– The Dangers of Becoming Too Securely Attached in Couples Therapy

CAN WE BECOME TOO SECURE IN OUR RELATIONSHIPS WITH OUR PARTNERS?

Most of us want to know how to have thriving, passionate relationships that endure for decades. We all know how to fall in love, even if, as we are single, we fear that we might not find love. For the most part, falling in love just happens. It’s exciting, hopeful, scary, and we find our lover, one way or the other. But, the real question is how to maintain the erotic and passionate part of our love without needing to find another lover.

In a wonderful book about long-term relationships, the eloquent psychoanalyst Stephen Mitchell puts words to the difficulty of this endeavor. He writes, “We learn to love in the context of the contrived and necessary safety of early childhood, and love seeks, perpetually, a kind of safety that screens our the unknown, the fantastic, the dangerous. The great irony inherent in our efforts to make love safer is that those efforts always make it more dangerous. One of the motives for monogamous commitments is always, surely, the effort to make the relationship more secure, a hedge against the vulnerabilities and risks of love. Yet, since respectable monogamous commitment in our time tends to be reciprocal, the selection of only one partner for love dramatically increases one’s dependency upon that partner, making love more dangerous and efforts to guarantee that love even more compelling. So we pretend to ourselves that we have, somehow, minimized our risks and guaranteed our safety—thereby undermining the preconditions of desire, which requires robust imagination to breathe and thrive.” (p. 47)

Thus, in one paragraph, Mitchell details the longing for safety and security versus the danger of making one person our lifetime partner. The more we rely on one person to help fulfill a version of love we long for, the more dangerous they become, because we attach more and more of ourselves to them. However, this isn’t what kills passion and romance. What actually makes for boring and deadening relationships is our insistence that security is the most important factor of love.  We what say to ourselves (usually outside of our awareness) is, “If I’m going to give more and more of myself to my partner, I need absolute certainty that they won’t harm or leave me.”

WHY WE ALL NEED SOME HELP LEARNING TO LOVE!

As long as this belief is outside of our awareness, we will continue to be dumbfounded as to why our relationships aren’t as life-giving as we want them to be. While we don’t particularly need couples therapy to help us become more aware of this underlying belief, we do need friends and outside resources to help challenge the way we naturally think about things.

Couples therapy in Nashville, TN could be a great resource for helping individuals learn that there might be conflicting forces within themselves vying for different realities. Mitchell highlights such an astounding dilemma in each of us: we want a guarantee, but we also want intrigue and fascination. We want difference, but we don’t want to be surprised.

Love is one of the most important factors to our overall level of happiness in life. But most of us don’t spend a lot of time and effort LEARNING how to love well. Most of us have an underlying belief that we don’t need to LEARN how to love; we should already know how to do it!

IF YOU ARE INTERESTED IN COUPLES THERAPY IN NASHVILLE, TN         

If you are interested in exploring more of these dilemmas within ourselves and how they affect our relationships, then couples therapy in Nashville, TN may be helpful for you and your partner. Chris Roberts is a licensed couples therapist in Nashville, TN with many years helping couples achieve the love they long for with their partner. Chris can be reached at (615) 800-9260, or at chris@nashvillecounselor.net.