Connor Beaton explains that the primary trap for anxiously attached men is "outsourcing" their sense of safety to others, which produces hypervigilance, chronic checking, and externalized validation. He advises building an internalized (insourced) sense of safety through daily self-soothing practices, using supportive peers during early stages, and developing self-regulation to move toward secure attachment. The clip closes with an invitation for viewer feedback.
Chapters
If you are the anxious man in the relationship, right, the anxious, attached guy who's chronically text bombing and checking in to see if your, you know, partner's okay or if everything's going okay, if she's fine. Your hyper vigilance is chronically scanning to make sure that she's not upset with you or that the relationship's okay. There's one thing that you need to understand and focus on to move towards a secure attachment in your relationship. You see, at the very foundation of every anxious, attached man is an outsourcing of safety to the person that they're with or the people that are around them. You learned at some point in your childhood that in order for you to feel okay inside of yourself, inside of your body as a person, that you actually need other people around you to be okay so that your system can settle. And this creates this hypervigilance externally towards other people, along with a whole bunch of other things, right? Like externalizing your validation, externalizing your sense of worth, et cetera. So the main piece that you have to begin to focus in on rigorously, meticulously, every single day is insourcing a sense of being okay, insourcing a sense of safety. Now, this is challenging. Obviously, if you're with a partner that has more avoidant tendencies and they shut down or they pull away or they close off, of course that's going to send you into a little bit of a spiral. But the more that you can reel the nets in and begin to self soothe, self reassure, remind yourself that you're okay. And for a period of time, you might need to have some friends, you know, some men in your life that you're going through this process with so that you can call them and get some insight like, hey, you know, my anxiety's, you know, spiking right now, and I could just use your help to remind me to come back into a sense of security within myself so that I don't text bomb the crap out of my wife or girlfriend so that I don't love bomb them so that I'm not, you know, chronically checking in to make sure that they're okay. As you do this, you start to develop a sense of trust and safety and security within yourself that not only signals to your partner that you've moved into a more secure place, but you actually develop a sense of confidence and competence in being able to regulate your own system, which is oftentimes the thing that you weren't able to do in childhood. So, comment below, let me know how this one landed for you. And what, you would like me to go deeper into?
