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Stop Giving That Horrible Person Another Chance
Attachment theory and emotion regulation skills to the rescue.
Have you ever wondered why it is so hard for people to leave abusive relationships?
Have you questioned why it is hard to stop giving chance after chance to people who hurt and confuse us?
Have you ever wondered why we tend to go into a trance of allowing and justifying hurtful and bizarre behavior when this person is around us? And then later on, when trying to talk to someone about it, are confused about how we made sense of this, or find ourselves trying to cover for how absurd that harmful person’s reasoning is?
Forming and maintaining attachments with people who confuse and hurt us is a fawning response.
A fawning response is a type of trauma response in the same category as the “fight”, “flight” and “freeze” responses that we commonly hear about. Fawning is often an unconscious desire to please, love, and empathize with someone who has hurt us, as a way to placate, get them to stop hurting us, and to reestablish a sense of safety.
In other words, we have built a template of attachment where we find a way to become a mental contortionist to justify or reframe the…
