Your Life At a Glance
Whether we’re aware of it or not, our attachment style can have a big impact on how we can achieve our goals and the life we want.
The New Year is frequently a time to reflect on the past and set goals for the year ahead.
Whether we’re aware of it or not, our attachment style can have a big impact on how we can achieve our goals and the life we want.
By first looking at the influence your attachment has had on your life, you can identify the areas where this interference has been the most powerful. When you know where you have been, you can then have a better chance at determining what you need to move forward toward the Life Vision you desire.
To get ready for the new year kickoff, I want to share with you a helpful exercise from my upcoming book The New Rules of Attachment: How to Heal Your Relationships, Reparent Your Inner Child, and Secure Your Life Vision to discover your attachment style and how learning more about it can help unlock a new you for the new year.
Exercise: Your Life-At-A-Glance Timeline
In this exercise, you’re going to build a Life-At-A-Glance Timeline. By looking at the common themes among your memories and life events, you’ll be able to see how your attachment style has influenced your life, as well as how you remember it.
To begin, open your journal to two blank side-by-side pages or use a blank 8.5 x 11 paper turned horizontally.
With a vertical line marking the end of the line on the left, and a vertical line marking the end of the line on the right, draw a horizontal line across the page. Write your birth date and year on the left, and the current date and year on the right.Using hashmarks along the line, start by filling in memorable dates and events as they come to mind, as well as your age at the time of the event.
A simple way to do this is to give the hashmark a letter and then create a key to the event you are including on the timeline (see below for an example). The points on your timeline should represent anything that is of importance to you and can consist of events or experiences that evoke positive, negative, neutral, or mixed emotions.
Everyone’s timeline will look different and a milestone that has importance for you may not be something of value to your partner or friend, and vice versa. If you’re having trouble coming up with occasions to complete your timeline, these examples that might spark ideas for you:
Your earliest memory
Significant moves/relocations
Your first important friendship or romantic relationship
When you first encountered your most memorable teachers, coaches, or other important adults
Graduation from high school, college, and/or graduate school
Job changes, promotions, and/or career shifts
An award or achievement
Some of your most cherished memories
Some of your most devastating memories
Something you are proud of
Something you regret
An illness, injury, or surgery
A situation that helped you to grow personally
Once you’ve recorded your most important memories, review each of them in chronological order.
Some questions you can ask yourself as you review your timeline:
What feelings and thoughts arise as you read through your personal timeline?
What themes stand out to you?
Are there any discernible patterns for when some of your best and worst memories occurred?
Are there any specific people in your life who are connected to your major timeline events?
Are most of your timeline events a certain type (e.g., achievements, relationships?). Is anything glaringly missing?
Where is the timeline most crowded, and where are events more scattered? Are there any large blanks?
What was a particularly difficult period in your life?
Were there periods that were relatively problem free?
What painful memories are you still carrying with you today?
Now that you’ve had time to reflect, how do you feel?
Is your timeline balanced, or is it a bit skewed toward particular types of situations or events?
Is there anything you can add to balance it out so that your timeline is representative of the full scope of the positives and negatives of your life?
Your attachment style has a lot to do with the balance of your timeline and the types of events you choose to include in this exercise.
Some attachment related patterns to consider:
Avoidantly attached people (or what I call the Fiercely Independent) tend to ascribe more meaning to events that highlight personal accomplishments, and they may exclude negative events from their timeline because they don’t want to come face to face with the experiences that might have triggered their avoidant attachment in the first place. The Fiercely Independent often experience discomfort toward deeper probing of feelings, and therefore, tend to exclude events that involve heightened negative emotionality. They may also minimize their relationships with other people, so you might not see too many relational events on their timeline.
Anxiously attached people (or what I call Worried Warriors) tend to have a predominance of events on their timelines that relate to their relationships with others, or they include important events in the lives of their loved ones. They may also be slightly skewed toward events that relate to times when their anxious attachment style was triggered, for example, when they were excluded from a social group, or when they had to perform at work and felt they came up short and didn’t meet expectations (whether that’s objectively true or not).
Those with disorganized attachment (or what I call Surveillance Specialists) tend to have more difficulty outlining their lives in a sequential way. Surveillance Specialists may find it challenging to organize the important events of their lives and can’t easily identify how they feel, especially when they are under significant stress. They are also likely to highlight events where feelings of abandonment, rejection, and confusion were triggered, and find it difficult to see themselves in a consistently positive light (therefore under emphasizing events that highlight their accomplishments). They may be unable to fully recall certain memories and experience strong physiological reactions that resemble fight-or-flight responses when they reflect on these events.
I hope this helped. If it did, please do share this email. Forward it to a friend who you think would benefit from it.
Until next time,
Judy
P.S. Remember that book I mentioned at the start of this newsletter? It’s now available for pre-order.
Pre-Order here: https://bit.ly/3MvuvvF
About me:
Dr. Judy Ho, Ph. D., ABPP, ABPdN is a triple board certified and licensed Clinical and Forensic Neuropsychologist, a tenured Associate Professor at Pepperdine University, television and podcast host, and author of Stop Self-Sabotage. An avid researcher and a two-time recipient of the National Institute of Mental Health Services Research Award, Dr. Judy maintains a private practice where she specializes in comprehensive neuropsychological evaluations and expert witness work. She is often called on by the media as an expert psychologist and is also a sought after public speaker for universities, businesses, and organizations.
Dr. Judy received her bachelor's degrees in Psychology and Business Administration from UC Berkeley, and her masters and doctorate from SDSU/UCSD Joint Doctoral Program in Clinical Psychology. She completed a National Institute of Mental Health sponsored fellowship at UCLA's Semel Institute.