This post is the fourth and last of a series on developing intimate relationships as part of eating disorder recovery.
Last time I talked about shame and feeling unsafe as obstacles to intimacy. This time I pick up the thread about feeling unsafe and go over ways to establish a greater sense of security in intimate relating.
By “feeling unsafe” I mean fearing abandonment. (In my post on boundaries, June 18, 2010, I discuss the opposite fear, that of being taken over, invaded or controlled in intimate relationships.) Abandonment fears may result from early experiences in which caregivers are unreliable, untrustworthy or not sufficiently present. Such fears may also be the legacy of catastrophic loss. Without realizing it, you internalize these experiences as a guide for what to expect in the present. To be more secure in present day relationships, you’ll need to work on putting past experiences into the past, not just in your mind, but in the way you feel. Easier said than done!
In my last post I identified three important ways to work on distinguishing past from present:
- Unlearning old patterns
- Learning to choose safe people
- Discovering you can live through breaches of trust
In the rest of this post, I give you pointers on how to work on each.
Unlearning Old Patterns
Last time, I said: “The pattern you learned is that if you trust or rely on someone, you get abandoned. Your grown–up brain probably knows it’s not cause and effect. But deep down it feels like it is.”
It can make a very big difference just to realize that those scary expectations actually come from the past. Knowing specific experiences (one–time events or chronic conditions) that contributed can help with the job of assigning fears back to the past.
It’s one thing for your brain to know and quite another for your nervous system to catch up! You tell yourself “that was the past” but your body responds with a clench in your stomach, shortness of breath or a racing heart. This is one of those places where body–based therapies can really be helpful. (See “Recovery from the Top Down and the Bottom Up,” November 20, 2009) For instance, you might review reassuring experiences about people who have been trustworthy—experiences you’ve scarcely noticed for being so afraid. Given time and space, you can weave these comforting examples into your felt experience of what’s true and possible until your body can respond calmly.
For a number of you, putting the past into the past will involve resolving early relationship trauma. (Remember, anything that overwhelms your ability to cope at the time it occurs can be traumatizing.) Be sure to work on traumatic history with someone who is experienced in trauma treatment.
Learning to Choose Safe People
If you had untrustworthy or unavailable caregivers, you might pick people who fit these patterns and thus match your worst expectations— a kind of self–fulfilling prophecy. Similarly, if you experienced the catastrophic loss of a caregiver, you may find yourself repeatedly drawn to people who can’t be there for you.
The new idea is that you can recognize who is reliable and present and who is not. This is an example of how awareness—choosing with your eyes open— can be your best friend. If you choose people with your eyes closed, you’re overwhelmingly likely to repeat the old choices. P.S. It also helps to learn that you aren’t going to change the unreliable ones. They aren’t unreliable because you are unworthy. It’s who they are.
While you work on increasing your awareness, make sure to pay at least as much attention to what others do as to what they say. Start by investing small amounts of trust in people who seem promising. Then stop and take time to evaluate how reliably they behave before investing more. Do they show up or call back when they say they will? Do they listen to what you tell them about yourself? How do they treat their commitments to others? For some of you, this will be a break from a familiar all–or–nothing approach: trusting no one on the one hand or jumping in blindly on the other.
A focus outward on evaluating the other person’s behavior may also be new to you. If you have an eating disorder, you’ve probably spent most of your time focusing a harsh critical eye on yourself. Your concern has been how to make yourself acceptable to others. (I post about the “Internal Critic” on 4/23/10 and 5/7/10.) In recovery you learn that the people you let into your life need to be worthy of you!
As you work on sharpening your eye for reliability in others, watch out for the following paradoxical reaction: I can’t risk picking reliable people because then I’d try to rely on them and that’s not safe! If you realize you’re stuck in this bind, make sure you talk about it in your recovery treatment.
Discovering You Can Live Through Breaches of Trust
In the last post I said: “For a dependent child, an unreliable caregiver or the loss of a caregiver can be devastating. For an independent adult, untrustworthiness in others or loss can be terribly disappointing, but it doesn’t have to rob you of all solid ground.” This is the core truth on which your current security is based.
This idea will be hard for some of you to get your mind around. Perhaps without even realizing it, you’ve been searching for that external anchor—a partner, a relative, a friend, a therapist—who will permanently provide the security you don’t feel inside. This approach is, of course, doomed to failure for at least three reasons:.
1) The arrangement is bound to make you feel more vulnerable, not less. If you think another person is essential to your stability, you’ll focus on what ‘s needed to keep them around at the expense of your own desires and needs. Not only does this put you at the other’s mercy, but it keeps reinforcing a self–image of helplessness and dependency.
2) People are just human. The most rock solid among us will fail others, let down those we love or be unavailable sometimes. But if you’ve elected another person to be your security source, this will feel intolerable to you.
3) People who sign up to be the strong one in a relationship need you to be vulnerable to feel better about themselves. They won’t be able to support your strength or confidence as you grow in recovery.
The only reliable road to feeling secure is to develop a sense of security within yourself. This is not to deny our basic human need for connecting to and being comforted by others. And a secure relationship seems just about essential as a place to work on building up internal security. It just means that support from others can’t permanently substitute for security that comes from inside.
How do you begin to build up inner security? Like so many other recovery projects, it’s something you accomplish with small steps and regular practice. Here are some examples of small practice steps you can take:
- Regularly notice and credit yourself with your competencies.
- Resist listening to harsh internal criticism that undermines your self–confidence.
- Practice turning to internal resources just for a few minutes, even if you go on to seek the support of others.
- Think of what a supportive person (real or imagined) might say or do that would reassure or comfort you when you need it. Notice even small ways these thoughts affect how you feel.
- Make sure your recovery work includes practicing—again in small steps—skills you need for greater self–reliance. These might include the ability to manage difficult emotions, skills of self–assertiveness, tolerating being alone, distinguishing adult aloneness from childhood abandonment, constructive expression of anger and more.
- Practice ways of feeling grounded in your own body, such as locating your center, feeling your feet planted on the ground, tracking your breath as you inhale and exhale, and so on.
- Let others support your efforts in ways that encourage growth and independence rather than dependency. This could be cheerleading your successes, offering suggestions, debriefing missteps, encouraging you to keep going, just to name some examples.
When you are confident that you can stand on your own two feet, even in the face of disappointment or loss, it becomes possible to risk connecting intimately to others. You can let yourself be known because rejection, however unpleasant, won’t leave you helpless or rob you of belief in your own worth. You can lean on another person because you know if they fail you, you still have yourself. Whatever the other person does, you are secure in the knowledge that you will still end up okay.
