A (long) Secure-Anxious / Avoidant Breakup

I'm really touched by this, and reflect back to you the warmth and respect.  I'm glad that you found what is helpful and supportive here, and of course would love to see you continue with us if it is helpful to you. Best wishes for what lies ahead for you! 

Thank you for the update. That rage you feel is normal and even healthy. You are hurt and in some ways your attachment figure has abandoned you, so you are feeling that in anger, it is your psyche trying to protect you. It is okay to let that out, go smash a pillow, yell, cry. Just allow yourself to feel that. Our body processes a breakup the same way we grieve any loss.

Keep on reminding yourself the reasons why this isn't your fault. Write out a list even of all the things that didn't work, add to it eveytime you have a new thing and then keep re-reading it. Eventually you will remember all the ways things didn't work for you.

When you are insecure, it can exhibit in so many ways, and it is all about how two peoples insecure dynamic intertwine that affects how the relationship progresses. Two months is not a healthy amount of time to just move in with someone, that is rushing. So she ended things with you, did not take time to grieve and is already living with someone. It doesn't make it easier for you, but you can't see what that relationship is like on the inside or how it is going to progress.

She could:

Be using it to cover up all the negative feelings from your breakup, insecure attachers are great at rebounds
Feel safe in the relationship because they are less then her in some way and she feels like she has the power
Have them up on a pedestal still and believe they are the perfect person who will complete her
Be telling herself all sorts of justifications as to why you and her don't work

thank you for your reply, usernametaken  

I don't know that it's anger any more. Three months later, anything she does or has done is so far past actually mattering that I don't know how much rage I can actually muster. It's just that there's a part of me inside that's ready, always, to take any information like that and turn it against myself. The self-centered part of you that wants to make it about you, that wants to tell you it's your fault and that you're not good enough. I can recognize it for what it is now, at least.

And yeah, I've thought of all that. There's no way to know which of those things, or which combination of them is true. But it seems the least likely scenario is that she's just doing 100% better and is healed and ready for a serious relationship. Considering the circumstances of the breakup, the shutting me out and rushing straight into something else with someone else... there's no way that's a good thing for anyone. But from her perspective, it must be.

You're free to hold on to that narrative as long as you want! Everyone on the board has one, and has had to let go of it in order to get better. Good luck!

Females and fawning

jebkinnisonforum.com/post/17299/

“In trauma studies, we have tended to regard the nervous system as sex and gender neutral. However because women, on average, have far more estrogen than most men do, women are disproportionately impacted by the social nervous system, both its strengths and weaknesses. Estrogen is a bonding hormone that primes us to be perceptive and attuned to other people’s experiences. This awareness of and care for social bonds is crucial for the survival of our species and is an extraordinary gift. It evolved so that we would take exquisite care of our young.
That said, there are downsides to our bonding superpowers.

We are more susceptible to the social nervous system reactions under stress—both fitting in and fawning. Women are often more prone to social comparison, concerned about how our actions are or will be perceived, and hung up on friendship and relationship problems. We can minimize our perspectives, opinions, intelligence, and aspirations to keep the peace or maintain the status quo of our relationships, family, or work life.
These concerns about belonging can become deafening and keep us in unhealthy situations—whether they’re dates or jobs or marriages—way longer than we might like or might be good for us, because we are afraid to break connection, to not be liked, to be labeled a tease, demanding, selfish, or bitchy. We are hardwired to care more about connection and be more socially invested in our relationships than men are.
A better understanding of the impact of hormones could also help us understand some of these behaviors. In the meantime, we can also develop considerable agency when we examine our relationship to social norms, which may be operating to create some level of primal safety but may not be serving our best interests and our true, long-term safety and well-being. Women are confused as to why hey went along with their doctor’s recommendation when it dident feel right, or stayed with an abusive partner, or had sex again with someone who violated them. Yes, our conditioning to be “good,” “nice,” and not disruptive comes into play here, but so does our internal sense of survival, which tells us that we may not survive separation or conflict.
Many women have gone back to their abusers, back into situations where abuse was likely to continue, or simply remained in dangerous environments even though they knew it was unhealthy. It makes no logical sense; why would we do that to ourselves? But the social nervous system sometimes compels us to pull threats closer, and we feel “safer” with proximity to a known threat than with one
that is lurking somewhere out in the world.
Have you ever felt like you just couldn’t have a difficult conversation, even with someone you loved and trusted? You waited and waited, because that interpersonal conflict seemed like such a big deal you could barely handle it? Beneath the fear of confrontation or conflict might also be a fear of losing that connection, and depending on your past history of belonging and attachment, it can feel incredibly scary and difficult to end a relationship. Similarly, consider a more extreme situation in which a woman finds herself afraid for her physical safety, where someone has power over her. Her desire to please and remain socially connected can override her deeper impulses and instincts, and ultimately that can lead to a lot of shame and blame. She will ask herself questions like “Why didn’t I speak up? Protect myself? Get away? Fight?”
Once again, it is essential that we women remember this is not a moral issue; we need to learn about, respect, and have compassion for the survival mechanisms of this complex social nervous system of ours. The more we understand, the more power, more choices, and more true safety is available to us. Being attuned to our social environment is important. Can youimagine if no one paid attention to how their actions impacted others? We’d all be terrible neighbors. That’s not a world we want live in. However, many women err on the side of taking upless space, remaining quiet, becoming invisible, swallowing their needs so as not to create waves or conflict. We unconsciously choose these behaviors, which become habits, and personality styles, because conflict can threaten the intactness of our social nervous system that is critical to our survival.”

People leaning into flight, freeze, fawn responces with some elastic connective tissue and in a position of having less power, are often blamed for not speaking up, not standing their ground, for not fighting back in different situations. They simply don't have the same capacity in their nerveussystem and in their tissue for fight responces.

They are often blamed by people with more collagenies connective tissue with more fight energy. People with more fight energy don't understand why -they got more fight ressources themselves.

Women are often blamed for fawning/for trying to fit in. The heerd is more important to women. The social nerveus system interaction is more important to women.

Most research about how we react to stress have been made on men. Fight was the most common stress responce. But they forgot to do the study on women. Women uses tend and befriend strategies due to stress or flee. ( - Shelly E. Taylor.)
Also it is more safe to keep a threat close, than far away.”

A female SE practitioner   

I believe he meant more that in a legal context, there should be no jumping to conclusions about a parent's treatment of a child if that child is exhibiting signs of disorganized attachment. Like lawyers shouldn't be trying to argue that disorganized attachment = child abuse and CPS should take the child away from the parent.

But I know what you're saying. Whatever happened to my ex in childhood did not set her up for success in attachment further down the line. Same goes for myself and any of us with insecure attachment. 

I see what you're saying now. Thank you for sharing that link.

I'm not saying that I'm simply existing in this miserable state of "noble suffering" all the time, but rather that it's a daily struggle to not be pulled in that direction. The equal but opposite reaction (avoidance, self medication and dismissal) is anathema to me, so it's not actually an option for me, though it causes me anguish to see that strategy being adopted by the person I had a relationship with. However, the push and pull does come from the feeling that even straying toward the "objective" middle ground is too much a betrayal of myself (and the patterns I cling to almost unknowingly, and certainly unproductively...) and that's why one day I'll feel like I have bird's-eye view of what happened and I move imperceptibly closer toward accepting and letting go, and the next day I'll wake up in my bed only to start the day by rehashing why I am still so upset. As I did today.

There's a lot to be upset about. And it does feel like the opposite way is to do a lot of hand waving everything away, dismissing, ignoring, pretending and lying to the self. That's how I frame it, anyway. I don't want to be like that. But I'm working on it and you're right. Middle ground. The objective approach as an alternative to martyrdom and voluntary suffering.