How I Went From Avoidant To Secure (And YOU Can Too) in Brief

All right, team, welcome back to the Mantalk show. Connor Beaton here. Today I'm going to be sharing with you the five specific tactical steps that I took to move from avoidant, an avoidant attachment style to a secure attachment style. Okay, I was pretty avoidant. I was very avoidant, which I'll talk about a little bit. But these things are things that you can deploy and see results relatively quickly. This is not a lifelong style, you know, work in progress that you're gonna have to spend the rest of your life doing. It's not a multi decade project. This is something that you can deploy and actually start to see results and change in your life. But that is dependent on two specific things. One, as an avoidant, you are going to need to get uncomfortable. Doesn't matter what type of avoidant you are, doesn't matter about your past. It doesn't matter what mommy and daddy looked like and how they treated you and what your family system looked like. Like. Yes, all of that is relevant and no, it doesn' the context of what I'm about to lay out, you are going to have to get uncomfortable. Okay? And I'm going to explain why in a second. The second thing though is you are going to have to face and move into your resistance. You are going to have a tremendous amount of resistance to everything that I am going to lay out, I promise you. I know that because I had a ton of resistance around doing any of these things. This isn't just a concept. Avoidant attachment style isn't a concept in your head or simply a belief system. It is wired into your nervous system. A big part of the resistance that you are going to face, my avoidant friends, is that your body is going to try and pull you back to isolation and solo time and your individual safety and, and pull you away from relationality and being in relationship. The resistance is going to be physical, okay? Because your nervous system has been wired to move you away from relationships and will create a lot of resistance. Because you have learned to protect yourself by moving towards self isolation. I'm going to say that part again. You have learned to protect yourself by moving towards self isolation. Step number one, build self awareness around two crucial things. Self awareness around two crucial things. Number one, when and what am I doing to break connection and closeness with someone? When and what am I doing to break closeness and connection with someone? Now, what I did when I was doing this work is I got out two pieces of paper and I wrote down when do I break connection? On one of them and I wrote down what do I do to break connection on the other one? And I just started to make a list of all the things that I did off the top of my head, right? So what do I do? Oh, I don't text back, you know, when she asked me how I'm doing, I just say fine all the time. I don't ask back, you know, I don't ask her how she's doing. You know, I just listed out all these things. When do I break connection? You know, when she wants to be close, when she's asking me how my day was, when she's asking me about my family. And I started to write down all of the things, and I kept a running list of these things. So as. As things went along, I would add to the list, right? I'd add to when am I breaking connection and what am I doing now? Why is that important? Because you need to have and develop a robust awareness of when you are breaking connection and creating disconnection. Okay? The aim of the game here is that you become the. The person who creates and maintains connection in the relationship. Because avoidance. There's no other way to say this but you and I may not anymore, but I used to be the one responsible for the disconnection. Okay? Avoidance are not always, but often very much responsible for the disconnection. They're creating the space in the relationship. They're pushing the other person away. This isn't to shame or blame you. They're. Because you probably have enough of that, but you are the one pushing the other person away, creating the space, creating the disconnection, creating the shutdown. And so you need to develop awareness around what specifically am I doing so that you can begin to deploy autocorrect. And I remembered what my mentor had said. When any type of break or rip or tear or disconnection happens in the relationship, be the leader of the reconnection. And I was like, oh, I know he's right. I know I need to do this. And so I walked back into the apartment and, like, almost through gritted teeth, like, I want to reconnect with you. Are you open to that? You know, like, every part of my body did not want to do it. It was just so foreign to me. It was so not ingrained into my system. But I went back, I marched my ass back into the apartment, and I said, I would like to reconnect with you. Are you open to doing that? I think at the time she actually said no, if I'm remembering correctly, which made me even more furious. So I went up to the rooftop patio. And I came back down and I said, when you're ready to reconnect, let me know because I would like to do that. And then she said yes. And we, we had a conversation around it. So be responsible for the reconnection. You are not going to want to do this. This is going to be one of those things that your body and your mind has all the stories about. Don't do it. You'll be weak. You know, you're going to get hurt. You're going to be responsible for things that you're not responsible for. All the stuff is going to happen. Okay, last one. Move from self protection to relational reliance. Move from self protection to relational reliance. Now, notice I am not saying move towards dependency. A lot of men, a lot of avoidance, will hear what I just said and they'll say, are you saying that I should be dependent on my partner? No, I'm talking about reliance, reliability, knowing that you can rely on somebody else, knowing that you can trust somebody else to be there for you, to have good conversation with you, to connect with you, to meet your needs. Move from the self protection that is so ingrained that says shut down, don't express, don't expose, don't ask for what you want and need, pull away. Don't connect to relational reliance to a place that it's okay for me to trust this person in this moment. It's okay for me to rely on my partner to pick something up for me or to do something for me. So start to move towards relational reliance that you can rely on the other person that that's safe, that. That they are trustworthy. All right, comment below. Let me know what you thought about this video. Don't forget to man it forward. Share this episode please. There are a lot of men that are out there and a lot of women that could use this one. But in my experience, men are generally a little bit more avoidant and women are more anxious. So send this to someone whether they are an avoidant person or they are with an avoidant person. Uh, this could go a long way. Maybe this is something that you want to listen to with your partner. And again, don't forget to hit the bell notification to get notified when more videos drop. All right, Connor, beaten out. We'll see you next week.