Ideal Dynamic Thread

I think the answer to this lies in the fact that our friends don’t trigger our attachment system as strongly as romantic partners

I really like @shiningstar 's technique to visualize the feeling you want to experience every day in the relationship. I will certainly be meditating more on this but off the top of my head some feelings are "accepted, desired, protected, believed, free, grateful, understood."

I think one of my consistent problems in dating has been that the men who make me feel "desired, free" have left me feeling "ungrateful, unprotected" and the men who make me feel "understood, desired" have left me feeling "unaccepted, unfree." For example one man I dated didn't intervene when his friend put his hands on me at a party and other men I have dated have been jealous about my time and insistent about how we spend time together. Thinking about it in @shiningstar's way makes it somewhat easier to judge if the relationship is working for me.

Even if I might like a quality or experience I am having it's not contributing to my emotional health if there's some big omission. I try to be responsible for my own feelings and self-aware but dating has been challenging for me because I have to rely on the other person's behavior. I feel like my world is shattered when trust is broken.

tnr9 You may be right that "caught" is a tell of insecure behavior. I definitely meant it how you described in your first post where you described wanting to be the best version of yourself. I like the idea of us growing and changing together. I feel motivated to become a stronger person. But maybe this is insecure. With some men, I already know I am enough, and they usually seem a little obsessed, and it is honestly quite boring for me.

I can't answer alice's question when it comes to friendships versus relationships, but one topic that comes up with my friends that I have no explanation for is how the quality of my friendships versus my relationships are so different. I have many excellent friends. When we want to do something, like plan a day together, there is a healthy back and forth and exchange of information and responsibilities. Within a few minutes we can plan an excellent day with a division of labor and roles that ensures everything is taken care of and we will have a good time (who drives, who brings the food, who brings the wine, etc.) In my experience this is much rarer to find in dating partners.

I agree that visualisation can be powerful when it comes to creatin what you want in a partner. I am working with a psychologist at the moment on a protocol called “the ideal parent figure protocol” by Daniel brown who is a psychologist in the USA. It’s designed to change your attachment style from insecure to secure using visualisations of parents that have the qualities you needed as a child and may not have gotten. He wrote a book about it, it’s very fascinating. They did a small study showing people who did the protocol over a period of time that were diagnosed with mental health issues at the start were no longer diagnosable with them at the end. Its premise is that visualising remaps what is called the “internal working model” that we have from our childhood from a negative to a postive on. This then changes our attachment style and who we ultimately become attracted too.
When I first discovered this I wanted to understand how it may work. There is good research to show that the brain does not know the difference between what is real and what is imaginary. So when you visualise and do it repeatedly the brain starts to believe this is real and a rewiring occurs. Professional athletes use visualisations to achieve their sporting goals and it has even been shown to work for weight loss achieving better health outcomes with chemo therapy for cancer patients.

I think you've hit the nail on the head. being free and protected can become conflicting, and it takes someone special for you to make you feel both as well as for you to make progress in your own security to be able to feel this way within yourself. My own experience is... unless you feel that way about yourself i.e., free and protected by yourself, it is very hard for you to rest easy with others even if they make you feel this way or to accept how someone can make you feel this way. It's kinda like having practice by yourself so that when someone pushes you off your center, you will recognise that you're off centered. otherwise, you're always off centered and you feel knocked around alot. That's kind of how i visualise it. be what you want to be first, then assess other people's effect on you, then you'll be able to differentiate if the problem is you, them, the relationship dynamic. 

I think i really identify with what you've said with relying on them and trust being broken! it was a huge part of my own reflections on why I'm so insecure. a huge part of the insecurity comes from feeling vulnerable to another person's behavior, and that when the person is not considerate of their effects of me, the only casualty is my life and not theirs. So i was very wary of someone else's behavior and had to "manage" the risks in various ways that were not healthy. I've come to think of it in this way: people and relationships are risk factors - they are a risk factor to the stability of my life, but in the same token, I am a risk factor in the stability of their lives. I cannot promise/manage what they will do, but I can minimise the risk factors in my life in various ways.

1. be a minimal risk factor in other people's lives - this will only gain the interest and respect of those who behave in the same way, and you will immediately see how others are inconsiderate to you. believe them immediately the first time they show that they are huge risk factors. sometimes some discussion can be had, when you perceive the other party to be TRULY interested in being considerate to you. i used to give and give and give, because i was often criticized for having overly rigid boundaries and being unforgiving. there's a huge difference between negotiating boundaries and having patience with safe partners vs having endless tolerance and patience with unsafe partners. The latter is often mistaken as the former, particularly for people who didnt grow up with good role models. the latter is also easily placated with verbal platitudes and superficial actions, but never a real adjustment of behaviors/attitudes. 

2. be secure for yourself. I used to want to date men who are good with finances and organizing cos I'm terrible with it, but it also scares me because I'm leaving alot of security at their hands, so i would really hold them to very high standards of integrity, of which very few have met. i've since accepted that nobody else should/will know about my situation and i can only manage myself so that i'm secure in the event that they suddenly leave me in any way (death, cheating etc). i don't rely on them nor look to rely on them. The one yardstick I do use for reliance is - is this someone I will trust to make decisions for me when I'm in a medical situation. if this is a "no" i dont even care about dating this person. if it is a "yes", i'm happy to date this person, but i will not rely on them too much except for support and companionship, and even then, i try to limit it. 

3. avoid those who bring on alot of emotions, good or bad, in me. high arousal is often a sign of being triggered, so if I'm noticing high arousal, I take pleasure in the positive effect but I don't seek to continue or preserve the relationships with too much effort anymore. the best kind of relationships are those that bring out quiet pleasure and contentment in me, so i pay attention to those and try to nurture those slowly. i've had situations where i made fast friends with men who had partners, who first seemed ok with it and then out of the blue was not, and my friendships and networks were just disrupted for no reasons at all. for them, it might just be one connection lost but they still had partners; for me, it is a loss of support and networks that I had relied on, and a huge crash in terms of emotions. 

PS: just found this and thought it's relevant to visualizations >> jebkinnisonforum.com/post/37292/thread 

@shiningstar, thank you for some of the amazing points you've outlined. I have a question about the third point you mention " avoid those who bring out a lot of emotions in me". I think I understand what you mean. I think with my DA ex I was constantly in a state of arousal because he was so distant. This was as much on my unhealed FA side as it was on his DA side.

Can you give me some examples of instances where you noticed yourself bring aroused? Both positively and negatively?

Yea. this is something that really took some time to "understand" because we're so used to activation/deactivation. I'm not sure if I can put it into words well, because I'm still taking notes on it with other forms of relationships e.g., colleagues, strangers. 

So an example would be going on a date. Negative arousal for me is feeling nervous which I would take as dating excitement. The nervousness is kinda antsy and makes my mind blank out, I'm tense and feels awkward. I'd want to look and feel good for the other party, in order to please and impress that person. The arousal is rigid and I'm trying to "avoid" missteps. there's a bit of a wall that protects me and i'm regulating myself quite alot. Positive arousal, on the other hand, would be happy to see that person but in calm fashion. I'd still be slightly nervous cos it's still dating and you're romancing each other, but it's not a blanking out, tense, awkward kind of nervous. It's more like a... happy giggle kind of nervous, if that even makes sense. I'd want to look and feel good for the other party, but it's more to have a good time AND it's really less of a focus on impressing someone else in order to keep the relationship going. The arousal is flexible, soft and I'm looking forward to creating new experiences with that person. I expect and experience the other person to be the same i.e., looking forward to being and doing with me, and it's about "being" rather than "avoiding". 

I think this applies to friends, strangers, colleagues. I've noticed myself feeling a tad rigid with colleagues/friends (negative arousal), and I think that's because I'm more attached/open to them than they are to me. That feeling goes away when i distance myself from them and treat them as less psychologically important. I remind myself that they are just people who are involved with me because they have to be, rather than naturally because they want to be (e.g., in committees), and that I should keep some boundaries and a distance, even if I like them. However, I've learnt that this feeling means that I should not be too comfortable being open with them and saying too many things to them. This is somewhat difficult for me because I have no filter and I generally assume that everyone is good and wants to work together as a team for the greater good. Similarly, I used to assume that people behave well in relationships and would want the relationship to grow and be better and stronger, but that is just not true. Some may want it but not able to do it, some just don't want that at all but say otherwise.  It is not a statement on who I am - remember that everyone is a risk factor and so am I, unless proven otherwise. I think APs tend to get a little aggrieved when others consider them a risk factor, and then it spirals out from there as APs get triggered and act out, proving that they ARE risk factors - at least that's how it was for me. 

As I'm typing this, I'm also thinking of a few other points.  

Negative arousal doesn't necessarily mean you aren't drawn to the person or it isn't love, it just means that the interaction/person is making you feel a certain way that is not quite positive and uplifting. Usually in the early days of dating, the difference between negative and positive arousal can be quite slight and nuanced, so alot of insecures mistake the former with the latter, or least thought it is a normal thing in dating and attraction. 

The arousal can switch for the same person, and that was my experience with my exDA. It started out relatively positive and then turned seriously negative. In the early days, it was somewhat positive (looking forward, not focused on impressing, keeping it going) but with a tinge of negative (I feel a tad rigid around him), so both can exist at the same time. once we both got more serious, he deactivated and I got super triggered, I was then in a constant state of negative arousal because of the distancing, gaslighting and stonewalling. not only was it a constant state of negative arousal, it was heightened state of negative arousal - always alert, crying, stressed out. 

I think an "easy" way of determining positive/negative arousal is - is this expanding or contracting your inner self? Positive arousal indicates alignment and progression of your inner self - there's a sense of expansion and clarity that is easy and uplifting. There's calmness but progression/expansion. So, I've sort of moved to the philosophy of "feeling" rather than "form", and the feelings I want to pursue are those of calm, positive in nature AND keeps me looking forward. I think this is also something we've touched on in this forum - the feelings of "boredom but safety". I'd like to say that my current partner is safe but not boring. Our lives are very boring (we just netflix, work, sleep) but there's a sense of activity and expansion in our lives just by having each other and the kind of interactions we have that is not rigid. It's about having fun in your souls, not necessarily doing fun activities all the time or having an outwardly exciting, eventful relationship.

I'm slightly rambling, but the last thing is that I first set myself an intention not to be and/or feel rigid in life, no matter what. This is centering myself. I practiced it with everyone in every situation. When I was dating, i observed if this person did/say things that made me feel rigid, and that person is immediately filtered away. For example, there was a creepy dude who kept insisting my hair looks better in a certain way even after I explained that I know but have to tie it up because I'm eating and I have long ass hair. It was not a discussion, just him repeating that my hair looks better down. small thing, but it made me feel rigid, so I nixed him. Another one kept saying things like... I'm allowing someone to constrain me so I'm ready to have a relationship. I felt rigid in response to that, so that was the end of it. 

we can always further discuss rigidity and the nuances of it, but I think i've rambled enough on this and need to get on with my day. LOL. Thanks for asking me this though! It was an interesting trip down memory lane and trying to formulate the words for it.