​Attachment Theory: Underneath the Problematic Pattern
The attachment view of love gives us a way of understanding toxic patterns. It guides us back to the nature of our childhood experiences of being cared for, encouraged, and protected. Our early experiences of these fundamental needs are stored in unconscious or implicit memory and beliefs about ourselves and others. When these experiences and beliefs cause us to expect to be rejected, abandonned, or hurt by others, and/or to doubt that we have value or are lovable, we may find we have an avoidant or anxious "attachment style" as we seek love and security and defend against hurt and vulnerability in our relationships. 

As adults, we may consciously want calm, loving, cooperative discussions in which our thoughts and feelings are met with understanding and acceptance. But our desires and plans can be derailed when when unconscious anxieties and beliefs take over. When the child in each of us jumps into the fray with fears about being hurt (e.g., neglected, rejected, abandonned, shamed, controlled, ignored, betrayed, misunderstood) exchanges between lovers can evolve so fast and become so chaotic we can’t catch what’s happening underneath the heated words or the withdrawal. We can’t see how we could react differently or change the pattern we’re trapped in. 

But if we slow things down we can see the underlying attachment needs—the need to feel understood, accepted, loved, and supported. The powerful emotions that accompany these needs, and the ways we defend against feeling rejected or judged, often arise suddenly. When triggered, our attachment needs explode a conversation into an argument fueled by underlying, unrecognized issues of security and survival—whether the triggering of these issues results in raised voices or withdrawal, heated emotions or numbness. Caught behind our defenses we cease to be open and available to each other.  

Below, I suggested an approach to becoming more aware of what we are defending against or what is getting in the way of the harmony we want. But sometimes we can't figure out why we keep getting triggered and tripped up in reactions and patterns we don't want--and trying to consciously control or change our thoughts, feelings, and behavior doesn't work. Here, individual depth-oriented therapy can help uncover and heal unconsciously held, emotionally laden beliefs and fears that seem to defeat our conscious will to change.

While or after doing our own work to understand and heal ourselves, emotionally focused couples therapy can help us build new patterns of interaction into our relationship that support secure attachment and intimacy. 

Emotional Responsiveness: The Key to a Lasting Love for Couples
Dr. Sue Johnson, who developed Emotionally Focused Therapy, described emotional availablity as having three main components:

1. Accessibility: Can I reach you? Can I be reached?
This means being emotionally and physically available, staying open to your partner even when you feel insecure or defensive. It often means being willing to struggle with your emotions (or your numbness) that make you want to either fight or withdraw so that they are not so overwhelming. It may mean learning what you each need to feel open and to return from disconnection.

2.Responsiveness: Can I rely on you to respond to me emotionally?
Mutual responsiveness is grounded in respect and tolerance for your differences that eases the defensive need to be right and supports the desire to understand each other. It means accepting your partner’s feelings and perspectives and sending clear signals of comfort, care, and validation when your partner needs them.

3.Engagement: Do I know you will value me and stay close?
The dictionary defines engaged as being absorbed, attracted, pulled, captivated, pledged, involved. Emotional engagement here means the special kind of attention we give to a loved one. Prioritizing time together without distractions, affectionate touch, words of care and appreciation, and expressing interest in each other’s feelings and thoughts are examples of what partners often talk about as being emotionally present.  

However, we each receive and give love differently. So, engagement also means knowing what makes each other feel loved, as well as what is called each partner’s “love language”—how each of us expresses love. We may find speaking our partner’s love language difficult or may find feeling loved difficult if they don’t speak ours. Being responsibly engaged (able to respond to each other’s needs) may mean becoming bilingual in your love language.

One way to remember these three aspects of emotional responsiveness is through an acronym: A.R.E. (accessible, responsive, engaged) and the questions:
Are you able to be with me right now?
Am I able to be with you right now?

​Becoming Accessible
When we want to be heard, it’s crucial to understand that communication is a 2-way street. If either one of you is inaccessible (whether too hot or too cold), it’s best to delay or back off and take a break. 

Oops! A way of signaling the need to take a break is for one of you (whoever is noticing the conversation reeling out of control or beyond resolution) to say “Oops!” as a non-blaming signal that a break and time to regroup is needed.
Returning to connection starts by connecting with and understanding your reactions to your partner.

Getting at what is going on in you: Take some deep belly breaths; journal, draw, or walk out your upset letting the flaring charge of energy release from your body. In journaling, write to the prompts:
What I’m really upset about is . . .
I can’t be accessible, responsive, and engaged with my partner right now because I’m . . .
To be able to reconnect I need . . .
​
The important benefit of journaling or drawing is that it captures and contains your upset, holding it still so that it’s not cycling repeatedly in your head and you can look at it, gaining a bit of separation from it and sometimes a different perspective. It can be difficult to make yourself do this, whether you’re feeling some variation of angry, hurt, scared, or guilty—or a combination.
It’s natural that these emotions, once aroused, don’t want to let go of you. The thought-spiral they cycle into is fundamentally defensive and protective of you (and themselves)—even self-blame (e.g., I never get it right . . .) or catastrophic thinking (e.g., they’ll leave and I’ll be alone the rest of my life . . .) is building justifications for you’re a habitual sense of self and your reactions.

Before re-engaging it’s important to ask yourself the A.R.E. question: Am I able to be accessible, responsive, and engaged now? If the question isn’t a clear yes, is there something you need from your partner to create the emotional safety you need to be present and engaged?

Returning to Connection

​Right timing: is essential in having discussions that tend to morph into a conflictive pattern of interaction.
Before you talk about the issue again, this might mean asking your partner if they are feeling open to reengaging?

Starting with reassurances can contextualize the discussion in your love and commitment to one another. This might include reassuring each other of your love, desire to understand, willingness to listen, commitment to staying.

​Structuring the conversation: This can include “rules”:
Who talks first and for how long without interruption.
What kind of response you want or don’t want (e.g., no blame; understand but not correct or criticize; listen and care/reassure without trying to fix).
Listen with attentiveness (if you start thinking about what you want to say, take a breath and return to listening, letting yourself feel what your partner is communicating)

Remembering to use the “Oops” to stop yourselves from falling down the slippery slope into old patterns of interaction. And apply compassion with ourselves and one another--recognizing that old patterns will tend to crop up when we are emotionally, mentally, or physically stressed or beleagured beyond our capacity to cope. 

Text and image by Rebecca Livingston Pottenger 

​First, a few words about the feminine principle, considered here as a set of inherent human qualities that are also inherent in the ecological, interdependent nature of life.
 
It might be better to relate to the feminine as yin and masculine as yang, distinct from culturally contrived gender assignments that compromise our human wholeness. In Taoism, yin is related to night, moon, that which is hidden, and matter in its liquid/fluid and heavy/solid forms. Its movement is inward toward beingness and presence rather than doingness. Yin is attentive, working without force through allowing, accepting, and integrating. These qualities are mirrored in Barbara Stevens Sullivan’s description of the feminine as a psychological principle functioning in all life:
 
The dynamic feminine receptivity is found in creative play, “trying things out …without direction” leading to the “creation of new combinations of life’s elements, each combination being valued …for its existence, not comparatively…The central value of the dynamic feminine principle is Eros: the connections between individuals, the relationships that encircle our lives.” Whereas the masculine principle is goal-directed, toward achievements and perfection, seeking to transcend death and the limits of the body; the feminine “accepts the weight of the body…[including] the gruesome ills of the body and its ultimate death.”

​As the masculine/yang energies are focused on goal-directed doing, seeking transcendence and perfection guided by the mind, feminine energies are immersive, engaging and guided by the whole self, including the fluidity of thought and emotion, the weighty limits and needs of the body, and one’s interconnectedness with life. Whereas yang turns to logic creating distinctions (this not that), abstract equations, assumptions, and predictions—yin creates grounded, embodied, experiential knowledge, embracing a wholeness (this, that, and the other) that “includes imperfection and that blurs edges and differentiation.”
 
The feminine and masculine seen in the Yin/Yang mandala are shown as two interpenetrating parts of a whole, whether a whole being or the whole of nature. Without yin energies, masculine yang becomes too self-centered and aggressive. Without yang energies, the feminine becomes too passive, too yielding and too accommodating. When integrated assertive yang can be softened by the relational, receptive and inclusive understanding of the other. The protective, aggressive nature of anger can morph from blame and retribution to a fierce determination to correct injustice, to find remedy. Caring for others can be mediated by the assertiveness to recognize and speak to one’s own needs, to actively pursue one’s own dreams, and the ability to say NO

​The Unavoidable Nature of  Interdependence
 
Recent scientific research is providing the biological strata that undergirds the psychodynamic theory that says we only come to consciousness and evolve psychologically (including ego, persona, and the relationship between the conscious mind and the unconscious) through relationships. One of the most salient effects of our relational experiences is on our ability to form secure attachments with others and a secure relationship with ourself. This theory presupposes the idea that we effect one another. Scientific research is developing an understanding of the heart-brain axis, and the heart’s role in the bi-directional relationship not only between body and psyche, but also between the self, the environment, and others. Quoting from a 2026 research review by clinical physiotherapist Dr. Andres Palantzas and cardiovascular researcher Dr. Shady Abohashem:
       
     "It is suggested that the body’s magnetic field, particularly the heart’s and brain’s, encode and transmit emotional information. Different emotional states generate distinct biomagnetic fields that may reflect the body’s metabolic state. Positive emotions (love, compassion, appreciation) generate coherent HRV [heart rate variability] patterns, radiating ordered electromagnetic signals, while negative emotions (fear, anger, anxiety) result in incoherent signals and energy loss. Among those, fear has the largest bio-field signature. The heart’s magnetic field, being the strongest in the body, can influence nearby nervous systems, enabling heart-to-heart synchronization and physiological coupling. EEG–ECG studies confirm cross-individual rhythm synchronization, even without direct contact, and proximity can allow one person’s ECG to register in another’s EEG. . . .
When individuals are in similar emotional states, their magnetic fields become more coherent and can spread contagiously, influencing others and leading to synchronized responses. Mediated by the earth’s magnetic field, this phenomenon can scale globally, explaining why mass emotional events (e.g., 9/11) are detectable in geomagnetic data."
 
Palantzas and Abohashem found that empathy has been shown to facilitate “magnetic field interactions” that amplify interpersonal connection and coherence. Compassion is consistently identified as a strong emotional state, capable of enhancing coherence among individuals and groups, while also strengthening the effects of an individual’s fields on another’s physiology. Nonverbal-compassionate intent has been shown to induce measurable relaxation and HRV changes in recipients. Clinical data report better outcomes when physicians display empathy, further confirming the ability of magnetic fields to transmit emotions and intent while also highlighting the importance of empathy in clinical practice.
 
All this is to say that our emotional states are automatically—biologically—impacted by others. We are not independent, not only our actions but our state of being affects those around us.

​Patriarchy, the Devaluation of the Feminine Principle and Severed Wholeness
 
We have inherited a culture that has overvalued independence, sacrificing interdependence to fantasies of the “self-made man” and the idea that integrity means that your personality should not change to accommodate others. To get ahead in life, you need to know who you are and prioritize your own agenda. Early in American history this can seen in the belief America’s expansion was its divinely ordained “manifest destiny,” justifying the decimation of native lands and peoples.
 
American patriarchal culture tends to be hyper-yang: stressing achievement, goal-oriented, competitive individualism and independence. These attitudes are reflected in the idea in psychology that the ideal, healthy self is self-sufficient, self-reliant, self-determined, self-assertive, logical (not emotional), and immune to the effects of others. In patriarchy, the ideal self is a nonrelational, masculine self, devaluing, and in the extreme absent of, feminine inclusive, receptive, and relational qualities. In the social and political arena this can be seen in the campaign slogan “Fuck your feelings.”

​Here we are talking about the impact of cultural—patriarchal—values and norms on what we expect, who and how we assume we need to be, and what we should fear about and in ourselves.
​
Historically, women’s acceptable roles have been those related to homemaking, childrearing, and caregiving. Although this may be changing, its effects can still be seen, with many women attempting to fulfill (or being burdened with) the expectation that we can do it all: taking care of others—whether intimate partners or children—and working or pursuing a career.
 
In the workplace women are often expected to fulfill female-associated duties and/or to prove they do not have “feminine foibles” (aren’t emotional, can be “hard-nosed” competitors and supervisors) and must out-masculine the men, because feminine relational attributes are not valued in the competitive workplace. 

​In patriarchy women are left to suffer a culturally-imposed dilemma in which our feminine relationality is in conflict with having the hyper-individualistic, competitive sense of self a male-dominated world sees as legitimate.
 
Co-dependence has as its partner in anti-dependence, which thwarts interdependence. That our contemporary world tends to collude spiritually and psychologically with an anti-dependent, hyper-masculine ethic is exposed in the beliefs “you are 100% responsible for your reality” and “I’m not responsible for your happiness.” Neither are true. If you are 100% responsible and I am a part of your reality, then I am 100% caused by you (and vice versa). This seems to me to be an attempt to deny both that we control very little in life and that we are inherently interdependent with both human and non-human others. Humans need to be responsible (response-able) in caring and supportive ways with one another and with the nonhuman world. 

​Intimate Relationships: An Interdependent Cauldron of Growth
 
The experience of secure attachment in an intimate relationship can be depicted as overlapping circles, with each circle representing a person:
 
In this dynamic both partners are changed by the relationship as it requires responsiveness to and care for the other, becoming aware of and being responsible for (able to respond to) one’s effect on the other. The relationship has a paradoxical effect on the self, making one both more and less one’s familiar self as it requires taking up less space in some ways and stretching in others. It can contribute to an authentic sense of our importance in our effect on others and it can challenge and curtail our self-importance in the face of the importance of the other.
 
This, I think, is the dynamic that women who describe themselves as codependent want. This is different from insecure attachment where the ego is overwhelmed by the fear of shame and rejection and trust in one’s own value is absent. These are conditions that drive the need to consume, control, or fuse with the other to defend against rejection and shame. Here, we might say that the relationship itself triggers reactive, unwanted but uncontrollable feelings and patterns of behavior as unconscious (repressed) shame and fear of abandonment acts autonomously to scatter the ego’s best laid intentions. 

A Note About the Aftermath of Leaving an Abusive Relationship
 
I have found that for women leaving an abusive relationship there can be a layer of grief around identity loss that needs to be cared for—which I experienced in leaving my own such relationship. Being abused mirrors and is consonant with a woman’s identity that carries the shame of worthlessness. Abuse can relieve the dissonance where being loved is at odds with shame and self-estrangement. As punishment, abuse relieves the burden of shame.
This can create a cycle in which shamefulness for being abused causes a woman to subject herself to more abuse (including the self-abuse of an inner voice that shames her for being abused). As such shame is a crucial element to address as a shamed woman heals from abuse.
 
Shame, I find, disrupts a woman’s connection with and trust in her own inner experience, needs, and desires, creating an empty inner deadness, or sense of an absence of self. Being abused is a visceral experience of one’s self-ness; an experience of emotional and/or physical pain in which the woman knows herself to be deeply, exquisitely, excruciatingly alive and real. Turning away from an abusive relationship can create a deep sense of grief for the loss of that self, leaving one in a frightening absence of identity.
 
Emotions and unconscious psychological wounds are held and expressed in the body—in our posture, facial expressions, the way we move, our tone of voice. To escape intolerable emotions and bodily distress—wanting to override, deny, or fleeing into a fantasies of spiritual dominion over the physical—we dissociate from our bodies. In Bone: Dying Into Life, Marion Woodman writes: “You think of yourself—light, fast, free—free of earth, free of bondage to your body. In your 'perfect' body, you are in control, addicted to the light that keeps you out of body. You're a swan maiden, addicted to wings, addicted to spirit.”
 
But the body is living our life. Dominant American culture’s rejection of yin energies that move inward, valuing inner emotional and bodily felt experience fosters a mind–body split, alienation from the body, and distrust of embodied experience and wisdom. For both men and women, our lives and our dreams are birthed and become real, express, interact, change, and die through our body. The body is continually tracking, absorbing, remembering, and processing information from our inner and outer environment beyond what we are conscious of. Dissociating from the body and the unconscious does not cause the body or the unconscious to cease to exist. Rather, in place of our lost wholeness, we pursue transcendence over the realities of embodied experience and the body’s limitations and mortality in what Marion Woodman called an “addiction to perfection.”

The Trauma of Hyper-Individualism to the Authentic Self
 
We are living with the social, political, economic, and environmental consequences of American patriarchal culture that prizes some men over other men, men over women, and “white” people over “non-whites,” but also yang energies subordinating and co-opting yin energies to support male anti-dependence and a competitive, power-driven, capitalistic hierarchy. Deeply engrained, institutional, and transgenerational forces have assigned females the feminine, defined as the relational, receptive, emotional, and sacrificial aspects of human nature—qualities devalued in a competitive, power-driven, hyper-individualistic patriarchal paradigm. Such that we have the aphorism “Behind every great man is a woman”—and quite possibly a woman who in our contemporary world would be afraid she is co-dependent.
 
For women, social survival (safety and belonging) often means that other-oriented, receptive, relational qualities are split off from yang self-directed assertive energies, with these selfless qualities viewed not as part of having a self, but as an indication that one is lacking a sufficient sense of self. 
 
The oppressive harm this does to women—causing them to pathologize ourselves, silencing our authentic voices, invisibilizing our needs and desires, depleting our vitality and agency—is mated with the dissociative damage this hyper-individualistic cultural paradigm does to men. To be a man means to inhabit the masculine qualities of the psyche: assertive/aggressive, individualistic (nonrelational), logical (non-emotional), and assertive/aggressive (which deems anger and lust as the only “manly” emotions). For men the price paid is anti-dependence—an avoidant attachment style—that represses and demeans as feminine, weak, and unmanly vulnerable emotions, such as sadness and fear, creating an inability to be intimate with one’s inner emotional life, let alone be responsive and emotionally vulnerable with another person.
 
Finding What Is Authentic for You
 
The capacity for self-sacrifice is important in a materialistic and individualist “me” culture. Sacrifice means to make sacred—to create a situation in which divine or transcendent energies can enter, connecting us to one another and to something larger than ourselves.
 
It is interesting to note that male and female self-sacrifice seem to have different tenors. In men it seems most often to be praised (and even expected) as associated with heroism, violence, and the pursuit of victory—such as in men risking their lives in war. In these contexts, self-sacrifice seems to become fixate on contests for power, where individual or group self-protection requires the defeat or domination of the other. Patriarchy dictates that this type of sacrifice makes a man more manly. Caught in patriarchal shadow are the men who choose to sacrifice outer power over others and instead prize being and becoming (as a stay-at-home parent, for example). These men sacrifice their professional desires for the benefit of children or their spouse—as women are often expected to do in narrow gender expectations and roles informed by patriarchy. Along these lines, the American military has defended its ranks against the infiltration of women. Might the prevalence of the rape of women in the military reflect a need to reinforce this ethic and norm of violence and power over rather than engagement with as an exclusively male precinct? Might bad behavior toward women be a violent response to the vulnerability of emotions such as sadness and fear?
 
I think what we see enacted here is a visceral process of projective identification, forcing women to carry the emotional and physical vulnerability men cannot bear. In projective identification, a person attempts to rid him or herself of unconscious inner distress by projecting this distress outward, into another person. The projection takes place in actions or words that cause the other person to feel what the person projecting feels but must keep repressed and unconscious. Projection allows us to get rid of what we don’t like or can’t deal within ourselves. These dynamics show up in American culture in a host of ways, including men who project their fear of powerlessness or inferiority and sense of shame onto others, objectifying women through the use of degrading pornography, and in racialized settings in which white people mistakenly assume the inherent inferiority of non-whites.

​Self-sacrifice and other qualities of relational caring do not necessarily indicate a lack of a sense of self but rather can suggest a sense of self that is stable, flexible, and inherently related to and caring about one’s environment. This ability to accommodate or adjust to other beings can reflect an authentic expression of the heart’s biologically based understanding of its inherent connection to others and the environment.
 
To embody relational, caring qualities as authentic aspects of oneself can be complicated for women by personal and cultural attachment trauma. Here, there can be a feeling of dread should one speak one’s truth or not please others. I’ve experienced this as existential dread. The feeling is as if I don’t do X, then something unbearable (and sometimes unnamable) will happen. In other words, it can feel like I’ll die, even though I know I won’t and I can’t explain logically why I feel such dread. This feeling can be part of the compulsion--as distinguished from choice—to sacrifice oneself, deny one’s own needs and desires, or be silent.
 
As a compulsion dread arises as a defense against cultural and personal attachment trauma—as protective barriers shielding us from unbearable experiences of rejection, abandonment, or shame. In this “faun” reaction to trauma, the hope is that by pleasing others one can assure one’s psychological safety and viability that would be lost if one showed one’s true self.
So fundamentally, I think, the primary wound that shame inflicts is fear of ourselves. What would it be like to not be afraid of being who I am?  To be at home in my body? I like Rainier Maria Rilke’s suggestion:
 
Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and  . . . try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.
 
A Few Words About Neediness
 
Especially in women, when it seems that someone else’s every want is a need, and my own needs are always merely wants, self-sacrifice can become a denial of needs leading to neediness. This connects with the label of co-dependent in that emotional neglect or unresponsiveness from a partner (or parent) is an expression of anti-dependence.
 
Anti- and co-dependence can be considered insecure attachment styles. As male-bodied children learn not to be hyper-independent so as not to be vulnerable (have emotional needs) and thus be “sissies” and female-bodied children learn to repress their needs and the assertiveness/anger with which they voice them in order to serve the needs of others.

​“Neediness” is the result of accumulated unmet or frustrated needs. We become needy when we deny our own needs, afraid to ask others to support, consider, or prioritize our legitimate need to feel cared for. Men are rarely accused of being “needy,” perhaps because American patriarchal culture cultivates in them an unconscious assumption of their entitlement to being accommodated, or they have simply learned to state or do what they want without much consideration of others, too often leaving women—trained to silence and accept neglect of their needs in a state of neediness.
 
None of us can realistically “do it all ourselves.” As the minister Joyce Meyers once said, “If we were meant to do it by ourselves, there would only be one of us.”
 
Neediness often arises as a result of relationships that lack mutual caring or reciprocity. This can occur in a relationship with someone who is unwilling to give to us or who would give to us, if only we would ask. But for women who have learned to survive by subordinating their needs to those of others, to ask means to be vulnerable to rejection, which our compulsive giving and denying of our own needs may be defending against in the first place. 

Images by Rebecca Livingston Pottenger ©2026