Insecurity
If you are in a serious relationship then sooner or later you will probably experience some degree of insecurity. Perhaps your partner is suspiciously preoccupied and you don't know what they are up to. Or maybe the attractive new person at work appears to be spending more time with your partner than you think is necessary. Hopefully with little more than a quick check of the facts the feeling passes and relationship life continues.
Some people can be dominated by insecurity bringing friction or disaster to their relationships whilst others appear care-free, seemingly never jealous or concerned. What makes people react so differently?
This article will explain:
What makes people secure or insecure in their relationships?
The insecurity dynamic with your partner.
Can insecurity be changed?
Security begins in childhood: Attachment theory
The terms secure or insecure originate from the work of British psychoanalyst, John Bowlby. Over half a century ago, Bowlby studied childhood behaviour and recognised how a child’s early experience of their caregivers influences their significant relationships when they become adults. Bowlby observed that the quality of a child’s experience of their parents becomes their lifelong expectation of others. In other words how dependable your parents are (or were) shapes how dependable you expect your partner to be. Bowlby labelled these expectations ‘secure’ and ‘insecure’.
Secure means you tend to have confidence in your significant other. For example, when your partner is preoccupied or unhappy and you have to fill in the gaps, you are more likely to attribute reasonable and favourable assumptions to them. In your mind there is little to worry about.
Insecure means you expect others to be unreliable or undependable. If your partner is absent or unhappy you will tend to assume that they might not come back, or that they have lost interest in you. Fear of being abandoned is never far from the surface.
Insecurity can be subdivided into two types: anxious and avoidant.
When most people think of insecurity they conjure an image of somebody who is clingy and fearful. But not everybody behaves this way. In fact, the other type of insecurity looks almost the opposite. The two subtypes that are commonly observed are anxious insecurity and avoidant insecurity.
Anxious insecurity - When children are repeatedly separated from their parents - either physically or emotionally - they still naturally crave their parents love and attention but they live in fear that it may disappear at any time. They subsequently look for reassurance and get upset or angry when they don't get it. After their despair passes they become hopeful again, things are good until their fear arises or is triggered and the upset or anger begins again. This is known as anxious attachment.
Avoidant insecurity - If the child’s experience of separation is severe - the parents are consistentlyunavailable - the child becomes detached. This child has lost hope of reassurance or comfort and withdraws into their own world having learned that the only person they can truly rely on is themselves. This is called avoidant attachment.
Avoidant people can easily be mistaken for securely attached because they show little concern that their partner will leave them. But in reality their absence of distress is because they fear being let down so much that they avoid getting too close in the first place.
Our early experience of significant relationships forms our template for adult significant relationships.
How does this play out in relationships?
As with most personality traits, rather than fit statically into a category we tend to sit somewhere on a continuum with room for a little movement.
Your attachment style is not an independent thing; it is affected and provoked by the person you are involved with. The type of person you are in a relationship with matters. For example, if someone who is usually secure pairs with somebody that is predominately insecure, the insecure partners clinginess could cause the secure one to become a little more avoidant than usual. Likewise, a secure person who becomes involved with an avoidant partner could easily become more anxious and needy than usual because of the avoidant ones distance and withdrawal.
Your usual attachment style (anxious or avoidant) gets provoked and amplified by your partners attachment style. The way your partner behaves affects the way you feel and behave.
The insecurity dynamic: why it becomes a fight.
When one partner gets triggered they usually trigger the other. For instance, the anxious person is very sensitive to the distance maintained by the avoidant partner. They will try to make things better by moving closer but the avoidant partner sees this as intrusion so they try to make things better by moving further away. To the anxious partner this move away is alarming so they try to move closer still. The avoidant partner becomes increasingly frustrated and eventually leaves.
Ironically, both are scared of being hurt but their efforts to make everything better triggers alarm in the other. Too much distance feels scary to the insecure partner and too much closeness feels scary to the avoidant one. Things can quickly escalate and sometimes feel quite crazy.
Can our attachment style be changed?
Attachment styles persist over time and do not change easily. But context and environment play a significant part in how secure someone feels. So, by understanding your own and your partners attachment style you can intentionally create a safe relationship environment where you both understand and consider each other.
Attachment styles don't need to be problematic. This is because a lot depends on context. For example, during the honeymoon period of a new relationship both partners pay attention to the other and treat each other favourably so insecurities do not arise. However, as the stresses of everyday life creep back in and partners begin to refocus on things outside of the relationship, there is an increasing propensity for either person to be triggered into acting out their style of insecurity as they begin to worry where their partners attention went. This is when it can become problematic.
Instead of trying not to react to a trigger, it is more realistic to remove the trigger. But this is not always easy because the conversations needed to understand each others history and attachment require being open and vulnerable with each other which can trigger the insecure behaviour that you are trying to avoid. This is where a therapist can help.
If insecurity is a problem for you, individual or couples therapy can help you gain insight and have more control over yourself and your relationship.