Fears and longings originating in your earliest formative relationships fire up memories, physiological responses, and emotions. They also activate unconscious interpersonal templates about love. Implicit in these templates are expectations of danger and reward.
These unconscious expectations come alive in present-day romantic commitments. You may come to believe, for example, that if you avoid upsetting topics, your relationships are safer. So you inhibit your true feelings and needs in order to keep the peace. Or you may learn that when you work hard to satisfy the demands of the people you love, they come to rely on you more, and you fear rejection less.
Adult romantic relationships set in motion coping strategies you once used to insure your physical and psychic survival as a child.
The Double-edged Sword of Overthinking
Overthinking is one of our subtlest and most insidious cognitive coping strategies. It’s a double-edged sword. It may give us the illusion of control in the short term, but in the long-term, it can disconnect us from ourselves, others and our environments.
In relationships, this strategy goes on hyperdrive. This is because our relationships activate our entire attachment system, bringing to the surface powerful fears and longings.
Attachment Theory
British psychologist John Bowlby first began formulating attachment theory eighty years ago. Since then, there’s been a lot of research showing how early bonds with caregivers influence how we act later in life with our partners. In Attached, authors Levine and Heller put it like this: “The need to be near someone special is so important that the brain has a biological mechanism specifically responsible for creating and regulating our connection with our attachment figures” (Levine and Heller 2010, 12). This mechanism has a name: it’s our attachment system. When we fall in love, and feel threatened by the things our partner does and doesn’t do, says and doesn’t say, it fires up this system.
Our interactions with our partners can get very emotionally charged and intense.
Our Thoughts Aren’t the Same Thing as Truth
It’s important to recognize that relationships can power repetitive, negative, obsessive, or intrusive thinking. If we’re aware that our overthinking isn’t the truth with a capital “T,” but an interpretation that’s emotionally colored and shaped by our own past experiences with early caregivers, we can be careful not to believe our thoughts. We can identify them as narratives, stories and interpretations rather than fact.
