Navigating The Two Biggest Attachment Styles

I want to begin with the sort of core essence of anxious attachment. What is actually at the core of this attachment style and at the very center of it is a very simple notion. And that notion or that belief or that physical experience that people have who have anxious attachment is I'm not okay if. Unless you're okay or I need you to be okay in order for me to feel okay. Right? So there's this dependency that has emerged for the anxious person that says I need to make sure I'm constantly hyper vigilant on you. How you're feeling, what you're thinking, what you're doing, how you're relating to me and how you're doing will predicate and dictate how I'm doing. Now, as we are going to talk about, as you're going to discover, this essence, this core of anxious attachment is developed early on in life. And there's a lot of different factors that can play into a person's development of anxious attachment. But at the very essence of it, what I want you to take is that for the anxious person, their needs, their wants, their desires, their sense of safety even are, are always secondary to someone else's. They've been trained in childhood. They've gone through experiences that have led them to believe that my desires, needs and wants are secondary to yours and the only way for me to get mine met are to make sure that you are getting yours met. So there's this very hyper vigilant external focus that can happen. Again, their sense of safety, their wellbeing, their sense of worth and value can also be externally dependent. And again, like I said, this is a very much a learned behavior and is usually something that is sometimes witnessed in a parent. So that person may have seen this behavior played out in a parent. They maybe were raised to do so like a child having a, having to parent their parent in some way. So constantly having to caretake one of their parents in order to make sure that their safety as a child or, you know, their needs as a child could be met. But it was always on the other side of caretaking a parent. And it could have come from a bunch of other things that we're going to talk about in a moment. But the main point here is that you were probably, if you are an anxious person or if you have a partner who is an anxious person, because this video is going to be very helpful if you are with an anxious person, if, if you were, or if you are an anxious attachment. The point is that you were a child who was probably Put in impossible situations, in some points, impossible for you to solve a problem between your parents, and it caused you an immense amount of anxiety, right? Maybe there was volatility, or, you know, they were constantly arguing and you couldn't de escalate them. Or it was impossible for you to fix a financial situation that your parent was going through. Or is it possible for you to get it right?

Right?

You constantly felt like you were walking on eggshells. Matter what you did, you didn't know if you were going to get yelled at or if you were going to get approval. And it was very unclear as to what would result in you being okay. Or maybe it was impossible for you to save one of your parents or.

One of your siblings.

Maybe you grew up with a sibling who had an addiction, or maybe you had a parent who was struggling with addiction. And so that anxiety was you constantly trying to figure out, how do I get them to be okay? How do I save them? How do I solve something? But again, behind the anxious person is this impossible situation of I have to give you something, I have to do something for you, I have to solve something or figure something out for you, so make sure that you're okay before I can be okay. And that's at the very core of it. And when I say okay, it can mean a number of things. It can be safety, security. It can be okay in the sense of worth or, or value. It can be okay in the sense of, you know, worthy of being loved, worthy of being happy, okay to be happy, all of those different pieces. So the anxious person is constantly sort of like laying in wait, right? Their whole physical system is spun up, saying, I have to make sure that everything's okay outside of me so that I can get my needs met. And I want you to remember one thing, because this is gonna be very, very helpful as we talk about moving towards secure attachment. And it's the simple idea that secure people seek support, whereas anxious people seek validation. Secure people seek support, whereas anxious people seek validation. So the anxious person, whereas the avoidant, pulls away and isolates. The anxious person is hyper externalized, hyperexternalized. So the avoidant person is more internalized, they're more recluse, they're more aloof. There's less. There's a less likelihood you're going to know what's going on with them or what's happening inside of them. The anxious person has a hypervigilance to the external world. They have been, I use the word trained, you know, but they have been conditioned. Is Another way of putting it, they've been conditioned through their life circumstances that a lot of their sense of being okay in the world requires them to have a very real hyper vigilance. Right? What are you thinking?

What are you doing?

Are you okay? Are we okay? And if, and if you, and we are okay, then maybe I can be okay. And so there's this, there's this constant focus and this can be very frustrating for the partner, right? If you're with somebody who has a very high level of anxiety or anxiousness or their attachment, their sense of okay and belonging within the relationship is very externally focused and they're constantly asking you, what's wrong? Are you okay? How are you feeling right now? They're text bombing you, they're love bombing you. All those types of pieces that can be very frustrating. And so again, coming back to this one notion, secure people seek support while anxious people seek validation. They want validation, they need validation from outside of themselves that everything is okay, that they're safe, that they belong, that they are loved, that they're okay. All of that, all of those different pieces. So let's move into talking about the causes of anxious attachment. What actually develops anxious attachment? Because again, knowing what causes it, being able to identify it within yourself or within your partner and having that conversation with them. Not that it's your responsibility, right? This is something that you should probably get into with a therapist or, you know, a well trained coach or a psychologist. But understanding the causality of it will give you an indication of what needs to be healed in your life and will probably give you a very clear insight into how it's showing up in your present day relationship or past relationship. So I'm going to give you the causes, but I'm also going to give you examples of what that would look like in your present day relationships. One of the primary causes of an anxious attachment are inconsistent parental responses. Okay, Inconsistent parental responses. This is when caregivers are inconsistent with meeting their child's needs, with responding to the child's emotions or what they're asking for. Sometimes being unattentive. When a child is needing nurturing or care, it might be that, you know, the, the parent is constantly distracted and unable to give that child attention. And so the child's constantly getting, trying to get attention, right? They might be acting out, they might be asking for food, they might, you know, be needing something from a parent and it's very few and far between and the child isn't able. And this is the really big piece that's important. The Child is not able to, to figure out what is going to get attention from the parent. How do I get my needs met? From my caretaker. And if your parents or your caretakers were inconsistent in responding to your needs and responding to your desires, then again it could be you asking to play, it could be you asking to read a book or whatever it is. If they're very inconsistent and you aren't able to figure out a consistent method of getting attention, of getting your needs met, what will happen is within a child they'll start to code that as something's wrong with me, there's something wrong with me, and I can't figure out how to get your attention. And later on in life, you know, this one's a very clear through line. Later on in life this will show up in relationships where you will be very anxious. You're not certain as to whether or not you're going to get the attention, whether or not your needs are going to be prioritized. And so, for example, your mother and father may have had pretty wild mood swings. This can be a really good example where they're loving and joyful in one moment and then like the next moment they're, you know, they're, they're abusive and, and yelling and they, they may have been caring and attentive on a regular basis, but then they might have also been completely disengaged and cold. And for you as a kid, it was very unclear as to which one you were going to get, right? You weren't sure, if I act in this way, am I going to get joyful caregiver, am I going to get joyful dad, joyful mom, or am I going to get hostile, cold, shut down, yelling parent? And it almost didn't seem to matter which one you operated from, right? Whether you were acting out or whether you were acting in line, whether you were misbehaving or you were behaving, it didn't seem to matter. And so it was very confusing because you could never get a consistent result from that parent. And so an example of what this might look like in your modern day relationship is that you might constantly seek reassurance or validation from your partner. If you're the anxious person or if you're the partner, you're constantly feeling like your partner's asking you for validation, fearing that your partner's feelings or that their level of commitment, closeness, connection can change at the drop of a hat, can just change in a dime. And this is mirroring the unpredictability that you experienced in childhood, right? So for a lot of anxious attachments, this is a very primary driver of what creates that anxiety, right? It's this massive level of unpredictability. So if you are an anxious, attached person, I'd love for you to just write down the question, how was my upbringing unpredictable? Or where were my parents unpredictable as where were my caregivers unpredictable as parents? And that might be unpredictable with their emotions, unpredictable in when they would shut down unpredictable and when they would punish you unpredictable with their moods. But start to examine what role, and this is a really good way of putting the question for you to journal on what role did unpredictability play in my childhood? And that's gonna start to inform you as to how that anxiety started to form in the first place. This is, this is talking about, like the roots of your anxious attachment. So start to dig in that question because the likelihood that it's showing up in your current day relationship or if you're single in your previous relationship is very, very high. So how all of this can show up, there's a myriad of ways that this can show up within your current day relationships, but usually individuals have a hard time giving their partner space. So you end up going into the role of being overbearing, of being intrusive, and you fear abandonment, right? Because what you're used to is this very intrusive dynamic where somebody who loved you was intruding and penetrating through your boundaries. And so you be, you end up becoming somebody who does the same thing in relationships. So you're going through your partner's phone, you're reading through their journal, you're checking through their emails. You know, you're constantly, you know, needing to check in on them about everything, how they're feeling, what they're doing, et cetera. And you're, you become that quote, unquote wet blanket, for lack of a better term, that starts to smother their life and smother their sense of independence. And that's largely because there's a fear that if you allow your partner to have independence, it'll create too much separation and too much space. Number three is emotional dependence encouraged by caregivers. I'm going to just try and condense this down. Essentially, some caregivers will directly or indirectly, consciously or unconsciously encourage a child to remain dependent on them for some type of support, whether it's emotional support, psychological support, financial support, and this is often due to the caregiver's own insecurities. And so this parent might try and, and keep you dependent on them. And this can create anxiety because again, what happens is that it doesn't allow the child to really mature and learn how to do some of the things that they know they need to do as an adult. And it can be very crippling. So things like doing your taxes, creating a resume, you know, just basic things that you, that you need to be able to do as a human being to function in our society. That parent will oftentimes have created a dependency where you need them to do all these things. Whether it's talk about your emotional process, what you're feeling, what's going on in the relationship. These types of caregivers will have guilted the crap out of you as a child. There's just no way around it. They will have leveraged guilt and shame to keep you close and to try and maintain that dependency. And there's this sort of like, you need me in order to function and be okay and survive. You cannot be independent, you cannot be sovereign. You cannot have your own independence. You need me and without me, you will not be okay in the world. And so what happens for these types of folks if you grew up with a parent like that who created this type of dependency? You'll get into relationship with people and you will begin to be clingy. This is where the, and this isn't to hate on anybody. This is just to crack a joke and make some of this light because this should still be fun, right? Everything we're talking about should still be fun. This is where the like stage five cleaner comes from, right? Generally, kids that had a parent or a caregiver that created this type of real strong dependency will turn into the really clingy dependent person in the relationship where, you know, you as the anxious person looks to have the partner fulfill all of your emotional needs. And usually this is where the, the codependency shows up. You might be constantly demanding your partner to open up and share things with you constantly. You might reinforce with them like, you'll never do better than me or you need me. So that, that.

That experience that you had as a kid starts to manifest in your relationship or vice versa, right? You might feel like, oh my God, I can never live without you. My life can't function without you. I need you in my life. You know, this sort of world is ending catastrophic thing when your partner doesn't text back or they don't want to talk about the deep emotional thing, or they don't want to have the conversation. And it can spin you out emotionally and dysregulate you internally. So just notice that all the examples that I've given you are, for lack of a better term, they're broken attachments between the caregiver and the child. Another way of putting it is that they. There are impasses or.

Interruptions to the attachment between the caregiver and the child that are. That are quite severe, that cause questioning within the child. So you can grow up with a parent who is rejecting who. Nothing's ever good enough for them. They're sort of like the perfectionist parent might be. You know, they have mental health issues and you don't know what you're going to get. Or they're very harsh, they're abusive, they refuse to talk to you about certain things and, you know, neglect you. You make it very clear what you need and want. They're not capable of showing up for you. You know, they say they're going to be at the game and then they don't show up. They say they're going to be at the school event and then they're not there. And so there's this constant level of anxiousness and shame within you as a child that as you get into adult relationships, starts to permeate the relationships where you're constantly worried and anxious about whether or not you're going to be good enough, the other person is going to show up for you. Last but not least is abuse, trauma or ptsd. So some people that have experienced abuse or had traumatic events show up will have a very anxious attachment, and that anxiety is oftentimes linked to the trauma. So whether it's sexual abuse or physical abuse or verbal abuse, there's an anxiety that when things start to get intense in any way, shape or form in the relationship, there's an anxiousness that will start to show up and that those two things are connected. Usually for the person that has an anxious attachment and has experienced some type of abuse or trauma, that when things start to get in any kind of intensity, whether it's anger, whether it's the intensity of love and connection, will start to produce this very anxious stirring within the individual. And so they might ask if everything's okay constantly. They might have that hypervigilance externally that.

We talked about before.

So what do we do? Let's close this out with talking about how do we end anxious attachment and how do we become more secure. Now, at the base of all this, I'm going to circle back to the very beginning. At the base of the anxious attachment is the simple experience of if you're not okay, I'M not okay. And so I need you to be okay. In order for me to be okay, I need to learn how to trust myself. Because again, underneath all of this is the feeling of I'm not okay if you're not. I'm not, you know, I can't ask for my needs if your needs aren't already met. So the anxious attachment needs to trust that they can make good decisions and choices. They have to trust that they can produce safety within themselves and their lives without being punished or hurt or any of those other things from, from the outside world, from a parent or a caregiver or a partner. And the anxious person needs to do one thing. And so I'm going to give you some tactical things that are really important to move out of anxious attachment. So this is the big, this is the big finale here. So number one for the anxious person is being able to learn self regulation techniques, learning how to regulate yourself. Because anxiety is just the body going off, the alarm system in the body going off, saying something is wrong. And because the majority of anxious attached people have gone through circumstances in their childhood that taught them to set off the alarm system even if nothing's wrong. Right. It's like I remember in school people.

Used to pull the fire alarm even.

Though there was no fire. Right. I think I did it once, got in a lot of trouble. But that's neither here nor there. So that's what anxiety is like. The fire alarm's going off, but there's no fire. The alarm in the body is going off, but there's nothing actually wrong. And so an anxious person needs to learn how to use the breath to what's called down regulate the body. Because when anxiety happens, your body is in a stress state. So when you look at the brain under MRIs or FMRIs, when you look at the brain and what's happening in the brain when you're stressed versus when you're anxious, it's almost identical. They look, it looks quite similar. So your brain is, when you're anxious, producing cortisol and adrenaline and putting your body into a stress response. And you're in this fight, flight or freeze mode, your breath rate per minute starts to spike. So the more anxious you feel, the more that you start to breathe quickly. Which is why when people have a panic attack, they hyperventilate, right? Because their breathing goes completely out of control. And interesting fact, the reason why they tell you to use a paper bag or this is the old way of doing it. They, you know, you'd have to breathe into A paper bag is that the, the faster you breathe, the more you oxygenate your, your blood system and you.

Reduce the CO2, you actually reduce the.

Carbon dioxide in your body. And that's what creates this sort of lightheadedness effect. And so by breathing into a bag, you're actually, you actually force your system, you force your body to intake CO2, to intake carbon dioxide, because you're breathing into this bag and you're breathing out CO2, and then you're breathing it back in, and then it starts to level off the amount of CO2 in your body. If you are an anxious person, check in with your breath as often as possible and do a couple things. Number one is slow it down. Slow it down. Okay, so number two is breathe in and out through the nose as often as you can. I'm a little congested right now, but here we go.

So deepening the inhale and extending the exhale, letting the exhale be longer than the inhale. Okay, really big piece. And as often as you can throughout the day. Just start to get in the habit. If you're an anxious person, start to get into the habit of just checking in with yourself. How's my breathing? Deepen the inhale and extend the exhale.

And as you do that, a couple of things are going to happen. Number one, by extending the exhale and letting the exhale be longer than the inhale, you are going to force your breath rate per minute down, meaning that you're going to take less breaths per minute, which in turn is going to force your heart rate to lower. So the more breaths you take per minute, the higher heart rate. The lower the breaths per minute, the lower the heart rate. And as you lower your breath rate and you lower your heart rate, you move your body out of the anxious state, out of the stress state, and into what's called more of a. A parasympathetic dominant state, or more of a calm rest and digest state. Most anxious people have outsourced the regulation of their nervous systems and their bodies to a partner. And that, again, is usually not their fault. It's usually something that they were conditioned to do in their childhood. Right? So if you're an anxious, attached person watching, listening to this, you learned to outsource your sense of safety and your sense of regulation to someone else. And the. The biggest piece of healing anxious attachment and becoming secure is reclaiming your ability and the skill, because it is a skill, but reclaiming your ability and the skill to regulate your mind and your body by using your breath. Okay? Big, big, big piece. Number two is exposure therapy.

I have a joke that there's a.

Reason why trigger warnings don't work, but that's a. That's a different pie. Usually it's because when we are trying to avoid the hard things that cause us anxiety, it produces more anxiety, right? It's like the worst thing that you can do for yourself when you're feeling anxious is to say, oh, no, I'm feeling anxious. I don't want to feel this way. I shouldn't feel this way. That produces more anxiety. It becomes cyclical and we get stuck in that thing. So you need to actually try and lean into what's called exposure therapy, meaning the things that give you anxiety, I want you to start to move towards. So if having a hard conversation would produce anxiety with your partner, that's something that you can start to move towards. If not texting them every hour or not texting them after an argument would produce anxiety, I want you to move towards that. You have to actively move towards the things. And I'm not saying, you know, give yourself a panic attack, okay? I'm just making myself very clear. But what I am saying is that you have to expose yourself. And this is proven time and time again to work, right? Like if you have a phobia, if you are, you know, really afraid of spiders, one of, or elevators or escalators or whatever it is, one of the surest ways to end that phobia is to slowly expose yourself to the thing that you're afraid of, to the thing that causes you terror and fear and anxiousness. And so for the anxious person, usually it's security within the self. Usually it's not looking to the other person to reaffirm that you're okay or that the relationship's okay, you know, that the world's not going to fall apart, et cetera. Now, you might want some support to.

Do this, whether it's a coach, a.

Therapist, a psychologist, a counselor, a really good friend. But you are probably going to want some accountability as you walk through this part. But expose yourself to the things that you are afraid of and use the regulation in that moment. Number three is work on your sense of self esteem and self worth. For the majority of anxious people because of the experiences that they had growing up, their sense of self worth and self esteem has again been outsourced. It's been outsourced because your sense of worth and value and safety was externalized because of the circumstances that we talked about before in this video. Right? Your sense of worth, value and safety was externalized. And so you have to start to work on reclaiming that sense of I am valuable, I have a sense of self esteem. And how you do that is you start to validate and appreciate yourself. Rather than seeking this constant external validation and appreciation of who you are and what you do, you start to develop a system internally. So that might mean that you keep a journal, you keep a gratitude journal. One of the things that I found to be very helpful is instead of just saying, I'm grateful for this or I appreciate myself for that, I, I wrote down when I, I went through about nine to ten months of self esteem journaling. And one of the things that I found super helpful was I wrote down the question what I want to validate myself for is. And then I would follow it up with two things. It's important because this is important because. And how it makes me feel is.

So you have to intellectually anchor in.

The gratitude and, and you have to attach an emotion or a feeling to the gratitude. Next and last but not least is detaching worth and safety from others validation. Detaching worth and safety from others validation. Jung said, you cannot heal what you cannot separate from or what you cannot separate from, you cannot heal. And so if we're not willing to create some separation from a partner, from the normal routines that would spin up our anxiety, it's going to be impossible for us to heal. So we have to learn the art of healthy detachment. Healthy detachment. Not swinging the pendulum all the way to the end of the spectrum where we become avoidant, but just moving into a place where we can say, okay, I'm going to disconnect from, from the neediness that I'm feeling, or I'm going to disconnect. I'm going to start to just detach a little bit from the need to text bomb them right now or the need to follow up. Oh, I'm going to just detach a little bit from the need that I feel to check in on them. Right? It's like I already checked in on them twice today. I'm going to disconnect from that, from that a little bit and just start to pull back. And then in that space when we, again, when we start to detach a little bit, we have room to validate ourselves, we have room to regulate ourselves, we have room to expose ourselves to anything that might come up. The stories, the anxiousness, et cetera. So those are the four big, big pieces when it comes to helping you heal. Anxious attachment.

Now, what I want you to know Is that if you have been labeled as an avoidant attachment, if you have read any material about attachment styles and you've sort of self identified or you've gone and done some tests and it's like, yep, definitely have an avoidant attachment style, that's not a death sentence. It doesn't mean that you're going to be that attachment style indefinitely, forever. You can actually move through a lot of these behaviors quite quickly. And that's one of the things that.

Doesn'T get talked about.

It's also interesting because when you look at some of the research around attachment styles and you look at some of the ways that attachment styles are talked about, one of the interesting things is, and I want to make this clear out of the gates, avoidant isn't worse than anxious. And I feel like I have to say that, right? So there's three attachment styles. There's a couple sort of like subcategories that we'll talk about and we'll focus in on other episodes. But there's secure, which is what we're aiming for, a secure attachment style. It's a healthy attachment style. You're able to be open, connected. You have a good amount of your own independence, your own sovereignty. You're able to self reflect and understand what's happening within you and bring that into the relationship. You're able to. The sort of highlight of a secure attachment, the thing that we're all aiming for, is that you're able to balance the relationship. Feeling secure, safe, trusting in your intimate relationship. You're able to balance that with independence and sovereignty. So you're not giving up independence for the sake of trying to maintain a relationship. And you are not giving up the relationship in order to try and maintain your independence, which is really what an avoidant attachment style is. An avoidant attachment style, so that we can just define it here and now, is really a sacrificing of intimacy, closeness, connection or relationship to over prioritize independence and sovereignty. So avoidance, avoidant attachment style can kind of be described as, or defined as an unwillingness or a fear of being in deep relationship with another. An unwillingness or fear of being in deep relationship with another. The best way I can describe this, and I said this to somebody in a session once who was an avoidant attachment style. And he was like, holy shit, that's it. It's almost like having an allergic reaction to intimacy, right? So you have this like allergic reaction as soon as you start to get too close to the other person. As soon as this sort of depth of intimacy starts to show up. You have this almost like allergic reaction that causes you to pull away, that causes you to shut down, or that causes you to push the other person away with various tactics. And we're going to talk about some of those tactics that show up because they can be very helpful for under. For helping you to identify specifically when your avoidant attachment style is starting to come up. I really want to emphasize to you that these attachment styles are not unhealthy things. I think in our psychological culture, in our therapeutic, industrial complex culture, what's happened is that people diagnose themselves or they hear those terms being that label being put on them, and it's almost like they have some type of infectious disease that they need to kill off. Okay? These attachment styles don't mean that you are broken or faulty in any way, shape or form. The big thing that I want you to get straight out of the gates is that these attachment styles, specifically avoidant, which we're going to talk about today, is an adaptive strategy. It's an adaptive strategy that you developed in childhood because of a primary caretaker, whoever that primary caretaker might be. So, because in your childhood, and what we know from developmental psychology is that literally your brain and your nervous system are wiring to, specifically the first three to five years of your life are wiring to your mother. And so when you are very young, especially from in utero to be zero to 18 months, that sort of first year and a half of life, your whole nervous system and your whole experience as a child is interconnected with your mom. And so your nervous system is literally going through what she's going through. So if she's wildly anxious, your nervous system is going to. Is going to have had the experience right out of the gates, you know, first entry into this world, for better or for worse, your nervous system will have had the experience of a lot of anxiousness. If your mom was maybe dealing with postpartum depression or she had, you know, four other kids to deal with, three other kids to deal with, and she's very overwhelmed and overrun by that. She might not have had the time and the attention to actually give to you. And you may have felt very early on like you were alone. It was very hard to actually attach or connect to her or to a primary caregiver. You became avoidant because growing up, your foundation of attachment, your foundation of relationship wasn't stable or secure or something happened to produce mistrust of the deep intimacy that comes along with those relationships. And I'm going to give you a very clear Few bullet points of causalities. So I'm going to give you very clear things of like here's the three or four or five things that actually cause avoidant attachment styles. And that is crucial to understanding how to get out of your attack this avoidant attachment style and move to secure. Again, we want to move to a secure attachment style because otherwise it's very hard to feel like our needs are important, our wants are important, our desires are important. And it's very hard to feel connected in any quality of relationship when we have an avoidant attachment style. So this attachment style often has a desire to be overly independent and self sufficient, oftentimes to the point of pushing others away. Version of this is that they don't trust relationships. Relationships feel dangerous or hostile. Getting too close to other people, maybe because of a betrayal in previous relationships or, or early on in life has caused some type of very deep mistrust that intimacy, relationships, closeness are a safe thing. And so it literally feels in the body like this is not safe and I need to protect myself from it. Like I need to protect myself from intimacy, I need to protect myself from closeness. And oftentimes people that have a more avoidant attachment style prefer not to rely on others and not to have other people rely on them. Now there can be variants of this, right? You might be an avoidant attachment where you're like, I'm okay with other people relying on me, I like that responsibility. But I sure as hell I'm not going to rely on other people. I will not allow myself to, you know, be put in a position where I have to rely on another person because that feels dangerous, that feels too close to intimacy, and I'm going to avoid that at all costs. The next thing that's very important about understanding and sort of defining what an avoidant attachment style looks like is that they often, an avoidant person will often view themselves in a better light and view the other person or the other people in a more negative way. So it's very common in a relationship for an avoidant person to.

To feel internally, to literally have the experience in the relationship that the majority of the problems are coming from the other person, right? And you kind of feel, you can kind of feel that if you're in the relationship with an avoidant person, it sort of feels like, why are all the problems on me, right? Not like on the victim and yada yada, yada, but you know, anytime a conflict comes up or disconnection in the relationship, it's like it's always the fingers Being pointed in one direction and for the avoidant person. So if you're watching this and you're avoidant, what you'll probably experience is it feels like you are the one who is not superior in the relationship, but that you're causing less problems in the relationship that the problems that are happening, the disconnection, the conflict, the arguments, the lack of sex, the, you know, lack of communication, etc, they're not really on you. That you're doing a pretty good job and that the other person is largely a part of the, is largely the main part of the problem. Now I'm not saying that that can't be true in some relationships, but for the most part, if you're an avoidant person in a relationship, this is how you're going to show up. There's going to be this internal perspective that you are not as much at cause for the dysfunction as the other person. Now that's very important because we're going to talk about causality. What actually causes avoidant attachment style? And again, if you feel like you know all these things, you can skip to the end and get into how do you move out of it? But I want to make it super clear that understanding what causes avoidant attachment style is part of the way out of it. Okay. Number one is emotional distance from a caregiver. Emotional distance from a caregiver. And so, so Dr. John Bowlby actually observed that caregivers who are emotionally distant from their children or sort of unresponsive to their children's needs can lead to the development of an avoidant attachment style. So you can imagine being a kid and you know, you are crying or you're upset about something and your parent is largely non responsive. They are not really responsive or caretaking of your emotional upsetness of your distress. And as a child that can feel a whole bunch of ways. But what it teaches that child is essentially my emotions. My emotional experience doesn't matter to the people that are around me, my emotional experience doesn't matter to the people around me or it's not safe for me to trust my emotional experience with the people around me. So in these cases the child learns that showing any type of vulnerability, seeking any kind of comfort during hardship. Right? So just note some of these things as I'm going through because if this is like pinging with you, these are parts of the things that are going to help you get the hell out of this avoidant territory. And it can look one or one or two other ways. Emotional distance from the caregiver can Also be high levels of control from that caretaker, high levels of manipulation from the caretaker. And, you know, maybe they were constantly controlling you. What you did, what you could say, you know, what you could wear. They were constantly manipulating you or, you know, sort of gaslighting you as you were growing up and, you know, telling you that something wasn't true when you knew that it was, or something didn't happen when you. You knew that it was. An example of this is, you know, I've worked with a number of men who caught a parent having an affair, and the parent lied about it and said, no, you know, that's not happening. That type of extreme version, but that type of betrayal. And then gaslighting can create a big rift in the attachment to the degree where you feel like you can't trust relationships. And so you start to pull away. So a last example, and this is for, you know, when we're very young, is when you are a child and you start to cry or show distress, but you are ignored for whatever reason. Doesn't matter what the reason is, right? Because again, you're a child. You don't have. Your prefrontal cortex isn't online. You're not reasoning through things like, oh, I can see that Mom's super busy with my brother and sister. That's not happening. It's just. Just, I'm distressed. I need something, I'm hungry, I need a diaper change, I need to be held because I'm feeling scared, or whatever it is. If you are ignored or told to be quiet enough times by your caregiver, by mom, dad, whoever your caregiver is, the likelihood of you learning to suppress your emotional needs is very, very high. So you start to avoid seeking comfort. So a big, big star, big asterisk that I want to put to this is if you are someone who experienced emotional distance as a child or emotional shutdown, you were told to be quiet, you're told to stop crying. You're told, you know all those types of things. It's very likely that you will continue that in your relationships. You will continue to emotionally distance from your partner. You won't trust that you can bring your emotional needs. You won't trust that you can seek any type of comfort from your partner. And so you will leave all of those things out of the relationship. Now, that's a really big indicator of how to actually resolve this avoidant attachment style and to start to move towards a secure attachment style, which we're going to talk about more later. But what I want to draw Drop here is just the note that if this is something that you experienced quite a bit of, right, mom was shut down, dad was shut down, you know, it wasn't safe for you to talk about what you were experiencing mostly or express what you needed in any way, shape or form. All of that is going to inform that you are going to have to risk starting to bring some of your emotional needs into your relationship because my guess is that they do not have a place usually. The story here is my experience doesn't matter and we're going to touch more on that later. Next, number two is the encouragement to be prematurely independent or situations that, that sort of thrust you as a kid into premature independence. So sometimes caregivers will encourage their children to be excessively independent at a very, very young age. You know, asking them to contribute around the household, asking them to take on adult like tasks which can cause that child to be put into a more adult orientation long before they are able to. And so the secure attachment with the caregiver, with the adult doesn't actually have time to form or set. And you're being asked to take on something much bigger than you. The analogy that I like here is imagine pouring the foundation of a house and the concrete hasn't actually set yet and you're starting to try and build the frame on top of that. It's going to create all types of challenges as you continue to build the rest of the home. So an example of this is, you know, a caregiver who sort of pushes their child at a very young age to do a lot of tasks alone, right? If you're like 6 years old and your parents are getting you to do the laundry or helping them balance their checkbook or you know, like you're six years old and they're, they're, you know, getting you to try and understand monetary policy like that, that kind of stuff is, is just going to be too hard. Things that were outside that you're not developmentally ready for can also be a big one. So trying to, to take on responsibility around the house, right? If you were, if you grew up in a single parent household and you had to take on the responsibility, you know, for good or for worse of tending to another child, of being a disciplinarian for one of your siblings, having to care for other kids like that, having to care maybe for a sick parent, etc, those can be a, a big cause to the avoidant attachment style because again, like I said, it doesn't allow for us to develop a very secure attachment with a Caregiver. And what starts to happen within that child's brain is other people's needs matter more than mine. Other people's needs matter more than mine. And so I have to prioritize other people's needs above mine. And this can create a very real sense of hostility within us. So that when we get older, it's. It's like, f that I'm not doing that. I'm not gonna prioritize your needs. I'm not going to prioritize what you want or what you need. And anytime that you tell me what you want or need, I'm gonna shut down. I'm gonna pull away. Especially if it's closeness, right? Especially if what you need is for me to be emotionally close to you. Cause then that feels like I'm gonna have to take care of you next is rejection of attachment needs. Rejection of attachment needs. So if a caregiver, if one of your parents consistently rejects or punishes you as a child, when you attempt to seek comfort or support, right, you had a nightmare. You're getting bullied at school, you hurt yourself physically, and you get rejected or yelled at, you get punished or rejected. When you're trying to get that support. What can happen to you as a kid is that you adapt by developing the avoidant attachment style. Because you learn that it's not okay for me to ask for support. It's not okay for me to make my needs known. And so how I. How I have to adapt and survive.

Right?

Again, avoidant attachment styles and anxious attachment styles, they are adaptive strategies. So if I keep asking you as my parent for support, for help, and you reject it and you punish me for that, what it teaches me is that what I need and want ultimately need to stay out of our relationship. So, again, an example of this is, you know, a child reaching out for a hug when they are feeling sad or when they're feeling lonely or when they hurt themselves and them being pushed away or scolded, leading them to stop seeking physical affection. That's an example. Or even worse, you get punished for bringing that to your parents, Right? What the hell's wrong with you? Like, this is stupid. Why do you think that this is an issue that's going to reinforce internally when I'm. When I'm going through something challenging, it doesn't matter to other people. So I should just offload it and give you a list of things that you can look for when it comes to an avoidant partner. Now, again, just because your partner has one of these things or you have one of these things doesn't make necessarily make you an avoidant person or partner, but if you have a bunch of them, it's probably a pretty decent sign. So number one is not returning texts or calls or emails. Although I, you know, I don't think a lot of couples generally email them each other. But not returning texts or calls. Forgetting to respond consistently can be a big sign of avoidance. Forgetting plans, special occasions, dates, that can be another big sign of avoidance. Another one is not reciprocating expressions of intimacy or love or affection, right? So you might find that if you are an avoidant partner, you. You might say that you want more intimacy or want more sex with your partner. And then when they try to navigate initiate, you find yourself shutting down. You find yourself making excuses for not having that intimacy or not having sex. Another one is deflecting conversations. Generally, when it comes to the relationship progressing around more commitment, such as, you know, getting into a committed relationship, moving in together, getting engaged, those types of things. An avoidant person will oftentimes it's those inflection points where they will have a lot of maybe combativeness or they're shut down, or there's excuses about why you can't talk about it, but there's some form of deflection away from that conversation. Next is maybe dismissing or making fun of the other partners, attempts to create closeness and intimacy or connect in a deeper way. So you might have a partner, right? If you are the avoidant person, you might have a partner who's trying to get you to read a book that would bring you closer together, or go to a workshop or listen to a podcast, or, you know, go on a certain date, whatever it might be, and you find yourself responding to those things, which, those are bids for connection. Those are bids for affection and closeness. You might find yourself responding to those things by mocking them, dismissing them, you know, calling them ridiculous or whatever that might be. Next is there's a certain level of discomfort with emotional closeness. There's a dislike of opening up to others and expressing thoughts or feelings. Opinions are okay, beliefs are okay, but opening up about thoughts or feelings specifically about the relationship or anything, intimacy that might lead to more closeness is oftentimes it feels like a threat. It might avoidant. People will definitely find it very challenging to trust that somebody else can be relied on. Next is that they prefer to maintain very rigid or strong boundaries in the relationship. They may pull away or shut down. If somebody questions those boundaries that are very rigid and very harsh, they may pull away. If people start to get more emotionally close. And they prefer to. When conflict arises, they prefer to kind of go into their own camps. So more avoidant people, especially people that are very avoidant when conflict arises, the approach that they take is not. Not, let's try and solve this together. It's, you go and think about it, I'll go and think about it, and then we'll kind of, you know, figure our own stuff out, and we'll move through it like that. All right, now for the big stuff. What do you do? How do you handle it? If you are the avoidant person in the relationship and want to move to a more secure relational style, A couple things. Number one, you have to unequivocally. You just have to. If you want to just going off the choice conversation before. But where we all need to start is understanding the origins of your avoidant attachment. Where did it actually come from? And the reason why this is important is that you. Part of the healing for all avoidance is to see the patterns and the behaviors that created their avoidance in the first place. Because, and I don't know how else to say this, more often than not, an avoidant has learned their avoidant attachment from an avoidant attachment.

Okay.

Oftentimes, if you are avoidant, you learn that avoidant attachment style from another attachment style. Right. One of your parents had a very emotionally attached, you know, disconnected attachment style in some way, shape or form. And so it's quite common that it's a learned behavior. And if you can start to see the patterns in your parent. And this is the hard part, but it's the thing that we all need to come into contact with. If we are the avoidant person, what.

We start to see is that we.

Are putting our partner in the same position that we felt we were in growing up.

Okay?

We're putting our partner into this position where they're starved of the connection, the intimacy, and the closeness that they're wanting. And that's a very similar position that we were in when we were a child with a caregiver or with somebody that we deeply loved. So we have to start to do that work. Now. Maybe I can create a separate section on that for you guys to kind of dig into. But that work should really be done with a psychologist, therapist, or coach that really knows what they're doing when it comes to attachment style. This is why at our men's weekends and all the programs that I do, a big portion of it focuses in on helping you become a secure attachment style. Number two, prioritize your experience Prioritize your experience. Avoiding People usually have the story that what they need or want doesn't matter, or they have to sort of manipulate and coerce things to get what they want, right? So there's usually this story of like, well, what I want doesn't matter. If I say what I want, it's going to cause a problem. If I try and tell somebody how I really feel, it's going to be used against me, it's going to be used to harm me. I'm going to get rejected because of it, I'm going to get punished because of it. And so because of that, avoidant people actually do not generally prioritize their real internal experience. So their real wants, needs and desires are oftentimes omitted from the intimate relationships in their life. And they might seem counter to that because again, in relationships, when a avoidant gets in a relationship with a secure or an anxious person, what ends up happening is that the avoidant person is getting pursued. They're constantly getting chased. And so for the other partner, it can feel like the whole relationship is about the avoidant person. But for the avoidant person, what it'll feel like for them is my needs actually aren't a priority in this relationship. And that's what confu can creates a tremendous amount of confusion and, and conflict in the relationship. So you have to start to be willing to be specific about what you're experiencing in the relationship, not complaints about the other person, but actually to communicate your wants, your needs, your desires. And you might want to start by owning the fact that you have a hard time building, developing, maintaining closeness in the relationship. And because that's you prioritizing your experience of I have a hard time trusting not you, but I have a hard time trusting closeness. I have a hard time being open and honest about what I'm feeling. I have a hard time actually asking you for what I want and need. I remember working with a man, and this is just an example who was in. In a relationship with a woman, and they've been dating for a couple years. And he said he really had struggled for his entire life to communicate what he wanted sexually in the bedroom. He felt like he had never been able to actually ask for what he wanted in the bedroom because he was so worried that he's going to get rejected and denied. And so he had to start to open up with the woman that he was dating and start to say, hey, listen, I'd like to explore X, Y and Z. I would really love for you to do this or for us to explore this. And it was something that he had never done in any prior relationship. And it really, really opened up their relationship in a massive, massive way. So you have to start to prioritize your own experience, your own needs, your own wants and desires. And where you can start is just writing, just taking a pen and paper and making a bit of a list. Like, what are some of the things that I want in the relationship?

Right.

Do you want to go on a date night a week? Do you want to go and have a specific type of date? Do you want to do more travel or adventure or hiking with your, you know, with your partner? Do you want to go and travel to certain places? Are there certain conversations that you want to have? Right. So start to really just write out what are some of the things that, you know, you already want to be included into the relationship that you've maybe been struggling to talk about or to open up about. Number three is shift from blame to ownership. Shift from blame to ownership. Avoidance tend to over index blaming the other person as a defense mechanism. Right? It's not a attack weapon. It's a defense mechanism. And so one of the things that we have to do when we recognize that we are the avoidant partner is that part of how we are creating distance and space between us and our partner is over indexing that they are the problem, that there's either something wrong with them or, you know, the decisions that they're making or that they, that, you know, they're constantly in the wrong. And we, we have to start to take ownership over our part in the conflict. And you have to start to take ownership over your part in the disconnection in the relationship. And so when something isn't working in the relationship and you have conflict around it, you have to step away and take a real solid look at what's my responsibility in this. How am I contributing to the disconnection? How am I contributing to this conflict? And once you start to do that, you can bring that back to the table and take ownership over, you know what, I shut down in that conversation, or I actually wasn't listening to you, or, you know, I was blaming you for what was going on. But you have to start to look at taking ownership over your part of the relational dysfunction. And specifically, and this is the big, big, big piece that you need to start to take ownership over in order to move into a more secure attachment style. You have to take ownership over the ways in which you are pulling away, shutting down, or disconnecting. It cannot be the responsibility of Your partner. And the reason for that is that even if they were pointing it out and they were right, it would still cause you to pull away. So you have to take ownership over all the ways in which you disconnect, shut down, pull away from emotional closeness, physical closeness, and sexual closeness. And so that where I would encourage you to start with that is again, just sit down and start to take stock of what are some of the ways in which I pull away, shut down, or disconnect in my relationship and just start to write some of those pieces out so you can catch yourself in the moment and take ownership over them and lean into closeness and connection. So then times in which you would normally, you know, conflict starts to brew up and you shut down and pull away, or, you know, your wife or your girlfriend makes a comment about how you forgot about something instead of shutting down, or like, you always do this or, you know, you're always criticizing me, you lean in and say, you're right, I did forget this. I did forget to pick that up from the grocery store or whatever it is next. Use shutdown as a bridge. Use shutdown as a bridge. Now, this is a really, really important one. Every single time you want to shut down or pull away or you find yourself shutting down or pulling. Pulling away, call it out.

It might be in a conflict, and.

You can say, I'm shutting down right now. Or it might be, you know, you and your partner haven't had great communication for a few days, and you can feel yourself pulling away. You can feel yourself wanting to disconnect. You can feel yourself wanting to move towards coping mechanisms, whatever they might be, call it out and say, you know what? I feel like there's a lot of distance between us. I feel like I'm pulling away. Have you felt that to. And in this way, you're using the recognition of the shutdown as a bridge for connection. You're using the recognition of shutdown as a bridge of connection. And you can use that to open up into a conversation about number two, point number two, which was prioritize your experience. And you can say things like, hey, I'm shutting down. I need a minute. Let's reconnect. And you can take a breath and lean back in. And then you can say, what's actually underneath the shutdown, right? What's actually happening behind that? Are you worried about letting them down? Are you worried that your needs don't matter? Are you worried that you, you know, if you ask what you want, you're going to be rejected? Are you just struggling in some way, shape or form because you, you feel a little bit lonely, right? Like whatever it might be. But use that shutdown as a bridge to reconnect to your partner. Next next is build trust with routine and repetition. So just because you use shutdown as a bridge one time doesn't mean that that's going to magically move you out of this avoidant behavior. You are going to need some repetition, right? It's like a golf swing. You're not going to get up to the golf tee and crack it 300 yards right down the middle of the fairway, right? You're going to, you're going to shit the bed a couple of times. It's going to go way off to the right or way off to the left. You know, you're going to hook it, you're going to slice it. That's going to happen. It's going to take some practice. So you need to have a bit of a routine and some repetition to actually lean into intimacy and to begin to trust that it's okay for you to ask for your needs to be met. It's okay for you to be open and transparent, to prioritize your experience. It's okay for you to take ownership not only over your part of any conflict or dysfunction, but it's okay for you to take ownership over what you actually want in the dynamic in the relationship. One thing that can be very helpful in this part of it is to schedule a weekly or bi weekly experience or date or conversation with your partner where you get to share something with that person. You get to share are in something with that person. It doesn't really matter what it is, but it can be an art class. You could go do pottery. You could go to a sporting event. You can go and have a hobby together, right? A photography walk, a walk through the forest, a hike. It doesn't really matter what it is, but it is a very specific and intention intentional time where you and your partner are committed to creating some type of connection. Now the reason why this is important is because you're gonna find yourself wanting to sabotage around that and all of your avoidant BS is going to pop up around it. You're gonna, you know, the two or three times in you're gonna find like, I don't want to go do this thing or maybe we can just skip this week or whatever it is and it'll be a training ground for you to prioritize consistent connection, consistent intimacy. Remember what I talked about in the beginning for many avoidance. One of the things that creates avoidance. An avoidant attachment in the first place is inconsistent connection, inconsistent intimacy. And so we have to be willing to prioritize that in order to do the last piece, which is get uncomfortably close.

Realize and remember that for you as an avoidant person, closeness feels foreign and closeness feels like a threat to your system. And so you have to be willing to lean in and you can ask yourself the question, if I was putting the relationship first, what choice would I make? I love this question. For me in the past and for any avoidant man that I've ever worked with, this, this question has been a radical game changer. Because for the avoidant person, it is a me first life. I have to protect myself first because nobody else is going to do it for me. And so we have to start to shift and say, okay, I'm in this with somebody, I'm in a life together with somebody, I'm in a relationship with somebody. So if I was putting the relationship first, what choice would I make? You know, about this date, about this decision? And you don't have to use that every single time, but start to leverage that question because it can really help you reorient your mind and your body to a more relationship centric way of living and choosing versus a me centric individual way of living and choosing. That's leaving you alone, disconnected, unhappy, and not getting what you actually crave and want in your relationship. So.

Just know that if you feel like you're doing this work and you're becoming like more anxious or more avoidant, it's probably that you're on the right path. Keep going. Now, that doesn't mean that I'm advocating you, for you to be an anxious attached person or avoidant attached person. It simply means that that is the direction that's moving you towards safety. It means that you're picking a side. It means that you're finding a path. So as you do this work and you start to ground and you start to find more safety and more security, you are going to notice that the urge to pull away, disconnect, sell everything and move to Bali, the urge to become more anxious and needy and clingy in your relationship, those things are probably going to heighten. Know that that's going to happen. Know that that's okay. Be honest about it with, with the people that you're working with, with your therapist or psychologist, be honest with your partner about it. Just be as transparent as possible and you'll move through that phase much, much faster. All right, thank you very much for tuning into this. Please don't forget to man it forward. Share this episode with somebody that you know will enjoy it. I hope you got a tremendous amount of value out of this. If I can ever do anything to support you, let me know. And there is a an attachment guide that is in the comment section below.

In the caption as well. And so don't forget to check that out. That might be of some service to you. And until next week, this is Connor Beaton signing off.

Sa.