IGNORE Attachment Styles In Relationships (+ Do THIS Instead)

If you label yourself with an attachment style without knowing the underlying protective mechanism at play, you could be disempowering yourself, trying to fit a square peg into a round hole, and going down a literal rabbit hole of information that can be so confusing and distracting from the actual healing process. In today's lesson, I'm going to break down the core essence of these defensive mechanisms that attachment theorists label as your insecure attachment style. And if you're struggling with patterns in your relationship and dating life that keep you from having a healthy relationship, I'm going to simplify the process of healing the core wound that your defense mechanism or insecure attachment style is actually trying to protect. Now, don't get bogged down in the exhaustive information about attachment styles. This theory is excellent and valuable, and you can if you want, but I'm going to simplify it today and give you two core aspects to your healing work that you need. Above and beyond any diagnosis of what your attachment style is. And if you're new to this channel, welcome. I'm Amy, and I work with women who struggle with insecurity, anxiety, and low self-worth in relationships, and I teach them to heal their past and connect to their true authentic self so they can create the healthy, secure, and loving relationship they desire. And if you want more content on this topic, please be sure to subscribe to this channel. Hit the bell button so you get notified when I post new videos twice a week. Now, before we begin, I want to announce that a few spots have opened up for the free one-to-one consult with me for the Love by Design program. So make sure you stick around to the very end of the video for the announcement on how to sign up for that. So just to get you up to speed in case you haven't heard of attachment theory or the four different attachment styles, you may or may not be exhibiting traits from them. There are four main styles that generally account for the way we relate to others. The first is secure. You're a person who is comfortable and aware of yourself, your needs, and your emotions, and you can express them during conflict, and you enjoy a balance of freedom and togetherness, and you're not sensitive to that disconnection and reconnection in relationship. The second is anxious. This is where you're highly sensitive to those moments of disconnection, and you generally need more togetherness in relationship, which you might think of as needy energy, but you actually didn't feel safe as a child on some or many levels with your parents, and so your nervous system is just working overtime to get that safety in connection with your partner. You also perhaps grew up in a family with parents who might have lacked boundaries or emotional maturity, and they showed you clunky parenting. They were either too harsh or too absent or a combination of both. So now as an adult, you don't really know your own values and needs. In fact, your own needs are probably the needs that you took on from your parents, the values you took on from your parents, particularly if you had an enmeshed relationship there, and so you don't set boundaries because you don't have that healthy sense of identity where I end and you begin that boundaries would normally protect. The third and fourth variations are the avoidant attachment style. You can still experience some of that anxious attachment, but you value emotional distance to stay safe, particularly when your relationships get too close or your partner bids for connection because you as a child had to learn independence and self-sufficiency in some way, and because that's the only way you've really experienced love. That's what you think it is now. Now, you might already be recognizing yourself in some of these descriptions or recognizing someone you've tried to be in relationship with, and you might even realize that you act anxious with certain partners, particularly those that reject you on some level, and avoidant with others, particularly those that really want to get to know you. It's important to know that there is value in knowing how you attach and relate to others, and if you want to go down this rabbit hole, I highly recommend Alan Robarge's YouTube channel for some excellent intellectual information regarding attachment styles, but there is a shadow side to these labels and categorizations, which is what this video is about. I'm not bashing attachment theory. I have had an excellent therapist who's worked with me on my anxious and avoidant tendencies, but theory for the sake of theory, putting yourself in a box can be incredibly disempowering. If you use your attachment style to stay in a victim role, as in you keep behaving poorly in a relationship and you use it as an excuse, or you use someone else's style to place blame, as in, oh, he didn't really mean that because he's DA. These can be really counterproductive to healing. The other shadow side to attachment theory is that it can cause us to start looking for things in ourselves or others that aren't actually there. We can know all the traits of an avoidant partner because we've read about it and heard about it, and then become hyper aware and sensitive to those traits that we start to project onto them what we're expecting them to do because we've boxed them into the avoidant category. Now, this is taking the humanness out of a theory that is just simply designed to explain patterns of relational behavior, not to be a complete diagnosis or cure our blocks around love. So the really cool thing to understand here is that because we learned these patterns of behavior when we were children, we can unlearn a lot of them, which I'm going to show you how to get started on today. We can work our way from anxious and avoidant to secure because we are not labeled for life. Attachment styles are not boxes. They really sit more on a spectrum where we can move from sometimes being more anxious or avoided depending on our internal resources or the kind of partner we're with, and then we can move towards secure as we do this work. So it's really important for you to know that there is a dynamic framework here, and I'll show you how to start leaning more towards a secure style in your relationships. So firstly, let's actually identify what our attachment style even is, how it came into existence at a subconscious level within us that makes us feel safe. And from here on in, I'm going to refer to all of the non-secure attachment styles, anxious, avoided, and all the variations as simply insecure. So when we were infants, our bodies and brains were developing, and we're programmed subconsciously with survival instincts. We are focused solely on meeting our survival needs when we're young. Are we getting enough food, warmth? Are we physically safe? And very importantly here, are we feeling connected? Connection is one of our primal survival programs we have built into our DNA. It makes sense when you think about it because in order for us to survive, we need people around us to bring us food, keep us warm, because we're not self-sufficient. But what happens to everyone when we're young, to some degree or other, is that we don't get the connection we crave from our primary caregiver, and our body experiences it as a form of trauma. The first trauma being, and this is going to sound strange to you, is the moment we leave the comfort and safety of our mother's womb. We carry birth trauma as a species. And then we're in this strange new world, and then from there, varying types of trauma can happen. Maybe you're adopted, or you grow an abandonment wound from an early age. One of your parents is abusive or alcoholic, or perhaps they're just really distracted when they raise you. It isn't always this extreme version of trauma. They might just have clunky or dismissive parenting styles. Regardless of the environment, it isn't safe for us as children one way or another. So we develop a kind of covering over ourselves. A way we can change who we are in order to get this connection we need. And this happens subconsciously, out of our awareness. We become a version of ourselves that is not who we truly are, but who we think we need to be to fit in, receive love, and feel we belong. Now, according to attachment theorists, 50% of the population are insecure in some way that they relate, which is basically where we keep the covering on into adulthood. We don't integrate and heal the connection with who we've become in our childhood with who we truly are, and we don't come into our own identity and start feeling secure within ourselves. We carry our insecurity that we have to be someone else in order to get love into our adult relationships. Thus, the insecure attachment style exists. Now, I want you to let me know in the comments below how you've noticed your false self or this covering appear in your life. In order to get the connection or love you want from a partner, what have you done? And if this video is helping you, please give it a thumbs up so that others see the video and get the benefit from this knowledge. Now, we're going to look at the reasons why our covering stays in place because knowing those reasons can help us to unpack and shed this old covering and start maturing and growing into an integrated adult person so that we can finally receive love and give love authentically in our relationships and also, to be honest, really expand into our potential as human beings because this work goes beyond any relationship or dating issues. So, why do we unconsciously keep the covering on as an adult? Why do we assume this false personality or false self to get the love we crave? Surely, because we want this love so badly, we want to do it in an authentic way, right? There are two main reasons we don't. Firstly, we haven't learned how to accept and love all parts of who we are. We haven't learned wholeness because we carry deep shame buried beneath us that there's something inherently wrong with who we are. It makes sense because when we were young, we weren't getting that love we craved, so we became someone else or put on this covering in order to get it. So, kid logic is really run by shame here. We automatically reason with ourselves, and this is out of our awareness, that the reason we're not getting love is because it's our fault, not because dad's an alcoholic or mom's really distracted with three other kids. There's no capacity for adult understanding when we're children. We just take it simply personally, and we're doing this unawares at all from the ages of infancy. So, if we haven't learned in our childhood and teenage years how to feel comfortable with all these parts of who we are, which we do with parents that have a certain level of emotional maturity to help us process the world as we start engaging with it, we then learn to deny and shame ourselves without that support. So, let's say your best friend breaks up with you when you're eight. Kid logic is going to take us personally, shame who we are around it, and we need the help of our parents to understand it and process it, that it might not be about us, and go through the internal emotional steps to learn compassion and understanding and this wider view of the world outside of our understanding. Without a parent doing this, we're going to take rejection personally and continue to do that every time we get rejected in some way or other, whether it's our first breakup or having to leave the family home, whatever or whenever that rejection arises in your body. It's this abandonment wound that is tied to our underlying belief that we're not lovable, we're broken or unworthy, and we'll never be unconditionally loved. Now, that wound has defense mechanisms tied to it because we inherently want to protect parts of us that are hurt. And so, we know of the common defense mechanisms fight or flight, and they literally form the underlying pattern of anxious and avoidant attachment styles. The anxious attachment type is the fighting type. You will fight for connection. You are the angry pursuer, always, always wanting to get the love you craved originally from your childhood. And the avoidant type is, of course, the flight type. It's not safe for me here, so I'm out of here. So, hopefully, you can see those primal defense mechanisms protecting the core wound that underlie the attachment style theory. And you've no doubt done both fighting and fleeing in your life when you are having your heart broken or you're being rejected. Secondly, the reason we keep our false selves in play into adulthood is because we haven't learned how to feel safe in our own bodies, on our own. Part of secure attachment with our parents is a biological felt sense of safety and security. And if their nervous system was in any way dysregulated when they were raising you, that sent alarm bells to your nervous system that your body isn't safe. And safety, of course, is one of our primal survival needs. So, your own nervous system learns then to function in a dysregulated way. And you don't actually know any difference here. You think the resting state is normal. But if you ever felt as a child that you were sleepy or you had poor memory or you had any kind of anxiousness or depression as a child and also as an adult, it's time to look at how your nervous system is functioning. Is it permanently switched on in fight-or-flight mode or freeze mode, which is where you disassociate from your reality and live in a kind of fantasy? You might also notice that you get a trigger and your reaction is way out of proportion with what you were triggered by. So, when this happens, there's a stimulus that triggered you that's actually touching an old feeling memory of not feeling safe as a kid, feeling shameful or neglected and not seen and heard. You probably can't put words to it because that feeling sense lives in our body. It is actually part of us somatically. That emotion lives in and is held deep in the body. So, this is where sabotage comes from. Those patterns that you do time and time again, even though you know you shouldn't on a mental level, your body stores that feeling sense that can only feel safe for you when you overeat or are addicted in some way or in a relationship where you're always being rejected because that's what you knew as a child, that was safety for you and no amount of mental gymnastics is going to change that. So, how do we actually start shedding these very deep defense mechanisms that keep covering us up to feel safe but they actually don't serve us anymore as adults. They're only keeping us in stuck, toxic and old relational patterns. There are two aspects to start working on your own healing journey. Firstly, you need to get self-aware. All of the parts of yourself that you've been rejecting and covering up your whole life now need to have a light shone on them so that you can start feeling whole again and really coming home to yourself. So, the quickest way to do this is meditation. It is the easiest way to start listening and giving space to the parts of you that are crying out for help and attention. Just start with five minutes a day of simply paying attention to your breath and letting the internal dialogue come up and then let it go. We don't want to attach to that dialogue. We don't want to identify with it or start creating stories around it. We just want to let ourselves or our inner child feel heard. Secondly, you need to start learning how to feel safe in your own body and specifically how to feel safe with the emotions that are coming up that are uncomfortable. So, start to lean into uncomfortable emotions and resist the temptation to distract yourself or soothe yourself with eating or busyness, whatever your vice might be. Those emotions, like your internal dialogue, are what we naturally suppress. And in suppressing them, this is kind of an internal violence that tells them they're not wanted. This is contributing to you not feeling safe and secure in your body. Now, I want you to make sure you stay within your window of tolerance here. Just become aware and allow one emotion to come up and exist and sit with that uncomfortableness for as long as you can manage without spiraling into any shame or blame or any defense mechanisms. Getting comfortable with being uncomfortable is key. And it's like letting out steam gradually and slowly. It's going to want to perhaps come out all at once and we need to let the steam out bit by bit with what we can manage. Emotions like anger, sadness, fear, guilt, and shame are all bundled up in there. So, treat them with kindness and love. Let them have a place in your awareness and you'll start to feel a little bit more whole the more you practice it because you're just not going to be suppressing them anymore. By looking at them and acknowledging them and, in a way, accepting them, it has a releasing effect. They actually lessen their grip on you when you do this. Thirdly, we need to learn somatic intelligence and this is where we acknowledge how the emotions and beliefs feel in our body, what actually happens in our throat and our chest when we engage with an uncomfortable emotional thought. And look at our body from a bird's eye view. Just witness the physical manifestation of this shadow part of you. By calling out your body's experience when you're in an uncomfortable emotion, you start to gather intelligence about what's going on in your subconscious because the two are linked. So, when my deep abandonment wound is triggered, for example, there are specific physical things that I feel. My body compresses and tightens in a certain way. In my chest, I feel it and in my throat, it feels a specific way. And the more I witness and observe this, the more I can catch myself when I'm triggered and then self-soothe rather than launch into attack mode because of my insecure attachment history. So, understand the attachment styles are these very primal defense mechanisms. Fight, flight and freeze. And knowing what they're protecting and how to work with where your wounds lie in your body are key to firstly healing those wounds and then managing your insecurities or insecure attachment style when that arises. And not putting yourself into a box is one of the most important things here, which is the point of this video. Instead, just actually work with the reality of how your defense mechanisms are appearing in your relationship and on your own. You don't need to waste energy trying to fit a square peg into a round hole. You will no doubt have some anxious and some avoiding tendencies because you're human and you'll go into fight or flight or freeze mode at times. That's a natural part of being wounded and protecting a part of yourself that feels very vulnerable. Lastly, one more point. A lot of my clients that I work with in my program, Love by Design, ask me if it's possible to do this work while being either in relationship or dating. And I want you to know that yes, healing work can be done wherever you're at. And if you're in a relationship that's triggering you all over the shop, that's a great learning ground for you to start unpacking what your underlying wounds are, what conditions you need within yourself to feel safe. And then you can circle your partner into that process so they can get on board with helping you heal and feel safe. And of course, as you do this, they may choose not to do that. And if they're setting back your healing work, it's a good indication you might consider the health and appropriateness of that relationship for you. My clients that do this healing work on their own and choose to be single while they're doing it, of course, they make great progress on their own but only to a point because we need the mirror and learning ground of connection and making mistakes when we relate to others to unpack what we do and to truly heal that. However, and I made this mistake for 15 years, you do not need to be in an unhealthy, insecurely attached relationship in order to heal. Do not stay with someone that continually chooses to reject you or chooses to wound you. They might be on their own healing journey. And if they keep putting you outside of your window of tolerance again and again, even if they're lovely and gorgeous people, that re-wounding is not going to help your healing. We can heal and be in relationship when both parties are willing to look at their own behaviors and learn how their past affects their current reality so that you guys can form a secure relationship container together, you know, where you're both putting in your best effort to contribute in a secure and healthy manner. If your partner keeps choosing to not do that or you find that you are yourself unable to keep doing that and re-wounding keeps happening, take a serious look at your relationship. And I've created a great video here on how to do that really thoroughly. So you now know the reasons why we keep our insecure selves at play in relationships and how to start healing and feeling safe in your own body so that you can earn a more secure sense of self and way of relating to others. And it's really only skimming the surface of what I teach in my program, Love by Design. And if you're interested in diving more into those two processes of accepting and loving yourself to become whole and learning the somatic perspective of feeling safe in your own body so that you can create a really authentic, healthy relationship with yourself and another person, I want you to join me in my free training to learn the exact three-step process on how to go from anxious and insecure to secure in relationships. And you can sign up for that webinar in the description below. You can also interact with me on a more personal level in my free Facebook group. And if you want to submit your application for the free one-to-one consult, you can do all of that in the link in the description. And please, I would love to hear from you in the comments. How did you find today's lesson? What are the things that you want to try more of or what you've experienced? Please post them in. I'm really keen to keep helping you along in this journey. And if you found this video helpful and valuable, then click the thumbs up button to help this channel out and also subscribe for more content like this because I post twice a week. And in the meantime, here are some great next-step lessons for you to go on and watch so that you can keep moving on this journey towards healing and having an incredible relationship with yourself and the partner that you desire. And for now, I'll see you in the next video.