Excerpt from a Connor Beaton YouTube video describing hypervigilance as a central feature of disorganized attachment. The speaker explains that people with disorganized attachment are highly attuned to incongruencies and shifts in relationship 'temperature'—becoming externally focused on partners and environments as a learned strategy from childhood to try to secure safety and stability.
Disorganized people have a lot of hyper vigilance towards any incongruencies in the relationship, any behavioral changes in their partner, any changes within the relationship, the temperature of the relationship. Like when things are hotter or colder, they're closer, they're more connected, they're less connected. A disorganized person will be extremely hyper vigilantly tuned in to all of that, because when they were growing up, they had to learn to just be in a constant state of externalized awareness. What is happening outside of me? And they had to do that in order to try and provide any type of safety and stability and internal sense of just being okay. And so there's a lot of externalization of, how are you doing what's happening in our relationship? They might even be very hyper vigilant about what's happening in their environment. So hyper vigilance, a big, big, big hallmark of it.
How to Raise Strong, Unshakable Boys in Today's Culture, with Dr. Shefali Tsabary
