My Insecurity Drives Him Away
When I give a workshop, the hottest issue people share about is the pattern of driving their lovers away due to their insecurity.
How many times have I heard: “They love me at first….until my intensity drives them away.”
As common a pattern as this is, the people struggling with in feel quite isolated. They feel they are in an abandonment box of their own making. They feel freakish for having this problem. They feel weak, unfit to be in a relationship. It’s such a painful pattern, and there are thousands of people out there suffering through it.
Insecurity creates such a disastrous dynamic in a relationship. It gives our power to our partners. It takes the mutuality out of the equation. It makes us overreact and over-need. Insecurity makes us want too much too fast. It gets us in over our heads. It causes us to aim our emotional suction cups at our partners. It makes us feel less about ourselves and our partners feel less about us. Feeling insecure and driving our partners away leads to self-loathing.
The first step is to stop beating ourselves up. Emotions are given. We can’t just switch them off, try as we might. We know our insecurity is turning the other person off, but we can’t just grab a magic dial and turn down the fear. We’d sure like to, at least in time to save the relationship, but we can’t just will our feelings away.
We need to DEAL with these feelings and there is a lot we can do to regain our balance. It begins when we end the protest.
Ending the protest means acceptance of the reality that we are responsible for our own emotional wellbeing. This is an enormous leap, and one I’ve written a great deal about in previous books, articles, blogs, etc.
If our neediness and insecurity are creating problems in our relationships, we have to realize that becoming emotionally self-assured is the only way to go – and what better time to learn this than right now, right in the midst of an insecurity crisis, where we are obsessed over our partner response toward us.
It’s important for people to understand that these emotional issues we’re struggling with are not due to any inherent weakness on our parts – they are most likely due to historic events that emotionally conditioned us to respond with fear. This emotionally conditioned response is quite involuntary – locked into our mammalian brains. The intense insecurity, neediness, fear, panic – these are not our faults, but since we’re plagued with them, we are responsible for “fixing” them.
I want to preach this from the rooftops, because people need to stop beating themselves up and instead take this leap to self-reliance. The alternatives are just too painful: Either to get caught up in patterns of constant re-abandonment (abandoholism) or avoid relationships altogether (abandophobism) in order to remove ourselves from the intense anxiety.
One thing about fear: rather than dissipate, it incubates over time. So if you just avoid the fear-causing situation (i.e. relationship), you are not healing the fear, you are allowing it to increase. This means that it will be right there, with an even stronger punch the next time you attempt to be with someone.
No, the only positive option is to use your insecurity as an opportunity to become emotionally self-reliant. This involves radical acceptance of your separateness as an individual. You must stop laying your need for security and reassurance at the feet of your partner and do all of that for yourself.
This is what motivated me to write my book BLACK SWAN as well as the others – because we feel so helpless and hopeless when we’re going through something like this, but it is the most amazingly beneficial opportunity we could ever have, if we know how to make this leap to emotional self-reliance. And very often we can do it in time to save the relationship.
PS: I have created a series of videos that take you step-by-step through the 5 Akēru exercises and other life-changing insights of the Abandonment Recovery Program.
Whether you’re experiencing a recent break-up, a lingering wound from childhood, or struggling to form a lasting relationship, the program will enlighten you, restore your sense of self, and increase your capacity for love and connection.