The Anxiety Map in Romantic Dynamics is also envisioned as a "rescue map" that borrows from the laws of thermodynamics to transform a threat, or stress, called "loss" coming in at us, to become the type of self-esteem called, "confidence," instead. This occurs through making the mature (higher-brained) decision to use the energy in a process called, "courage."
It is a simplified construct that makes use of the Triune Brain Model, and as such, views three possible options for our use of anxiety - the "reptilian brained" option of avoidance/impulsiveness/addiction, the "mammalian brained" option of "masochism" or a "poor me" attitude, and the "higher brained" option of courage.
Walking Though the Anxiety Map, Step By Step
Anxiety ➳
Your starting point. Anxiety is negative energy in you, caused by either loss or your being low on confidence, and fearful to take action to confront threats.
Loss ➳
When someone stresses you in a way that takes away something you own, including security, safety or comfort, it can be blocked by the personal boundary. However, if that fails, makes you anxious. It lowers an exactly equal amount of confidence in you, a type of self esteem.
Confidence ➳
The type of self-esteem called, "confidence," causes you to feel "fathered" or "paternal" toward others. It is a sense of being able to tolerate risk, change, threats or loss. When you are fearful or paralyzed from taking action to defend yourself, you have a lower amount of confidence, and so you feel an equal amount of anxiety to the lowered amount of confidence.
Addiction, Impulsivity and Avoidance ➳
Once you are anxious, either through suffering losses, or having some of your confidence taken away, or being low on having the guts to take action against a threat in the first place, then you have a choice. If you do nothing with your anxiety, then it drives you into automatic, undirected, random action to either run away, or mindlessly struggle and fight against the threat - a survival instinct called, "the Fight or Flight Reflex.", or to hide, avoidant, and impulsive in addiction. Addiction is "hiding from anxiety and threats," and is the emotionally passive response to being anxious (which is making no decision about it.) However it is reptilian-brained to be impulsive. Ironically, your addiction will kill you, when the original fight-or-flight instinct that triggered it (or the panic attacks that can go with it) was designed to save your life, not kill it.
Masochism and Victim-thinking ➳
An active emotional choice for using anxiety, along with courage. However, masochism is the pathological narcissism choice, the destructive, "win/lose" choice for behavior in treating others, n the case of anxiety. It gets you a quick fix improvement in happiness by getting rid of the anxiety, quickly, dumping it on others by "guilting them," being "passive-aggressive," or playing the victim. However, society is quick to come down on you in response - anxiety and threatened or having a sense of loss of their own, which stresses you back and makes you even more anxious by abandoning you, usually.
Courage ➳
The only way out of masochism and addiction, courage is relatively free of pathological narcissism. It is constructive and "win/win" in behavior toward others, and is a high character virtue. It can only be executed with other virtues such as patience, and good boundaries, with boundary doors in them.
Courage is one of the many forms of anxiety, the others being addiction, victimization, masochism, and its temporal derivatives, worry, regret, guilt, and hate, or guilting or masochistic shaming behaviors. When we engage in this kind of "emotional alchemy," we are literally turning negative emotional energy (stress) into positive emotional energy (confidence), through courage. In the process, we actually use negative energy as a "fuel" with which to go face our fears, emotionally, to solve the problems and threats that come our way. (Which is what courage is: an action taken to directly confront your fears, even if you are afraid while doing so. It feels like being treated in a fatherly fashion.) In this way, courage is essentially, "fathering yourself."
Therefore, this map is like a way of "escaping and recovering loss" from among your many threats and stresses, by taking your negative energy that comes from the outside, and actually using it to constructively build your life and your resources.
The concept of destructive versus constructive decisions weighs heavy in this model, because the distinction comes from proven models of economics, such as the "win/win" constructive choice in behavior and "win/lose" destructive choice in behavior seen in Game Theory of Economics, as in the Nobel Prize winning theory set forth by John Nash in the "Nash Equilibrium."
There are numerous chapters in Romantic Dynamics illuminating this Anxiety Map, and simplifying our understanding of how the "three brains" of the human mind interact, as well as how all three work together in the process of human courtship. The emotions are at the center of the state of being we call, "Love," because love amounts to a feeling of happiness by way of the connection to another person. This bond is both an "imprinting" phenomenon between parent and child in our youth, but then is revivified in adult life within a romance, happiness, and the elevated self-esteem at its core.
As a result, we all need to contend with the effects of destructive anxiety (addiction, victimization, masochism, guilt, worry, and avoidance of our troubles) effectively, and the pathological narcissism which drives them, in order to also defeat the external forces of stress - in this case, "loss" - which comes into our relationships and harms our sense of friendship and love. Being mature (with our higher brain) and therefore, constructive and "win/win" in our relationship decisions, causes us to choose assertiveness in response to our own loss, threats and anxiety, and promotes love and friendship with our potential partner. This is essential for step five of courtship, where we learn to "Find the Stress in Each Other," in order to move on to a "best friendship" and the soon-to-follow partnership that may be possible in phase three of courtship - the intellectual attraction of a committed relationship.
Emotional Attraction ➳
The Anxiety Map most pertains to topics and skills built for the emotional attraction phase of courtship, or the friendship and love phase (phase II.) There is much more material on emotional attraction and friendship, HERE.
