“Mom! Can I please have some ice cream?”
My seven-year-old whines as sweat pours down her face from the hot sun on the playground. “No,” I responded. Her body immediately becomes limp on top of mine, and she proceeds to wither before my eyes, desperate for immediate ice cream gratification.
As a woman, this desperation translates to thoughts like, “Why doesn’t he message me back? I want him to text me now! So I guess I will just text him again.” You’ve gone on a few dates, you’re “hooked,” and you’ll go to great lengths, even compromising your values, to be in a relationship with him. The relationship is ending, and he says he still wants to be friends, leaving you hoping he’ll “fall back in love with you” (as was my case in my last breakup, leaving me in tears for days…a story for another time).
Watching my seven-year-old from the perspective of a 47-year-old provides insight into my own childhood. When I see my daughter fall into desperation—intense, urgent neediness, with tunnel vision to get what she wants, accompanied by clinginess—I see myself, a 47-year-old woman, with my anxious attachment system activated.
What if I told you that when your anxious attachment pattern is activated, it’s an invitation to deepen into your femininity, an opportunity to change your neural pathways and patterns of relating?
The extreme discomfort of insecurity while dating is the exact medicine you need to open to softness and embody your feminine frequency.
Looking through the archetypal lens of immature and mature femininity (as your young girl and mature woman), you can see that when desperation is triggered, you’re unconsciously acting from a surface-level sense of entitlement. Many clients, and myself included, wonder, “I’m doing everything right, why can’t I find an available man?” This reflects the little girl inside us who doesn’t get the ice cream she wants, even though she’s asked politely.
As an online dating mentor, I notice trends leaning toward “learn these five things to become more feminine and attract a man.” But femininity isn’t about doing something; it’s a state of being. Quick fixes perpetuate a sense of entitlement in our inner little girl and push us further into an immature masculine framework.
Your little girl or your immature feminine (we all have this part of ourselves) operates at a surface level, lacking depth. She braces herself for potential abandonment, with a narrow perspective fixated on her desired outcome. Sensations of discomfort are difficult for her to tolerate, resulting in tantrums and cries of entitlement.
Your mature woman—your adult self—operates at a deeper level of discernment, acceptance, trust, and feeling. The mature feminine is depth. Her beingness is amplified by her ability to live far below the surface of life. She has learned how to somatically open her body and surrender to what is, despite the stories of fear her mind creates. She has practiced and learned how to feel the sensations in her body, so when faced with the discomfort of not getting her way, she can feel these uncomfortable sensations in her body, allow them to move through her, and then shift into a different perspective of the circumstance. When you use the body to deepen into sensation, the mind follows by opening to see a multitude of different outcomes and perspectives.
There is one little hook here. Learning to feel and “dropping into the body” are part of the ancient feminine arts. Most women are completely disconnected from their body and their femininity and have not embodied the ability to feel sensations in the body. The work I do is based on the Globally Accredited Self Pleasure Modality™, a somatic modality rooted in the ancient feminine arts to teach you how to connect back to your body. As I said before, there are no “quick fixes” to deepen your femininity, which is why clients find my dating mentorships so successful after the five-month container of practicing the Self Pleasure Modality™. Learn to feel to heal your anxious attachment.
There are a few pivotal moments in a relationship when the anxious attachment pattern is activated. I notice most women don’t make it past the dating phase where their patterns are activated. Then, if they do, the patterns are once again activated in the very common “on and off” again situationship or the dissolution of a relationship.
Roughly 20 percent of the population has an anxious attachment pattern; however, intuitively in my work as a dating mentor, I feel more than 20 percent of women come up against the extreme discomfort of an anxious attachment pattern. The anxious attachment pattern is a survival system adopted from an early age and is characterized by the feeling of being “dropped.”
The feeling of being “dropped” occurred when, let’s say the infant, provided a signal cry to their primary caregiver. The caregiver responded with kind eyes, a positive affect, and a connection to the signal cry. Then, all of a sudden, the connection is dropped. Perhaps the caregiver responds to another child, another situation, or disconnects due to their trauma.
The infant is left with the feeling of being dropped and abandoned. They had and felt a genuine connection of love, and then it disappeared as quickly as it came, without warning.
In the anxious attachment pattern, the very feeling that you desire so much—that deep source of connection—you also fear. Because, love = disconnection for the anxiously attached. The more they receive love, the more they unconsciously push it away. Deep in the unconscious is the fear that when love does arrive, it will eventually leave.
So. You grasp onto the first sign of love.
The anxious attachment pattern leaves women relating from an insecure place and with the illusion they must work to gain love. That if they “just try hard enough” they will be loved and the love will stay.
We have all been in the grasping, clinging, extreme discomfort of neediness. I call this place and teach my clients that when your anxious attachment is activated in this space, you are in the “tunnel.” You cannot see anything and you are at an extreme point of desperation…“I am just going to send him this one text message. I just need to know why he ended it!”
If you are reading this article, you are being called to go deeper into your feminine beingness. In order to remember and restore what you already know in your body, the next time you find yourself in the tunnel, it is not a place to try to get out of so quickly.
It is most certainly not the time to text him, but it is a powerful moment for you to remember your femininity and bring your awareness and attention to the discomfort in your body.
It is a time to feel. If you haven’t taken the time to invest in yourself to learn how to feel, this is a must.
Each time you bring your awareness to the sensations in your body and away from what you feel you “must” do outside of yourself, you deepen into your femininity. You increase your capacity to feel discomfort. This is an invitation for you to open your body to feel what the truth is underneath the surface level of desperation.
Allowing yourself to crack just a bit to open your body to move at a deeper resonance of the mature feminine.
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