Dr. Dawn-Elise Snipes outlines five signs of insecure attachment: trouble naming feelings, difficulty expressing needs, boundary problems, mood swings, and low self-worth. She explains how secure caregivers teach emotional labeling and distress tolerance, then offers practical fixes like mindfulness, assertive communication, and exercises to recognize your strengths.
Hey there, everybody, and welcome to this video. On five signs, you never formed a secure attachment. I'm your host, Dr. Donnelly Snipes. If you have difficulty identifying your feelings, you may not have formed a secure attachment. When you have a secure attachment with a caregiver, they help you identify what this feeling you're having is and put a label on it. So you know if it's anxiety or anger or excitement, and they help you figure out how to tolerate that distress and then how to regulate those emotions. If you have difficulty communicating your needs and wants, you may have never formed a secure attachment. When you're in a secure attachment, that caregiver is consistently there and attending to you and saying, what are your thoughts on this? What is it that you want? What is it that you need? Not that they're going to meet your every single want and need, but they help you start identifying your needs and wants and articulating them, saying, this is what I want to have happen. They may help you learn how to compromise. If you want to go to Walt Disney for two weeks, you know, the caregiver may be like, yeah, that's not something that's even possible. How about a weekend? You know, maybe we can take a weekend family vacation. So the caregiver acknowledges the wants and needs, validates them as what the person has. That's one of their wants. Okay, it's not good. It's not bad. It may not be mine, but it's yours, and I respect that. I may not be able to meet it completely. How can we compromise as adults? We need to be able to communicate our needs and wants, which means we need to be able to figure out what they are first and then be able to state them in an assertive way. We say, these are my needs and wants. They're no more or less important than your needs and wants. And ideally, we can find a way to compromise to synergize, create a win, win, whatever phrase you want to use in order for us both to most effectively get our needs and wants met. If your boundaries are too rigid or too weak, you probably never formed a secure attachment. Rigid boundaries are when you have thoughts, wants and needs, but you don't let anybody know about them. You don't tell anybody you know them, but you don't tell anybody what they are. You hold these rigid boundaries. You don't let people close to you physically. You don't let people around your stop stuff at all. You hold yourself in a fortress, and that can keep a child safe. If they never formed a secure attachment. If they never had somebody to help them feel safe, if they never had someone who validated their thoughts, wants and needs, or worse yet, if their caregivers were abusive or neglectful and maybe told them that their thoughts, wants and needs weren't important, then they may have learned to say, you know what, I'm not going to share. There's no point in sharing because it just ends up leading to disappointment and heartache. Other people's boundaries are too weak. They may have thoughts, wants and needs, but they let other people walk all over them and tell them that their thoughts, wants and needs are wrong. And these are the ones that you should have. So here you have these thoughts, wants and needs. Now, because this is what I tell you, you're going to think either way is not healthy. Healthy boundaries are an analogy I often use are like a house. And not everybody is going to be given a key to come into your house whenever they want to. That's only your best friends and maybe your family. Not everybody's even going to be let in the front door. If a solicitor comes to the front door, you're probably not going to let them in. You don't know them from Adam's house cat, so you're going to keep a stronger boundary with people you don't know. However, when you as you start to get to know people, as you develop emotional and cognitive intimacy with them, you're going to let them further into your home, whether it's the foyer or the living room or ultimately, like I said, they get a key to the house and they can come and go when they want. If you have wide mood swings, that's a good indication you may have never formed a secure attachment because children aren't born knowing how to regulate their emotions. So a child who feels unable to regulate their emotions often is under a lot of stress and it's very traumatic and very stressful to to not know how to control that anger or that anxiety that comes out. And so if you still have those wide mood swings, if you have difficulty controlling your anxiety and anger, and you always have, that may be a sign that you didn't have a secure attachment. If it's something that started later in life after a trauma or something, then the mood swings could be due to something else. But if you've always had difficulty controlling your emotions, controlling your temper, there's a good chance you didn't have a secure attachment. And if you have low self esteem, you may not have formed a secure attachment. When a child grows up not being able to identify their emotions, not being able to identify their thoughts, wants and needs not being able to communicate their needs and get their needs met. Then they start feeling like they are unworthy because nobody's meeting their needs. If they grow up in an environment in which nobody pays attention to them or any attention is negative attention, that also contributes to their low self esteem because it says to them nobody wants to spend time with me. I must not be lovable. I must not be Good enough Strategies to Address not having a Secure Attachment Start becoming more mindful of your thoughts, wants and needs. Check in with yourself throughout the day. Learn assertive communication skills so you can start telling people how you feel, what you want, what your opinions are in a safe way. You're not going to do what I call radical assertiveness right away. You're going to hopefully start with somebody who is safe and start communicating that hey, I have opinions. Review your boundaries to determine if they're too rigid or too weak and start trying to figure out is there. If they're too rigid, start trying to figure out is there anybody I want to let in to the house a little bit further or are there too many people in here already? Too many people invading my space and I actually need to set some boundaries and get them out the door a little bit more. Make a list of distress tolerance skills and take steps to heal your stress response system or your HPA axis so you don't have those wild mood swings and make a list of all the things you like in other people. Once you do that, review that list and figure out what characteristics on that list you already have. Start trying to figure out why you are lovable for you. Look at a child, identify what it is about a child that makes them lovable and then look at that list and identify which of those characteristics you already have. Secure attachments Teach people that they are lovable for who they are, how to identify and regulate their emotions, how to set and maintain their boundaries while still communicating their needs. A more in depth video on developing attachment can be found@allce.com attachment.
