"I like the dreams of the future better than the history of the past."
Thomas Jefferson
Jennifer was quite overwrought: "I really do love him, I do, but I don't trust him! And I know it's because of what happened in the past. My first husband cheated on me so much, and eventually he left me for someone else. It took me years to get over the heartbreak. When I met Gf, it was like the sunshine suddenly came back into my life. He's so different from my ex. He is gentle, kind and honest. So why do I find myself getting so angry with him? I accuse him of all kinds of things, with no justification whatever, and I just keep having a horrible feeling that he's seeing someone, that he's about to leave me He's been very patient, so far, but how long can it last?"
Insecurity in relationships can reach phobic proportions.
And in fact, that's quite a good analogy, because phobias often result from over-generalizing fear from "one" specific trigger to future ones that are not really threatening.
So someone who was bitten by a snake as a child may develop a phobia of all snakes (not just the one that bit them), and then, through the years, spread this fear even wider to harmless pictures of snakes, or even to hose pipes! And we see this pattern of response in other disorders too.
HOW FEAR SPREADS
This over generalizing, known to psychologists as "faulty pattern matching", is also seen in post traumatic stress disorder. A woman who was mugged by a man wearing a red jacket found she feared all men wearing red. She over-generalized the fear from that one event to a "color."This wasn't on a thinking level but on an instinctual "feeling" level. A man I treated for PTSD had been on military service in Helmand Province in Afghanistan. Once back in England, he felt compelled to walk in the middle of the road rather than on the pavement/sidewalk, because he had become so afraid of possible road side bombs.
He had transferred that fear from one place where it "did" belong to another place where it "didn't" belong at all. He consciously knew that roadside bombs were most unlikely back in the UK. But this didn't stop him "feeling" as if bombs were waiting to go off along every roadside, and that he'd be much safer in the middle. Feelings often win out over thoughts or logic.
But what has this to do with relationships?
THE LEGACY OF TRAUMATIC RELATIONSHIPS
This is exactly what Jennifer had done. She'd transferred her anger, hurt, suspicion and insecurity from one relationship (where it was a natural and appropriate response to real circumstances) into a good and healthy relationship where these emotional responses not only didn't belong, but actually threatened to spoil.
Post traumatic stress response becomes a problem because the fear/terror response starts being triggered by things that have only a vague or superficial resemblance to the original trauma. So a road in England superficially resembles a road in war-torn Afghanistan and the fear response gets triggered. Gf looks a bit like Jennifer's ex (because they are both about the same age) and all the fear and anger gets triggered again. So why does this happen?
WHEN EMOTION GOES BAD
Emotions are there to help us survive. Wrapped within the word "emotion" is the word "motion". Some emotions - like fear and disgust -drive us to "move away" from something we deem threatening, and other emotions - like anger, lust, hunger and thirst - have us "moving towards" the focus of these feelings.
Emotions work in rather simplistic ways. If we are attacked by a sea creature, it makes survival sense to fear and avoid the sea in future. If we are attacked by a man with a beard, we may learn to fear "all" bearded men. Nature "errs on the side of caution" to try to keep us safe. This approach works pretty well in a primitive environment, in relation to naturally occurring threats. But in the complex world of today, this over generalizing of an emotional response can easily become counter-productive, and even downright harmful.
It's as if we need to develop more discerning emotional responses.
This is actually possible.
Suffering emotional insecurity in a relationship is often (not always) a "learned" emotional response from a dysfunctional past relationship. To overcome chronic feelings of insecurity, change has to happen on an unconscious level (where the feelings first generated) as well as on the conscious, cognitive level.
DEALING WITH 'EMOTIONAL ALLERGY'
If we respond to a healthy situation "as if" it is an "unhealthy" situation, the result is rather like an allergic reaction. People with allergies react very strongly to things which others find completely innocuous and harmless. The "reaction" itself becomes a problem - as anyone who has suffered hay fever or a nut allergy will attest.
Someone is offered a healthy relationship and they become frightened, anxious and/or angry - like an excessive emotional allergic response. But all this happens on the "unconscious" or "subconscious" level. It is not a conscious decision.
Consciously, Jennifer knew, or at least had no real reason to doubt, that Gf was a decent, loving and honest man who was devoted to her. But her "feelings", driven by her unconscious faulty pattern match, wouldn't let her respond to him and their relationship as if it were healthy.
I could have used logic and reason to argue with Jennifer about how unfair she was being to Gf until my face was blue and it wouldn't have done any good - because her "feelings" wouldn't have changed. She knew perfectly well all along how unfair it was. But with hypnosis, that great medium that allows us to communicate directly with the unconscious mind, I was able to help her start feeling secure and strong again, so that she could at last relax and enjoy her wonderful new relationship and leave the old one where it belonged, well and truly in the past.
This is why the new 10 steps to overcoming insecurity in relationships course includes 10 carefully selected hypnosis downloads as well as masses of helpful information and practical tips. It has a very clear goal: to enable people to control and beat potentially relationship wrecking insecurity and free themselves to truly move on and - when a genuine opportunity arises - love again.
Origin: street-approach.blogspot.com
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