If you experience pain during sex, you are certainly not alone. Pain during sex is called dyspareunia, and research shows that about 7% of women experience pain it.[1] Of those 7%, about one-quarter of them reported that the pain had been occurring frequently or every time they had intercourse over at least 6 months. Today, we’d like to look at some of the most common causes so that if you’re experiencing dyspareunia you maybe have a starting point to know how to explore and hopefully resolve this challenge. 

Pain during sexual intercourse is a relatively common issue. Of course, the lifetime prevalence is going to be higher, and I would expect that every person is likely to have at least some discomfort if not some pain during the course of their sexual interactions with their spouse over the lifetime of their marriage. This can be tough to talk about for some people, so we hope that today’s show serves as a bit of an icebreaker and introduction to the subject. 

We’re not sexologists, sex therapists or medical professionals. I am a marriage counselor so we do address sexual issues, but just be reminded that if you are experiencing pain your wisest course of action is first of all to talk to your doctor or gynaecologist, and possibly to book an appointment with a sex therapist.

There are more reasons for pain during sex than what we will cover, for example, we are not going to address urinary tract infections or sexually transmitted infections. But anxiety and menopause are two major causes so we’ll start with them.

Sexual anxiety (or sexual performance anxiety) is something that affects men and women of all ages, regardless of how much experience they have had with sexual intercourse. There are a variety of possibilities here. A newly married wife may be too self-conscious to tell her husband what she does not enjoy: this could lead to some trepidation or anxiety about having sex which could result in pain during sex.[2] In some cases, the anxiety may be short-lived and go away on its own. In other cases, it may be something that occurs on a regular basis and interferes with a healthy sex life.[3]

According to sex educator Amy Jo Goddard (n.d.), two things are generally the root cause of sexual performance anxiety. She states, “this response is conditioned by the way in which we were brought up to think about certain aspects of sex and our own bodies, and by social expectations that impact our relationship with our own sexuality.”[4] This means that messages from your family of origin, your church, or from locker-room discussions or friends at school — all those sources could potentially contribute to anxiety during sex.

Other times it may simply be a lack of sex education: perhaps not that you don’t understand how sex works, but that you’re just not prepared for all the realities of sexual encounters with your husband. Everyone functions differently and has different needs when it comes to sex, and not being well educated can lead you to feel unsure about the techniques of giving, achieving or receiving pleasure. Additionally, you may experience fear because of myths concerning pregnancy, or myths about how your body is supposed to react during sex, and these beliefs can be very anxiety-inducing.[5]

Of course, anxiety impacts arousal, which impacts your body’s ability to prepare itself for penetration and intercourse. It’s also important to note that the anxiety doesn’t have to be sexual performance anxiety. It could be anxiety about anything: how you’re going to pay the bills, your child’s health, the family get-together that’s coming up, whatever. General anxiety can also impact your sexual experience, potentially resulting in discomfort or pain.

Obviously, with such a wide variety of potential sources for anxiety it is challenging to cover all the possible solutions. If your anxiety is more generalized then taking care of that anxiety may just as easily end up taking care of the pain during sex as well.  But let’s look at sexual anxiety specifically. 

There are a few things that you can do to reduce your anxiety.

Menopause may involve falling hormone levels, which can have a variety of effects. You may be less interested in sex than your husband and that may make sexual encounters tense and stressful which could easily lead to pain. There can also be a physical shift towards vaginal dryness, which leads to pain during intercourse.[8]

Dwindling estrogen due to menopause is the number one reason for pain during sex at midlife and beyond. Hormone shifts make the tissues in your vagina to become thinner and dryer. That leads to physical friction during sex; your vagina may also become less stretchy so things may feel tighter during intercourse.[9]

There are a number of ways to compensate for the effects of menopause in order to reduce pain during sex.

Next is a common condition called vaginismus. This involves an involuntary spasm in the vaginal muscles that comes from a tightening of the pelvic floor muscles.[11] Vaginismus sometimes is caused by anxiety about having sex or a fear of being hurt during sex. If you have this condition you may also notice pain inserting a tampon.

In terms of what to do about vaginismus, doing counseling related to the source of fear or anxiety related to sex or penetration can help with this. There are also a set of exercises called Kegel exercises that can help you learn to relax the muscles surrounding your vagina.

In covering anxiety and menopause and vaginismus, we’ve dealt with some of the most common sources, but let’s just run through some more potential sources of pain in case some of our listeners are experiencing these as well.

Uterine Fibroids are benign lumps that grow on the uterus. Symptoms may also include heavy periods, cramping and an urge to urinate as well as painful sex. Your best option here is to see your doctor. Treatment options may include embolization (a minimally invasive surgical technique and hormone therapy or a hysterectomy (removal of the uterus).[12]

This is a difficult condition where the tissue that lines your uterus can grow elsewhere within or even outside of your pelvis, causing pain in your stomach, pelvis and back during sex.[13] You definitely want to see the doctor if you are experiencing deeper pain, not just pain at penetration so your doctor can diagnose this and recommend treatments.[14]

With PID, the tissues deep inside become badly inflamed and the pressure of intercourse can cause deep pain. Again, you’ll want to see a doctor here for appropriate treatments.[15]

This is possibly one of the simpler causes: you may have a yeast infection which causes pain and itching in the vaginal area. This can be treated with an over the counter product, but you should also see your doctor in case a stronger prescription medication is necessary.

It’s also possible that an injury from childbirth such as a tear or even an episiotomy (cut) made in the skin between the vagina and anus during labor will cause you pain. The treatment for this will vary depending on the injury. Sometimes a pain-relieving cream will be sufficient, there may also be work you could do with pelvic floor muscles or even surgery to remove irritated tissue. Again, it will depend on the injury so a doctor is the right place to start here.[16]

A related topic is having sex too soon after childbirth. Doctors advise waiting six weeks after childbirth before having sex.[17]

This is a condition that causes “almost a chronic or constant burning or raw feeling” around the vulva.[18] Doctors are not sure what the cause is but self-care and medical treatments can bring relief.[19]

About one in four women have a tilted uterus. This means that the uterus leans backward at the cervix instead of tipping forward. This normally is not a problem but it can make sex, particularly in certain positions, painful. The solution here is to experiment with different positions to find ones that are not painful.[20]

Not all women who experience pain during intercourse have a history of sexual abuse. And not all women with a history of sexual abuse have pain during intercourse. That said, some women who are survivors of sexual abuse may experience pain.

Again, it’s good to check with a doctor to eliminate other causes, but if you are a survivor and have pain that cannot be explained by another cause, you may wish to do your own personal therapy.

The medical profession may also be able to help in this situation as there are also medications that the doctor can prescribe to reduce pain, including low doses of tricyclic antidepressants such as imipramine, amitriptyline, and nortriptyline, as well as medications used in pain management for nerve-related pain such as duloxetine, gabapentin, pregabalin, and others.[21]

Generally speaking, where there is no underlying medical cause, sex therapy is often helpful. Even unrelated to abuse, there could be unresolved issues such as deeper guilt or inner conflicts regarding sex that you may wish to work through with a counselor.

It’s important to note that if you are experiencing very intense pain you should see a doctor right away. If you are unsure of the source of the pain, you should also see your doctor. There are other potential issues besides what we have mentioned here that your doctor can diagnose and recommend treatment for.

Regardless of the source of the pain during sex, it’s always recommended that you seek help: it’s easy to feel embarrassed and sit at home. It makes sense that it can be a difficult topic to talk about. But if you are finding intercourse painful and are unsure why, try talking to your husband, someone you are close to, and to your doctor so that you can try to understand what’s happening.[22]

Note: From BCACC: As podcasts can be subscribed to and accessed all over the world, psycho-educational podcasts should include a disclaimer to the effect that they are a self-help tool and do not replace individual counselling or represent an attempt to solicit clients from jurisdictions where the RCC does not have the legal ability to practice. Further, they are not intended for those experiencing severe symptoms such as suicidal thoughts, for which emergency help should be sought.

References

[1] Victoria Allen, “Why Sex Is Painful for 7% of Women,” Daily Mail, 2017,
https://ezproxy.student.twu.ca:3649/login.aspx?direct=true&db=bwh&AN=120945273&site=eds-live&scope=site.
[2] Allen.
[3] “Sex Anxiety: How Can You Overcome It,” Medical News Daily (blog), n.d.,
https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/321304.php#1.
[4] “Sex Anxiety: How Can You Overcome It.”
[5] “Sex Anxiety: How Can You Overcome It.”
[6] Pamela Connolly, “I Was a Virgin until I Met My Girlfriend and I’m Finding Sex Painful. Is This Normal?,” 2019,
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2019/dec/03/virgin-sex-relationship-first-girlfriend-painful-infection.
[7] Jessica Ferger, Pain During Sex? What Women Need to Know, 2014, https://www.cbsnews.com/news/pain-during-sex-what-women-need-to-know/.
[8] Allen, “Why Sex Is Painful for 7% of Women.”
[9] “Menopause: When Sex Hurts,” n.d., https://www.webmd.com/menopause/guide/painful-sex#1.
[10] Painful Sex in Women,” n.d., https://www.webmd.com/sexual-conditions/guide/female-pain-during-sex#1;
“Menopause: When Sex Hurts.”
[11] “Painful Sex in Women”; Ferger, Pain During Sex? What Women Need to Know.
[12] “Painful Sex in Women.”
[13] Deborah Weatherspoon, “Why Do I Have Lower Abdominal Pain During Sex?,” 2019,
https://www.healthline.com/health/lower-abdominal-pain-during-sex.
[14] Ferger, Pain During Sex? What Women Need to Know.
[15] “Pelvic Inflammitory Disease,” n.d., https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/pelvic-inflammatory-disease/diagnosis-treatment/drc-20352600.
[16] “Vulvar Pain: Symptoms, Causes, and More,” n.d., https://www.healthline.com/health/womens-health/vulvar-pain#treatment.
[17] Kalli Anderson, “Postpartum Sex: Why It Sometimes Hurts,” 2017.
[18] Ferger, Pain During Sex? What Women Need to Know.
[19] “Painful Sex in Women.”
[20] Weatherspoon, “Why Do I Have Lower Abdominal Pain During Sex?”
[21] Stephanie Yeager, “Easing Vaginal Penetration Pain,” 2015, https://www.paindownthere.com/blog/sexual-abuse-vaginal-nerve-pain.
[22] Ferger, Pain During Sex? What Women Need to Know.

Back in episode 209, we did a show on the five things you need to know if you’ve been betrayed by your husband. Today we want to look at the experience of a husband who has been betrayed. Men and women both experience betrayal, but have different ways of responding to it. 

Betrayal trauma is the result of a shocking disclosure of a relational breach, whether that’s unfaithfulness or some other form of broken trust or loss of confidence in your marriage. These breaches can come from things like spousal neglect, cheating or various forms of infidelity, dishonesty, deception, betrayal, rejection, or other circumstances that cause you to stop trusting your spouse.[1]

Unfortunately, there is much less research on men dealing with betrayal trauma than on women. Men definitely experience pain and have to go through a process of healing after they are betrayed, but they tend to process it differently than women. According to Douglas Weiss (2019), a psychologist who sees both women and men dealing with betrayal trauma, men tend to compartmentalize more than women and they tend to block out painful experiences such as betrayal.[2]

Research shows that men tend to go in one of two directions when dealing with infidelity: either they divorce their spouse or they give them one more chance.[3] Women are actually more likely to experience symptoms of trauma and PTSD after betrayal, whereas men don’t end up with the same PTSD symptoms. Keep in mind that this is a general statement. There are men who do experience trauma and PTSD symptoms after betrayal. They also should look for professional help, grieve what has happened, and deal with the hurt, anger and betrayal that they’ve endured.[4]

Just because you have not developed symptoms of PTSD, this does not necessarily mean you are free and clear of any lasting effects. Even without adverse ongoing symptoms, you still have to take time to process the hurt, anger and betrayal. You have to grieve the loss of an unadulterated marriage and other effects of what has happened.

There are some feelings that betrayed men experience that are common to both genders. For example, shame. It could be shame of believing that others will see them as sexually incompetent, thus prompting their spouse to go outside the marriage. It could also be believing that they are relationally or emotionally inadequate, again prompting the spouse to seek to meet their needs outside the marriage. However, where other women will typically rally around one of their own when betrayed, a man in the same situation may find himself with friends who don’t know how to support him in this very vulnerable and emotionally raw stage after he discloses the affair to them.

Finally, it’s always helpful to remember that everyone processes betrayal differently. And every kind of betrayal is different. For example, a financial betrayal (e.g., a hidden gambling loss) will prompt a very different reaction than the discovery of an affair.

One thing both genders need to do is to consider, process and express the emotions generated by the betrayal. If you have friends, a mentor, or someone in your support network who can be there with you as you do this work, that is a huge help. It’s also a good idea to reach out to your therapist for counseling. If you haven’t worked with a therapist before we have a number of our team members at OnlyYouForever who work with betrayal situations in marriage too.

We’d like to give you the five things you can do to help you recover from a betrayal. 

It’s important to understand that there is no quick fix to a situation like this. Recovery from betrayal is a painful process. It takes time to heal. 

It is totally normal during this time to feel anger and distress. It’s normal to be fine one moment and ambushed by emotions the next. It’s all part of the process of healing.

Betrayed husbands may feel tempted to act out in a revenge fling after finding out their wife has had an affair, but that does not help the marriage heal. Typically, you just end up hurting each other worse through a reaction like this and it does nothing to help your healing process.[5] Sometimes these revenge affairs are just an attempt to fill the hole in your own heart or an attempt to replace the loss you feel. Even if the betrayal has left you alone, being alone for a while is not necessarily a bad thing.[6]

It will take several weeks before things are not totally raw. It will take several months to return to a fairly normal state of being. And it may take a few years to fully heal from betrayal, especially if it was traumatic. To be honest, some spouses report not being able to fully heal from their spouse’s betrayal even with enough time.[7] That said, if you are motivated to heal and you can find the right kind of help to walk with you through that healing journey, there is definitely hope that you can heal with time.

This is challenging — but, ask yourself if there is a way you can see this betrayal as a wake-up call? A way to learn and discover things about yourself and about marriage so that you can grow. 

In a marriage, there are always times when one or both spouses’ emotional needs are not being fulfilled. This is especially true if you have had communication problems with one another. So as you work on regaining trust, try to be aware of the ways in which you perhaps have not been communicating your own needs and desires to your spouse. 

 A good couples’ therapist is very helpful: ultimately both of you will have to take some responsibility for the problems in the relationship that led up to the affair, even though your wife was the only one who was unfaithful. This is about taking charge of and accepting responsibility for the future.[8]

Seeing the betrayal as a wake-up call is also a helpful perspective to adopt because it is empowering. If you are just blaming everything on your wife, and staking your future on her making all of the changes, then you are adopting a disempowered position. Yes, she does need to make changes and she does need to demonstrate reliable behavior over time so that trust can be rebuilt, but you can also be part of the change process in order to create a new, safer, thriving and passionate relationship.

For men especially: we are not good at grieving. But going through a betrayal is a lot like bereavement. We talked earlier about some of the losses related to betrayal. Those things are in the past and cannot be recovered. 

Grief is a process that requires time.[9] It cannot be rushed and it should not be bypassed or it will likely show up in your marriage as anger later on, or even show up in your health in the form of mental health issues or even physiological problems.

Taking the moral high ground in a situation like can be very tempting: being betrayed puts you into the place of a victim. Moral superiority appears to restore power and offers an outlet for anger. Unfortunately, it will not help you heal. It will increase your spouse’s shame and that will not help her to heal or to do what she needs to do in order to avoid this problem in the future. 

On the flip side, blaming yourself is not productive either. While we do encourage you to face your part in contributing to a marriage where this became a possibility, it was still your wife’s choice to go outside of the vows she made to you. You don’t need to compromise your own integrity, the person you are, or the person you believe you can be.[10]

Ideally, what you want to do is to move on from the experience and commit yourselves to restoring your marriage rather than ruminating on the betrayal.

Blame and guilt are destructive in a relationship. There’ll be a period where that is at the forefront, but if you maintain that and it becomes resentment you will have a hard time sustaining your marriage (if that is what you hope to do).[11]

There has to be a process of acknowledging all the hurt, doing the hard work of forgiveness, working on yourself to understand how you’ve been impacted, and then restoring the marriage. 

Throughout this, focusing on the positive can be helpful. This is a time, as you begin to heal, to strengthen yourself. Look for things at work or in your recreation time where you can be successful and boost your self-confidence.[12] Ground yourself back in things that matter to you: your faith community is a good one to consider. Practice gratitude. 

If you choose to rebuild your marriage, while the betrayal will remain as a significant event, don’t allow it to become what defines your interactions and your relationship with your wife for the remainder of your marriage.

Note From BCACC: As podcasts can be subscribed to and accessed all over the world, psycho-educational podcasts should include a disclaimer to the effect that they are a self-help tool and do not replace individual counselling or represent an attempt to solicit clients from jurisdictions where the RCC does not have the legal ability to practice. Further, they are not intended for those experiencing severe symptoms such as suicidal thoughts, for which emergency help should be sought.

References

[1]“Recovery From Partner Betrayal Trauma,” n.d., https://partnerbetrayaltrauma.org/.
[2]Doug Weiss, Do Men Get Partner Betrayal Trauma Too? What’s The Difference? (Question Answered), n.d., https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nussTjkgchY.
[3]Weiss.
[4]Weiss.
[5]Linda Blair, “I Can’t Stop Thinking about My Wife’s Affair,” 2008, https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2008/feb/21/familyandrelationships.
[6]George Everly, “The Trauma of Intimate Partner Betrayal,” 2018, https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/when-disaster-strikes-inside-disaster-psychology/201806/the-trauma-intimate-partner-betrayal.
[7]Blair, “I Can’t Stop Thinking about My Wife’s Affair.”
[8]Blair.
[9]Blair.
[10]Everly, “The Trauma of Intimate Partner Betrayal.”
[11]Blair, “I Can’t Stop Thinking about My Wife’s Affair.”
[12]Everly, “The Trauma of Intimate Partner Betrayal.”

Physical touch is an important way to keep the emotions of love alive in your marriage. It is one of the first senses we develop as humans and is a primary component of intimacy in adult romance. Unfortunately, it’s something we can forget about, be turned off towards, or start to associate with difficult memories or experiences. Today, we want to look into the research on physical touch to see the benefits of it and learn how we can rekindle it in marriage.

Social touch is essential for normal human development and for the development of attachment during intimacy. We talked about attachment in episodes 251 to 254: it’s the development of a loving, secure bond between two people. There is a large body of research literature on the beneficial effects of touch (typically mother-infant) for attachment and soothing during infancy and in that very important infant-caregiver relationship.[1]

There’s also a lot of research on the benefits of physical touch in marriage, and we want to talk about touch in that context. We’re talking about the kind of affection that includes “any touch intended to arouse feelings of love in the giver and/or the recipient.”[2] And while we are using the word “arouse” in that definition, loving touch can be either non-sexual or sexual. Really, both are important. Another research article we looked at helpfully pointed out that, “Ideally, the touch is appropriate to the setting, does not interfere with goal-directed behavior, and is not oriented toward immediate sexual gratification.”[3]

Touch that is appropriate to the setting means that you are not touching your spouse sexually in a public place, in front of family, etc. That kind of touch can be loving, but is appropriate only in some contexts. Most couples will understand that intuitively.

Physical touch should also not interfere with goal-directed behavior, meaning that it’s not intrusive. It should never involve holding or restraining your partner when they’re trying to do something else. Affectionate touch should not be controlling or interfering even if it is intended to be warm. Furthermore, it should not interfere with safety. For example, you shouldn’t attempt to hold your partner’s hand while they are driving during a snowstorm and need both hands on the steering wheel. Touch should always be respectful — this should not take away from spontaneity completely, but there are times that respect and safety should come before spontaneity.

Finally, physical touch should not simply be “oriented toward immediate sexual gratification.” There is certainly a place and time for sexual touch in a healthy marriage, and there is a place for touching your spouse in a way that invites sexual initiation or invitation. At the same time, if every time you touch your spouse you are really just approaching your spouse sexually with little or no loving non-sexual touch, and this is a regular it is likely that you will leave your spouse feeling objectified like you are only touching them for sexual gratification. Something to be handled or groped. That’s not intimate, respectful or nurturing.

Touch is one of the love languages articulated by Chapman in his book, The Five Love Languages.[4] If you feel this is one of your love languages or your spouse’s, then tender touch is very important.

For some husbands, when they heard the words “physical touch” they immediately think of sex. But think of sex as just one dialect of this love language: holding hands, brief kisses, hugging, back rubs, an arm around the shoulder… these are all ways of expressing love by non-sexual physical touch.

Some forms of touch may be explicit and call for your full attention. For example, a back rub or foot massage from your spouse. Naturally, sexual foreplay calls for your full attention. But other kinds of touch may only require a moment and can be part of other activities, for example putting your hand on your wife’s shoulder while you pour her a cup of coffee.

Touch can also be a way to add a positive touch to a mundane or even dreary experience. For example, a kiss when you get in the car to set off on a road trip together. Or a hug before you go shopping — even if you don’t like shopping, sets a positive tone for the activity.

When you reach out to your partner with tender touch, you create emotional closeness. This is important. And sometimes I hear people say, “Well, I didn’t grow up in a touchy-feely family”. The good news is that you can learn to speak this love language. It can begin with a pat on the back or resting your hand on your spouse’s leg as you drive or watch TV. It’s OK to ease into this.[5]

Some research has shown that affectionate touch in marriage is linked to health benefits. A number of studies have found that there are positive benefits for cardiovascular health, as well as neuroendocrine, and immune biomarkers.[6] Various forms of positive physical contact with a relationship partner, including holding hands, neck and shoulder massages, kissing, physical intimacy (holding hands, touching, hugging, kissing, or sexual interaction), and nonverbal affection.[7]

If you’re interested in other health benefits associated with physical touch, research has also revealed other benefits to physical affection and social interaction.[8] Warm partner contact is described as positive, relationship-focused interaction (including talking about a topic that enhanced feeling of closeness as a couple and watching a 5-minute romantic video) while maintaining physical contact (e.g., holding hands) for 10 minutes, followed by a full ventral hug lasting for 20 seconds.[9] In a comparison of groups with and without warm contact, the group with warm contact had lower SBP [systolic blood pressure], DBP [diastolic blood pressure], and HR [heart rate] responses to laboratory stress tasks”[10]

Not only does touch benefit physical health, but it also helps with emotional bonding between you and your spouse. There was a study in 2006 (Coan) where they actually zapped women with an electrical charge while they held the experimenter’s hand or while they held their husband’s hand. The shock was not perceived as threatening if the wife was holding someone’s hand, but if the wife was happily married, the part of the brain that is threat responsive was even calmer if she was holding her husband’s hand. In other words, the more happily married you are, if you are holding your husband’s hand, the less threatening the world around you becomes.[11]

Another study we found looked at non-sexual cuddling: whole body touching that was intimate and physical and loving. They looked at cuddling before falling asleep and also during waking up, and on average the participants reported feeling very protective and very nurtured. They found it to be moderately relaxed and peaceful, very much enjoyable and they felt very positive after cuddling. They rarely brought up sexual themes in response to questions about what they did or felt, and instead reported themes like love, intimacy, closeness, and comfort.[12]

Indeed, this kind of touch along with holding hands and hugging and other forms of touch can release oxytocin. This causes a calming sensation (oxytocin is also released during sexual orgasm). Furthermore, physical affection reduces stress hormones in the body by lowering daily levels of cortisol.[13]

You can see how incorporating physical touch into the daily patterns of interaction in your marriage has benefits for health and for the bond between you. It really provides an experience of being grounded and connected, protected, and cherished in your marriage. 

So if you have not been a touchy-feely couple or person, you may be wondering where to start. It’s OK to start slowly: to just explore and experiment and let yourself get used to one form of touching before adding others. This is especially important if you’ve had trauma or touch deprivation in your background. It can take a little time to learn to get comfortable with safe, loving touch if you’ve had other touch in the past that really was not safe or loving. You’ll have to talk yourself through that, to remind yourself to stay present, and to remind yourself that this touch is touch that you’re choosing, and you’re choosing to do with someone who is safe and loving and respectful towards you.

You might consider holding hands, whether you’re out together or sitting next to one another on the couch. You could offer to give your spouse a shoulder, back or foot rub. If necessary, you can just practice this as a form of affectionate non-sexual touch to get used to enjoying. Or, if you are trying to rekindle the sexual passion between you, you can enjoy the touch with the possibility but not the necessity of it becoming sexual.

Cuddling is similar. Get good at non-sexual cuddling. After some time, some of your cuddling could be sexual — just learn the cues to send those signals to each other. But even then, save a good portion of your cuddling for non-sexual intimacy.

Initiating hugs or kissing is much the same; these are non-sexual gestures of affection or appreciation or warmth that can be a great way to feel close and connected to your spouse. Hold those hugs: try them for several seconds, then for 20 seconds or even 30 seconds if that is comfortable for both of you. If you want more on that you can check out one of our early episodes at OYF dot link slash 24 on hugging your way to a better marriage. Even hugging well is a learned skill.

We pray this information is a blessing for you, and that it would bring you greater warmth and joy in your marriage! Of course, if it does help you, we’d love to hear from you through an Apple Podcasts review, or you can shoot us an email.

References

[1]M. H. Burleson et al., “Marriage, Affectionate Touch, and Health.,” ed. Newman Matthew and Roberts Nicole, Health and Social Relationships: The Good, the Bad, and the Complicated. American Psychological Association (2013): 67–93, https://doi.org/doi.org/10.1037/14036-004.
[2]Andrew K. Gulledge, Michelle H. Gulledge, and Robert F. Stahmannn, “Romantic Physical Affection Types and Relationship Satisfaction,” The American Journal of Family Therapy 31, no. 4 (July 2003): 233–42, https://doi.org/10.1080/01926180390201936.
[3]Burleson et al., “Marriage, Affectionate Touch, and Health.”
[4]Gary Chapman, “Speaking Love through Physical Touch,” The 5 Love Languages, 2019, https://www.5lovelanguages.com/2009/03/speaking-love-through-physical-touch/.
[5]Chapman.
[6]Burleson et al., “Marriage, Affectionate Touch, and Health.”
[7]Burleson et al.
[8]K. M. Grewen et al., “Warm Partner Contact Is Related to Lower Cardiovascular Reactivit” 29, no. 3 (2003): 123–30.
[9]Grewen et al.
[10]Grewen et al.
[11]Burleson et al., “Marriage, Affectionate Touch, and Health.”
[12]S. M. van Anders et al., “Descriptive Experiences and Sexual vs Nurturant Aspects of Cuddling between Adult Romantic Partners.,” Archives of Sexual Behavior 42, no. 4 (2013): 553–60.
[13]Terry Gaspard, “10 Ways to Rekindle the Passion in Your Marriage,” 2016, https://www.gottman.com/blog/10-ways-rekindle-passion-marriage/.

Transitioning from full-time employment into retirement is naturally going to impact both your life and your marriage. Retirement comes with lots of changes, and there are ups and downs to the process. Whether you have parents going through this, you’re coming up to retirement, or you have recently retired, there’s lots to learn about how to handle the changes that come with moving into retirement since it’s a brand-new stage of life.

Research shows that there are both positives and negatives that can come as a result of retirement. Certainly, in North American culture retirement is idealized and celebrated as something to look forward to at the end of your career, but many couples also experience some disappointment when it turns out to be not as great as they had hoped. 

One study looked at positive interactions between couples of different ages. The study showed that younger couples had the most positive interactions: good healthy, positive day to day moments. Middle age couples (40’s) had the least. And older couples (about 65 and over…the retirement group) had an intermediate amount of positive interactions. But the study also found that negative attitudes decreased with age. It’s normal for couples to go through tough stages of becoming parents, establishing their careers, getting mortgages paid off: this requires adjustments across the lifespan. It is reasonable to expect that going into retirement is going to require some adjustments as well.[1]

According to studies from around the turn of the century and current research, the divorce rate rises within the older population compared to the divorce rate of the younger generation. This raises an important question: if retirement is pitched as such a wonderful thing, why are people struggling in their most important relationships?

Transitioning into retirement comes with a lot of adjustments. Going from working to not working is just one of the changes that come with retirement. Many couples find themselves facing changes in where they live, changes in their routines with their spouse, and even changes in their identity. A retiring therapist might ask himself questions such as “Am I still a therapist if I am not doing therapy? What am I now? What is my purpose? What is our purpose?”[2] When retiring from any profession, one or both spouses may find themselves facing a shift in their sense of identity as they move into a new stage of life.

There are many other questions that come up for couples in retirement: How will you and your spouse decide what to do with your time? What is your retirement plan in terms of your savings: can you live without employment income for 10, 20, or 30 or more years? 

In addition to these questions, the couple have to adjust to changes on the relational side of things. Couples find that they’re spending a lot more time together, more than they have for many, many years. Most retired couples are not raising children, caring for parents, or heading off to work for the bulk of the day. Suddenly, whatever your marriage is like, it is all right there in front of you and it has to be faced.[3] If your marriage has been strong and healthy — you’ll see the effects of that. And that’s great! For those couples, marital satisfaction will increase because they have even more time to spend together. But if your marriage really hasn’t been great for 20 years but you’ve made it through by focusing on raising and launching your kids, or concentrating on your career or business, and now you’re past those things and you’re just left with a “not great” marriage: that’s a challenging place to be in. Those escape mechanisms of work or other things are gone and not available any longer, and there’s a lot to figure out.[4]

One factor that impacts couples when they retire is whether or not they retire together. More and more couples are both working in today’s world. That makes it tough to retire at the same time, especially if there are differences in your pension eligibility. Research shows that older couples where both spouses were still working or looking for work reported significantly lower relationship satisfaction than couples where both spouses were retired. That’s a tough spot to be in: you wish you were retired, your peers may be retired, but you have to keep working. But it is good to remember that this is not a problem in the marriage: it’s a problem outside the marriage that affects the marriage.

Another factor is having a “refilled” nest or boomerang children.[5] What happens when those young adults come home? In 1995 and 2001, men and women with children present in the home rated their marriage quality lower than those who had no children at home. It’s important to note that having children at home can be a very positive experience. The unhappier couples may not be unhappy due to the adult children returning home. But it could very well be the case that the issues which prompt the children to come back home are also affecting the parents: e.g., a depressed economy or labour market difficulties.

Another thing to consider is that your style of marriage may become more amplified during retirement. A couple with a well balanced husband-wife relationship that stresses intimacy and sharing are likely to find their marriage during retirement very rewarding as they have more time together to interact and enjoy one another’s company.

If you both enjoy this way of interacting with one another, that’s a good thing. If one or both of you do not, that may result in challenges.[6] 

There are other patterns that couples tend to fall into in the way they interact with one another. If you have more of a parent-child marriage where one spouse assumes a parenting role and the other the role of child, that could be distressing for some couples. On the other hand, if you find it fulfilling to parent your spouse or need and appreciate the extra care your spouse provides, things could be fine with this style of interaction.

If you and your spouse are more like associates or partners with a friendship between you, your retirement may involve more rewarding moments outside of the marriage such as activities or groups you belong to, and the ways that you spend your time away from home together. Couples in this context can also enjoy their marriage but it will look different in retirement than the other styles. 

It’s also reasonable to expect that your marriage may go through more than one of these phases in retirement. Perhaps you start off like associates: you each have a sort of local bucket list things you want to get involved in. That goes well. If one of you has a health crisis, you may adapt to a parent-child format. When you recover, and through the care and support you experience you really want more time together, you may adopt the husband-wife style rather than going back to the associates/partners format. This is also a possibility. 

There are some practical ways that couples can make the most of the transition into retirement. First, it is helpful if you and your spouse can find common goals as you approach retirement. If you find yourself retired and realize that you have different goals, it may be a good time to look for something that you can both work towards. Couples who have common goals are able to work together to determine the best way to achieve those goals. If there is no discussion surrounding common goals, it can be difficult for couples to be on the same page and they might move in conflicting directions.[7]

Most older married adults say that their greatest source of conflict lies in communication and recreation. On the flip side, most older married adults report that they have the greatest pleasure in discussing children or grandchildren, in doing things together, sharing dreams, and going on vacations together.[8] By establishing goals around your time with family, what you would like to do, and where you would like to go, you share a sense of purpose and togetherness that brings you closer together as a couple.

One particularly important thing for couples is to be flexible. Your marriage will need to adjust to retirement, and you are both in it together. As you move into retirement, you will need to adjust to other life factors such as changes in your grown children’s lives (relocation, the addition of grandchildren, possible health crises in their families) in addition to the changes in your own lives. 

 A few things are really helpful when adjusting to these changes:

Really, retirement can be a very sweet time for older couples. In one study, couples married for 50 years or more frequently identified increased sharing and time together as a blessing in their later life.[9] There is so much to enjoy. But it helps to have clear goals, some sense of purpose, and also adaptability. Because retirement is not one final phase of life: it will have transitions and changes and challenges within it as well.

References

[1]Michelle Gagnon, “Interpersonal and Psychological Correlates of Marital Dissatisfaction in Late Life: A Review,” Clinical Psychology Review 19, no. 3 (1999): 359–78.
[2]Morris Medley, “Marital Adjustment in the Post-Retirement Years” 1, no. 26 (1977): 5–11, https://doi.org/10.2307/581854 https://ezproxy.student.twu.ca:2187/stable/581854.
[3]Medley.
[4]Lee Chalmers and Anne Milan, “Marital Satisfaction during the Retirement Years,” no. 11 (2005): 4.
[5]Chalmers and Milan.
[6]Medley, “Marital Adjustment in the Post-Retirement Years.”
[7]Medley.
[8]Medley.
[9]Gagnon, “Interpersonal and Psychological Correlates of Marital Dissatisfaction in Late Life: A Review.”

When you’re working through recovery from something like porn or sex addiction, depending on how deeply rooted that addiction is, it forces you to confront a number of different dynamics in all aspects of your life. Many people who do this difficult healing work are a blessing to others because they’re forced to face down so many issues, as often they have experienced a great deal of personal transformation. One of the important areas we look at in our therapy with those struggling with these addictions is attachment, something that we went into in detail back in episodes 251 to 254.

One of the unfortunate impacts of porn and sex addiction in marriage is that the addict often resorts to blaming tactics to defend or minimize the addiction. Of course, this is very hard on the spouse of the addict but when we understand the role of attachment in this sort of addiction, it helps us understand more of what is happening which in turn helps to push back on this blame game that gets played.

A few on the other. The more a person was comfortable with interpersonal relationships, the more the draw of his fantasies would diminish[1].  (e.g., genuine engagement scholars talk about the relationship between attachment style and sex or porn addiction. Leeds (1999, cited in Zapf et al., 2008) thought that an addict’s attachment style lived in tension between fantasy on one hand and genuine interpersonal relationships and connection and intimacy in marriage). It’s easy to see how someone is drawn towards fantasy based on their own attachment difficulties. 

The father of attachment, John Bowlby, did not speak to sex addiction and attachment specifically, but he did point out that our individual assumptions about how we view others and ourselves are most significant in our closest relationships. This includes how comfortable a person is with being close to another person: indeed, much of attachment is about the intermittent effort to create closeness[2]. Thus, when you have an addiction like this occurring in a marriage, the addicted spouse is attempting to experience that closeness in a fantasy-based experience rather than in the context of a real, tangible, marriage bond. Again, you see that the attachment needs are there but they are pointed in the wrong direction.

Attachment difficulties are very common in people with sex addiction. A 2008 study (by Zapf et al.) showed that over 80% of the sex-addicted participants were characterized by attachment styles other than secure attachment[3]. Nearly half were of the fearful avoidant or disorganized attachment style where there’s a real longing for connection but a great fear of it as well, compounded by the shame-based concern of being really seen. You can see how pornography or sex addiction is an attempt to fit in the missing piece of that attachment puzzle. 

The problems of sex and pornography addiction are closely linked to difficulties in forming a close connection to one’s spouse. The research is beginning to show that individuals with sex addiction or pornography use have trouble forming close attachment to their spouse. Patrick Carnes, the grandfather of the whole sex addiction recovery movement conceptualized it as primarily a relationally oriented problem. Leedes (1999) wrote, “although the inability to form close attachments may not be sufficient to explain the etiology [source] of sexual addiction, it is a necessary component” (p. 218)[4]. Weinsten (2015) further notes that the acting out behaviours of sex addiction and compulsive pornography use are characterized by sexual activity minus emotional connection[5]. That is why you see these maladaptive attachment styles at play whenever you witness sexual compulsivity[6]. The acting out associated with these addictive patterns is like an attempt to gain intimacy, but without the emotional connection that comes with real intimacy with one’s spouse.

It’s important to note that just because you are not securely attached, it absolutely does not mean that you are sex or porn addicted. There are lots of other ways for those other styles to play out in the context of faithful, committed marriage partners. However, the opposite is usually true: if there is a porn addiction or sex addiction at play in a person’s life, they typically do not have a secure attachment style. 

Since individuals with these addictions find it hard to form a close, secure attachment to another person, sex addicts will compensate by fantasizing about unattainable and unrealistic surrogates[7]. It’s the same for pornography use, in which case a person is seeking to meet their emotional and intimacy needs outside of the marriage. Of course, this impacts closeness and intimacy whether the porn use is known or hidden. Furthermore, it decreases something called partner significance in the mind of the porn user and these issues threaten the stability and satisfaction of the marriage relationship[8].

If your spouse is in recovery from a porn or sex addiction, it may be helpful to explore more around the relationship between porn and sex addiction and different attachment styles. Patrick Carnes was the first to document the fact that “over 70% of individuals with sexual addiction come from rigid, authoritarian, and disengaged households.”[9] That’s a pretty big revelation because it really points to the roots of an addiction like this. Not in the sense of blaming one’s upbringing, but in acknowledging that a home where there was little warmth or connection or flexibility is most definitely going to have an impact on how you pursue closeness or connection or sex as an adult[10].

If growing up required you to develop detachment as a survival skill—checking out mentally or physically, hiding your actual feelings, avoiding closeness because there was risk associated with that—then that pattern is formational for avoidant attachment. It also fits well with sex addiction because you can get an experience of something very similar to intimacy without actually needing to be close to another person.[11]

On the other hand, if you were never certain of your parent’s availability and because of that developed an anxious attachment style, then in another way sex may become a means of feeling closeness and reassurance. If there’s no commitment required to obtain sex then you can also have an experience similar to intimacy but not have the concern of separation or abandonment. So sexual relationship without emotional commitment may also be easier for anxiously attached individuals as well as avoidantly attached ones. Again, this doesn’t mean that all people with these attachment style resort to these behaviours: we’re just describing a framework of possibilities. 

Moreover, if you have a disorganized attachment style and find yourself porn and/or sex addicted it is likely because you experience a mixture of these reactions.

Of course, it’s great to understand all this and be able to connect the dots. But what do we do about it? How can our understanding of the connections between attachment styles and porn or sex addiction assist with recovery?

First of all, treatment for sex addicts and many porn addicts should include addressing attachment and not just the sexual aspects of the marriage. While it is devastating in its own right, for recovery purposes the addiction should be viewed as a symptom of the underlying attachment issues. If you are avoidantly attached and in recovery, you have likely noticed that you have difficulty expressing your feelings. Some of the characteristics in this category of attachment include introversion, a lack of assertiveness, unexpressive of emotions, a belief that you are undeserving of love and support and an interest in emotionless sex.[12] Working with a therapist, you can learn to adjust those beliefs and behaviours so that you can be relationally warm and expressive, trust in the reliability of the connection your spouse is extending to you, build the skills of emotional connection, and thereby create healthy, genuine intimacy. 

Part of the process of healing is recognizing the ways that your former attachment style has created barriers to intimacy. There are a few things that you can practice help you create intimacy with your spouse including:[13]

These techniques can produce very positive results for couples. It takes work and patience and practice. But when you start to discover the joy of true intimacy and connection, even the beauty of connected soul-to-soul sex, then that creates a huge amount of resiliency against going back to the shallow, temporary satisfactions of addictive behaviours.

References

[1] James L. Zapf, Jay Greiner, and James Carroll, “Attachment Styles and Male Sex Addiction,” Sexual Addiction & Compulsivity 15, no. 2 (May 14, 2008): 158–75, https://doi.org/10.1080/10720160802035832.

[2] Saudia Twine, “ANCOVA Study of Psychotherapy Treatment of  Internet Pornography Addiction in Heterosexual Men,” Fidei et Veritatis: The Liberty University Journal of Graduate Research 1, no. 1 (July 27, 2015), https://digitalcommons.liberty.edu/fidei_et_veritatis/vol1/iss1/3.

[3] Zapf, Greiner, and Carroll, “Attachment Styles and Male Sex Addiction.”

[4] Zapf, Greiner, and Carroll.

[5] Aviv Weinstein et al., “Sexual Compulsion — Relationship with Sex, Attachment and Sexual Orientation,” Journal of Behavioral Addictions 4, no. 1 (March 2015): 22–26, https://doi.org/10.1556/JBA.4.2015.1.6.

[6] Weinstein et al.

[7] Weinstein et al.

[8] Twine, “ANCOVA Study of Psychotherapy Treatment of  Internet Pornography Addiction in Heterosexual Men.”

[9] Stephanie Carnes, “Sex Addiction, Neuroscience Trauma and More,” Lecture, 2016, https://www.naadac.org/assets/2416/stefanie_carnes_neuroscience-trauma_ac16.pdf.

[10] Candice Christiansen, “How to Identify Your Attachment Style as a Sex Addict and Improve Security in Your Relationships — Namasté Center For Healing,” 2014, https://www.namasteadvice.com/blog/how-to-identify-your-attachment-style-as-a-sex-addict-and-improve-security-in-your-relationships.

[11] Zapf, Greiner, and Carroll, “Attachment Styles and Male Sex Addiction.”

[12] Zapf, Greiner, and Carroll.

[13] Christiansen, “How to Identify Your Attachment Style as a Sex Addict and Improve Security in Your Relationships — Namasté Center For Healing.”

Emotional labour is a significant part of a couple’s relationship. Emotional labour was first coined by the sociologist Arlie Hochschild in her book, The Managed Heart (1983)[1]. She defined it as the work of managing your own emotions, but the term has been expanded to looking at the overall burden of managing or carrying emotions in a marriage and/or family context. You’ll probably be aware in your own marriage, one spouse often takes most of the responsibility for worrying about a particular issue: a struggling child, or financial issues, etc. That is part of their emotional labour that they are carrying in the marriage. 

Often, the burden of emotional labour is not borne equally by both partners in a marriage. According to a 2011 study by Ellison et al., women take on the majority of emotional labour bearing in marriage[2]. Women may be socialized or programmed to be more nurturing than men, and they typically take on not only their own feelings and concerns, but also those of their husband in order to accomplish daily tasks.

Morris and Feldman (1996) reported that nearly 2/3 of both men and women report that women tend to remind their spouse more often about things that need to be done like going to the grocery store or taking out the trash[3]. In addition, husbands don’t experience societal pressure to take charge of family to-do lists the same way wives do. Men are more likely to issue reminders about things from which they personally benefit. For example, making sure your wife remembers to buy you a new suit jacket for a work party. Women’s reminders, on the other hand, are more selfless and oriented towards others: organizing a child’s birthday party, picking up the family dry cleaning, taking the dog to the groomer, and so on.

The problem with the difference between men and women’s agendas comes back to the idea of emotional labour. In this case, the greater burden is on the wife. This can lead to burnout as she has to keep a happy face on but carry most of the emotional labour. 

Emotional labour involves more than just who does what items on the to-do list. Morris and Feldman (1996) also noticed that husbands frequently don’t take responsibility to think beyond the task nor do we take initiative regarding the task[4]. For example: when a wife asks her husband to go to the grocery store, he may ask her to tell him what to buy. He may not put in the mental work of going to the kitchen and considering a meal plan and what’s in the pantry and fridge and figuring it out himself. So even though he goes to the grocery store and does the purchasing, which is helping out physically, he is not really helping with the emotional workload associated with the task. 

Returning to the idea of fair division of labour: what matters in marriage is not that division of labour (emotional or physical) is exactly 50/50 but, rather, that the division is seen to be fair by both the husband and wife. 

How exactly emotional labour should be divided is something that needs to be worked out in your marriage between you and your spouse. It may be that in your marriage it is perfectly fine for the husband to be given a list and just get the groceries. But it’s important to think beyond the example to the concept behind it. By considering the overall emotional burden, you may be in a marriage where both spouses appear busy and working hard to contribute to the functioning of the household, but the way you have arranged it may leave a much greater emotional burden on one spouse versus the other. That may lead to burnout. It may feel unfair. It may create resentment: even though both spouses as busy in the physical sense of doing things. This is definitely something you want to talk to your spouse about. 

Because this subject is one that requires us to step back and reflect, we created a worksheet for our Patreon supporters that helps you look at the emotional contribution you are making to your marriage. It will help you understand what you bring to the marriage and what you need from it so that both of you can discuss and refine balance of emotional labour in your marriage. If you’re not a patron, you can get this worksheet by becoming a patron of The Marriage Podcast for Smart People. 

Emotional labour also relates to the issue of conflict in marriage. Most people are guilty of immature behaviour during conflict. For example, if you avoid talking about a fight you had with your spouse, even when it’s important to do so, you really just let the discomfort hang in the air which is basically a ploy to get you to take on the emotional labour of that problem. It shows your spouse that you’re not willing to put the effort in to resolve it. You may even be passively working to get your spouse to pull out their feelings without actually communicating with them so that it becomes their problem to try to guess what to do to make things better. This puts the emotional burden on you[5].

Another study related to this issue of emotional labour and conflict showed that the effort required by emotional labour is not only physically exhausting, but can actually result in psychological harm to the people involved in the conflict[6]. Additionally, it means the spouse carrying the emotional labour burden may end up feeling the feelings for both spouses. Typically, wives are more absorbent emotionally and able to feel negative emotional energy more instinctively. In the long run this can be exhausting[7].

The question remains: what do you do if your spouse is bearing too much emotional labour in your marriage? Well, if you’re the person dumping your emotional burden on your spouse due to conflict between you, you should be open to your spouse trying to help you. If you put down your spouse’s offers of help, or suggestions about solutions, you’re sending the message that you’re not interested in processing what happened or what you feel and that you’re just looking to take your feelings out on your wife or husband. That’s going to have a distancing effect in your marriage: it pushes your spouse away. But it’s also going to exhaust and deplete your spouse both physically and psychologically. 

To create a strong relationship, you need to find a way to tackle these issues together. It becomes important to share the emotional burden even of the conflict that occurs between you. 

Here are three key points for sharing emotional labour in marriage[8]:

A relationship without some aspect of emotional labour cannot be a healthy relationship. For example, if you’re expecting that you can have emotional outbursts of anger and that it’s up to your spouse to regulate and solve the problems for you when you are upset, this is going to be very exhausting of your spouse. Especially if it’s a common occurrence. 

The better approach is to understand that a good marriage requires hard work — and a good part of that hard work is what we are calling emotional labour. This means taking responsibility for your own emotions and being willing to do the work necessary to resolve conflict.

Part of the work of emotional labour is also being willing to listen to your spouse’s feedback regarding things that you aren’t doing a great job of. This is particularly important for husbands, although some wives struggle with the same thing. It’s easy to hear that kind of feedback as an attack and it can poke a hole in your ego. 

But when you are willing to consider the emotional issue that your spouse is presenting, and are willing to be open to and invite her to share her perspective with you, that is sending a clear signal that you’re willing to share in the emotional labour of the challenge that is facing you. 

There’s also a gender issue involved because a lot of the emotional labour that wives put into their marriage is around presenting things to their husbands in a way that makes sure their husband doesn’t blow up or get upset[9]. Really, that should not be part of a marriage. We all need to be considerate about the way in which we present a problem in order to be fair to our spouse. It’s important to make yourself approachable by showing your wife that you’re willing to listen and by setting aside any natural tendency towards defensiveness that you may have.

One of the hardest parts of taking on emotional labour for any spouse is the vulnerability that it requires from us. Husbands sometimes need to be pushed a little harder because part of our society’s definition of what it means to “be a man” is to be invulnerable and hide our negative emotions (other than anger). But when you are willing to show your sadness or fear or anxiety or uncertainty, that actually is how you participate in the emotional labour of an issue. Whether it’s conflict between us as spouses, a family issue with children, or an outside issue with work or church life, etc.

As a husband, if instead of minimizing or dismissing these issues, you can allow yourself to feel the struggle of the issue, and share that feeling with your spouse without needing her to take it on for you. Then you are able to feel joined together. It can really create unity between you as you are vulnerable and sharing and together in that moment. This is how even things like life challenges can bring a couple together. That’s all dealing primarily with emotional labour as it relates to conflict or problems.

In conclusion, it is helpful for husbands to have a discussion with their wives about the division of emotional labour in the household. How does that feel for both of you? Does it feel fair? Or do you need to shift that load somehow to make it more balanced for both partners?

References

[1] Arlie Russell Hochschild, The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling, Updated with a new preface (Berkeley Los Angeles London: University of California Press, 2012).

[2] Christopher G. Ellison et al., “Sanctification, Stress, and Marital Quality,” Family Relations 60, no. 4 (October 2011): 404–20.

[3] J. Andrew Morris and Daniel C. Feldman, “The Dimensions, Antecedents, and Consequences of Emotional Labor,” Academy of Management Review 21, no. 4 (October 1996): 986–1010, https://doi.org/10.5465/amr.1996.9704071861.

[4] Morris and Feldman.

[5] Lea Emery, “7 Signs You’re Doing All Of The Emotional Labor In Your Relationship,” Bustle, 2018, https://www.bustle.com/p/7-signs-youre-doing-all-of-the-emotional-labor-in-your-relationship-8403535.

[6] Hsin-Hui“Sunny” Hu, Hsin-Yi Hu, and Brian King, “Impacts of Misbehaving Air Passengers on Frontline Employees: Role Stress and Emotional Labor,” International Journal of Contemporary Hospitality Management 29, no. 7 (July 10, 2017): 1793–1813, https://doi.org/10.1108/IJCHM-09-2015-0457.

[7] Virginia Pelley, “‘What Can I Do To Help?’ Is a Stupid Question,” Fatherly, March 9, 2018, https://www.fatherly.com/love-money/emotional-labor-marriage-care/.

[8] Phillippe Fradet, “4 Ways Men Can Take On More Emotional Labor In Relationships (And Why They Should Do It),” May 28, 2019, https://thebodyisnotanapology.com/magazine/7-ways-men-must-learn-to-do-emotional-labor-in-their-relationships/.

[9] {Citation}

Secure attachment is foundational for strong marriages where both partners feel safe and secure. In the past three episodes, we’ve been looking at different styles of attachment that are born out of difficult childhood experiences. Today, we are considering the fourth style, secure attachment, which is really the goal that those of us with these other styles are striving for. Only about 46% of the population has secure attachment as their primary attachment style. We want to explore this one and really understand what it looks like so that we know what we’re aiming for if we are wanting to experience more of this style of attachment.

One of the signs of secure attachment in a marriage is that both partners can take comfort in their spouse[1]. Couples with a secure attachment can share feelings of both joy and discomfort. They are also able to ask for help when they need it without fearing a negative response from their spouse. 

One of the times when it is most evident whether or not a couple has a secure attachment style is when they experience conflict. During conflict, securely attached couples are more able to discuss difficulties in a calm way without raising their voices or getting exasperated. Furthermore, they do not let conflict formulate doubts about the future of their relationship. When they do get into conflict, they are more likely to see that as “just a phase” or as a passing, temporary experience rather than allowing it to escalate into a question about their future together. 

Couples with a secure attachment to each other trust the security of the bond that they have with their spouse. They can trust the integrity of that bond even when they are not getting along well.

One researcher looking at secure attachment during conflict also noted that those who have the ability to formulate or initiate affection toward their spouse maintain problem-solving communication while in conflict. By communicating well with one another even in conflict, they are more likely to express their needs to one another and prevent misunderstanding.

People with a secure attachment generally feel secure and connected in a wider variety of areas[2]. They allow themselves and their spouse to move more freely and have time alone without concern or questioning. It doesn’t mean they are together less, but the security allows a greater freedom to come and go without the security of their bond being questioned.  

Generally, they are more in touch with their own feelings and so are able to be more empathic and understanding of their spouse’s emotions as well. They are very capable of offering support and comfort when their spouse is distressed. A healthy, interdependent relationship helps a couple when they are together and when they are apart. 

Securely attached spouses also tend to be more honest, open and fair in their marriage. They feel comfortable sharing intimate thoughts (including regarding sexuality) and emotions. Their empathy tends to be more out front and leading in their interactions[3].

Another sign of secure attachment is that they enjoy doing activities with their spouse; they also enjoy their own space for doing some things separately. While those with anxious or avoidant attachment are less likely to view others as trustworthy, those with secure attachment feel that they can depend on others and they are more likely to perceive others as trustworthy.

Securely attached individuals also have better self-esteem and more positive thoughts of others. A lot of attachment is about how I view myself and how I view others. Avoidants tend to be high on self and low on others; Anxious tend to be low on self and high on others. Secure are more balanced: they are better able to trust others and sort things out when others let them down. 

As parents, secure individuals are involved, attentive, sensitive and responsive to their children’s needs. They more naturally are able to do things like:

Another study observed that after toddlerhood and beyond, secure parents adopt an authoritative parenting style that provides the child age-appropriate limits and support[5]. Because they are more trusting, secure individuals will allow and more easily adapt to their child’s growing skills and needs. They’ll allow the right amount of freedom by balancing that with the child’s need to be protected and kept safe. 

In sum, securely attached people are very aware of what is happening with their children. They pay attention, they are more able to understand what their child is experiencing, and they are better equipped to provide a helpful response.

When your primary caregiver is responsive, warm, loving and emotionally available to you as a baby or toddler, you’re likely to develop secure attachment[6]. This helps the baby grow to be confident in its mother’s ability to handle their positive and negative feelings. For that reason, the child feels freer to express both positive and negative emotions, and does not need to learn to develop defenses against their own unpleasant emotions[7].

One of the grandmothers of attachment theory, Mary Ainsworth, suggested that when a mother is a secure attachment figure, she became a safe haven for the child to explore from[8]. The child would feel safe and confident to explore the world or their environment knowing that he or she could always return to the mother for safety. Babies who are securely attached tend to cry less, cooperate more, and enjoy their mother’s company more. They also grow up to be happier and healthier as adults.

If you are secure in your attachment style, it is still possible that your spouse is not. What do you do if you find yourself in this position? 

One thing that can be helpful for your spouse is partner buffering[9]. This means that as a securely attached spouse you can, with effort and insight, help your anxious or avoidant spouse become more emotionally regulated in order to more manage their anxiety, whether it is about themselves or about you.

If your spouse has an anxious attachment style, you will need to give far more reassurance than you feel is necessary. This means that you are providing more reassurance than you know you would need. For example, if your anxiously attached spouse wants you to call if you’re going to be late: be diligent about making that call every time. The more you are able to provide that consistent reassurance, the more you extend a safe haven to your spouse, and the more likely their attachment system is going to be able to feel secure.

If your spouse has an avoidant attachment style, it’s important to provide security for them even when they have retreated. You can learn not to encroach when they need time and space to themselves but also extend security to them by connecting or doing acts that demonstrate caring when they are with you. Think of it as a shift from pursuing towards nurturing. So instead of provoking the avoidance you are providing connection even when they are defaulting to avoiding. This will help them to learn that they can be connected, that receiving nurturing when they feel like isolating is a more attractive option, and will help them to open up more when feeling overwhelmed.

This is partner buffering: it is learning to respond to your spouse in a way that fits their attachment style. Partner buffering lowers their sense of distress around the connection between you, and offers them a positive experience when they may be expecting a negative one, such as rejection. In other words, it’s helping them unlearn that it is unsafe to be in a close, trusting relationship with another person and to learn that they can feel safe and connected to someone else in the context of a secure attachment.

Of course, it’s not on you to fix your spouse but partner buffering can help your secure attachment to provide a safe haven for your spouse to heal from their attachment injuries. You can learn more about this in the bonus content.

References

[1]R. Rogers Kobak and Cindy Hazan, “Attachment in Marriage: Effects of Security and Accuracy of Working Models.,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 60, no. 6 (1991): 861–69, https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.60.6.861.

[2]Ronit Baras, “Attachment Styles in Relationships and Marriages,” 2019, https://www.ronitbaras.com/emotional-intelligence/personal-development/attachment-styles-in-relationships-and-marriages/.

[3]Judith A. Feeney, “Attachment Style, Communication Patterns, and Satisfaction across the Life Cycle of Marriage,” Personal Relationships 1, no. 4 (December 1994): 333–48, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1475-6811.1994.tb00069.x.

[4]Barbara Nicholson and Lysa A. Parker, Attached at the Heart: Eight Proven Parenting Principles for Raising Connected and Compassionate Children: (From Preconception to Age Five), Revised and updated (Deerfield Beach, Florida: Health Communications, Inc, 2013).

[5]Divecha, “What Is a Secure Attachment? And Why Doesn’t ‘Attachment Parenting’ Get You There? — Developmental Science,” 2017, https://www.developmentalscience.com/blog/2017/3/31/what-is-a-secure-attachmentand-why-doesnt-attachment-parenting-get-you-there.

[6]M. Lynne Cooper, Phillip R. Shaver, and Nancy L. Collins, “Attachment Styles, Emotion Regulation, and Adjustment in Adolescence.,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 74, no. 5 (1998): 1380–97, https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.74.5.1380.

[7]Divecha, “What Is a Secure Attachment? And Why Doesn’t ‘Attachment Parenting’ Get You There? — Developmental Science.”

[8]Mary S. Ainsworth, “Infant–Mother Attachment.,” American Psychologist 34, no. 10 (1979): 932–37, https://doi.org/10.1037/0003-066X.34.10.932.

[9]Ludden, “Responding to Your Partner’s Attachment Style,” UPLIFT, May 4, 2017, https://upliftconnect.com/responding-to-attachment-style/.

A disorganized attachment style can cause a person to feel mixed emotions towards their spouse, which can be confusing if they are not understood in light of the other attachment styles. We’ve looked at anxious attachment and avoidant attachment in the previous two posts. Today we turn to disorganized attachment, or fearful avoidant attachment, which includes elements of both of these styles.[1] People with disorganized attachment fear intimacy but may also seek it out. They are both anxious and avoidant so may have a lot of mixed emotions when approaching relationships.

In a marriage, an individual with a disorganized attachment may have a negative view of themselves and their spouse. They may feel unworthy of support and may anticipate that their spouse will not support them. In turn, they are likely to feel uncomfortable relying on their spouse despite having a desire to be close and intimately connected to them. 

Individuals with an avoidant attachment style are really are caught in a dilemma of independence vs intimacy. It can be hard for them to be vulnerable, to ask for help, or to trust their spouse. They may appear to have mood swings but this could just be a reflection of their attachment pendulum swinging between possessive demands of an anxious attachment and the dismissive independence of avoidant attachment. 

One of the challenging things for a spouse of someone with this attachment style is inconsistency. Their spouse may act differently depending on whether they are responding to the demands of the anxious or avoidant attachment style.[2] This may be frustrating at times, but compassion helps us to understand how to move towards a spouse who may have this attachment style.

The key here is to see that those with an avoidant attachment style have very deep internal conflict because they are afraid of needing their spouse, yet also have a deep need for their spouse.[3] This may result in behaviour that appears contradictory or confused: they will seek to approach their spouse in times of distress, but that approach may be interrupted or incomplete. It may appear to be chaotic or hard to make sense of because at the same time that they are making the approach, they are experiencing a desire to distance themselves. They may be combining this with aggressiveness or withdrawing kinds of behaviours that can make it difficult for their spouse to understand their actions.

Sometimes, you’ll see abusive behaviours in this attachment style because the cycle of abuse requires a honeymoon period with a lot of closeness at one end of the cycle, followed by harsh, abusive behaviour at the other end. It doesn’t mean that all people with disorganized attachment resort to abuse or that all abusive spouses have disorganized attachment: it’s just making the observation that this is one area of overlap between these two constellations of behaviours. 

Another thing that is sometimes symptomatic of a disorganized attachment style is a tendency to act out sexually, and in some cases, be unfaithful to their spouse. This certainly doesn’t mean all people with disorganized attachment are unfaithful or that all spouses who have affairs are disorganized in their attachment style.

However, because of the desire to be close but not be close, some people with this attachment style tend to have a larger number of sexual partners over their lifetime and they tend to be more sexually compliant. When someone solicits sex from them, they are more likely to say yes.[4] This is part of wanting a connection but also feeling afraid of that connection.[5] In a sense, the hookup culture provides connection without intimacy, so you can see how it might be easier for a person with this attachment style to engage in it.

Within the context of marriage, someone with this attachment style may move very quickly towards sex when their spouse appears to be unhappy or angry with them as a way of resolving conflict: you don’t have to face the underlying issues in the conflict (that’s avoidant) and you feel like you’ve made the connection safe again (that’s anxious).[6] Now in fairness, a lot of couples may do this but it is more likely to be a well-established pattern when a spouse has a disorganized attachment style. 

Basically, a child develops a disorganized attachment style when they feel afraid of their parents and also seek out that parent to quell their fear. Let that sink in. That’s a profound dilemma, especially for a child. Mary Main, a key attachment researcher, calls this kind of attachment “fear without solution”.

In some situations, these children grow up in abusive homes. They may feel that they are in danger around a parent or guardian yet at the same time consider this person to be their safe place. Even in non-abusive situations, the parent may be unable to function in a protective role or to identify with the child’s needs.[7]

When attachment researchersobserve children with this attachment style, they set up this situation wherethe parent leaves and then returns and they would watch the children. In this case, the child would move toward their parent but then change their mind. They may also run away or act out violently or be unpredictable in their responses:the child has this intrinsic need to approach the parent for reassurance comfort but at the same time may have anything between uncertainty and terror with regards to what will happen when they come close to that parent[8] It’s very sad.

The norm for people with this attachment style is that they are coming from very difficult backgrounds, usually involving abuse and trauma as children. This being the case, a great place to begin with is resolving that trauma with good counselling.[9] You will need to make sense of the events and situations of your childhood that precipitated this attachment style in order to understand yourself better. Sometimes there will be a clearly abusive parent and other times the caregiver may not have been there to protect you from abuse that did happen. 

Growing up in this kind of environment often leads to a very negative view of the self and others and those beliefs and thoughts need to be shifted in order to develop a secure attachment. 

We have talked a lot about secure attachment. It’s important to note that a person can develop an ‘earned secure attachment’ which is a secure attachment style that individuals who have come out of disorganized attachment can create for themselves.[10] A counsellor will help you to make sense of the story of your childhood and to make that history more coherent in your mind. With this kind of work, you come to a clearer understanding of who you are and how you became the person you are. That’s the basis for establishing how you want to relate to others today. This is a birds-eye view of how you can create secure attachment even after having very challenging childhood experiences.

References

[1] Byron Pirola, “Together Apart,” Marriage Resource Centre (blog), accessed September 1, 2019, https://marriageresourcecentre.org/together-apart/.

[2] Marni Feuerman, “Your Attachment Style Influences the Success of Your Relationship,” The Gottman Institute, February 24, 2017, https://www.gottman.com/blog/attachment-style-influences-success-relationship/.

[3] Margaret Tresch Owen and Martha J. Cox, “Marital Conflict and the Development of Infant-Parent Attachment Relationships.,” Journal of Family Psychology 11, no. 2 (1997): 152–64, https://doi.org/10.1037/0893-3200.11.2.152.

[4] Ramona L. Paetzold, W. Steven Rholes, and Jamie L. Kohn, “Disorganized Attachment in Adulthood: Theory, Measurement, and Implications for Romantic Relationships,” Review of General Psychology 19, no. 2 (June 2015): 146–56, https://doi.org/10.1037/gpr0000042.

[5] Kelly Gonsalves, “Having A Lot Of Sex But Can’t Connect With Anyone? Read This,” mindbodygreen, March 26, 2019, https://www.mindbodygreen.com/articles/how-fearful-avoidant-attachment-style-affects-your-sex-life.

[6] Gonsalves.

[7] Lisa Firestone, “Disorganized Attachment: How Attachment Forms & How It Can Be Healed,” PsychAlive (blog), June 11, 2013, https://www.psychalive.org/disorganized-attachment/.

[8] Mary S. Ainsworth, “Infant–Mother Attachment.,” American Psychologist 34, no. 10 (1979): 932–37, https://doi.org/10.1037/0003-066X.34.10.932.

[9] Regain, “What To Do If You Have A Disorganized Attachment | Regain,” accessed September 15, 2019, https://www.regain.us/advice/attachment/what-to-do-if-you-have-a-disorganized-attachment/.

[10] Clara E. Hill et al., “Attitudes about Psychotherapy: A Qualitative Study of Introductory Psychology Students Who Have Never Been in Psychotherapy and the Influence of Attachment Style,” Counselling and Psychotherapy Research 12, no. 1 (March 2012): 13–24, https://doi.org/10.1080/14733145.2011.629732.

When we look at some of the areas that people with an avoidant attachment style struggle in, it’s easy to focus on extremes or exaggerate the way they interact with you. But your spouse can be avoidantly attached to you and still be a faithful, committed, reliable person in the marriage. 

In this article, we’re going to look at the challenges that having an avoidant attachment presents in marriage. The section towards the end is especially important because it examines how an avoidant attachment style develops in childhood. Someone with this attachment style may behave in ways that seem like they are intentionally doing things to hurt you, and it is easy to take personally. But in most cases, there is no intent to harm or be difficult in the marriage. We really encourage you to listen to them with compassion and understanding. 

The default posture of an avoidantly attached person is to not depend on others. There are a number of reasons they may have this fear. It may be because they are distrustful of close relationships or are afraid of relying on anyone else. It may also be because they don’t want to experience the pain of rejection. They may feel pressured to give the other person the level of support they receive. They may avoid being close enough to receive support from another because they don’t want to offer support in return and have their efforts rejected. This may be because there have been times when they have depended on someone else and it has led to disappointment.

A person with an avoidant attachment styleplaces a lot of value on independence and being self-sufficient.[1] They may consider that to need someone else is to show weakness, so they sometimes develop a lone wolf mentality. They may also seem to be very much in their head and working through problems rationally.

To fully understand the avoidant attachment style, we need to look at how attachment in general develops in childhood. When a child is with their parent and they experience a moment of threat or uncertainty or distress, their attachment system is activated. What this means is the part of the brain that is responsible for tracking and monitoring the safety and availability of their primary caregiver is turned on. The moment of fear prompts the child to re-establish if their parent is safe and available and can meet their needs. When the parent affirms this, the child’s brain turns the activation off.

A child whose caregiver is not available learns to prevent their attachment system from activating. They don’t let themselves get upset or distressed or needy towards a loving significant other. Therefore,they develop an avoidant attachment style: first towards their caregiver, and later on towards their spouse.

An avoidant attachment can have a significant impact on a marriage. An avoidant spouse may do the following things:

All of these responses are geared towards keeping that attachment system deactivated. They’ll deny or minimize their vulnerability and repress their emotions as a way to manage emotions that have been aroused.

Because of the “not needing” others attitude and fiercely independent coping style that comes with keeping their attachment system deactivated, people with an avoidant attachment style are often very self-reliant. This desire for independence can cause the following things to happen:

It’s interesting to note that you will often find avoidantly attached people in litigation, scientific fields or those kinds of occupations where avoiding the feelings of others can be beneficial, or where performance is not based on group effort.[4] These occupations allow them to work in an environment where they can do their job without being involved with the emotions of others, which a career that involved a lot of people work would require them to do.

Looking at people with an avoidant attachment from a spiritual perspective, they often seem to have difficulty experiencing warmth, intimacy or closeness with God.[5] They may see God as distantor impersonal or generally uncaring.[6] This kind of information is helpful just to note that their avoidant attachment isn’t something that singles out their spouse for special treatment but is a pattern of avoiding deep connection across significant relationships.

As children, avoidant adults often experienced a certain level of unresponsive behaviour towards their distress or need for comfort from their parents. This can happen on a scale from mild and continuous unresponsive behaviours through to more severe forms of neglect.[7] For example, their parents may have been unresponsive when the children were distressed or in need of comfort. Going back to the idea of activating the attachment system in the brain: these are the moments when the child feels the need to reach out to be affirmed that the parent is available and safe and responsive.

If the child experiences rejection in those moments when they need reaffirmation due to being emotionally upset, the child will learn to suppress their emotional neediness. That natural desire has to be put aside when frightened, in distress or in pain, because if they are not upset then at least they can be close to their parent physically, even though they are not available to meet their emotional needs. In other words, I’ll put my distress away so I can be near you.

Sometimes you see children who’ve developed this attachment style actually backing up towards their parents. It’s the pursuit of some feeling of closeness without being seen. By not outwardly expressing feelings, they can at least partially gratify one of their attachment needs, which is to remain physically close to the parent. In these situations, the child learns from repeated, painful interactions with attachment figures (parents) that their distress leads to rejection or punishment.

Some children learn to rely heavily on self-soothing and self-nurturing behaviours. They attempt to meet their attachment needs on their own since they cannot rely on an attachment figure to meet them.

Children with an avoidant attachment style learn to appear very independent and to not need support from others. Later in life, this translates to not seeking authentic, vulnerable intimacy in marriage[8]

If you are listening in today and recognizing that you are avoidantly attached, your spouse may be feeling anything from content but wishing for more of a connection with you all the way to highly distressed and feeling very rejected. But the good news is that you can change your attachment style to your spouse: there are ways to help yourself as an individual and things you can work on as a couple. 

One of the first things you’ll want to do is to own how this attachment style shows up in your marriage. Knowing that this is what happens, owning that and being willing to face it and work on it together is a huge gift to your spouse.

One of the things you can work on together is really thinking about “we” instead of me and you. If you are avoidant you can just start prompting yourself to think about things in your marriage interdependently rather than independently. Think less about doing things efficiently and more about doing things together. You can invite your spouse to gently call you out on this as well: they may be a very useful barometer on when the independence is trumping connection.

As you experience more connection, notice what that’s like. It feels better. There’s warmth there and a deeper joy. 

Another thing to work on together is cultivating emotional intimacy. You can invite your spouse to ask what you are thinking. You can urge yourself to share more vulnerability with your spouse as well, knowing that they are a safe person. This is how you make yourself more comfortable with vulnerability and start to disconfirm the idea that when you are distressed your attachment figure (spouse) will reject or punish you for showing that distress.

For yourself, it becomes important to learn to accept your spouse for who they are. Sometimes when you are avoidant, you can build a case against your spouse to justify the distance between you. It may feel more comfortable to create distance, but it supports avoidance. When you challenge yourself to accept and appreciate your spouse more deeply, it puts you back into a better position for developing closeness and fostering connection. 

Sometimes in this attachment style it’s hard to know how to be close to your spouse because you’ve been conditioned towards independence. This might sound odd but try activating your attachment system by thinking about losing your spouse and the devastation you would feel. That punch in the gut feeling is often followed by a desire to be close to your spouse — to make sure they are safe and available and they feel cared for. Now: how can you demonstrate more of that reaching for connection in other moments?

Attachment is a spectrum where you have anxiously attached on one end and avoidantly attached on the other with secure attachment in the middle. If you are avoidantly connected, you may want to try thinking about how you could foster anxious attachment in yourself. And try a little of that so that you land somewhere in the middle.

So as you reach for the uncertainty of connection it really compels you to step away from the “I don’t need anyone — I am an island unto myself” position and towards some interdependence and just that idea of, “I need you and you need me and that’s good!”

References

[1] Jeb Kinnison, “Type: Dismissive-Avoidant Attachment Style,” Jeb Kinnison, March 10, 2014, https://jebkinnison.com/bad-boyfriends-the-book/type-dismissive-avoidant/.

[2] R. Chris Fraley and Claudia Chloe Brumbaugh, “Adult Attachment and Preemptive Defenses: Converging Evidence on the Role of Defensive Exclusion at the Level of Encoding,” Journal of Personality 75, no. 5 (October 2007): 1033–50, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-6494.2007.00465.x.

[3] Jeremy McAllister, “Ending the Anxious-Avoidant Dance, Part 1: Opposing Attachment Styles,” GoodTherapy.org Therapy Blog, May 18, 2017, https://www.goodtherapy.org/blog/ending-anxious-avoidant-dance-part-1-opposing-attachment-styles-0518174.

[4] Kinnison, “Type.”

[5] Mockingbird, “Attachment Theory and Your Relationship With God,” Mockingbird, October 26, 2016, https://mbird.com/2016/10/attachment-theory-and-your-relationship-with-god/.

[6] Lee A. Kirkpatrick and Philip R. Shaver, “An Attachment-Theoretical Approach to Romantic Love and Religious Belief,” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 18, no. 3 (June 1992): 266–75, https://doi.org/10.1177/0146167292183002.

[7] Jason D. Jones and Jude Cassidy, “Parental Attachment Style: Examination of Links with Parent Secure Base Provision and Adolescent Secure Base Use,” Attachment & Human Development 16, no. 5 (September 3, 2014): 437–61, https://doi.org/10.1080/14616734.2014.921718.

[8] Jones and Cassidy.

Attachment is part of how we relate to others from an early age. Attachment is about the emotional bond that exists between two people — usually in a family or marriage context. Understanding your own attachment style and that of your spouse can help you figure out why you do the things you do during conflict or even everyday married life. 

Understanding attachment can also help you see what you might do differently in order to secure and strengthen the bond between you and your spouse. Attachment is fundamental to marriage — so read through this article and the next three if you really want to learn about what is probably the most significant undercurrent in marriage.

This is the first of a four-part series on attachment. This article will focus on anxious attachment and how it affects a couples’ relationship in marriage. 

The basic idea of attachment theory is that how you were loved as an infant becomes critical to how you relate to significant others in your life as an adult. When you are a baby, your primary caregiver, usually a parent, will have a unique way of relating to you. We refer to this caregiver as an attachment figure. When you get married, your spouse becomes your key attachment figure. When you have kids, you become an important attachment figure to them. But we start with our own primary caregiver and the essential components of how they relate to you centre on this one fundamental question: was my attachment figure nearby, accessible, and attentive to me?

If a child grows up in an environment with an attachment figure who is available to meet their attachment needs, the child will grow up feeling loved, secure, and confident. The child is then likely to explore his or her environment more freely, play with others and be sociable.[1]

The challenges or attachment injuries a person experiences in childhood impact not only them, but also the way they relate to their spouse. See our previous article: Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE’s) and the Impact on Your Marriage. For an adult, the attachment system that was formed in childhood gives rise to the emotional bond that develops between him or her and their romantic partner. Two researchers took Bowlby’s studies of attachment and explored them in the context of marriage.[2] They noted certain parallels: infants/caregivers and adult romantic relationships share the following features:

Typically, once a person’s attachment style is established in childhood it remains with the individual through their adulthood. 

Two terms that we will use frequently when talking about attachment are the words avoidance and anxiety. Avoidance is about whether or not a person is comfortable with closeness to a significant other. Do you seek connection and being seen? Or do you shy away from it or even really run from it? Anxiety is about your trust in the security of your connection. Do you feel at peace that your significant other is available, responsive and committed? Or are you needing to reassure yourself of this sometimes or even all the time? 

Each person has an attachment style to their spouse. Sometimes, one spouse is one style, and the other spouse is a different one. For example, if you are anxious about your connection to your partner, your partner may be securely attached to you, which means the problem is not that your partner is unavailable or unreliable, but that you are not able to rest in and trust that he or she is available. That’s the part you have to take responsibility for. Conversely, your partner may begin the marriage as a securely attached person, but if you are consistently inconsistent in your availability or accessibility then their attachment style toward you may become more and more anxious because of your behaviour.

There are four styles of adult attachment. These occur on a spectrum and can be thought of as quadrants rather than four distinct parts. Each of us falls somewhere on a scale of severity in one of these four quadrants: 

Low on avoidance and low on anxiety. People who have secure attachment are comfortable with intimacy. They are not worried about rejection or preoccupied with the relationship. They are interested and invested but don’t have an underlying anxiety about the status of their connection to their spouse.

High on avoidance and low on anxiety. They are uncomfortable with closeness and place a high value on independence and freedom. They are generally not worried about their spouse’s availability. 

Low on avoidance and high on anxiety. They crave closeness and intimacy and are generally quite insecure about the relationship.

High on avoidance and high on anxiety. They are uncomfortable with intimacy, but also worried about their spouse’s commitment and love.

So those are the four attachment styles. Our next three articles will cover the avoidant or dismissive, anxious or preoccupied, and disorganized attachment styles. In this article we will look at anxious attachment.

The key concepts of the anxious attachment style are:

After conflict, they will often gather positive evidence about the relationship to use as a defense against abandonment.

It’s important to remember that attachment styles all occur on a scale or spectrum. There are a lot of characteristics for each style. You will resonate with many, or possibly all of these characteristics if you are anxiously attached.[3]

Furthermore, an anxiously attached spouse generally doesn’t have much trust in the security of the bond between him/herself and their spouse. They may fear being abandoned, feel unappreciated by their spouse, or fear their spouse becoming too independent. They may have anger towards a spouse who they perceive to be insufficiently available and not responsive enough to their needs. 

Common things that an anxiously attached spouse may say include:

These phrases are indicators that you do not feel safe and secure in your relationship with your spouse, and you are always looking to them to make you feel secure because of your anxious attachment.

It is common for an anxiously attached spouse to put their securely attached spouse on a pedestal and overestimate their abilities while underestimating their own. When entering the marriage, they may believe this is their only chance for love. Because of their low self-worth and high view of their spouse, they may worry about losing their spouse and be hyper-aware of any sign that their spouse is pulling away from them. This sense of insecurity increases their need for security; ironically, this often results in behaviours that smother or otherwise drive their spouse away.

Individuals with an anxious attachment need constant reassurance and affection from their spouse and have trouble being alone. Because of this underlying fear of losing attention or affection, they may not take time to see matters from their spouse’s point of view. They can easily stumble into misunderstandings and conflict because they’re trying to control their spouse in a way that relieves their own fears. 

An anxiously attached spouse may text their husband or wife constantly while they are at work, asking for updates and really intruding on the independence of the other person. If their spouse then gets annoyed and pulls back, it heightens their anxiety, potentially creating conflict: why are you ignoring me, etc.? The anxiously attached spouse doesn’t see the impact of their own fear on their spouse which may even be having the effect of driving the other person away. And that confirms their fears and the perceived insecurity of the attachment.

To understand the anxious attachment style from a place of compassion, it is helpful to understand how it develops. If a child is loved by a parent, but that parent feels helpless or overwhelmed in the early months and years of that child’s development, the parent may only really get close and attentive to the child when he or she is distressed.[4]

Children who grow up without a reliable attachment figure learn early on that a high degree of internal distress produces the most attentive response from the parent. Maybe as a toddler, the child learns that tantrums are the best way to elicit undivided attention from a parent. When the child is not distressed the parent is not really available. The child learns that their parent is sometimes there and sometimes not. When the parent is not available it may be seen as rejection, so the child becomes highly sensitive to signs of unavailability as a warning to expect rejection. A child like this may become clingy and dependent because there is no consistency.[5] From an early age, the child learns to demand attention from their parents because they may not always be available.

In some cases, the parent has their own abandonment wounds and the child becomes someone the parent depends on to fulfill their own needs. So the parent fosters neediness in the child in order to satiate the parent’s hunger for being cared for.[6] A child in this situation is really trained to remain dependent and needy, checking in with the parent for security rather than internalizing a secure attachment. It does validate the parent who has a wound that is satiated by being needed, but it leaves the child dependent and anxiously attached.

Secure attachment is the ability to feel secure in the availability and connection of your spouse whether you are together or apart. So the question is: how do you challenge yourself to shift to a more secure attachment style if your default is anxious or preoccupied attachment? 

There are a number of things that can help an individual with an anxious attachment style to move towards a more secure attachment. Self-soothing is often a helpful practice. Learning to calm and soothe yourself is really just doing your own parenting. It’s providing the reassurance, availability, and presence for yourself that your caregivers were not able to give you. Anxiously attached Christians who have strong faith in God may also benefit from really learning to draw on the consistent availability and presence of God as a way of self-soothing.

Another thing that is helpful for anxious attachment is spending time getting to know yourself: your strengths, gifts and talents. Building confidence in yourself and accomplishing tasks and seeing yourself develop as a person fosters a sense of self-worth. That self-worth helps you subconsciously understand that you can function well independently which increases a sense of security. 

Finally, individuals can work on not jumping to conclusions and overreacting. Because fear is at the root of anxious attachment, and because anger is often the face of fear in marriage, it helps if you can take a step back when you find yourself overreacting. Work at being things from your spouse’s point of view; try to be generous (giving the benefit of the doubt) when interpreting their actions and have faith in his or her goodwill before assuming the worst.

In a romantic relationship, there are a number of things that a couple can work on together to help an anxiously attached partner become more secure. See our previous article Why People Seek Marriage Counselling and What Approaches They Use. First of all, it is very helpful to practice communicating your feelings and needs directly. Often, it will be more automatic to try to control your spouse or to micromanage them — and these actions are driven by deeper needs and feelings within yourself but it will be really hard for your spouse to see past those behaviours to these feelings and needs. If you can communicate with them more directly, you can avoid acting in ways that may otherwise frustrate or even drive your spouse away. 

It’s also a good idea to consider working with a couple’s therapist. A couple’s therapist trained in emotionally focused couple’s therapy can help you reorganize your marriage attachment style so that you can relate to one another in a more secure, healing way.

Finally, it’s important to be patient with yourself and your spouse. Your attachment style is really most often instilled in you without any choice or decision on your part. The same goes for your spouse’s attachment style. Despite these challenges, it is still possible to learn how to create a secure, loving bond with your spouse. These other attachment styles: anxious, avoidant and disorganized — they are not permanent disabilities. They are definitely challenging, but this is also a way that you can grow together as a couple and derive incredible meaning and value from the healing powers of marriage. Be careful to give yourself and one another a lot of compassion and patience for the process.[7]

References

[1] John Bowlby, “Attachment and Loss: Retrospect and Prospect.,” American Journal of Orthopsychiatry 52, no. 4 (October 1982): 664–78, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1939-0025.1982.tb01456.x.

[2] Cindy Hazan and Phillip Shaver, “Romantic Love Conceptualized as an Attachment Process.,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 52, no. 3 (1987): 511–24, https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.52.3.511.

[3] Jeffry A Simpson and W Steven Rholes, “Adult Attachment, Stress, and Romantic Relationships,” Current Opinion in Psychology 13 (February 2017): 19–24, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.copsyc.2016.04.006.

[4] Nancy L. Collins, “Working Models of Attachment: Implications for Explanation, Emotion, and Behavior.,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 71, no. 4 (1996): 810–32, https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.71.4.810.

[5] Jason D. Jones and Jude Cassidy, “Parental Attachment Style: Examination of Links with Parent Secure Base Provision and Adolescent Secure Base Use,” Attachment & Human Development 16, no. 5 (September 3, 2014): 437–61, https://doi.org/10.1080/14616734.2014.921718.

[6] Ibid.

[7] Darlene Lancer, “How to Change Your Attachment Style,” October 2018, https://psychcentral.com/lib/how-to-change-your-attachment-style/.