Two Lessons That Can Fix Your Attachment

All right, team, welcome back to the Mantalk Show. Connor Beaton here, and today I'm going to be teaching you about the two main things that you need to understand to fix your insecure attachment. When I say insecure, I mean anxious, avoidant, disorganized, dismissive, fearful, whatever it is that your attachment style is if it's insecure. I'm going to teach you the two things that you need to know and understand and work on in in order to move towards a secure attachment style. And this is something that I haven't seen anybody else really talk about. So you're gonna wanna stay tuned because I'm gonna go through each attachment style and teach you the specific things that you need to know and do. So let's dive straight in. Every attachment style is really organized around one thing, okay? And I'm gonna break this into secure attachment and insecure attachment. Secure attachment is organized around safety. It's safe for me to express my needs, wants, and desires. It's safe for me to say no. It's safe for me to create space or closeness and intimacy. Whereas the insecure attachment style, again, anxious, avoidant, dismissive, whatever, is organized around threat. So not the danger of a bear in the woods or, you know, some type of physical threat, although that might be the case for some of you. But specifically relational threat, rejection, abandonment, loss of autonomy or agency engulfment. Right? Kind of that enmeshment that can happen from some parents being not understood or not seen being overly controlled. And so the insecure attachment style is a threat detection system. And when that threat detection system gets activated, you do not choose your response. You don't choose how you respond. You automatically respond. Your nervous system responds. And today I'm gonna break down three main things, okay? The first is what the threat is for each attachment style. So I'm gonna go through each of them. And then the main second part is the survival strategy that shows up in response to the threat. Because there's two big things that really mark an insecure attachment style of any kind. It's that you perceive a threat even if it's there, whether it's there or. And then you deploy a survival strategy. And it is that threat response and that survival strategy that's keeping you in the insecure attachment style and preventing you from moving into a secure space, a secure attachment with somebody. And they're going to teach you how to regulate your system so that you're not hijacked by this threat response and survival mechanism. Because if you can't tolerate the Threats. And you can't alter the survival strategy. You will continue to unconsciously destroy the relationships that you ultimately want. That might be a little bit dramatic, but you will continue to unconsciously create insecure connection in your relationship. So let's just dive straight in. Attachment part number one that we're talking about is that attachment, the insecure attachment specifically is a threat detection system. And the main thing I want to talk about here is that attachment is not personality. This is a misconception. A lot of people have pathologized themselves. You may have walked around saying, I'm an anxious attached person or I'm an avoidant person and it's become a part of your identity and a part of your personality. But it is not. It is a threat detection that was wired within you within childhood. It is a response that your nervous system learned when danger showed up in relationships, when love would get withdrawn or taken away or punish, when shame was deployed, when abandonment happened. And it created a response mechanism in your nervous system that chronically looks for threat within relationships. And that's really how you've learned to attach. So insecure attachment, insecure attached people have really learned that when they're in relationship, they are in a constant chronic state. Their nervous system is in a constant chronic state of looking for the threat or threat detection. And that's how they relate to the majority of people. And it creates that survival strategy. Not a healthy strategy, not a connective strategy, a survival strategy. So let's break each one down and let's start with anxious attached. The core threat for the anxious attached person is disconnection and abandonment, being unwanted, being replaced. And for the anxious attached person, distance feels like death. Distance feels like death. Remember, if you are an anxious attached person, the threat is, I need you to be okay in order for me to be okay. So you're constantly scanning the environment for the threat of are you not all right or are you pulling away? Silence can feel like rejection. Ambiguity can feel catastrophic. And we can really. That can really send your mind reeling. So remember, for the anxious, distance feels like death. And the survival response is pursuit. I am going to cling. I'm going to over text. I'm going to over explain. You find yourself over functioning, protesting constantly. How come you didn't text me back? Why didn't you know that I needed that? And there's a lot of emotional escalation. And so you, if you are an anxious person or if you're with an anxious person, what you'll see is that your survival response is to Try and like wet blanket yourself around, around that other person, right around your partner. And it's like the closer, the more that you can close the gap that you perceive between you and that other person, the more that you feel safe, which never actually happens. So this is a, a kind of fight response, which is very interesting, right, because when we think of anxious people, we don't think of fighters. But this is not a freeze response. This is actually a fight response disguised as connection seeking. So sometimes you're with anxious people and it can come out, it can feel like if you're on the other side of it, it can feel like they are constantly fighting, arguing, creating conflict to try and get closer to you. They can feel needy. But what their nervous system is really saying is if I increase proximity, if I increase closeness, then maybe I can survive. Maybe I won't feel this very deep threat inside. Now what's actually happening in your body, anxious attached people, is that there's a kind of sympathetic activation, AKA you're in fight mode, you're in go mode. You have the racing thoughts, you have the ruminating thoughts. There's the tight chest, there's the urgency, there's the catastrophizing, right? The mind just goes a million miles a minute, playing out all of the worst case scenarios that might be happening. But, but the body is screaming, right? If you've heard me talk about the elephant and the rider, the elephant being the body and the mind being the rider, the body is screaming, connections disappearing. And so I need to do everything in my power to get closer in proximity to you. In order to do what? Negate what I'm feeling inside. Now this is the really key piece because regulation for the anxious person never actually comes. This is the illusion and the fear, or this is the illusion that shows up for the anxious person never actually comes in creating that closeness or if it does, it's so fleeting, it is so temporary that it's frustrating. So the work really is for you as an anxious attached person to be able to tolerate relational distance. That's the threat for you. Distance feels like death and that's the threat. So the more that you can build up sending a text message and being okay, not getting text back for an hour or three or four, the more that you can build up the tolerance of that person being a little upset or a little withdrawn, the more you can build up tolerance to having your significant other maybe pull away a little bit or they, you know, they're, they're frustrated because you forgot to do something. So here's what you need to do. Okay, step one, anxious folks. Name the threat. Name the threat. Say internally, my abandonment alarm is going off. This distance feels like death. Whatever word, whatever verbiage works for you. We as guys seem to really like that more hostile language. Like, this feels like death. Man, this is terrible. But this, what this does is it creates some separation between you and the reaction. Okay? And this is really important. Carl Jung said, what we cannot separate from, we cannot heal. So you actually need to create some separation by acknowledging it. Right. My abandonment alarm is going off. Number two, this is a huge one. Regulate before reaching. Regulate before you text. Breathe before you pursue. Connect with an accountability partner. Connect with a friend and say, man, my anxiousness is off the charts. I know that it's not coherent. I know that it's not rational. And I needed to tell somebody so I don't puke this all over my partner. Right? So slow your exhale down, slow the body down. Do some box breathing. You know, this is what I teach my son to do when he's scared at night from monsters and ghosts and stuff like that. Hand on the chest, hand on the belly. You close your eyes, you breathe into the belly and the chest, and you remind your body, I'm safe, I'm okay. And you're teaching your nervous system in that moment, distance does not equal death. I am okay. Even if my wife, my girlfriend, my husband, my boyfriend is not all right. Okay, number three, last piece for you anxious folks. Delay the protest. Set an alarm for 20 minutes. Most anxious. And when I say protest, I mean it's the automatic response of like, why aren't you texting me back? And the, you know, the 10 text messages and the four phone calls of like, what are you doing? And where are you? And I don't know where you are. And you know, it's. That's the protest behavior. So most anxious protest behavior is an attempt to reduce the discomfort that you're feeling inside of your body. Okay? So if you regulate first and you delay the protest. I'm not going to text him. I'm not going to text her. I'm not going to call her. I'm going to set an alarm for 20 minutes. I'm going to go read a book. I'm going to go do some push ups. I'm going to do some burpees. I'm going to go do some work. When you delay that protest, you're building out your tolerance for the discomfort in your body and you're teaching yourself. You're wiring your Mind and wiring your nervous system to know that you can tolerate that discomfort and that you can regulate, you can self soothe without needing that external confirmation that everything's okay. All right, avoidance, let's talk about you. Lovely avoidance. And I'm not going to talk about fearful and dismissive so much as I'm just going to talk about avoidance in general. So for the avoidance, the core threat, and this was me to a T, I've talked about going through avoidant attachment. But to me, for me and for all avoidance, the core threat is engulfment. Am I going to lose my sense of agency and freedom and identity? Am I going to get control by you? Am I gonna have to rely on you for me for a long time? Just relying on somebody, needing somebody, expressing my needs to somebody felt terrible. It just felt like garbage. There's no other way to say it because for the avoidant attached person, closeness feels dangerous. So it's the inverse of the anxious, right? For the anxious, distance feels like death. And for the avoidant, closeness feels dangerous. Might not feel like death, but it definitely feels like a massive threat. Dependence feels in some way, for some avoidance, it feels humiliating. The more I think I need you, the more I think I want you, the more I want to express what I need from you or want from you, the more embarrassed I feel, the more humiliated I feel. The more the story of like, I shouldn't need you to be okay. Cause remember, at the core of the avoidant is I don't need anyone to be okay. I am only okay on my own. So being needed by someone or feeling like you need someone is what is the threat. Okay? So relationship becomes the threat. Whereas for the anxious, the withdrawal of relationship is the threat. So the survival response for the avoidant, pretty simple, pretty classic, it's withdrawal, right? It's disconnect, it's emotional shutdown, it's stonewalling, it's hyper rationalizing, fixating on work, right? You might find yourself that when the relationship really starts to get close and you can feel your significant other like, you know, loving on you and needing you and you feel in love, all of a sudden, you know, you're 80 hours a week in a work project and you're like, oh, I don't know what happened? Minimizing of feelings. So you kind of shut down what's happening inside of you and deactivating, right? So a deactivation. The most common one that I see in avoidance is the chronic questioning of the relationship, the chronic rumination of is this the right person? I Don't. Maybe she's not, maybe she's not the right person. Maybe this isn't the right relationship. How does she compare to the other women that I've dated and been with? And you know, maybe there's another woman on blah, blah, blah. So this is a flight response. Okay, interesting, right? The anxious has a fight response. I'm going to fight for closeness. And the avoidant has a flight response. I need to move away from relationship. Now I had some shame around this when I learned this initially and I thought to myself, why am I running away from relationship? Like, like what a, you know, like what a weak ass move. But what I realized was a lot of my avoidance was because I couldn't trust attachment growing up. Sometimes that attachment was abusive, sometimes that, that attachment was really harmful verbally, psychologically, physically. And so you learn to withdraw, to depart. And the nervous system says, if I can create space, I can survive. Now again, there doesn't actually need to be in your current relationship a physical or verbal threat in order for your nervous system and your attachment style to experience a threat. Now what's happening in your body for some avoidance, it can be quite intense. And so you can actually be having a kind of dorsal vagal activation, which is a very fancy polyvagal way of saying a freeze or a collapse or a complete shutdown. You might notice that you have emotional numbness. So you can't really feel much going on in the body. You can feel a lot of heaviness in the body and maybe not be able to articulate emotions. There's a kind of reduced affect. Again, that's a kind of numbing out of what's happening inside of you. And there's an irritation when somebody wants closeness. You're irritated by that. The body is saying too close is unsafe. Closeness is the threat. How do you regulate this? This is the tricky part. Okay. And when I say tricky part, I mean it's something that you actually have to choose. You have to really choose to work on this. The thing with the avoidant is they are, they get a lot of flack online. I see a lot of, I see a lot of people hating on the avoidance. There's more acceptance for the anxious people because anxiety is very common in our culture. It's very, it's very sort of socially accepted to have anxiety. So it's not as big of a deal. But the avoidance seem to get a lot of hate and flack avoidance. I love you. It's okay, I've been there. I know exactly what it's like, but for the avoidance, it can be a little bit trickier because when other people are trying to convince you that you need to get closer, what they're really saying is, or what it feels like inside of you is you need to face danger and threat. You like, intimacy, closeness, connection, all feels dangerous. And people are almost like telling you to put the hand on the stove, right? And so that's why a lot of avoidance for a lot of avoidance people. I have a lot of empathy and sympathy for them because usually when they're in relationship, they are experiencing a lot of hostility from partners who are telling them, come closer. I want, you know, I want more intimacy from you. And for them, inside of their system, that feels like a huge threat. So the work is not to force vulnerability. It's not to force yourself into positions of being vulnerable. The work is to learn to expand your tolerance for closeness without shutting down, okay? It's expanding your tolerance for closeness without shutting down, just like the anxious is expanding their tolerance. Because remember, this is the survival strategy. Your survival strategy, the threat is closeness. The survival strategy is get the hell out of there. So you have to begin to lower the threat response and begin to expand your window of tolerance for closeness and connection without shutting down. Here's exactly how you do this, okay? And I wish somebody had taught me this way earlier in life, but here's exactly how you do this. So, number one is you notice the urge to withdraw, and you really start to pay attention. You have to start to catch it earlier. There are always signs and symptoms of you wanting to pull away. You might feel like your breath is, you know, tighter or more constricted. You might just feel a visceral reaction of, like, man, I just want, like, oh, I want to stretch out. I want this person to go away from me a little bit more. Or like, you find yourself getting agitated by what your girlfriend or your wife is saying, and you don't even know why you're agitated because there's no real rhyme or reason for your agitation. It's just that your nervous system is in a threat response already. So that's the urge to withdraw. That agitation, that irritation, the wanting to pick a fight, the internal judgment or criticism of them that probably is coming up inside of you, all of that are symptoms of I want to withdraw. So what do you do? You label it, I'm pulling away. I want to pull away. This awareness is huge. And my real strong encouragement for you, avoidance, is to write out your withdrawal methods. What do you do specifically to disconnect and pull away. Do you pick fights? Do you start judging them internally inside of your head? Do you start to criticize them openly? Do you start to lie about how late you're working? Like, what do you do to create space and withdraw and start to communicate that I feel like I'm shutting down and start to communicate. I could use some space. I could just use 10 minutes to take a breath, and then we can come back into this conversation. Step number two, stay focused. Physically present. All right? Instead of leaving, instead of peacing out. Because what a lot of avoidants do is they start to peace out into their mind. They start to ruminate, criticize, judge, whatever it is, disconnect, check their phone, stay present, maintain eye contact. This is going to be a big thing for you. Avoidance. Keep your body oriented towards the person instead of turning away, instead of crossing your arms and sort of collapsing in. Physically, keep your body oriented to their person and focus your mind instead of on the criticism, on the judgment, on the thoughts of, like, I want out of here. I wish they'd stopped talking. Focus your mind on slowing your breathing. Teach your nervous system. Closeness might be uncomfortable sometimes, but it's not dangerous. Okay, it might be uncomfortable, but it's not dangerous. And finally, name one feeling or emotion. Avoidance regulates, usually through cognition, and I was notorious for this. And this is why, generally speaking, more men are avoidant is because we try and regulate through rationality, through cognition. But connection requires sensation. Connection requires us to have some tether, some anchor to an embodied, somatic understanding of what's happening inside of us. So practice saying, I'm feeling overwhelmed right now, or I'm, you know, I'm feeling a little bit of agitation or I'm feeling a little bit of, like, concern or fear or whatever it is that's happening inside of you. It's not a story. It does not need to be analyzed. It is just a feeling. And this will interrupt your shutdown. Okay? The. The labeling of the feeling is going to help orient what's happening inside of you. And if you can express it, if you're in a relationship with somebody where that can happen, you can say, you know, I feel like I'm shutting down right now and they're doing this work with you, then that is going to help it pass much faster. All right, finally, my disorganized attachments. Here's the core threat and disorganized is a bit of a combination of anxious and avoidant, depending on the style. But the core threat for the disorganized is connection itself. Closeness is danger, Distance is danger. It's both dangerous and this is the really hard part. The way that I like to think about the disorganized attached person is that there's just no plan for connection. They don't know necessarily how to do it. It feels foreign. But not only does it feel foreign, it feels threatening if it's there or if it goes away. So love feels unsafe. Aloneness feels unsafe. It's a very brutal place to be. And this is often rooted in a. In a highly chaotic childhood or a traumatic childhood environment where, you know, maybe parents were extremely erratic in their behavior, maybe they were abusive, they were very chaotic. They were there. They were not. They would abandon, they would come back. You didn't know if you're gonna get nice dad or crazy dad or nice mom or crazy mom. And so that's the threat. Okay? Closeness and aloneness both feel like a threat to the disorganized. The survival response is this yo yo behavior. That's the. I call it the yo yo behavior. It's the push, pull behavior. I'm going to push you away and pull you closer. I'm going to pull you closer and I'm going to push you away. There's a lot of emotional volatile volatility. You don't really know what you're going to get or how you're going to feel based on any given circumstance. There's a lot of freezing. There's a lot of anger outbursts, and you'll oscillate between the two of them. And then the last piece for a lot of disorganized attachment styles is a kind of dissociation, right? So there's a checking out. And again, that's because there's a confusion around. I don't even know how to connect. I want it deeply, I crave it deeply. But that closeness feels dangerous. But I'm also sad and depressed by being alone. So this is a blend of fight, flight and freeze. This is the hard part for disorganized attachment folks. And I really, my heart really goes out to you because I have worked with many disorganized folks, and they live in a state of fighting one day, freezing the next day, running away the next day and being very frustrated because at their core, they deeply long for and crave intimacy and connection. Now, what's happening inside of you disorganized folks, what's happening inside of your nervous system is that your nervous system is confused. The thing that keeps me safe also hurts me. Right? The strategy that you learned to keep you Safe, which is, you know, when somebody gets too close, you push them away. When somebody gets too far, you try and pull them close. That is the strategy. If they're too far, you pull them in. If they're too close, you push them away. All right, so it's like a little bit of whack, a mole that's going on. What's happening inside of your body, inside of your nervous system, there's kind of this rapid nervous system swing, right? You're moving from safety and parasympathetic and you're, you know, to rest and digest to stress and. And real like, chaos and adrenaline to complete shutdown and freezing. And what is one of the big demarcations, one of the big sort of markers for the disorganized is hyper arousal to collapse. So you'll probably find yourself in this sort of duality, this polarity of you go, and everything's exciting and you're like, super aroused and everything's wonderful to just like, blah. You can't get off the couch and stop watching Netflix. Netflix. And then it's really constituted with a ton of shame spikes. People that have disorganized attachment have a lot of shame. There's a lot of dissociation and there's a lot of fear of oneself. And this is not necessarily drama. It's a dysregulated threat system. So your threat system is so dysregulated that it's confused and it knows it's confused. This is the. This is the interesting thing about the disorganized attachment style is that because it's constantly perceiving, that's a threat today but not tomorrow, and the threat changes. Your nervous system knows that it's confused. Your body knows that it's confused. So what do you do? How do you regulate a disorganized attachment and a disorganized nervous system? The work is really to build internal safety before relational safety. Okay? This is really important. You have to prioritize building internalized safety that you feel safe with yourself so that you can begin to trust relational safety. You can discern whether or not a person that you're dating or somebody that you're married to is operating in a way that is safe and trustworthy, et cetera. So step number one, my disorganized folks slow everything down. A disorganized system moves incredibly fast. And I've actually given this assignment to many people where I say, for the next two weeks, you are going to be in like a living walking meditation. You are going to Slow down your speech by 50%. You're going to slow down your breath. You're going to slow down how you walk, how you make your coffee and your breakfast. You are going to slow down absolutely everything. I want you to drive slower. I want you to get out of the car slower. I want you to do absolutely everything slower so that you can begin to. To acclimate your body and your system to knowing what it is like to move at a slower pace. Because again, while the disorganized might oscillate between fight, flight, or freeze, all most of those states, all of those states are still a very fast orientation. Even in the freeze orientation, what a lot of people will describe is like the car's not moving, but the engine's revving at the red line, right? It's like the engine's just. But the car is just sitting in neutral, right? So that's a freeze response in the body. Still, things are moving fast. Fight moving fast, flee moving fast. So you want to slow everything down. So for a few, few weeks, slow everything down. Step number two is track your body sensations. Instead of reacting to anything that's happening in your relationship for a period of time, what you're going to ask yourself is, what am I feeling in my body? When she said that, when she did that, when she didn't show up to that, when she didn't respond to that, what is happening in my body? Where is the. The charge and the activation? Where is it? So what am I feeling, right? There's heat, there's intensity, there's tension, there's collapse, there's an explosion of energy, there's cold. Whatever it is, the description is what you're feeling inside and where is it? Where does it exist? Is it in your abdomen? Does it feel like it's in your diaphragm, in your chest and your hands? This builds internal coherence because remember, for you, my disorganized friends, there's confusion about what's even happening inside of you. So a huge piece that you need to work on in order to not only have the threat response go down, but to sort of quell that survival strategy, to shrink that survival strategy is to start to gain some real clarity on this is what's happening inside of me. And this builds coherence. The third thing is containment practices. Okay? Practicing containment when you're overwhelmed. And there's a lot of great exercises that you can do that things like polyvagal practices and somatic practices offer. You can cross your arms over your chest and kind of gently squeeze to, like, bring some containment physically into your body. You can do wall sits and press your back against the. Against the wall. Your vagus nerve runs up the. The spine, and so it's nice to press your back into the wall and you can kind of feel physical boundaries. You can push your hands onto the wall. You can just press into things. But this is going to help you to feel some physical containment. If your mind is racing and it's really teaching your nervous system, I can contain myself. I can do that. I know how to do that. All right? I'm not going to go into secure attachment. In this video, I do have all of the things that I've laid out are going to move you towards secure attachment, which is the wonderful part about this work. So if you're wanting to dive more into secure attachment, I do have another video specifically on secure attachment. I'm going to give you three real regulation formulas to close this out. Regardless of your attachment styles, whether you're secure, whether you're insecure. The first one is notice the threat narrative. Okay? Notice the threat narrative. What story is my nervous system telling me? What story is my body telling me? Is it talking? Is it worried about abandonment? That person's abandoning me. Is it worried about engulfment? I'm going to lose my agency. Is it worried about chaos? What's happening next? Regulate the body first before you respond, before you engage, before you make a decision. Soothe. Regulate first. Slow exhale, Ground your feet, relax your jaw. Guys, we are notorious for carrying tension in our jaws. Soften your shoulders, relax your abdomen. No regulation equals no clarity. So regulate before you respond and then finally communicate and connect after regulation. It's a very simple process that I'm laying out for you, but I promise you it will pay dividends if you practice this. Three steps, okay? Communicate and connect after you regulate, not during peak activation. When you're freaking out, when you're wanting to pull away, when you're wanting to cling. That's not the time to connect and communicate. Say, I'm feeling anxious and I could use some reassurance or some space to chill out. I'm feeling overwhelmed, and I need a few minutes to just get my shit together. Right? I'm activated and I want to respond to you and not react, so I need a minute. This is secure behavior, and it's something that you will need to practice even if you are not secure yet. Okay? So I'm going to leave you with this. I hope that you have found this incredibly helpful for you. I'VE given you a lot of exercise you can do depending on your attachment system and your attachment style. If you have any questions, share below. Do not forget. Please, for the love of all that's holy, share this with somebody. Man it forward. There are so many people that could use these resources, these tactical resources, because I see so many people talking about attachment styles but not giving executable, actionable steps that people can actually take to move towards secure attachment. So watch this with your significant other, watch it on repeat. Write down the one or two things that you are going to do and commit to doing them for at least 20 to 30 days. Whatever you decide. You're like, I need to do this, that one thing. Focus in on that relentlessly for the next 20 to 30 days and I promise you, you will see a huge shift in the way that you relate to people in your life. I promise you. I have seen this so many times, so I hope that you enjoyed don't forget to like, don't forget to comment, don't forget to share and don't forget to subscribe to the channel. All right, as always, until next week, Connor Beaton signing off.