Are Attachment Styles Sabotaging Your Love Life? | Matthew Hussey

If we diagnose ourselves as an anxious attachment style, the danger of a diagnosis is that it becomes an excuse for whatever we do. There are four different attachment styles: anxious, secure, avoidant, and anxious. avoidant. Audrey, maybe you can speak to the anxious attachment style and maybe the anxious avoidant.

I'm not sure about you guys, but I first heard about attachment styles when I read the book Attached, which talked about attachment theory. So I suppose people who have anxious attachment are always looking for ways the relationship's going to fall apart. A lot of it is tied into feeling sort of fears of abandonment. and fears of rejection. You can get very, very reactive in arguments because you get very flared up within those kinds of ways. But also, I think even when the relationship is going well, you're still looking for ways that it could fall apart, even in the best moments.

What for you is the worst part about being having that anxious attached start, that anxious style?

Well.

I actually, I've got much better over time with it. I definitely related to it more a few years ago. But I think, I think the hardest part is not being able to enjoy it, not being able to just feel.

Safe, not being able to enjoy the thing you have.

Correct.

Yeah.

Not being able to just enjoy the relationship. and it can be the most, you know, beautiful or non-confrontational, non-argumentative relationship, yet you still somehow have this underlying feeling of everything's gonna go wrong and everything's gonna go to shit. So I think that's probably the hardest thing. And I think accepting that you are safe is something I've personally had to do a lot of work on. as you know. And I think that once you can do that, you do just sort of find a new peace in your relationship and that's really, really lovely. But I think until you can sort of, you can accept the fact that no one really ever is safe truly, right? We can all, at any given moment, we can all get hurt. Something can go wrong. People can leave. People can die. And I think if you spend your whole time living there, it just destroys the experience.

Stephen, as someone who perhaps relates to the opposite end of the spectrum, or not, you tell me, is it fair to say you are on the avoidant side of attachment styles?

Slightly, yeah. I probably lean, I don't relate so much to the the anxious attachment one, the avoidant one more so. There is one that's kind of a bit of both. It's called disorganized and there could be bits of that because in some ways I do crave intimacy or I don't have crave intimacy is the word, but I can really feel a sense of like, I don't know, maybe anyone does. If you're alone for a long time, you can feel a sense of like, oh, I don't want to be abandoned. like I want to, you know, being a bit feared of being abandoned because I'm a natural. I enjoy my own company a lot. I do have a natural sort of loaner tendency. I have historically gotten scared of being trapped in relationships and feeling like relationships are a large demand on my time and energy.

And so that's the avoidant part of you.

Yeah.

And.

And perhaps feeling resentful at times when I have to. I feel I have to do things for too many things for the relationship, or I'm very scared of someone becoming emotionally dependent on me for their needs. And I think that's the crux of it. That's the grand fear is this person will now depend on me for their happiness. And that's a scary thought, I suppose, for someone with that tendency.

What I want to know is which one you guys relate to. Matthew and Jamison. I bet Jamison is secure. I can just see it securely attached. Is that the one you most relate to?

Yeah, actually, I do relate to being securely attached. But I have to say, I mean, I'm sure we'll probably get into this because going off of the book attached, remember when I read it, I thought it was a very solid theory and it felt very like this is pretty insightful about people's different experiences of relationships. But that book seemed to think that it was pretty, you were pretty much just cut from that cloth. Like you were in one of these categories. And I think it's easy for me to relate to being secure now because I've been in a long-term relationship that's just based off loyalty and trust and I'm just very secure there. But I can just imagine that if things went a different way, definitely wired for all kinds of, there's just definitely a spectrum.

That point, Jamison, about it potentially being fluid is interesting because I think the risk of a book like this is you can, people can get in sort of diagnose, I don't know, constant diagnosis mode where you explain everyone's behavior as a function of attachment styles. And, you know, the truth is some people maybe they're avoidant, but there's also people who are just selfish assholes and don't want to compromise on anything. And they don't need to be diagnosed as, oh, if they're avoidant, and I just figure out and understand that. Or there's people who are, you know, who are really anxious to an extent where it's toxic and they're toxically needy. And it's like you can't just get off the hook by it being, well, I'm an anxious type, but you're like, some forms of anxiousness are genuinely like toxic. Like they are someone who immediately smothers someone and completely sort of almost uses them as a, you know, as a, you know, just kind of to get all their emotional needs met and to feel like I'm now subsuming my life into yours. And these are not just healthy tendencies, right? So there can be a way people maybe use it as a way to kind of explain those parts of themselves a bit too much or over diagnose?

Look, the catharsis of a diagnosis of any kind is that you have a diagnosis. I mean, anyone who's ever had any kind of illness or pain knows that having something diagnosed emotional or physical can be very cathartic. I now know why I am the way I am. I have some kind of closure on myself. The danger of a diagnosis is that it becomes an excuse for whatever we do. And If we diagnose ourselves as an anxious attachment style, and then anything we do that is anxious in our behavior, any way we treat someone, any way we unnecessarily accuse someone or act out, we say, well, I can't help it. I have this anxious attachment style. That becomes a very dangerous thing. I think that we have to separate what our tendency may be from what behavior we are going to choose to model. Because that's always a choice. What we decide to do is a choice. I could be anxious, but say, I'm going to do better than this feeling I have right now. I feel it, but I also know what my nature is. I know that my nature is to be overly afraid of losing someone, to believe that I'm not going to be okay if I lose someone. and then to overcompensate for anytime I think I've made a mistake, to get overly guilty anytime I do something that I'm not proud of, to create stories anytime someone doesn't text me enough or leaves me alone for five minutes. To imagine kind of things in the book, rustling in the bush is a lion when it's It's nothing. It's the wind. I know that's my nature. So I'm going to do better than that nature in the way that I behave. That is a choice. You, Stephen, could know that it's kind of there's a part of you that trends towards feeling suffocated or feeling like you're afraid of becoming responsible for someone's needs. and emotional well-being and catch yourself and go, I know that's where my mind goes naturally. It doesn't need any help to go there. That is where my mind goes. But I also know that about myself. And given that I know that about myself, I know that I have a tendency to overly keep people at arm's length instead of just setting healthy boundaries and or even just communicating about the fact that I really like having some alone time in my week or my day, or I really like being able to go to a quiet corner and just kind of read and do my thing. I really think that what can be useful about these kinds of heuristics is that the ability to know which way the wind naturally blows for us doesn't become an excuse for all of our behavior. Instead, it becomes a recipe for self-awareness so that we can mitigate our own behavior.