet someone else. Not recommended as good tactics for moving on, took way too long and kept me in cycles and patterns.

The couple people I dated short term who had some sort of mental instability and were gaslighting me hit my self esteem pretty hard and made me hurt and confused. I went no contact with both and started reading about emotional abuse and gave myself a talktrack without any self blame, and felt those deeply right at the beginning but also quickly moved on with some distance. Again, those were like 4-6 weeks, so my attachment wasn't so strong.

If you are AP, I'd recommend you start with yourself and your self esteem and try not to make it about any romantic partners, past or present, at this point in time. If you have been on the receiving end of emotional abuse from a partner, that's not your fault and you didn't deserve that. But now you have to take responsibility for yourself and heal.

In another thread, I wrote about what I did over a long period of time to move from AP to earned secure, which makes dealing with breakups a lot easier because you are just dealing with the breakup and not layers and layers of attachment injury on top of it. jebkinnisonforum.com/thread/1262/attachment-style-self-help-suggestions

Theoretically, people can be and move between any attachment style depending on experiences and how much they let negative experiences affect them as adults. Some research indicates you'll likely stick with your primary one from childhood that's been conditioned into your nervous system, but it can be changed with self work. My personal opinion is, if you're insecure and you're shifting due to more bad experiences without healing, you'll be more likely to add more maladaptions over your primary style. So if you think of AP as high anxiety/low avoidance and low view of self/high trust in others, then bad experiences that make you more avoidant and distrustful of others isn't going to also improve your own self esteem and anxiety. So I'd think it's more likely you'd slide from AP to FA and not DA. However, if you start healing as AP and improve your self esteem and decrease your anxiety, you'll start moving towards secure. I've found that when I started consistently testing secure, it came with a true change in how I think. While I still have AP thoughts and gut reactions, I recognize them as such and they don't make sense to me to act on, so I also think once you get to secure through true healing and not just superficial level habit changes, like once your core perspectives really change, you're going to stay there.

It's doable!!