Insecure in Love: How Anxious Attachment Can Make You Feel Jealous, Needy, and Worried and What You Can Do About It Paperback – June 1, 2014

This book is great. It's clear, very well explained and offers exercises for learning and growing. About 2.5 years ago I was having a lot tensions in my relationship because of the attachment "issues." I'd read the classic book on attachment but it was more like a label and it seemed to offer the only solution of finding a different partner. It seemed quite prescriptive and not about what a person can do to heal or lessen the friction.Did I probably have some childhood wounds with attachment? For sure. Who doesn't? Did I have a traumatic break up in my formative years. Yep--didn't you? I did therapy; I processed all the things years and years ago but I still had patterns come up that felt suffocating. Did I have to forever be trapped in reproducing those patterns. Absolutely not.Read this book to learn how to step out of it. I believe I found out about it via lawyer turned life coach Kara Loewentheil's podcast (UFYB) or coaching on relationships. The book works very well with coaching because it gently shows you how there are other ways to be in relationships that aren't driven by an anxiety label and how to work with anxious attachment habits. (Yes, I mean habit and not a diagnosis.) There are exercises and a lot of concrete tactics for working with and learning from your emotions and notions of attachments and rejection.As I learned and got curious, I learned how I was setting up / interpreting lots of things as rejection outside my relationship. For example, I am in a field that requires me to submit projects or proposals that could be rejected. If I don't pay attention, I can go through the rejection spin out here or in lots of other areas of my life. This is not a fun way to live and a sure-fire road to writer's block. This is pattern that I've largely unlearned and, when it does come up, I can recognize it much more quickly than before. It doesn't wreck my world.[NB: I read this book first and most recently read the Bouncing Back from Rejection one so I might be conflating the two a tad.] In all honesty, I might even love the Bouncing back from Rejection book even more. The ways of processing emotions and related thoughts resonates with how I deal with emotions like these when they come up (usually through self-coaching). I more often return to the rejection one because it helps me distance my learning from solely looking at my intimate relationships. Iterations of this pattern come up in all sorts of relationships and life endeavors and it's worth investing in learning about how to shift it.While not easy, these books and learning process have been life altering. They give you many concrete tools to unlearn these sort of patterns and can help you re-articulate your close relationship/friendships and your reactions to real or perceived rejection.

I love that the author of this book does provide practical ways to resolve the issues that come with the attachment styles, as well as give you understanding around whether it's something you can work on or it's something that requires you to move on. It's written in very accessible and relatable language and mentions a lot of things that really hit home. I think everyone with anxious attachment should read this book to better understand what can be done about it.As for how much I've changed from it, I'm not sure. It definitely got me to think about a lot of things in my last relationship when I felt anxious (which is why I picked up the book in the first place), and I'd have yet to experience the changes with someone suitable. I'll likely re-read it a few times over the next year before hopefully being in a more suitable relationship!

Helpful to learn all the skills. Learning how To recognize attachment issues and how to manage them.and what to do to change it into a healthy life

Two important and related quotes I've learned in life that apply to this book:1. As G.I. Joe taught me as a kid, "knowing is half the battle".2. In science I've learned that "if you can measure it, you can manage it."Basically, if we're serious about our relationships and those we love, we'll be willing to look internally to understand our own behavior, and that of our loved ones. Like anything important in life, this book isn't a "quick fix", but it is empowering. It explains a lot of our behaviors in relationships and gives tips on how to grow and heal.

This was a great read, and is now a useful reference book to understand attachment typologies. What I find striking is that this author argues that to overcome anxious attachment, one needs to actively find a healthy relationship (friendly, familial, romantic, otherwise). This is easier said than done, and possibly easier in some life areas than others. Also, I find that this approach could put a lot of undue burden on the “healthily attached” person; in fact, many advice columns continually argue that if a partner is too needy, to drop them. I suppose this is where genuine love, understanding, and communication come in, and possibly the lacking factors that might have contributed to anxious attachment. In all, my self-awareness has heightened and I am less emotionally reliant on others, however I am not sure that I am closer to attracting the kind of complementary partner that is described in the book. In this regard, I feel the author should have spent more time discussing just ways that one can reframe one’s interactions and strategies for the individual to use with a potential partner, friend, colleague, child, pet, etc. versus rely heavily on finding successful healthy romantic attachment; this would have been more practical because we form many, many relationships over our lifetime, and the author could have spent more time on the common denominator in all of them: the individual.

This book is a decent/okay resource. I'm sure when it was first published, it was a lot more appropriate for its time, but I feel it no longer serves the original niche. I read this book after having read Polysecure, and I'm glad I read them in that order. This is a good supplemental read to Polysecure if you can read between the lines and look past the obvious issues.To be clear, this book is NOT inclusive, and the gendered language feels very forced. I got some helpful information from it, but not nearly as much as I could have. The author does give a disclaimer about her book and research being very Western society focused, but the more I read, the more I felt the disclaimer doesn't excuse the extreme lack of inclusivity.That being said, I would still recommend reading it after reading Polysecure.

An eye opening book if you're struggling.