Insecure in Love Quotes

“In a room full of people, it makes sense to help the person who’s suffering the most, the one we know best, the one we’re most capable of helping. Sometimes that person is you…”
― Leslie Becker-Phelps, Insecure in Love: How Anxious Attachment Can Make You Feel Jealous, Needy, and Worried and What You Can Do About It

“One final caution: Don’t be too quick to move past a “nice-but-boring” date. As Levine and Heller (2010) note, sometimes people equate their attachment-related anxiety with the feeling of being in love. When someone is comfortable to be with and seems accepting of you, your attachment-related anxiety might not be triggered. So it’s entirely possible that the “nice person” you met might be a great fit for you—despite the lack of immediate “excitement.”
― Leslie Becker-Phelps, Insecure in Love: How Anxious Attachment Can Make You Feel Jealous, Needy, and Worried and What You Can Do About It

“Some children perceive their parents as inconsistently available. It could be because the parents are unavoidably focused on pressing life situations or on their own emotional needs. The child’s inherent sensitivity is also a factor. Whatever the reason, children who come to question whether their parents are available are extremely upset even by the thought of their parents not being there for them. This is characteristic of a preoccupied attachment style.”
― Leslie Becker-Phelps, Insecure in Love: How Anxious Attachment Can Make You Feel Jealous, Needy, and Worried and What You Can Do About It

“Love yourself before you love someone else.”
― Leslie Becker-Phelps, Insecure in Love: How Anxious Attachment Can Make You Feel Jealous, Needy, and Worried and What You Can Do About It

“Some children grow up with parents whi have their own strong attachment issues: they experience their parents as sometimes emotionally available, sometimes scared, and sometimes even scary. This variation is confusing and frightening, and these children are unable to find a way to consistently meet their attachment needs. They don’t find solace in either deactivating (trying to go it alone) or hyperactivating (reaching out for attention and acceptance), so they attempt to use both kinds of strategies in a disorganized way. This creates a chaotic and confusing pattern in relationships known as the fearful style of attachment.”
― Leslie Becker-Phelps, Insecure in Love: How Anxious Attachment Can Make You Feel Jealous, Needy, and Worried and What You Can Do About It

“You must allow yourself to let down your defenses and experience vulnerability within a caring relationship. Then you’ll need to develop the inner resilience to continue reaching out even after you feel hurt by your new love (which will happen eventually in any close relationship”
― Leslie Becker-Phelps, Insecure in Love: How Anxious Attachment Can Make You Feel Jealous, Needy, and Worried and What You Can Do About It

“While some children are preoccupied with trying to get and keep their parents’ attention, others give up trying to connect. As Bowlby (1961) explained, after a child’s protests go repeatedly unanswered, or are mostly responded to harshly, the child experiences despair. Then, when he finally gives up all hope of being reassured and protected, he detaches—attempting to deactivate his attachment system by shutting down his emotions and his need for a caregiver—and becomes extremely self-reliant. As an adult, he is unlikely to experience the closeness that comes with romantic relationships. This characterizes the dismissing style of attachment.”
― Leslie Becker-Phelps, Insecure in Love: How Anxious Attachment Can Make You Feel Jealous, Needy, and Worried and What You Can Do About It

“Just as you would attend to a hurt child by being nurturing, it is extremely helpful to approach yourself in a compassionate manner.”
― Leslie Becker-Phelps, Insecure in Love: How Anxious Attachment Can Make You Feel Jealous, Needy, and Worried and What You Can Do About It

“It helps to remember that emotions are part of being human, even when they are painful. It also helps to be patient with yourself; learning to befriend your emotions can be a long-term project and a skill that you will have to practice for the rest of your life.”
― Leslie Becker-Phelps, Insecure in Love: How Anxious Attachment Can Make You Feel Jealous, Needy, and Worried and What You Can Do About It

“Confront the dark parts of yourself, and work to banish them with illumination and forgiveness. Your willingness to wrestle with your demons will cause your angels to sing. Use the pain as fuel, as a reminder of your strength.”
― Leslie Becker-Phelps, Insecure in Love: How Anxious Attachment Can Make You Feel Jealous, Needy, and Worried and What You Can Do About It

“Feeling emotional pain and understanding how you maintain problematic patterns do not tell you how to be different or automatically establish healthier patterns. This has to develop over time with new experiences.”
― Leslie Becker-Phelps, Insecure in Love: How Anxious Attachment Can Make You Feel Jealous, Needy, and Worried and What You Can Do About It

“Children are motivated to stay close to their parents, whom they perceive as a safe haven. And children are motivated to explore the world away from their parents, whom they perceive as a secure base. When all goes well, children learn that they can have closeness and autonomy.”
― Leslie Becker-Phelps, Insecure in Love: How Anxious Attachment Can Make You Feel Jealous, Needy, and Worried and What You Can Do About It

“I will explain in chapter 5 how together, as compassionate self-awareness, these two processes can help you open up to reassurance and acceptance by others, to feel their support even when you are alone (as mental representations of attachment figures), and to essentially be an available attachment figure to yourself.”
― Leslie Becker-Phelps, Insecure in Love: How Anxious Attachment Can Make You Feel Jealous, Needy, and Worried and What You Can Do About It

“To nurture a healthier way of connecting in romantic relationships, consider how your current or future relationship might be better if you had a more secure style of attachment. As you think about this, however, it’s important for you to know that you do not need to be the model of secure attachment to find happiness. But whatever style works for you, it will probably need to be closer to a secure one on the attachment-related anxiety and attachment-related avoidance dimensions. Fortunately, as I’ve mentioned, you can develop this more secure style as an adult. This process is what psychologists call “earned security.” There are two basic pathways, and they intertwine. First, you must look to the outside world. You need to begin by developing a relationship with at least one emotionally available attachment figure. If not a partner, then you can start with someone else, such as a family member, friend, clergyperson, or therapist. It could even be God. Remember, attachment figures are those you feel you can turn to in times of distress and who are supportive of your attempts to expand your personal horizons. The more you experience feeling accepted and protected, the more you will believe that you are worthy of love and that capable others can be available to truly love and comfort you—giving you some “earned security.” The second approach to developing “earned security” is to directly nurture a part of yourself that makes you more aware of your experiences and to respond to those experiences in a more accepting and compassionate way.”
― Leslie Becker-Phelps, Insecure in Love: How Anxious Attachment Can Make You Feel Jealous, Needy, and Worried and What You Can Do About It

“Dismissing people approach their sexualities in the same distant and self-protective way as they engage in relationships in general. Because physical or sexual contact can weaken their defenses, many are uncomfortable with connecting through touch, such as with hugs or gentle caressing. They might abstain from sex, sometimes choosing to rely on masturbation. Or they might remain emotionally distant by limiting sex to one-night stands or short-term relationships that are only superficially close. When they are in intimate relationships, they tend not to be affectionate and may be emotionally disengaged during sex. This can leave anxious partners feeling unattractive and unworthy of love.”
― Leslie Becker-Phelps, Insecure in Love: How Anxious Attachment Can Make You Feel Jealous, Needy, and Worried and What You Can Do About It

“A simple reading of these styles will leave you with the impression that the only “good” way to have a healthy relationship is to have a secure attachment style. This impression would be wrong. The “best” way to attach is to have a romantic relationship that makes you happy. If you tend toward having a preoccupied style of attachment and are married to someone who also has that tendency, but the two of you are happy—then trust in that. Enjoy it. Your style and life circumstance are right for you. As it happens, one significant way (but not the only way) of finding happiness in your relationship when you are unhappy is to move toward a more secure style. But as you evaluate your life and what you might want to change, it is important that you keep your eye on the real “prize”: happiness in love.”
― Leslie Becker-Phelps, Insecure in Love: How Anxious Attachment Can Make You Feel Jealous, Needy, and Worried and What You Can Do About It

“People also have a working model of others—an expectation of whether or not others will be emotionally available to them. To the extent that they expect that others won’t be there for them, they feel uncomfortable with getting close and want to avoid it. This is what psychologists call attachment-related avoidance. There are some people who are so sure that others won’t be emotionally available that they decide to be fully self-reliant. They do everything they can to try to keep themselves from feeling the need to depend on someone else. It’s as if their attachment system or homing device is stuck in the “off” position.”
― Leslie Becker-Phelps, Insecure in Love: How Anxious Attachment Can Make You Feel Jealous, Needy, and Worried and What You Can Do About It

“The working model of self is your sense of how worthy or unworthy you feel of being loved. As you might imagine, when you feel unworthy of love, you also fear being rejected and struggle with attachment-related anxiety. You might recognize this as anxiety—a feeling of tension or nervousness. But you could also feel it as other distressing emotions, such as sadness, loneliness, or anger. Adults and children with a strong sense of unworthiness live as though their attachment system, or homing device for an attachment figure, is stuck in the fully “on” position. If you identify with this, you may be constantly in search of reassurance from an attachment figure and chronically feel alone, rejected, or in fear of rejection. And even at the less extreme levels of attachment-related anxiety, people can struggle with feeling somewhat inadequate, and fear being unable to emotionally handle rejection. This book is designed to help you overcome such distress, whatever your level of attachment-related anxiety.”
― Leslie Becker-Phelps, Insecure in Love: How Anxious Attachment Can Make You Feel Jealous, Needy, and Worried and What You Can Do About It

“He explained that they are designed to keep a “stronger and/or wiser” person—an attachment figure—close so that the child can survive and feel safe. He also offered the revolutionary notion that in order for children to thrive, their attachment figures should be warm and emotionally available (Bowlby, 1961, 1989). This idea was in direct conflict with what mothers were taught at that time. The prevailing wisdom was that a sensitive, nurturing approach to childrearing would make children clingy and too dependent. Instead, mothers were encouraged to keep an objective, rational distance, even when their children were upset or ill (Johnson, 2008).”
― Leslie Becker-Phelps, Insecure in Love: How Anxious Attachment Can Make You Feel Jealous, Needy, and Worried and What You Can Do About It

“One important lesson that I’ve learned in doing therapy is that creating change is a bit like gardening. Just as a gardener doesn’t reach into a seed and pull out a plant, a therapist doesn’t reach into people and make them change. Rather, therapists provide people with what they need to grow. I listen to people, share my perceptions about them and their situation, offer compassion, and provide guidance. In response, they (hopefully) learn to see themselves differently; respond to themselves in new, more positive ways; feel encouraged to risk change (the unknown is always at least a little scary); and learn to be different. But all of this must happen at its own pace; it can be encouraged, but it cannot be forced.”
― Leslie Becker-Phelps, Insecure in Love: How Anxious Attachment Can Make You Feel Jealous, Needy, and Worried and What You Can Do About It

“—Guy Winch, PhD, author of Emotional First Aid and The Squeaky Wheel”
― Leslie Becker-Phelps, Insecure in Love: How Anxious Attachment Can Make You Feel Jealous, Needy, and Worried and What You Can Do About It

“Well, of course you’re struggling with that. The ways you are thinking and feeling make perfect sense.”
― Leslie Becker-Phelps, Insecure in Love: How Anxious Attachment Can Make You Feel Jealous, Needy, and Worried and What You Can Do About It

“When others treat you in a way that fits with your self-perceptions, you feel validated and the relationship feels comfortably familiar, even if it is painful. You are also more likely to continue the relationship”
― Leslie Becker-Phelps, Insecure in Love: How Anxious Attachment Can Make You Feel Jealous, Needy, and Worried and What You Can Do About It

“Adults experience similar intense anxiety and painful sadness when the existence of their primary relationships (and the love those relationships offer) feels threatened”
― Leslie Becker-Phelps, Insecure in Love: How Anxious Attachment Can Make You Feel Jealous, Needy, and Worried and What You Can Do About It

“better. Then you’ll be in a better position to nurture”
― Leslie Becker-Phelps, Insecure in Love: How Anxious Attachment Can Make You Feel Jealous, Needy, and Worried and What You Can Do About It

“As with almost everything else in life, you learn about relationships through experience. And since your first serious relationship began as an infant with your caretakers, that is where you began learning about relationships.”
― Leslie Becker-Phelps, Insecure in Love: How Anxious Attachment Can Make You Feel Jealous, Needy, and Worried and What You Can Do About It