5 coaching tips for the Anxious to be successful in dating!

People that have the anxious attachment style feel they are usually at the mercy of the person that chooses to date them. It’s understandable to believe that because your emotions usually go into overdrive after every successful date with that special person. The magazines and all of the self-help books don’t help in your journey cause you to act in a way that isn’t authentic to your nature. The books usually tell you to play it safe and don’t show too much emotion in the relationship. So what happens is you continuously attract those individuals that you need to reject, avoidants. Avoidant attachment styles will enjoy the aloofness you are trying to project, because that’s their style. As soon as you flip the script on them and bring out your true personality of wanting to get close, they will run for the hills.

In this coaching session, we will give 5 tips that will help you feel empowered on your next date.

Acknowledge and accept your true relationship needs. – You are who you are. If you clearly understand what needs you have an any relationship, it shouldn’t take long to decipher if your partner will be able to meet those needs. If he/she can’t, move on.
If you recognize your partner has an avoidant attachment style, cut them loose. You will never be satisfied and will expend a lot of negative energy trying to do so.
Be your authentic self and use effective communication. – The play it cool attitude, the let’s just let the chips fall where they may mantra doesn’t work for you. Set your expectations up front, so there is no guesswork required.
Do the opposite! – Instead of thinking that every date you go on, he or she is “the one”, try dating several people without settling on one person very early on. This will allow you to evaluate partners more objectively and rule out those that can’t or won’t meet your needs.
Don’t overlook security. It may not be as exciting on the surface because there won’t be a lot of drama, but in the long run the relationship may be the most satisfying. So if you find a secure man/woman they may be a keeper.

By utilizing these 5 tips, you will empower yourself to be more successful in your dating life and will help you take your relationship to the next level.

Coach Keith

When it comes to Attachment – Opposites don’t Attract.

Have you ever noticed some of the articles in Essence Magazine, as well as countless others always ask the same question over and over, “Why do I keep falling for the same, unavailable, unemotional, unattached guy?” The complete opposite!

The problem, is when you have an anxious attachment style it’s almost unavoidable. There are three reasons for this.

There are just more of them around because they get over partners very quickly. An avoidant attachment styled man will usually go through multiple marriages.
People with secure attachment styles are usually content with their marital situation,so you won’t find many of those around.
A person with an avoidant style won’t date another avoidant. They already know the relationship is going nowhere for both parties, so why bother.

Even though, it’s almost inevitable that you as an anxious attachment style will find someone who is an avoidant attachment style, doesn’t mean there is no hope for you. You just have to be aware when your emotions start to kick in gear. Here are some reasons why you should be cautious.

YOU (Anxious Style) THEY(Avoidant Style)

Want closeness and intimacy.	Want to maintain some distance emotional and or physical.
Sensitive to any signs of rejection.	Send mixed signals that can come across as rejecting.
Can’t tell them what you need from the relationship.	Can’t read your cues (verbal/nonverbal) and want to.
Need reassurance and to feel loved.	Puts you down as a way to deactivate their attachment style.
Need to know where you stand.	Prefers to keep you guessing. Even if the relationship is serious, questions will linger.

So for all of you anxious people out there, how long are you are going to program yourself to fall for individuals that more than likely won’t make you happy.

If you have an anxious style, I would love to hear what you do to minimize your emotional rollercoaster, while dating.

Material taken from Attached. The New Science of Adult Attachment and How It Can Help You Find and Keep Love by Amir Levine M.D.

If you’re partner is anxious..reassurance is the key to Happiness!

Emily,who possessed an anxious attachment style, met an aspiring actor named David. She fell for him very quickly, but throughout the relationship, he gave her mixed reviews about wanting to be together. The lack of reassurance unnerved Emily and she began to obsess about him. She would constantly check on him and would spend hours tracking his whereabouts online and creating fake personas in order to chat with him.

Once she realized that he was actually the bad dude that she was trying to investigate, it took her a long time to leave the situation.

Why you may ask? Because of her attachment style.

Someone that has the anxious attachment style tends to be hypersensitive to anything that might threaten any intimate relationship. When that occurs, you will tend to activate strategies that will get, or remain close to your partner.

Some of those strategies are:

Thinking about your mate any and all times of the day.
Putting them on a pedestal:underestimating your talents
Believing this is your only chance at love (i.e. I will never find another person like him/her or I will end up alone.
Even though you’re unhappy now, they will eventually turn it around, so I better hang in there.
He/She can change.

These thought processes can cause you to live your life in the danger zone in terms of relationships. Constantly living in this zone can cause you to behave in such away that can be toxic not only to you, but also your partner.

You will try and get their attention by acting in ways like:

Staying in constant contact by e-mail, text, or simply running into them at odd places and times (i.e. stalking)
Withdrawing
Keeping score
Acting hostile
Threatening to leave
Manipulation
Trying to make him/her feel jealous

If you are dating someone that possesses these characteristics and you are very interested in them, don’t mess with their heads early in the relationship. Reassurance is the key. You must be attuned to their needs in the early stages of dating otherwise you will expend more energy trying to maintain a sense of normalcy.

Has anyone dated someone that had an anxious attachment style? What things did you do to reassure that you were committed to the relationship?

In our next blog on Attachment style, we will explore why the anxious is attracted to the avoider!

Coach Keith

Information about this blog comes from Attached – The New Science of Adult Attachment and How it Can Help You Find and Keep Love.

Men are the New Meat – Sex on College Campus!

In Saturday’s article Sex on Campus: She can Play that Game,Too painted a very disturbing, but believable picture about the type of relationships going on at our college campuses. On college campuses, men now, are nothing, but hot meat to be used at the discretion of female co-eds who barely have time for relationships. But we aren’t doing anything to change it. The emotionless sex that we have been using on women for years is beginning to have negative impacts on type of relationships we have after college and is contributing to our delay in finding a suitable mate.

The “hook-up” culture as it’s called is being turned on its ear by the very women that have been objected to it.

Young female college students, who now outnumber men 4 to 3 on campus are now making their own “Booty Call” and the men are falling for it, thinking they have landed on Eden East. In reality, our men haven’t offered a more desirable alternative. So women are now trying to do something about it. They have decided to take something they can control, their career and education. And the numbers bear that out. According to the National Marriage Project in their study Knot Yet, the benefits and costs of Delaying Marriage, female college graduates see over a $18K increase in salary if they delay marriage until their 30s.

In the article, women claimed, “Even if they did meet someone they were interested in, some women said the logistics of a relationship were just too hard. Some described extracurricular commitments — running debate tournaments for local high school students, or organizing Model United Nations conferences — that took up 30 to 40 hours a week, and came on top of going to class, doing homework and, in the case of less-wealthy students, work-study jobs. Some relationships ended, or never got off the ground, simply because schedules didn’t align.

This is how women are feeling, about the men they meet.

Men are now the hunted one’s. Instead of waiting for him to call me. I am going get a little satisfaction.
Because your personality is so ___________ (insert whatever negative connotation you like) I am going to need to be drunk just to get with you and it certainly won’t be memorable.
You are so wishy-washy and indecisive, why would I waste my time-sharing my dreams and goals with you.
Since your main concern is just about achieving pleasure, I’ll oblige you just so you will leave me alone.
No substance is necessary. If you are “hot meat” and good in bed, that’s all I need.
Since you are emotionally attached, I can do that too.

In fact, one lady was so emotionally unattached she hadn’t realized she’d been raped until she shared her story for the writer of the Times. And this sort of this is going on all over the country. Duke University is toughening their sexual assault policy because of it.

If you are tired of this type of lifestyle of emotionless sex with a women that doesn’t really care to know you. You have to flip the script. This is what you need to do.

It’s time to tell the truth. You have been lying to the young women. Once you are sober, you are looking for a wife, but are weeding out the one’s willing to throw away sex.

According to the 2001-2002 Longitudinal Study on Adolescent Health, about 80 percent of young-adult men rate marriage as an “important” part of their life plan.
Work on your plan. Sure it may change over time, but since our young ladies are working hard on their unbalanced lives, they want to feel you are doing the same thing.
Get to know women’s personalities face-to-face. You can’t get a sense of how a young lady think and feels behind their tweets and Instagram posts.
You are more than just a piece of meat. You can say No, too.

What do you think? Are our college men the new meat?

Understanding your Attachment Style can solidify your relationship before it gets serious.

I know you may be wondering, “Why I should ask a baby about my attachment style?” Why should I even care. For one, it’s about awareness. Usually when we go into a relationship, it’s based on an initial attraction, or a certain chemistry. When we break up, we don’t often analyze the reason. If we do, it’s usually based on extremes. Either, I wasn’t good enough, pretty enough, sexy enough, or he or she just couldn’t handle what I was ready to give.

According to the book Attached. The New Science of Adult Attachment and How it Can Help You Find and Keep- Love by A. Levine and R. Heller, our brain assigns our partner the task of being our secure base, the person we use as an emotional anchor and safe haven, the one we turn to in time of need when our relationship becomes serious.

Not knowing your attachment style can help hurt your relationship in these ways:

Can positively or negatively impact being your best in the relationship.
Can influence how you feel about yourself, or the degree to which you believe in yourself and whether you will attempt to achieve your hopes and dreams.
Can help you remain emotionally and physically healthier and live longer.

If the partner’s you choose or if you are unavailable and not supportive over time, the relationship can truly be demoralizing and debilitating. It can stunt and/or stymie your growth for future relationships.

Since this blog is about strengthening relationship, I have attached the link to the survey by Dr. Chris Fraley that will provide insight to your attachment style. If you are dating or you want to be in a serious relationship, this will proof very insightful.

http://www.web-research-design.net/cgi-bin/crq/crq.pl

I took the test myself and fell in the “secure” category. I am sure PG is happy.

Coach Keith

How Attached are you really? Ask a Baby!

If you read my last blog titled How dependent are you? A case study!, you read the story of Tamera and Greg and how one was dependent upon the other. As Tamera continued to get close, he seemed to push her further away. She pushed him so far that even though they both loved each other, in the end it wasn’t going to work.

Everyone has what authors Amir Levine,M.D., and Rachel S.F. Heller,M.A. call an attachment style. The three attachment styles are THE SECURE, THE ANXIOUS & THE AVOIDANT.

As an adult you may know exactly who you are. If not, let’s go back in time by figuring out how you would’ve have acted as a baby.

Attachment styles were first defined by researchers observing the way babies usually( 9 to 18 months old) behaved during the strange situation test (a reunion with a parent after a stressful separation.

If you were the anxious baby you were extremely distressed when mommy left the room. When your mother returned, you would react ambivalently, you are happy to see her, but angry at the same time. You take longer to calm down, and even when you do, it is only temporary. A few seconds later, you angrily push mommy away, wriggle down and start crying again.

If you are the secure baby you are also visibly stressed when mommy leaves the room. When mommy returns, you are very happy and eager to greet her. Once in safety of her presence, you are quick to be reassured, calm down. and resume play activity.

If you are the avoidant baby when mommy leaves the room, you act as if nothing has happened. Upon her return, you remain unmoved, ignore her and continue to pay indifferently. This act of yours doesn’t truly tell the whole story. Inside you are neither calm or collected. In fact, your heart is just as elevated as the other two babies.

So which baby are you? Better yet, which baby is your partner? You will find out in the next blog?

Coach Keith

Excerpt taken from Attached. The New Science of Adult Attachment and How it Can Help You Find and Keep –Love.

How dependent are you? A case study!

This excerpt is taken from the book Attached – The New Science of Adult Attachment and How it Can Help you Find and Keep Love.

A few years ago, our close friend Tamara started dating someone new:

I first noticed Greg at a cocktail party at a friend’s house. He was unbelievably good-looking, and I found the fact that I caught his eye very flattering. A few days later we went our for dinner with some other people, and I couldn’t resist the glimmer of excitement in his eyes when he looked at me. But what I found most enticing were his words and an implicit promise of togetherness that he conveyed. The promise of not being alone. He said things like, “Tamara, you don’t have to be home all by yourself, you can come and work over at my place,” “You can call me an time you like.” There was comfort in these statements: The comfort of belonging to someone, of not being alone in the world.

If I’d only listened carefully, I could have easily heard another message that was incongruent with this promise, a message that made it clear that Greg feared getting too close and was uncomfortable witht he commitment. Several times he’d mentioned that he’d never had a stable relationship –that for some reason always grew tired of his girlfriends and felt the need to move on……

As we got closer, his messages got more erratic and everthing started to fall apart; he began telling me that he was too busy to meet on this night or that. Sometimes he’d claim that his entire work week looked “crazy” and would ask if we could just meet on the weekend. I’d agree, but inside I had a sinking feeling something was wrong, but what?

After a while, the ups and downs started to take a toll and I could no longer control my emotions. I didn’t know how to act, and despite my better judgement, I’d avoid making plans with friends in case he called. I completley lost interest in everything else that was important to me. Before long the relationship couldn’t withstand the strain and everything soon came to a screeching halt.

One of the reasons dating can be so challenging is because of scenarios just like this. One person becomes attached before the other partner catches up emotionally. Over the course of the week will be helping singles understand their attachment style and how they can use it to their advantage to find the mate of their dreams.

We will first start by analyzing the excerpt.

What do you think of her behavior? Is there something she could have done differently in order to receive a different result.

What about him? Was he being true to himself, or was he just playing her?

Coach Keith