The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
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Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
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Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.
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Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.
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Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).
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That's precisely the issue I'm trying to address. I acknowledge that attachment theory may not be a particularly great method for resolving this issue, but I feel like I've exhausted every other avenue that's occurred to me and I'm running out of time and options fast.
I'm only an armchair psychologist but I suppose what I mean is that maybe attachment theory isn't necessarily meant to change you, maybe it's merits are in providing a means to explain to a potential partner why you might tend to behave in contradictory ways. If it's useful the use is putting it into practice as an aid to allow the other person to better relate to your individual characteristics. Would you want your partner to contort their inner self into a palatable presentation for your benefit (unhealthy, disingenuous) or simply describe their inner self and let you make a closer inspection for what it actually is?
A theory that says your childhood attachment figures left you with formative emotional insecurities doesn't grant any ability to jump back in time and change it, only the ability to recognise and acknowledge it. Your challenge is how to address those insecurities: face on, or remaining evasive. I might be mistaken having never had therapy but my previous reading around therapists is that they work, often frustratingly, by holding back from prescriptively telling you what to do or how to change yourself and instead concentrate on exploring the issues and, pardon the cliche, raising your awareness. I'm not a therapist and you sound like you're already adequately aware of the problem. So my prescription is to face up to it and next time find a (sensitive, measured) way to let the person know who you really are regardless of what exactly might have made you that way. What other options are there?
If you need a low stakes run look for an opportunity to try talking around the topic with your platonic friends that you have similar issues with and see how that goes. Don't bottle it up and wait until you're already post-closeness self-distanced from a good woman and then ruining it by going zero to a hundred. Sharing adversity is often how we progress from shallow relationships to something more meaningful, but it won't work if it precipitates into an intense emotional purging.
TLDR The diagnosis is insecurity. The objective is security. The route is slow, progressive vulnerability. I don't think you can fix it with more reading and planning, if you're here you're probably a compulsive reader already. It's necessarily a two-party problem, so treat it as an opportunity to know people and be known a little better.
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