9781529032178

Protest behavior is any action that tries to reestablish contact with your
partner and get their attention. There are many ways that protest behavior
can manifest itself, anything that can jolt the other person into noticing you
and responding to you.
Protest behavior and activating strategies can cause you to act in ways
that are harmful to the relationship. It is very important to learn to recognize
them when they happen. (In chapter 8, you’ll find the relationship
inventory, which is designed to help you identify your protest behaviors and
find more constructive ways of handling difficult situations.) These
behaviors and strategies can also continue long after your partner is gone.
This is part of what heartache is all about—the longing for someone who is
no longer available to us when our biological and emotional makeup is
programmed to try to win them back. Even if your rational mind knows you
shouldn’t be with this person, your attachment system doesn’t always
comply. The process of attachment follows its own course and its own
schedule. This means you will continue to think about the other person and
will be unable to push them out of your mind for a very long time.
It turns out that people with anxious attachment styles are particularly
susceptible to falling into a chronically activated attachment system
situation. A study conducted by Omri Gillath, Silvia Bunge, and Carter
Wendelken, together with two prominent attachment researchers, Phillip
Shaver and Mario Mikulincer, found fascinating evidence for this. Using
fMRI technology, they asked twenty women to think about—and then stop
thinking about—various relationship scenarios. Intriguingly, they found that
when women with an anxious attachment style thought about negative
scenarios (conflict, breakup, death of partner), emotion-related areas of the
brain became “lit up” to a greater degree than in women with other
attachment styles. What’s more, they found that regions of the brain
associated with emotional regulation, such as the orbitofrontal cortex, were
less activated than in woman with other attachment styles. In other words,
the brains of people with an anxious attachment style react more strongly to
thoughts of loss and at the same time under-recruit regions normally used to
down-regulate negative emotions. This means that once your attachment
system is activated, you will find it much harder to “turn it off” if you have
an anxious attachment style.