You Are Your Own “the ONE”
I’m going to be writing about things that I’ve written about here in the past, but that is something I do. I circle back around to certain ideas again and again, because that’s how I learn. I mull over concepts and re-mull as I become a new person each day (possibly even with each breath). I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that. The world is a cyclical and echoing place.
I’ve noticed this pattern in myself (thankfully, mostly in the past, as I’ve been doing and continue to do a lot of healing work on myself), friends, and strangers in which we put all our hopes and dreams into our romantic relationships. Learning about attachment styles has enabled me to be hyper-aware of how our attachment styles impact our beliefs and choices. I recently had a conversation with another single friend and it brought this topic to the forefront of my brain.
This person was basically telling me that she is constantly languishing. She has little to no desire to do much of anything. She continues to engage in life at a minimal level because she knows it would hurt her family if she gave up on life, but that feels like the sole reason she suffers through each day – doing remote work that doesn’t mean anything to her, isolating herself from most people.
She has core wounds around trust. She avoids human interaction as it is unpleasant for her because her belief is most people cannot and should not be trusted. The amount of energy she has to expend to determine the amount of trust/distrust she should extoll to each person she interacts with, even at the most basic levels of interactions, is so exhausting to her nervous system that it just doesn’t feel worth the trouble.
As she spoke I was thinking about how familiar these feelings and behaviors are – even if I don’t have the exact same history of experiences and wounds, I have felt a similar response to my challenges with socializing. I told her this and I added that she doesn’t have to exist like this. There is work, like the work I do on myself and my clients, that can repair these wounds so that social interaction can become more bearable and even a source of pleasure.
If I had to label her attachment style, I would say she is fearful-avoidant (the disorganized attachment style). On the surface, she might appear to be dismissive-avoidant but there is a duality that exists within her. She has the ability and desire to be in relationships. She is familiar with the comfort that comes with closeness and desires it deeply. While she avoids most human interaction, she dreams of finding “the one.”
“Once I meet ‘the one,’ I know my entire disposition towards life will change. I love so strongly and deeply. If I have a partner, it will be easy for me to work hard to cultivate a better life, because I can do it for someone I love, but I can’t do it for myself. Like, if I had a partner and children to care for, I would do so much more to improve my life, because I would be doing it for them. I have zero motivation to do that kind of stuff for myself though,” she told me.
Above I’ve mentioned two of the three insecure attachment styles, and though I’m not going to make this blog post be about explaining all the attachment styles. I want to delve a bit into the third insecure attachment which is the anxious-preoccupied style because I think their worldview is the easiest way to understand where these kinds of magical narratives about the “the one” come from.
The anxious preoccupied person struggles with developing a sense of self. They only see themselves existing in relation and response to the world around them. They are their reactions. Their world is their reactions, and their reactions are their reality. There is no separation between self and other. So if someone mistreats them, they have no choice but to react. That is why you will hear a lot of anxious-preoccupied people use phrases like, “You made me feel …” Everyone around them is responsible for the way they feel.
In contrast, on the other extreme, the dismissive-avoidant places very little to no value on their emotions and often has become almost entirely unaware of most of their feelings. If they are mistreated they will interpret the other person's behavior as that person's responsibility, and remain emotionally uninvolved.
The fearful-avoidant exists in a seemingly impossible blend of these two extreme worldviews (neither one of which is a complete picture). The fearful-avoidant most likely experienced some form of enmeshment early on, and became responsible in some way for the feelings of their caregiver(s). As a young child, this is a very confused state to live in, because on the one hand, she might develop a deep sense of individuality, stemming from recognition and resentment that her caregivers feelings do not belong to her, but on the other hand, this relationship is tied to her survival. Her needs for love and closeness will be met, but they come at a cost of giving up a sense of self. The fearful avoidant craves closeness, but “knows” (is under the false impression), that real closeness requires her to sacrifice most of her own needs and even some of her own identity.
Okay, so maybe in the end I did make this blog post about explaining the different attachment styles (minus the secure attachment), but it’s easier to understand each attachment style’s worldview in contrast to each other. I want to focus more on the loss of a sense of self that occurs for the anxious-preoccupied and the fearful-avoidant. It’s that loss of self, that leads people to believe that “the one” will be the answer to all of our problems.
In truth, with these types of misunderstood beliefs about what it means to be in relationship to others, “the one” is always the one that needs to be found within themselves. While they might find a person who they can have a relationship with, the relationship will always have an element of dysfunction. For the fearful-avoidant, the dysfunction will come from this deeply needed and desired connection coming at the cost of her relationship to self. She will sacrifice a sense of self to fulfill that need, but will never feel entirely herself and will need to keep an escape route in view.
The anxious-preoccupied person will gladly sacrifice herself because she doesn’t really feel she exists otherwise anyway. But she will continue to neglect and ignore all of her own needs because this relationship is her lifeline. It is her. As a result of her relationships coming from a place of desperation to be in relationship just to exist, she will not see reality as it is. She will not see her partner as they are. She will see a narrative she herself is unconsciously creating to make sure she can hold onto this other person with every fiber of her being. She will twist and contort herself, her needs, and her entire understanding of reality in order to maintain the viability of the relationship she’s somehow managed to procure.
Coming back to the anecdote about my friend, and the way she preserves herself, avoiding all other types of relationships (friendships, interactions with strangers, etc.) while waiting for the one person who will magically fulfill all her needs and change the way she experiences her world, it becomes difficult to ignore attachment wounds. She can call herself a romantic. A hopeless romantic. In truth, she’s created a fantasy that creates completely unrealistic expectations of our partners.
What's wild is that there are so many people who are already in romantic partnerships that suffer from the same attachment wounds, and wonder how it can be possible to be coupled (maybe even in a seemingly healthy relationship), yet still feel completely alone. It is because these wounds cause us to disconnect from ourselves, and if we are disconnected from ourselves, we are always alone.
All this is to say, to my friend, to myself, to you, dear reader, and anyone else out there who is struggling – you are “the one” - for yourself. The love you desire to give to another is the love you crave to receive, and you must learn how to give yourself this love and support. Once you learn to love yourself the way you need to be loved, you develop the ability to give love freely, to everyone, instead of holding it all in and tucking it away in wait for the one magical person you dreamed up.
It’s not easy work, but it is absolutely doable. I know this from my own self-healing journey, from the clients I work with, and from the work I see healers all over the world doing. Don’t give up hope. Put in the work. You won’t believe how worthwhile it will be.