In this week's episode Karin is exploring the various attachment styles and how they shape the way we connect with others.
She will lay out the four primary attachment styles: secure, anxious, dismissive-avoidant, and fearful-avoidant. You will have a better understanding of how these styles influence your beliefs about intimacy, trust, and vulnerability, and how they may be affecting your romantic relationships, friendships, and other relationships in your life.
Tune in to this episode to unlock a more powerful understanding of your attachment style.
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Full Episode Transcript:
I'm Karin Nelson, and you're listening to Becoming You Again, episode number 114.
Welcome to Becoming You Again the podcast to help with your mental and emotional well being during and after divorce. This is where you learn to overcome the trauma of your divorce by reconnecting with yourself creating lasting emotional resilience and living a truly independent life, so your life will be even better than when you were married. I'm your host, Karin Nelson.
Hello, my lovely ladies. Welcome back to the podcast. I'm so happy to be here. We've had some fun things happening in our house lately. My
son just graduated from high school a few weeks ago, my daughter has been in Germany for a few weeks, loving and completely immersed in the culture and back with her friends that she met last summer and having such an amazing time. And the weather is beautiful and perfect. And things are rolling with my business and going well with my relationships. And things are in a pretty good place. I know that's not going to last forever. I know how life ebbs and flows especially positive and negative, and 50/50. And so, in this moment, I am just thoroughly enjoying what I've been feeling and going through. And I am happy to be here. I love recording this podcast. I know I tell you this all the time, but it is one of my favorite things that I get to do. I'm just so truly grateful to be able to share all of the things that I am using and learning that may help some of you as you are learning to heal and grow from your divorce and the things that you are going through as well. And so I'm just truly grateful to be able to be here. If you are getting anything from this podcast, if you are learning anything, if you enjoy it, if you have found some kind of value, I would just ask that you please pause the podcast right now on whatever platform you are on. And go give it a rating and a review. Ratings and Reviews really help the podcast algorithm whatever podcasting platform you're on know that people are enjoying the podcast, and people want to hear more. And it's a way that they put the podcast in front of other people so that more women who are in the same situation going through the same feelings, the same struggles, the same emotional and mental strife that you and I are going through and have been going through and have experienced, can also find some relief, some respite and some calm and peace by listening to this podcast. So if you would do that for me, I would be so very grateful. Just take 30 seconds right now do that. I thank you. Thank you so very much, and appreciate you for being here.
Let's jump into the topic today. Today's topic, I'm going to be talking about attachment styles. No, I'm not presenting these attachment style theories to you. Because I'm going I want you to diagnose yourself, I want you to take a look at the way you show up in relationships and be like, well, that's definitely me. And now I'm completely doomed from here. That's not why I'm doing this podcast. The reason I wanted to do a podcast on Attachment styles is I want you to just listen as I explained the different types of attachment styles. And see if you recognize anything that sounds familiar or kind of sounds like the way you show up in romantic relationships specifically, but it can also be relationships with friends, it can be relationships, with parents, siblings, any kind of relationship really, but it's really, it's, it can be very easy to recognize the type of attachment style you have when it comes to romantic relationships. And think about it from your perspective, not necessarily from your exes, or your soon to be exes perspective, but think about it from your perspective. And then again, I just want to present these to you so that you have a little bit of awareness. Whether you are or are not this attachment style, I don't know. But it might give you a little more awareness around how you show up in a relationship and awareness around some things that you might want to work on moving forward. Because as you come into better understanding about your own behavior, when it comes to a relationship, it's going to make it easier so that you can figure out if there's anything that you want to change moving forward. If you want to get into a new relationship, how you want to show up differently depending on your attachment style.
Now the interesting thing about attachment styles is our early life experiences are what tend to shape our beliefs in this world. As children we are constantly scanning to answer the question, Am I safe? Is something scary? Am I secure, or is something else happening. And according to attachment style theory, this affects how we end up relating to other people, how we end up establishing ourselves to other people, and whether or not we're going to avoid intimacy.
And often, what happens is how we show up in adult relationships mirrors, the first established relationships with our primary caregivers, this isn't always the case, this is not always the truth, you definitely can be in a relationship as an adult for a very long period of time with someone and form an attachment style because of that relationship. So I don't want you to take this as the end all be all, whatever happened to you as a child is what's happening to his adult, maybe, and maybe not. Again, I'm not trying to diagnose anything, or say that it is this one way, I just want you to pay attention, and start to be aware of what might be happening in your relationships as it pertains to you.
There's a couple of different attachment styles. I'm going to talk about each one. And again, see if you can recognize anything that stands out to you as like, oh, yeah, I totally do that. Or yep, that's more me or no, that's really not how I show up in relationships, and just start to pay attention. Again, awareness, always the first step to anything.
So the first attachment style that I want to talk about is secure attachment. secure attachment would look something like in children, especially if a caregiver leaves for a little while, you know, to go on vacation or go out for the afternoon, the child might be sad for a minute or show some of the distress at the beginning, but then be able to compose themselves quickly once the caregiver returns. So someone who has a secure attachment style feels protected, they aren't really hesitant about being loved, and about loving other people. They don't tend to avoid intimacy, they often generally kind of look at their world, as a safe world and a secure world. But if you have a secure attachment style, it usually means that you're pretty comfortable with intimacy. And you also are good at interdependence, you're not really codependent, you're also not isolated, you kind of have a great balance of wanting to be in the relationship and also wanting to be independent. You don't show up as anxious in your relationship, you don't need to hear back from them immediately. And you're not truly avoidant in that relationship as well. When I think about myself, in regards to my marriage, there was not a secure attachment style going on there.
And then when I think about the relationship that I'm in now, and all of the work that I've done on myself, and all of the healing that I have gone through and created for myself, and the safety that I feel inside myself, and in my relationship, there is much more of a secure attachment going on for me and my behavior than I have ever had in any relationship that I've been in. And I think that's a beautiful thing to be able to state that and know that it really comes from me paying attention to the kind of person that I wanted to be in this relationship, paying attention to what it was that I needed, the boundaries that I needed to set the safety that I needed to create for myself in my body, and allowing myself to be loved and to love in the ways that I wanted.
And now the next type of attachment styles, I want to talk about kind of fall under this umbrella of insecure attachment styles. And there's different kinds that fall under this we've got secure attachment style, which I just talked about, right? And then there's insecure attachment style that kind of can be broken down into different categories, depending on how you show up. And so just kind of listen, see if there's anything that kind of resonates more with you.
The first one is anxious attachment. Someone with this attachment style, they might experience significant fear of being abandoned, or a need to be validated constantly, like told constantly that they're beautiful told constantly, that they're enough told constantly there that they are loved, told constantly that someone is there for them, someone will be there for them to protect them to take care of them. And what happens is, even with the validation, they may constantly feel even if they're being told that they're loved and that they are enough, they may not feel that way. They may not feel like the other partner cares enough for them. Someone with an anxious attachment might have kind of an extreme fear of being abandoned. They may feel like their partner doesn't care for them again, even if their partner is telling them to their face. I care for you. I love you. I'm here for you. Sometimes what can happen with an anxious attachment style is, the person might ignore their needs, in the name of people pleasing as a way to try and stay safe in the relationship, they may also tend to gravitate toward relationships or people that express themselves in a way that they perceive is normal that they perceive is acceptable. And then jump to conclusions very, very quickly about that relationship.
I remember a story years ago from kind of a mentor of mine, and she was talking about when she was first in a relationship, and he liked fly fishing or something like that. And she immediately was like, Oh, I love fly fishing, too. It's one of my favorite things. And then they started dating and a few months into the relationship, he was like, let's take a fly fishing trip, I think it'd be so fun for us to connect in this way. And at that point, she had to either, you know, come clean or break up and she decided to come clean that she had to completely lied about that, because she wanted to people please and kind of fit in to this relationship. But I just find it. A good example of this anxious attachment style of needing to kind of people pleasing be someone that perhaps you're not to try and fit in to try and feel secure. So that hopefully down the line, you don't get abandoned and you don't feel abandoned in that way.
The next attachment style that falls under this umbrella of insecure attachment style is dismissive, avoidant attachment. And someone with this attachment style, might experience fear of emotional intimacy. They might be the kind of person who actually avoids getting too close to someone else. They might distrust their significant other, which consequently can lead them to being emotionally unavailable. This type of person often prioritizes their own autonomy, which in and of itself is not about being but when it's all you prioritize, and you don't really want to be spending intimate time with your partner, that can be a challenging thing for relationship. People who have this type of attachment style may experience fear of not wanting to get too close to someone. And if someone were to kind of threaten the way they move in the world, a dismissive avoidant attachment is going to have kind of a big reaction to that they are likely going to need space, they're gonna say something like I need my space, I need to distance myself, they might even have like escape routes laid out in their head of how to get out of this relationship just in case something you know, drastically happens in their head or is perceived to have happened so that they can make their escape so that they can get out so that they don't have to be emotionally attached any longer.
And then another subset of the insecure attachment style is a fearful avoidant attachment and somebody with this attachment style, they may crave attention, they may crave love from that significant other. And at the same time, they are avoiding emotional intimacy. They want to feel needed. But they really have a hard time getting close in a romantic relationship.
It's not dissimilar to dismissive avoidant, but there's more fear behind it, I think is what's happening with this type of attachment style. And so what I want you to do, as I've kind of gone through and described these different attachment styles secure and then the several different insecure attachment styles, is just kind of ask yourself this question, what is possibly my attachment style? Just think about it in this way of like, there's no right or wrong answer here. When it comes to to recognizing your attachment style, there is just attachment styles that you have. There's traits that you have anything that has been learned can also be unlearned. And so if there is a trait or an attachment style that you are not happy with, that you want to change that you want to work on, you totally can do that. It's possible for you. If you have an attachment style that you recognize, and you're like, I don't really want that attachment. I don't want to show up in that way in my relationships, you can unlearn that you can learn how to change and show up and have a different attachment style, if that's what you desire. Attachment styles are not set in stone. It doesn't mean that you're stuck like that for the rest of your life. And it doesn't mean that there's something wrong with you. We all have different ways that we show up in relationships. And if showing up in a relationship in a more secure manner is something that you desire. It's totally possible for you to do that. All right, my friends, that is what I have for you today. Thank you so much for being here. And of course as always, I will be back next week.
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