#58: The 4 Attachment Styles & How They Influence Our Intimate Relationships

Hey, thanks for coming. Welcome to the Love Shack.

Hey. And welcome again to another Love Shack episode. A little old place where we get to get together, explore fresh perspectives and eavesdrop on juicy conversations and uncover the mysteries that nobody talks about but absolutely influences our relationships. If right now you are struggling with your special someone, this show is dedicated to helping couples rescue their relationships. I'm Stacey Bartley and I am here with my co host and lover, Tom. Together for the past decade, we've been teaching and mentoring couples from around the world with the sole purpose of helping them create love for a lifetime in their own lives. Doing it with practical skills and understanding and lessons. So it's great to be here with you.

Absolutely. Welcome inside the Love Shack episode Fellowship 58. God, that's hard to believe. Thank you so much for gifting your most precious resource. I know that I say that every episode, but it's really true because that really is our most precious resource. We have a great episode. That's all I can say.

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Well, it's all about attachment style. And this is a very popular conversations that's happening in the. In the world of relationships and rightfully so. So again, thank you, you know, for your time. It's always our intent to leave you with actionable, relevant information. And if you're a visual learner, I'll just throw this out to you. It may serve you best to watch our watch this episode on YouTube versus listening to it. But whatever, wherever you find us. Thank you so much for spending some time.

Yeah. And if by chance you're in a place where you can grab a piece of paper and a pen as we take a break here in a minute, I would invite you to do so because we're going to get real impractical on you today. We're going to give you a quiz so that you too, along with us can explore your attachment style. So let's, let's talk about this for a minute and perhaps maybe this is a new topic for you. I want you to know that attachment styles are a very common exploration technique in the relationship therapy and counseling world right now. It's not that it's new, it's that it's becoming popular. Attachment theory has come about because of the joint work and research that was done by John Bowlby and Mary Ainsworth. And the research actually dates back to 1958, believe it or not. And later on in the 80s, psychologists Cindy Hazen and Philip Shraver applied this work of Ainsworth and Bowlby to. To adult romantic relationships. And this created the understanding of the adult attachment styles that we know of and are familiar with and use in clinical work to this very day. The reality is there are relationship people, relationship counselors, therapists, et cetera, who solely focus on this as a modality for helping couples to deepen their relationships. There's a couple things that I want to say about this, but I'll do that in just a moment. What I want you to get excited for right now is that we're going to give you a little mini crash, crash course on attachment styles, why it is you would want to explore them, and then after you do, what to do with them next. Because this important work will help you understand your relationship, how you show up, and why so many of us have a difficult time navigating the feelings of attachment. It's inevitable, folks, that our attachment styles are going to show up in many ways in our intimate relationships. And here's a great example, right? This is a classic. Perhaps you are afraid to speak up or have a difficult conversation because you're scared to create distance between you and your partner. That's the reason you don't speak up or you're fearful, fearful of rejection, so you don't say anything at all. That's a classic experience of an attachment style that hangs us up when it comes to showing up in our relationship. So today we're going to break all of this down for you and give you all that you need to know as long and well, as well as. I'm having a difficult time talking today, babe. As well as give you a quiz so that by the end of this episode, you too are going to know what your attachment style is and how it's playing out in your love life right now. We'll be right back. And grab that piece of paper if you can, and a pencil to write with.

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Welcome back everybody. We're Tom and Stacy inside the Love Shack along with our engineer extraordinaire Eric Ryder. And thank you so much for being with us. And this is episode 58 and we have we're going to jump right to the heart of the matter and all about attachment style. There's a lot to unpack here.

Attachment theory is something that will help us better understand ourselves and how we show up in our relationships. It's where our behavior comes from. And as we start exploring this world of attachment theories, there's a couple of things that I want you to keep in mind. Number one, it's not who you are, it's just what we do. It's very important because there is not a stagnant attachment style. That's number two, attachment styles can change. We have the ability to create anything as human beings. So it's not who you are. It just might happen to be where you are in this moment. And it's what you do, it's not who you are. Attachment theory is a wonderful mode to help, help us see ourselves. That's the gift of it. It's like, oh wow, I can see myself or I can see my partner. And now I can better understand how it is I show up and I can understand why I'm doing what I do. That's the gift of it.

So I would say so perhaps being able to connect the dots to help us understand, like you shared how we show up maybe in a way that we've never been able to do so before.

Yeah. You know, sometimes we ask ourselves, why do I do this? Or why do they do that? I don't get it. And this is no different than other modalities that sometimes we don't connect to relationships. But let me but help us see ourselves. Some of those would be maybe looking up your astrology sign or maybe taking the quiz to discover what your love language is. These are all methodologies that we can use to help us see ourselves, which as a human being is the most difficult thing that we do. And by the way, just about the time you feel like you get yourself figured out and you've got a really great sense of self that ourselves, who we are, if we're growing right, is always changing and rolling over. And I say that as we jump into attachment styles because as I look back on my own relationship, I have seriously experienced all of the three major attachment styles. Let me tell you what the attachment styles are and then I'll tell you how they played out in my own life. Just so that you can see, number one, this is not who you are. It might be where you are right now. And we can even look at the parent relationship to you growing up. And that's where our attachment styles come from. So the first attachment style I'm going to mention is anxious. And we're going to do a quiz and we're going to dive deep into these, but I want to just introduce them to you right now. The first attachment style we talk about is anxious. That's an attachment style that is developed again by our primary caregivers. The second attachment style I'm going to mention is secure. Secure is the attachment style that if we were studying attachment theory, and we are right now, it would be the place that we all want to arrive at. It's the place where I feel sound and secure with inside of myself. The next attachment style is avoidant. Avoidant is an attachment style where I have a difficult time being in relationships. I have a difficult time. Right. Feeling emotionally connected. It makes me feel like I want to panic. And the last one is disorganized. And disorganized we're not going to talk a lot about because there's Such a small percentage of the population that are actually what they call disorganized and attachment theory or disoriented. And we'll talk more about that as well. But as I started my relationship journey, I started out as anxious. When I was in my first marriage of 13 years and my husband was struggling and I was struggling to find out who I was, my go to was an anxious style of attachment. I was very anxious in this relationship, meaning that I was constantly plugged into what was going on with him, how he was feeling. I was trying to make sure that his needs were met. In spite of my own needs. I would shut those down. And it was a very much emotional roller coaster with inside of myself that my relationship and how I showed up in it extracted a lot of emotional focus and energy out of me. And when I ended that relationship 13 years later with five children in tow, I was really angry about it. I could see how I had sacrificed myself. I could see how I had given so much. And as, because not as, because I, because I came from a very patriarchal type of an environment, I decided that soul sister was gonn take on her femininity and she was not going to take no BS from nobody. And in that place, I all of a sudden started to practice an avoidant type of an attachment where everything was done on my terms. Nobody was going to tell me anything, and I was going to be independent and you were going to do it my way, and I didn't need you anyway. I was going to figure out how to do this on my own terms, call my own shots, make my own money and raise my own kids. You were simply around as a little something that I needed on the side. And I lived that life for about five or six years until I come to the realization that I didn't want that life either. And then I met Tom and Tom and I. I came at that place from a very different place with inside of myself. And we've learned a lot and discovered a lot about how it is we attach. And I would say that Tom and I very much now have settled into a secure attachment with each other. And so I want you to understand, and the reason I share my story with you is I want you to understand that these attachment theories are not locked in stone. These attachments theories can change and morph because we as human beings can change and morph. And it's really important as we dive into this and do the quiz, that you give yourself that grace, that you give your partner that grace, that any of this, that you're going to identify and see yourself as in this moment can change.

And I would just add that, again, there's no inferior or superior attachment style. Again, it's a place in the medical world. Right. We have. Right, Mrs. Bartlett, we have what we call baseline. So this is a baseline place for you to perhaps understand yourself in a way you've never heard or been able to identify, and it makes more sense for you. And as Stacy shared, which I love to remind everyone, look, nothing is locked in stone. Again, relationships is the most dynamic process any of us will ever enter into our lives, hopefully. And it's. It's a place to continue us to have a show up at the best version of ourselves. But it can be a very, very helpful place for us to have a baseline of understanding why we show up like we do and how our partners are showing up like they do.

And. And check this out. I can, at times, depending on what's playing out in our relationship, flip into anxious and go, oh, wait a minute, that's not going to take me where I need to go. Or I can play avoidant. That's Tom's game. He loves to play avoidant. He. He loves to play. Okay, give it. Get away from me and just give me some space. Don't bother me right now. Leave me alone. I'll let you know when it's safe to come back. I'm more of. If I were to choose a favorite, I would be more of an anxious. So, like, if things start to go awry and challenges start to play out in our relationship, I will start to spin out and reel and start to sort through all the many ways I could have done it different or said it different or how I might have done it wrong or how I didn't meet the mark or how I wasn't there for you or what you might be thinking. That's anxious, and he's going to retreat now. Interesting to point out here. I want you to understand that avoidant and anxious are a very, very common pairing. And the reason why that's a very common pairing is in the work that I do, there is always a place where I attract somebody into my life that gives me the opportunity to practice what it is I need to learn. What does an anxious need to do? An anxious needs to learn how to just calm down. Be okay where you are. Give it some time. Stop reeling. Take a breath, for heaven's sakes. Right? Because as I reel, I'm now in fight or flight. I'm not thinking straight and I have lost the ability to think through anything logically because I am now not connected to my prefrontal cortex. That's a little brain science for you, but it's real. The more I get anxious, the more I start to reel, right? The less and less and less I use my executive processing in the front of my brain to solve my problem. And now I'm just looping. I'm just in fight, flight, or freeze. I'm just in survival mode. I can't make really good decisions from there, right? So what I need to learn is something that avoidant would show me. Sit your butt down. Spend some time with yourself. I'll get back to you when I'm ready. And what does an avoidant need to learn from an anxious? How to feel their feelings. How to communicate what they're going through. How to realize that safe attachment, secure attachment is exactly what they want and they don't need to be afraid of it. That you can come closer. It's safe. I'm not going to leverage you. I'm not going to take advantage of you. I'm not going to manipulate you. That you are safe here with me. Anything come up for you about that?

No, I mean, again, that. That combination, that most frequent combination makes a heck of a lot of sense. You know, we always say, you know, we say God, Gus. Excuse me, God, universe. Spirit has a great sense of humor because the. As we like to say, you can't make this stuff up. So we're always usually, I would say usually, always usually presented the perfect set of circumstances to allow us to grow and expand.

And an avoidant perfectly fires off an anxious and an anxious in saying, please, please, please don't go anywhere. You know, tell me how you feel. I'm here for you. I just want you to know I love you. Oh, my gosh. That makes an avoidant want to, like.

Go, oh, please, could you just take a breath and give me some space?

Yes. And so in that dynamic, we have these wonderful opportunities to create do overs and to see ourselves as it plays out. It's actually quite spectacular when you see it. So let's take a quiz. I invited you to get that piece of paper in that pencil or pen. And if you're driving, if you're driving.

Yes, please don't do this.

Yes, you can just make a note of what I'm asking you and you can always come back. And that's the wonderful thing about recording this in a podcast. You can come back and listen to it again and again and again. But we're actually Going to give you a short version of a lengthy quiz to help you determine what your attachment style is. And the funny thing about attachment styles is the funny thing about seeing ourselves in any capacity is we know when we hear it. We may have not thought these thoughts before, but when I say them, you absolutely go, yep, that's me. Yep, I know it. Right? And so it's. It's a very similar process to a piece of work that we do called that thing I do. And that thing I do is looking at my defensive behaviors and owning them and celebrating them and. And those defensive behaviors, we don't know what they are, as I typically sit down with a client, but as we start going through them, you start to see the smiles and sometimes sweaty armpits, because it's like, oh, I do that.

Yep, yep, yep.

Yeah. So we can see ourselves. And that's going to be this process. Right. Don't worry about getting it wrong, because you're going to absolutely know where you stand with these attachments. So without further ado, let's go to question number one. Now, how this works is I'm going to set this up is I'm going to make a statement, and if it's true for you, I just simply want you to write the letter I give you. If it's not true for you, don't write anything on your paper. Just leave it blank.

And then at the end, we're going to have you, you know, look at the letters that show up most frequently, and then that will help point you to your attachment style per this, you know, quiz. For this quiz.

Now, again, if the statement is true for you, I'm going to tell you the letter to write down. If it's not true for you, don't write anything down. Okay? If you don't relate to it. Question number one. I often worry that my partner will stop loving me. If this is true for you, I want you to write A on your paper.

Number two. I find it easy to be affectionate with my partner. If this is true for you, please write letter B on your piece of paper.

Next one. I fear that once someone gets to know the real me, he or she won't like who I am. If this is true, I want you to write A on your paper.

Next question. I find that I bounce back quickly after a breakup. It's weird how I can just put someone out of my mind. If this is true for you, please write letter C.

Next question. When I'm not involved in a relationship, I feel somewhat anxious and incomplete. If this is true for you, write letter A.

Next question. I find it difficult to emotionally support my partner when she he is feeling down. If this is true for you, please write letter C.

When my partner is away, I'm afraid that he or she might be come interested in someone else. If this is true for you, I want you to write letter A.

Next question. I feel comfortable depending on romantic partners. If this is true for you, please write letter B.

Next question. My independence is more important to me than my relationships. If this is true for you, I want you to write letter C. Next question.

I prefer not to share my innermost feelings with my partner. If this is true for you, please write letter C. When I show my.

Partner how I feel, I'm afraid he or she will not feel the same about me. If this is true for you, I want you to write down letters A.

Okay, we're almost done, ladies and gentlemen. Hang with us. Next question. Second to last. I am generally satisfied with my romantic relationships. If this is true for you, please write letter B.

Next question. I don't feel the need to act out much in my romantic relationships. I generally find I show up pretty well. If that's true for you, I want you to write letter B.

All right. Actually, I've just been just in for the newsroom. We have a few more. I think about my relationships a lot. If this is true for you, please write letter A.

Next question. I find it difficult to depend on my romantic partners. If this is true for you, I want you to write down letter C. Next question.

I tend to get very quickly attached when to a romantic partner. If this is true for you, please write letter A.

Next question. I have little difficulty expressing my needs and want to to my partner. And I do it regularly. So let me just say that again. I have difficulty expressing my needs and wants to my partner, but I want to and desire to. If this is true for you, write down B, letter B.

And next one. I sometimes feel angry or annoyed with my partner without knowing why. This is true for you, please write.

Letter C. And that's our last question. So now what I want you to do is I want you to tally up your A's, your B's. And your C's. And based on the one that has the most, the highest number, that would be a correlation to the attachment style that you engage with most often. Okay. Again, this is not who you are, it's what you do. So as we kind of transition to shuffling papers here, I'm just going to give you a few minutes to Tally up your score. So as we start talking about these things, the first thing I'm going to talk about is anxious. And let's talk about what anxious is means. And I'm also going to correlate the parental experience that you might have had that creates being anxious. Not because we want to bang on parents, but it helps us understand why it is we do what we do. It also helps us see ourselves better, which is the whole point of this exercise today. Right? We want to see and understand ourselves. And because this research comes from watching and observing parent child relationships primarily with the mother, it helps us understand how it is we create the attachment styles that we have. Again, these attachment styles come from our experiences growing up, but they're malleable. We can change them. We can do lots of things with them. As I have described in my own life. You can be many different attachment styles, and that's the good news. However, where it comes from is from our family of origin and the way that we learn to attach initially. So it helps us understand and maybe give ourselves a little grace as to why we show up the way we do now in our relationships. So the first thing I'm going to talk about is anxious. And anxious is this. You love to be very close in your romantic relationships with your partners, and you have the capacity for great intimacy. However, you often fear that your partner does not wish to be as close with you or you with as close with you as you would like to be with him or her. Relationships tend to consume a large part of your emotional energy. You tend to be very sensitive to small fluctuations in your partner's moods and actions. And although your senses are often accurate, you take your partner's behaviors on too personally. You experience a lot of negative emotions within the relationship and get easily upset. You're highly sensitive, and as a result, you're going to tend to act out and say things that you later regret. If the other person provides a lot of security and reassurance for you. However, you're going to be able to shed much of your preoccupation and feel contented with this. So it's all about helping you calm down and realize that you can trust your relationship. And an anxious person is constantly worrying about what's happening with their partner, constantly worrying about how they feel. They love intensely, they want to be very close, they want to be very intimate, and they're always worried that their partner won't or have the capacity or desire to meet them there in this space.

So I would say it's almost as if they, they can't really appreciate the place that they're in very much so.

They'Re always worried that they're doing it wrong or that there's something that they're missing or that their partner is going to seek or want or desire somebody different. Right. That they're enough and so they reel in this place. People with low self esteem often become very, very anxious in their relationships. And by the way, they're very, they're very easily attached to somebody. I want to be in a relationship and so I will attach very easily but then I become very anxious about how long it's going to last, about where we're going, about what's going to happen, about. Right. How you're feeling, how you're doing and I'm going to feel like and take on what's happening in the relationship very personally.

And did you share that this is in our meeting ahead of time. Did you share this is the most common attachment style?

It's very common attachment style, yeah. Now I wanted to talk about a little bit of the parent that comes from a anxious. So if you have an A, this is probably something you'll relate to as far as a experience growing up in your family of origin with your primary care provider or parent. The parent that creates an attachment style of this nature. They themselves have a very difficult time regulating their own emotions. They're all over the board. There's very interrupted emotional connection where they're there for you. One minute it feels great and it's wonderful and then they're gone and they can't be found and you're left to kind of grapple with some things on your own emotionally. Ofttimes too, the experience is an overstimulation of emotions like wow, okay, that's crazy and wild and how did we get here? It seemingly comes out of the blue. Also, the child often feels like there isn't enough room or privacy for them to be autonomous from their parents. So this is where a lot of parents become helicopter parents. This is the throw off of trying to be too involved in your child's life or trying to take charge and not give them the opportunity to realize that they have the ability to make good choices or can be supported when they make poor choices and they don't have the ability in this family of origin to explore those things with inside of themselves. The parent is always wanting to give them the answer, tell them what to do, how it should go, etc and it creates a lot of anxiety in the person and the child. Growing up, the parent is also very unpredictable. The parent creates a lot of confusion, There's a lot of fear, there's a lot of anxiety in the child as a result of this. And this will create the byproduct of an attachment style that is anxious. I'm always feeling like there's something I need to be mindful of, something that I'm missing. And it starts to make sense now when we go back and think about how we show up in our relationships that I'm still trying to sort out. Right. Am I good enough? Will you love me when or if this happens? And I'm depicting how I need to show up based on your mood, based on what you're doing and how you're feeling in the relationship.

And again, the most common pairing of these attachment styles, per your share earlier in the show was a anxious person typically will link up with an avoidance.

Yeah, we've talked about that. But yeah, so that's an anxious. If you're an A, you're an anxious and that's where you are. Now don't worry, we're going to talk about what to do next. But let's just go through each of them so that we can all identify where we are. Let's go to secure, which is B. Secure is a person who is warm and loving in relationships and they come naturally with inside of you. It's not something you have to conjure up or fake or pretend to be. It's just so inside of yourself. You enjoy being intimate without becoming worried about your relationship or your partner. Quite frankly, you take things in stride when they come up, especially in romance. And you don't get easily upset over relationship matters. You have a confidence that you can work through anything. You can navigate through anything. You effectively communicate your needs and feelings to your partner and are strong at reading your partner's emotional cues and respond to them. You have the ability to be so comfortable in your own skin that when you see something going on for your partner, you can actually respond to it because you're not spinning inside of yourself. You can share your successes and problems with your person and are able to be there for him or her in times of need. So that door can swing both ways. I can ask for my own needs and I can also give my partner the permission to ask for their own needs.

And is this attachment style recognizes as again, not inferior, superior, but maybe the most desirable to create a long lasting relationship?

Well, it is. It absolutely is. And not the secures don't have challenges. Remember, we're not all one of These, we all have the capacity to be all of these given certain challenges and points and times in our relationships. But again, we have a propensity to go to a certain place. And secure is absolutely the place where we can get the most joy out of relationships. We can enjoy being in them. And I can grow supported feeling at peace with inside of myself and with inside of my relationship. It's a wonderful place where we can explore and go places that we couldn't go in some of the other attachment styles. Now, the parent of a secure person, right? The parent of a secure person caused this child to feel protected. This child also felt a sense of parental compassion that was appropriate to what was playing out, right? So if a child comes in and their feelings are hurt or they fell down and scraped their knee, the parents emotional reaction to that, it makes sense. It links up to the child, right? It's appropriate for the given circumstance. They're present with the child and they're also very supportive of the child, but not to the point of suffocating them because the child is actually allowed to explore and have age appropriate autonomy that's encouraged to go out, figure it out, you can do this. I believe in you. Those are all statements of a secure type of parenting style. There's a carefree and relaxed atmosphere that we got this, right? I got you, you got me. I'm here for you, don't worry. Now go right. You're gonna be fine. Go check that out. Go explore that. I'll be right here when you return. There's also a positive, a physical affection or an environment of like physical touch where it's appropriate. I'm holding you, I'm comforting you. And this all promotes a sense of resiliency where regardless of what we go through, we got this, we can get through this. I'm here for you, right? Together we can get through anything. And that's the overall experience that a secure parental type of experience is creating for the child. And I know that as parents, that's the experience that we all want to create for our children, isn't it? I mean, the ability for the child to feel confident in themselves enough to go out and explore the world and, and explore who they are and to be able to confidently and robustly find like self esteem and confidence and courage in that place. That's what we want. And so ironically, if I am a parent, I can't give that to my child unless I'm there myself. And that's an important distinction. And I think that's why we don't see more of this is like I say to my kids when I was raising them, look, I could have been a fantastic parent if I wasn't wrestling with myself in some form of anxious or avoidant emotional experience with inside of myself. Right. And so it's important for us to just give ourselves some grace here. This is the ideal. And unless I'm there myself, it's very difficult for me to give to my children. But that's what creates a secure attachment style. And you think about how that plays out in relationships as I fall in love. There's a key things there. I know you're going to be there for me. I know we're going to get through this. I believe in my ability and your ability and us together to figure it out, that there's space for us to be able to share our wants and our needs. And ultimately this is absolutely where we want to learn to go. And the great news is we can learn to go here. So let's talk about avoidance. This is going to be letter C. If you had a lot of letter Cs, this is avoidant. And an avoidant experience inside of yourself right now is it's very important for you to maintain your independence and self. Self sufficiency. And you often prefer autonomy to intimate relationships. Even though you know emotionally you want to be close to others, it makes you feel uncomfortable when there's too much closeness. And you tend to keep your partner at arm's length. You don't spend much time with them, you don't want to get too close, you don't want to become too attached. And if you do, it causes a bit of panic. We tend to end relationships really fast here because I'm in panic mode and I don't know what to do. If you've had experiences of knowing that the relationship has gone along really, really well and then all of a sudden you know you need to end it because you don't know what else to do. This is very common and avoidant attachment style.

So you. When you hear stories of. Yeah, someone shares, you know, they. They get to a certain place and in a pattern of their relationships and then all of a sudden they can't go any further. Would that be a reproduction representation of an avoidant attachment style?

Absolutely. In fact, I was in a relationship with an avoidant person after my divorce and our relationship was really great from my experience. And he confessed that I would get to a certain point in a relationship and it's been like this with everyone I've ever been with. Where I just don't know what to do. I panic and I'm sorry, Stace. I just, I can't do this. And that's a true, a definite sign of an avoidant that there's this place of autonomy. I was there, I totally understood and took that on. I would get to a place at a certain point in time in my relationships where they would want to move forward and I would use the excuses of my work, my kids, you know, etc. As the excuse to push them away and go on to the next. I was truly a bonafide independent person at this point in time who was going to do life on our own terms after becoming that anxious person in the beginning. And I didn't feel, I didn't know how to navigate that. I didn't want to go back to being anxious, but I didn't find any balance in knowing how to please my partner. And I felt like I would have to go back there. So heck no, I'm not doing that. I would stay in that avoidance place as my own place of preservation and, and stability until I realized that wasn't really what I wanted either. Now parents of a person who create an avoidant type of an experience. The parent is unavailable. Often the parent is disengaged. The parent can also be rejecting of the child. Let's say the child needs to be comforted and nurtured and the parent pushes them away. This creates an avoidant attachment style where I go, okay, I guess I got to figure this out on my own. And thank goodness the child does. I want to point that out. This is not a bad thing. Thank goodness the child figures out how to cope right soothe and right calm themselves without the need of the parent. The child is often raised in a place of feeling secluded or isolated. There's a lack of face to face interactions with this attachment style. There's also a lack of emotional and psychological presence in the home. Everybody's kind of doing their own thing and taking care of things and busy, you know, making it all happen. The house is clean, dad's going to work, right? Everything's tiktoking on a schedule. But there's not a lot of emotional interaction or engagement in this experience. There's a lot of absence of touch. There can be absence of emotional neglect. All your needs are being met, but your emotional needs are nowhere to be found in this place. There's an expressive dissonance of not matching or validating the child's experience. I come home, I need some help. My boyfriend just broke up with me and nobody wants to talk about it. So I'm left to deal with it on my own.

Okay.

That creates an avoidant type of an attachment process. Okay. Makes sense when you start to hit break it down.

Doesn't it really does. Really doesn't. And again, not at all to bang on parents because it's the most challenging, you know, job we're ever going to undertake, in my humble opinion. But again, it does also, I would say, indicate the more place of having our stuff together, I guess would be in layman's terms, you know, again, you know, our children are going to, I, I, I think it just really confirms the absolute, you know, confirmation that our children pick up on our traits, if you will. I mean, this, this research shows that so well, we can do to, to bring that to our children is going to be the greatest gift we can give them.

There's a wonderful saying, babe, I've heard you say many, many, many times, and it's so true when we're talking about attachment theory, and that is you can't get enough of what you don't already have, and you also can't give what it is you don't have.

Right.

So this is an opportunity for us to all give some grace to ourselves. Because the reality is, as human beings, we really do the very best we know how. And if I don't have something like a secure attachment, I wasn't raised in that. I, I don't know what that looks like or feels like. I can, I can see logically as we read off this, this little description that I wanted. Right. But I, if I'm not there myself, I can't pass that down to my child. It's not possible. And, and we're all doing the very best we can. And, and like I keep saying, the great news is, is this can all be changed. It can all be worked with. Again, this is not who you are, it's what you do currently. And it can be changed, which is the really great news. I'm going to mention one more piece of attachment style.

So if you found yourself in that quiz that we shared with you earlier in the show and you don't find any of your letters adding up, if you will, then perhaps you may fall in the disorganized.

Yep, disorganized as a very small percentage of the population, and that's, that's okay too. But disorganized comes from a lot of family turmoil. There's a lot going on in the household. There's extreme shifts and emotion, and there's confusion with communication. You could be told one thing and then it flips and you're told something else. The parents have a lot of unresolved trauma. Just like we were saying. They are so thick in their own trauma and survival that they cannot be there for the child. Oft times, this is where we find a lot of substance abuse. There's. This is oft times where there's a lot of crazy making going on in the household and the parent, quite honestly, has an inability to respond to the child's normal needs. So normal things like needing to be fed, needing to go to bed, needing to have clean clothes, et cetera, those things fall by the wayside simply because the parent is so deep in their own trauma. This is also a very abusive type ridden environment. So the reason why a child creates a disorganized attachment is because the person who's supposed to be caring for me is very often the person who is abusing me and trying to make sense of that causes me to feel like I want you to come close, which is just kind of anxious. But then when I come close, you take advantage of that. So now I want to run. And you can flip through avoidant and anxious all at the same time. And so you might find people coming close and then you want to run away. Right? And then you run away and you want to come close. And so it creates this very disoriented or very disorganized type of an experience in your attachment style. And so if you by chance find yourself not relating to a B or circle, this might be something that you would relate to. And again, there is nothing that has happened to you that cannot be overcome, that cannot be healed. And ofttimes, the pain that we're feeling as a result of our attachment styles is the very emotion that finally gets us to take some action and say, okay, I got to figure this out, we got to do something different. And I'm here to tell you and to reassure you that wherever you might find yourself in this secure attachment quiz moment, that you can change it. That you have the capacity to absolutely create secure attachments within your relationships. And quite frankly, with inside of yourself.

So with the goal again being kind of the, the, the, the most place that's recognized to produce the greatest amount of, of wonderfulness, if that's a word in your relationship, would be the wonderfulness. I like the secure attachment style again.

Well, simply because it's the place that you can enjoy being in relationship with others the most.

Right? Right. No, it makes a lot of Sense again and again. We are not. We're just helping you figure out your own where you sense and have that clunk, we like to say, of where you think you are at this place of baseline to. Okay, let's. Here's where I see myself. Here's where it feels to make the most sense for my attachment style. And then also for your partner, if you have a significant partner in your life. And now, what do we do with this, Mrs. Bartlett? What do we do once we've identified this? What do we got? Where do we go?

Well, first of all, it's probably refreshing to just go, oh, my gosh, that makes sense. I understand myself and I understand my partner. That's so great. And that's a wonderful aha moment. So take that in and just allow yourself to really take in where you are in this moment. And then when you're ready and you decide that you want to work towards a more secure attachment style, here's what it's going to take. We've got to get to know our internal world first. Just like we said. You know what? We can't give anything we don't have. So I need to become familiar with what goes on inside of me. In our work, we call that becoming familiar with your own internal movie and being able to translate your own thoughts and feelings into a language that then you can share. So that would be step number one. Step number two is we have to learn how to create the same safety necessary for you to not only share what's going on inside of your internal movie, but so that you can also allow your partner to do the same. And this is not going to happen if we don't feel safe. So in an anxious type of an experience, me chasing after my partner to say, please, please, please, just talk to me about this. Can we? I love you is just going to drive them away. So it's learning the ability to say, hey, you know what? When you're ready, I'm here. Take all the time you need, I got this. And realize in saying that and then doing it is going to cause me to grow inside of myself. So there's some skills that you need to learn in order to create a safe, permissive space for the two of you to share. And then lastly, you're going to absolutely have to do two other things. You're going to have to learn how to do some emotional weightlifting, which is regulating your emotions, being able to calm and soothe yourself and know the distinctions between when it's time to say something and when it's time to listen. Which is going to take us to the last element is. It's. It's not so much what you need to say, it's how you say it, which is leading to, we've got to come to a place where we understand how to better communicate with each other. It's not about sitting on it. It's not about putting it under the rug. It's not about putting it in the closet. It's about learning how to say what you need to say. Say in a way that it doesn't take the safety out of the emotional experience.

So give me an example of what that. What that wouldn't look like and what we typically hear and why people will maybe start working with us is because they've chosen to say X versus what would you know?

It's the difference between saying, oh, my gosh, you're gonna leave again, like, you're never here anymore. I can't believe that you're gonna go with your friends for the weekend. I mean, what the heck is going on here? Don't you love me versus hey, you know what? I really am missing you. And I'd really like for us to find a time where you and me can just spend some time together. When would that be for you? Is that something you're interested in? So it's. It's learning how to say what you need to say. I said the same things in both of those sentences, but one is going to come across as though there's. There's space and there's safety in there, and the other one is going to come across as a judgment, a criticism, a belittlement. And that's going to push the person that you're wanting to come closer away again. It's not so much what you need to say, it's how you say it that matters. Okay, so that's where you need to begin when you want to create more of a secure attachment environment. Any last words here? I hope that you found this helpful. I hope that you'll come back and listen to this again and again and again and share it with people in your space and your fear sphere of influence. Because it's so important and such a helpful tool to help us understand and see ourselves and how it is we're currently showing up in our relationships.

And then I would just add that once you have this baseline of understanding with yourself and your partner and you're not sure how to. To take on the places, the takeaways that Stacy just shared, how do we do that? Oftentimes that takes some skilled facilitation. And that's what we're blessed and grateful to be able to help, help couples to do. Because I always like to say if we knew how to do it, then we already would have done it. And there's no shame in knowing that because we've never been, many of us have never been taught these skills.

Yeah. You know, so if you need some help with this, we can absolutely help you with that.

This is what we, this is what we do. People do.

All right, let's take a break for a minute so we can all just kind of let this settle in. Right. We'll be right back with a little bit of fun. We're going to switch gears on you, Foreign.

Tom. About two years ago, I was at a point in my relationship where I was ready to file for divorce. Not that I wanted to, but I just felt hopeless and helpless. I'd been through other counseling and coaching and didn't find any success with Stacy and Tom's methods. I was able to eliminate insecurity, set boundaries, plant my flag, eliminate rabbit holing. I was separated from my wife for a year and I have since moved back home for the last six months. Now, I still refer back to a lot of the teaching that Stacy and Tom provided and it's helped me. It's well worth it.

Learn the simple three step system to rescue your struggling relationship by registering for Stacy's brand new new free workshop. Reserve your seat by going to stacybartley.com workshop bringing good vibes to the Puget.

Sound and the world.

Alternative Talk 1150.

Welcome back. Tom and Stacey Bartley. Inside The Love Shack episode 58. We just finished. Really an awesome attachment style if I say so myself. And so if you, you know, this is something I sense we, we can all go back to and listen to many times. Now we're going to step into to.

Have a little fun.

Having a little bit of fun.

And since we're on the quiz journey here today, and this is all about a quiz journey, I have another one for follow the fun. Another one that Tom and I just took last night, which has been super fun. So I wanted to share it with you today. It's actually a quiz that helps you identify what your erotic blueprint is. I had no idea that there was such a thing. And when I found it, of course we had to jump in and figure out what our erotic blueprint was. This comes from a very, very popular Netflix show called Love, Sex and Goop. It's a fascinating watch if you want to Check it out. Please do. This therapist, Jaya has created a blueprint for erotica and she asks you some questions that are quite compelling to ponder and probably questions that you would never think to ask yourself or your partner about discovering what it is that basically turns you on. And so I would encourage you to go and explore it. And I'll just give this away. There are five components to an erotic blueprint and they are number one, energetic, number two, sensual, number three, sexual, number four, kinky, and number five, shape shifter. And so that's the exploration that as you take this little quiz, you're going to be able to identify which one is your primary go to. Much like what we just did, other than we're just talking about erotica now instead of attachment styles. Super fun. What we discovered and had a wonderful conversation about yesterday was Tom and I both happen to be sensual. So that means we love like smells and food and good wine and good music. And the environment has to be just right for us to be erotic with each other. If any one of those things kind of flips, it's really difficult for us to get in the mood, so to speak. So kind of fun that we're kind of both on the same page there.

And that doesn't necessarily have to be the case at all. Again, again, just a great place. It was really a very fascinating when Stacy walked me through it last night. I mean a very fascinating place. Yeah, that I wouldn't. In all, in the spirit of full, in the spirit of full transparency, I wouldn't think to ask myself these questions. So I just encourage you just to, just to check it out and try it on.

Well, and what's interesting is just like attachment styles, we can be a part of or have aspects of each of these in our erotica and it's fun to explore what your primary go to is and then where it all falls down. There's a free quiz. You can absolutely take it. You can go to miss Jaya.com or just Google erotic blueprints. And that's, that's miss M I S S J-A I Y A dot com is where you'll go right to the quiz. Or you can just Google erotic blueprints and you'll see that pop up just automatically it's on first page of Google, not hard to find at all. And you can take the free version or if you want to really get after it and explore the in depth version of you and your partner, you can absolutely pay. And they have an in depth version. Well, they'll send you Those results as well. So have some fun with this. It can explore it. It opens up the communication around our erotica and our, our sexual experiences that we have inside. In fact, there was a wonderful question that really provoked, you know, what is it that you find is a turn on or a fantasy in your own lovemaking? And, and I looked at Tom and said, do you fantasize? I don't know that he even does. He's more of a get her done kind of guy. Not that he's not romantic when he wants to be. I want to roll you under the bus here, babe.

But if you and our wonderful engineer's got his, his, his finger on the mute button. Right. Don't worry, Eric. I am, I am making sure my wife realizes we are live.

Well, it's kind of a fascinating thought when you think about not everybody does fantasize.

No, I agree.

Especially from a person who does.

It was a great question, I think, you know, No, I, I need to. Perhaps. I, I don't spend a lot of time in that imaginative world that again, we all, again, there's balance and everything, ladies and gentlemen, Believe me, there is. And there's, there's some real value to that.

Yeah. And if you want more fun tips like this every week, I encourage you to get on our fun list. And we also do a giveaway once a month. So get on over to my website. You can sign up to get on the fun list as well. So let's talk about some upcoming guests and some great conversations that we have coming up that hopefully will get you excited. We're going to spread some love. And Mandy is a wonderful author of a little book called the Birthday Suit and she has a guide to help parents teach their children about their bodies and about sex. And we are super excited to have her on the show because this is such an important conversation that all of us could probably use some ease around. Right? How do we talk about this thing called sex? We have a difficult time doing that with our lover, let alone trying to teach our children about this. And here's a clip from Mandy and what she would like to say to you about relationships today. Hey, my name is Mandy Nuttall and I am the author of The Birthday Suit Book 1 yearly guides to easily teach your children ages 1 to 9 about their body and sex. I'm looking forward to being inside the love shack with Tom and Stacey really soon as a guest. And the thought I'm having today that I'd love to share about love and relationships is don't underestimate the bond that you can create with your children when you can freely and comfortably talk about the body together. They need this connection and if they can't have it with you, they're going to find it somewhere else. I'll see you soon inside the love shack. That's a great example of secure attachment. They're going to find it somewhere, right? Create it with you. So I can't wait to have that conversation. It's going to be incredibly helpful and I'm going to suspect and let me just predict this now that as she talks about how to have these conversations with a child, it's going to translate to having these conversations with your lover. Just saying. Don't know that. But that's my highest suspicion and intuition speaking.

So as we wrap this up, what are we feeling today? Mrs. Bartley, what are we feeling this week?

Okay. Music. Music is a great place to help us feel to connect with our emotions. So today's song is Alan Stone. He's unaware. And you know, the fun thing about this backstory is my daughter who happened to be early on a musician and an opener for some of the rappers that we know like 50 cent, etc in her younger years, she turned me on to this artist maybe more than a decade ago and she said, mom, because his vocals are so incredible, this guy is going to make it big. And boy, was she absolutely right. This song that Alan Stone sings here in this song, it's one that he sang a decade ago. So enjoy it. But it's also very appropriate for our conversation today because he says in the lyrics, you say that you care but I was unaware. The push, pull the tear. I can't stretch it any further. Right. That's what happens in our attachments. So check it out. We have a list of songs for you for every single episode. Don't miss them. It'll help you feel what we talk about. And I guess that's a wrap.

That's a wrap. Ladies and gentlemen, thank you so much Inside the love shack. We so appreciate your time and focus and attention with us. We will be back same time, same place next week.

Yeah. And if you found value in being here with us today and you want to take your experience with us deeper, we encourage you to check out all the many ways you can do that. Something that you can give your sex, love and journey@stacybartley.com and hey, share the quiz. It's fun. We'll see you next week.

Thanks for joining us today in the love shack. We hope you, you came away with something that made your toes tingle. To learn more about everything you heard on today's show, go to stacybartley.com podcast Love the Show. Help us spread the love by sharing the show with others. Okay, everybody, time to go. We gotta close the doors to the Love Shack for this week. You don't have to go home, but you can stay here. Come back next week, though, and join us for another edition of Love Shack Live with Tom and Stacey Bartley.