Moving towards secure and freaking out in the middle

My experience has definitely been one of “two steps forward, one step back... two steps forward, three steps sideways”.. meaning... it hasn’t been linear at all and I’ve had to take small victories where I can. I feel like I’m fine for a few days and then a song will come on, or I’ll pass by a place, and I’ll be a crying mess and I’ll get those urges to call him up and say “we can figure this out! I can be whomever you need me to be!” which sounds pathetic even as I type it. I hate that I’m like this.

***As an aside, it really SUCKS when some of your favorite things are ruined because of a breakup (places, songs, foods, whatever...). I hope more people answer this thread because I want to know too. I feel so... WEAK.. sometimes. Like I wish I had a drill sargeant following me around, telling me what to do.

"What’s your experience and how do you know you’re really moving towards secure?"

If I'm objective - which I can do seemingly for everyone except myself - I'd say that the best sign you've become secure is that you've dumped your DA. It's our curse as APs that we find it impossible to leave the relationship and as such do the majority of the "work" to maintain it. We raise and drop our boundaries in a whim, sell off our identities to the highest bidder and shed or hide every idiosyncratic characteristic that make us who we are if we think it'll change our DA/FA's behaviour.

I'm starting to realize that even an isolated attempt to move to a secure style of attachment is itself a form of AP self/identity-abandonment as it's a process that by definition can't be directly observed or controlled - perhaps we're trying to do the whole chameleon thing again; the reality is that it only happens indirectly over time as we get exposed to people who are secure themselves. This last point is important: It means you must have a DA/FA who is willing to try to move to a more secure position also (good luck getting a DA to admit to being insecure). You *can't* do it without them - you really can't. If your DA/FA has already moved to the relationship-denial phase ("I don't know what we are, but you're not my bf/gf, we're not fwb, we're not together") then in my opinion it's already far too late. My ex-FA told me "I don't know what you are, maybe you're my exclusive penis, let's just keep it 'light and simple'" after our last break up where she at least had previously referred to me as her bf. We have been split up now a couple of weeks and she still reaches out every day over fb, and it is killing me - but that's another story.