How broken attachment affects marriages:
“Why doesn’t she trust me yet?” Attachment specialist Adam Lane Smith treated couples for years as a licensed marriage therapist, and this was the number one question he heard once a husband began fixing his attachment. Men are frustrated their wife doesn’t believe the changes are real, and women are frustrated their husband wants so much trust so fast. If you’re living on either side of a tense marriage and want to heal your attachment, this video will answer your deepest questions about how to rebuild trust, why it takes so long, and why the wife sometimes seems MORE resentful when the husband promises to change.
This video is part of an ongoing series related to attachment.
Unhealthy attachment means a person struggles to believe in any emotional security, so vulnerability to others becomes dangerous and fearful. In fact, vulnerability is utterly terrifying because it could lead to judgment and abandonment as secret imperfections are revealed. Vulnerability may even lead to outright victimization by those around them. Vulnerability and attachment are linked. A person with broken attachment struggles constantly with worries of abandonment and being forgotten because they don’t believe others really love them for who they are, only for the services they perform. They believe decisions others make will usually conflict with their own needs because the people they love don’t think about them enough to remember their wellbeing, or else they just aren’t important enough to consider. Disagreements and mistakes with poor attachment are often the end of relationships to them because they believe they’ll be abandoned and rejected instantly upon displaying imperfection and will be given no chance to explain or make amends.
In short, a person with unhealthy attachment believes others only love them for the services they perform, that love must be continuously earned, that people will actively fall out of love with them every moment they are not refilling the person’s pleasure meter, and that love can be accidentally destroyed by the slightest mistake.
