Episode Transcript
[00:00:12] Speaker A: Hi roots and rings family. Welcome to our episode two. Today we'll be discussing attachment styles and how they evolve as we grow.
[00:00:20] Speaker B: Yes, so with attachment styles obviously comes in love languages practicing discernment emotional regulation.
We will start off with what the attachment styles are. And that's anxiously attached, avoidant, secure and fearful. Avoidant, which is coined like disorganized. Obviously. The goal is to get to feeling secure in your relationship. That's the end goal. Right. At some point along the journey of your life, like your goal should be if you want to be in a relationship or a connection, it doesn't even have to be romantic. Some people struggle in familial dynamics and friendships with anxious attachment or avoidance. And the goal should really be secure.
[00:01:02] Speaker A: Yeah, that definitely should be everyone's goal. But like everything in life, it's easier said than done.
But I definitely think that it starts with being self aware. And I think it's also important to understand what your attachment style is because it helps you understand how you relate to your family and friends, how you work with people in the workplace and just like in the world and also how you solve problems for yourself and for other people. So. So I think that they're like those quizzes and stuff like that that are available. I think that it's important to just take some time just to scope it out, just to read the things and have an honest conversation with yourself about where you fall. So that way, if it's where you don't want to be, you can work on it.
[00:01:40] Speaker B: Right?
[00:01:40] Speaker A: Because like we said, the goal for everyone should be secure. I think that's definitely the healthiest place.
[00:01:45] Speaker B: Yeah. And a person gets to a place of security by knowing themselves. So if you're entering a connection of any type of, you ask yourself, like, am I, how am I viewing this connection? How am I, what energy am I bringing in? Right? Am I viewing it through like my past traumas or my wounding? And it's important. Some people don't even know that they have past trauma. You know, as a therapist and a coach, I ask in the beginning of our sessions, like, have you experienced any major traumas in your life? And a lot of the times people don't even know what they've experienced is trauma. So it's important to do like soul searching that we call it. It's important to know what you're, how you're stepping into something, what energy you're bringing, what you want to get out of the dynamic, what connection you want to foster, what type of connection you want to Foster. So, yeah, absolutely, for sure.
[00:02:34] Speaker A: And I think that even though the motivator may be for relationships, I think that at the end of the day, it's just for yourself, honestly, to just, like, understand what that is. But I think that it's hard to. I think it's hard for some people to identify what their traumas are because when we think of the word trauma, we think of like a car accident, Right.
[00:02:51] Speaker B: The worst possible.
[00:02:52] Speaker A: Or like, you know, something like physically traumatic.
But we don't even realize that it can just. It can be the smallest thing that your brain, when you're a child, like, just doesn't forget. And then it comes up in different places as you grow. And if you're not aware how that trauma shows up or the trigger of the trauma shows up in your life, it's going to keep happening. It's just going to keep happening. So.
[00:03:14] Speaker B: And Nina brought up a really good point. Like, regardless of the type of relationship you want to enter, your relationship to self sets the tone. And you can be anxiously attached within yourself. You can be fearful, avoidant, and disorganized and just avoidant straight up within yourself. Because what that looks like is you'll say things like, oh, he's so emotionally unintelligent, or she lacks emotional regulation. She's just all over the place. She's sloppy, she's over emotional. That's what your attachment style is coming out, like, within yourself. It's data.
[00:03:44] Speaker A: It's definitely like data feedback data.
Yeah, absolutely. And I think that, like, just to speak on the emotional intelligence, there's several aspects of intelligence. Like, you can be book smart, you can be street smart, you can have a way with words and the gift of gab, and you can basically, like, sell water to a well. Right. But you can also be like, emotionally intelligent. And like, that shows up in different ways. So, like, if you're. If you would consider yourself an intelligent person, you know, I invite you to think about what aspects do you consider yourself intelligent in and really have an honest conversation with yourself in? Maybe you're lacking a different form of intelligence. You know, like, I know that I'm book smart and I know that I'm emotionally intelligent. I'm not the best in street smarts. Like, I'm just. I'm gonna need somebody else to be the thug because I'm not always the thug, honestly.
But like, I realized that.
[00:04:33] Speaker B: Yeah. Just know who you are.
[00:04:35] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:04:35] Speaker B: Know what you bring.
[00:04:36] Speaker A: Yeah. But I think that also, like, it can get deeper, which we'll definitely talk on. Like, Other episodes. But like, I think that like, for example, like my, my lack of street smarts also is rooted in like my understanding of like people and my, my awareness of my environment and also like my social anxiety so that she doesn't have.
[00:04:57] Speaker B: I just, I feel like I've had social anxiety. But you know, other people don't think that way. I don't know.
[00:05:03] Speaker A: I'm still discovering that.
[00:05:04] Speaker B: But anyway, it's basically like self connection. Self connection. Because if, if you don't know which area you're smart in or which area you might be advanced in, you're not going to know the other areas where you might need to explore or do better in. Right? Because everything is a starting point. And I talk about attachment styles all the time with my clients and on my page, on my social medias. But I get a lot of pushback with saying that the anxiously attached is the most emotionally unavailable out of all the attachment styles. And usually women never want to hear that. And I didn't want to hear that either, right. Because I could lean more towards out of the attachment styles. I can lean more towards anxiously attached. When triggered, I've become pretty secure in my self concept and who I am as I have aged. But when triggered I could lean more into anxiously attached. And the reason why I teach this is because an anxiously attached person is focusing so heavily on the other person, okay. It's an element of control because they need the other person to make them feel better. So what we see with anxious attachment is like constantly checking in, constantly rereading texts, constantly being an analysis, asking if you're okay, being the initiator, being the doer, being the fixer, being the one that always shows up, right? You don't want to be forgotten, you don't want to be rejected, you don't want to be abandoned. And so you overwork and you over fix. And what you're doing as that anxiously attached person is you are growing further and further away from yourself because you're so pressed to get into the face of another person.
So in society you'll hear generalizations like, oh, women are more anxiously attached and a man is more avoidant, right? So avoidant you'll see people categorize that as like narcissistic, selfish, self indulgent, oh, self centered. They're all about themselves, they only care about them, they give me no attention.
The polarity between an anxiously attached person and an avoidant. They come together like this because they're both self disconnected. But the anxiously attached person is so focused on Another person that that gap within themselves becomes bigger and bigger and bigger, and you move further and further away from secure.
[00:07:16] Speaker A: I haven't. I just had a thought as you were speaking about this.
Maybe the reason why women are more categorized as the anxiously attack attached versus the men being the more avoidant. I think that because our attachment styles form in our younger years as we're growing and as women, as little girls, we're taught to, you know, be mindful of the room, worry about how other people feel, keep quiet to keep the peace, you know, and all these things. I think that when we. When we age and stuff, we're naturally more focused on the other person because that's how we're kind of taught to be conditioned, you know, more focused on the others. And maybe that's why we're more anxious, like, categorized as more anxious because, you know, this brings me back to like a funny. A funny way to describe this that our boss said to me just the other day about being the indoor cat versus the outdoor cat. And, like, a lot of, like, I'm gonna make a lot of cat cat references. I'm a cat mom, and I have cat brain, and I'm not afraid to share that. But anyway, so, yeah, indoor cat versus outdoor cat.
Men are the outdoor cats. They're the go getters. They're the ones that, like, go out in the world and do the thing. And then, like, women are traditionally the indoor cat, right? And so, like, now there's this, like, shift in society, right, where like, which type of cat should you be? Which type of cat is more appropriate? You know, gender roles are just shifting, and it's very. It's a little more fluid now, but then it's not, and it's weird. But anyway, I think that generally speaking, that could be a reason why women are more considered anxiously attached.
[00:08:48] Speaker B: It's definitely that it's conditioning just to. Before I. I don't want to lose my thought, but when you said fluid, keep in mind that attachment styles are actually fluid. So if you were saying, like how I said earlier in my 20s, I was definitely more anxiously attached than secure, right? But when triggered, I can lean towards an anxious attachment because it's fluid. So your attachment style could change at any time, even if you're secure, right? That's the ultimate goal. But something could happen to you in your life where you experience a trauma, you experience a heartbreak, you experience a separation, and then, like, it's not like you're starting from scratch because you have that experience, but you could get taken back into that type of mindset again or that those type of behaviors because you're trying to self soothe. So I just want to, I want you to be aware that if you're figuring out like your way or your journey on like anxious attachment and you fall back into or you get triggered and you notice certain behaviors are coming up, it's not that you're doing anything wrong. Okay. It's that we're human beings and things are fluid and we're. The biggest goal that we're trying to get to the end goal is to feel better inside. And anxiously attached people are dying to feel soothed, but they're looking at it into that. They're going about it the wrong way because they're looking for that soothing in the external instead of it coming from themselves. Like it. An avoidantly attached person is self focused and self preserved. So their need is always going to become, always going to come before somebody else's. That's why you perceive them as selfish. But is it really selfish? Like obviously you can be more emotionally intelligent as an avoidant, but like is it really selfish to be self preserved?
[00:10:30] Speaker A: I don't think it's selfish to be self preserved.
However, I do think it's selfish when let's say an anxious and an avoidant are in a relationship and the anxious is like, but are you okay? Okay, tell me what's wrong, Tell me what's wrong. And then they avoid it. I can see why it pushes them away. But the avoidant is like, I'm good, I'm good, I'm good. But they're not, it's not really good. I think that maybe could be selfish.
[00:10:48] Speaker B: Yeah. Well, that's poor. That's just poor communication. Right. That's like emotional intelligence, emotional regulation.
Yeah. So that, that part is.
It's not a healthier way of communicating or connecting with someone.
Word. But generally the point, the message here is that your connection with yourself will set the tone for your behaviors in any relationship you enter. That's basically it.
[00:11:12] Speaker A: Absolutely.
[00:11:12] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:11:13] Speaker A: I think that if you're anxious, you're kind of like, I don't know, like you could be like so focused. Like as you said, like they're emotionally unavailable because they're so focused on getting that validation from the person that maybe the other person can try to be communicative and they're not even receiving that. They're not maybe because it's not something they want to hear or like, you know, I'm just thinking of like different ways where like somebody could try to communicate you're so anxious that you can't even like hear the words or process what is being said.
[00:11:41] Speaker B: Because an anxiously attached person is always chasing the next high.
[00:11:44] Speaker A: Yeah, right.
[00:11:44] Speaker B: The next suit.
It's like a drug addict. There's. You never stop getting high. There's always something that's needed.
[00:11:51] Speaker A: What's that Sex in the City quote about men? About men. Are. Men are, are the drug.
[00:11:54] Speaker B: Are a drug.
[00:11:55] Speaker A: Because they like bring you so high and then they like.
It just brought me to that.
[00:11:59] Speaker B: Yeah, no, it's true. And that's, that's what any topic, men, career, money, your own body. Like you're just constantly in chasing energy because you can't get it from yourself. And that's what's really sad.
[00:12:11] Speaker A: But that definitely starts in the younger years and it's important to just like understand that so that way you can
[00:12:16] Speaker B: kind of just like, yeah, the bottom
[00:12:17] Speaker A: line is safe, fix it up, safety.
And we have a visitor.
[00:12:24] Speaker B: Don't touch the sand.
[00:12:27] Speaker A: But I think that also like, just to like
[00:12:33] Speaker B: get your cat.
[00:12:34] Speaker A: Mama, say hi to the audience.
Hi.
I wanted to also like shift it just slightly to speak on like attachment styles and how they kind of influence what our love languages are.
[00:12:50] Speaker B: I was just going to say that.
[00:12:51] Speaker A: Oh, okay.
[00:12:54] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, that's perfect.
So thinking of like the love languages, I, I'll share this personally because I was leaning so much into anxiously attachment in my earlier years.
Something that was important to me was words of affirmation.
I also grew up in a household where I was extremely loved. And so like an ex boyfriend of mine actually brought this to my attention because the standard was that I was deeply loved by my family, so I wasn't able to see outside of that for myself. Right. But an ex boyfriend of mine was like, if you brought home a napkin, like your family would, would tell you how, how good you did or how much you were loved. I'm like, yeah, duh, that's a good napkin. I like that napkin.
So.
So I grew up with that as my foundation. We talk about generational trauma, but there's also a lot of generational love. Yeah.
So what, what I started to need, I guess from relationships was that words of affirmation and I wasn't giving it to myself. Right. So as an, as an anxiously attached, you kind of chase that love language. So if, if it's gift giving, you chase that love languages are not unhealthy and you should receive whatever your love language is. Right. You and your partner, you and your dynamic, whatever you're in it's not unhealthy until it becomes unhealthy. Everything is, is like on a spectrum and there's an extreme to it, right? So for me it started to be like, well, that's what I need, that's what I need, that's what I need. But I wasn't giving it to myself.
I wasn't self focused. I was so externally focused that I just, I needed to hear things all the time. And now as a 42 year old woman, I. That's not even close to being my love language anymore.
[00:14:37] Speaker A: I have a question.
[00:14:38] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:14:39] Speaker A: Do you think that you got caught up in needing those words of affirmation? Because when your family gave it to you in your, in your younger years, it was like praising you. It was like praising you, but it wasn't per. It was like from an outside perspective. And what I mean by this is like for example, we're educators, right? So like let's say we are giving some type of praise to the student, right? And this is something that I try to be mindful of. Instead of being like wow, good job, you're so smart. I would be like, wow, good job. You really worked hard to get that answer right. You know, like, it's just like more of like instead of being like you're so smart, you're so this, you're so this. So then you're, you're used to getting all these compliments. Compliments that when you don't get them you're like kind of like disheveled. You don't know like basically how to maybe give them to yourself versus the other way is like they're affirming that it's coming from you and that's why. Or it's coming from the effort that you put and that's why it's great or something. I don't know if I'm making sense.
[00:15:33] Speaker B: You are making sense, but I don't know if that's exactly it for me because I had, it was specific with men, so it was more of a relationship based thing that was on the side of being unhealthy for me, like externally. Okay, so it wasn't in my career. I mean of course you would accept a compliment and stuff like that, but it started to become something too meaty when it came to a relationship dynamic. Okay, but that is true. That is a great way to help a student or a child foster a higher self concept in themselves which we. This everything is like full circle moment. A high self concept teaches you secure attachment and it teaches you a Healthy love language. So that's the basis of what you're trying to build in children is safety and a high self concept. Absolutely, absolutely.
[00:16:25] Speaker A: And I think also it's just important to know like to teach them from, from a young age, like whatever happens in your life is up to you in like subtle little ways. Right. Like, like, okay, like you worked really hard to get that good grade and like certain, certain ways that you form the words so that way they understand like, okay, this, then I will get this result versus oh, I'm just, I'm just waiting to hear this from somebody. Or like, if I, if I don't do good on this test, that means I'm dumb versus I didn't do good on this test because I didn't apply the effort and try hard enough to get that. You know what I'm saying?
[00:16:57] Speaker B: You talk a lot about if then in our IEP meetings. Right? So it's very similar.
[00:17:02] Speaker A: Yeah. What do you mean? What do you mean by that?
[00:17:03] Speaker B: You talk about the if then visuals for students. Oh, oh, if I do this then.
[00:17:07] Speaker A: Oh yeah.
[00:17:08] Speaker B: Oh yeah.
[00:17:08] Speaker A: First, first, then board, first that boys.
[00:17:14] Speaker B: Yeah, first do this and then. Right, but it's the same thing, right. So you teach them if you do this. Look at the trajectory of it. It's consequential thinking, which as adults, not everybody.
[00:17:25] Speaker A: Nah.
[00:17:25] Speaker B: Not everybody practices consequential thinking because it's
[00:17:28] Speaker A: easier to blame the world. It's easier, right.
[00:17:30] Speaker B: When we're like, easier to blame your partner. It's easier to blame your kid, your boss. I don't know everything outside of you than it is to say like, how am I participating in my own suffering or how am I participating in my own success? That's. Those are two questions that you should ask yourself almost daily. And I know that might seem like overkill, so you know, take that with a grain of salt. But it's important, it's important to be self aware.
[00:17:53] Speaker A: It is. It, absolutely. I think that it's just we're so conditioned in this like microwave cookie cutter culture to just receive things so easily that we don't want to put in the work. We don't want to put in the work in the relationship. Like if things are going, if we're having a rocky period, it's very easy to just go on Instagram and be like, oh, I like that big booty or I like those arms, like, let me like and comment or whatever.
[00:18:17] Speaker B: Instant gratification.
[00:18:18] Speaker A: Yeah, we get instant gratification. So when we, when we come up, when these challenges Come up. We. We don't really have the tools to, like, appropriately handle them. Like, life is not meant to be so easy. It's supposed to be hard. Like, we're on a constant journey of, like, learning and evolving literally to the day that we just are no longer on this earth. And, like, I think that, like, people are always searching for the easy way out. And it ties into, like, blaming the world because it's easier to blame the world for the things that are happening to you versus taking the responsibility yourself and having those. Again, I say honest conversations because I feel like I thought that shit like, five times already.
[00:18:52] Speaker B: But, like, it just.
[00:18:54] Speaker A: It's really so pivotal that you do have these honest conversations and understand that, like, it's okay that things are hard, it's okay that things are challenging. It's okay that you're maybe having a rocky road in the relationship that's supposed to happen. It's supposed to be a mirror. So you can evolve and you can grow and you can be better for yourself and the person and blah, blah, blah, they, you know.
[00:19:11] Speaker B: But it's also important to, like, remember that you have a lot of control over, one, what you experience and two, mostly how you perceive it. So if you're going to sit there and you're constantly going to engage in a rhetoric or a mental state of like, this is hard, this is hard, this is hard, this is hard. It's never not going to feel hard.
So if you're having a challenging conversation, if you're having, you know, a rough patch in a relationship or whatever, like, your perception is going to make it better or worse, before you even have that dialogue, you know, you step into a room and your energy speaks before you speak. Right? Your energy speaks before you talk. It's the same thing about how you perceive whatever you're stepping into. So if you are. If you're going to sit there and just be like, everything is hard, everything is a challenge, everything is a struggle. I can't get ahead. Like, that becomes your inner narrative, and you will not be able to get out of that. And you come for coaching, you come to therapy, you come to mentorship, you vent with your friends, and you're like, I just. I just. Everything is just bad. Everything is just piling up. Everything is just getting worse. I can't get out of my own way. And why is that? Why can somebody else get out of their own way with similar situations than you are, similar resources, and you can't. Something in your mind has got to shift. Your mind is the Most powerful piece to all of this because it's like the missing piece out of the puzzle. You control so much of your dynamic of how, how you come across to people, your reality. Yeah, it's just, it's, it's, it's really. Once you get it, once you see it, you can't unsee it. And I hope that like today you see it.
[00:20:45] Speaker A: Yeah. I think that whole phrase, like, fake it till you make it, I think it's really funny because if you think deeper into it, it's like, okay, like for example, like if, if we have to present something at work, right? And like, we're super nervous, we don't know what to do, whatever. We don't want to let the people know that. Right. So like, we have to kind of like fake it. Like I, I'm not feeling it, but
[00:21:02] Speaker B: I'm just acting like I'm feeling it.
[00:21:04] Speaker A: And then eventually when you're acting like
[00:21:05] Speaker B: you're feeling it, you're just doing it. So you're then like feeling it and you're like, whoa, like I just did that. So we make it bigger. Like we make anticipatory anxiety is real. Like you make it bigger in your head before you actually do it.
[00:21:17] Speaker A: Word. We do stand in our own way. We do, I think all of us in some way, shape or form have done that before. And I think that's, you know, easily relatable.
But I think it is a constant journey and it's constant work and it's not really linear. It's like kind of zigzag and all over the place.
[00:21:31] Speaker B: But, and one thing, like I want you to take this with you is I know that people who are listening to this have done a lot of self work, have, have done a lot of like, soul searching and deep dives into who they are. And I want to remind you that if you're working on attachment styles, anxiety, avoidance, love, languages, all of these mental health perspectives, and you feel that sometimes, like, your work is not paying off or you still have these, like, we'll call them demons or like negative mindsets that keep dragging you back, this is a reminder that your brain loves to keep you safe and safety is not always healthy. It turns to toxicity. So your little anxious attachment style when you were younger, your brain, if it's not acclimated to security, is going to want to drag you back to your anxious attachment style because it feels at home. Just because something feels at home doesn't mean that it's successful.
So if you're used to closing people out when you're overwhelmed or when you're sad or when you're stressed, when you don't want to have hard conversations or you're used to being the one that's constantly needing a check in, like tracking their partner. All of these things, like, on top of someone, your brain is going to use that as your default safety. It's your job to create a new story and a new narrative to let your brain know that where you want it to be. So we'll use secure as an example is the goal. And that's now its new sense of safety. And the way that you do that is through repetition.
So anytime you get dragged back into the anxious or avoidant, you say to yourself, hey, listen, like, we're okay. Insecure. I'm okay to put my phone down and not track him. I'm okay to have a difficult conversation. I'm not going to die, right? I'm not going to die. If I express my feelings here. I'm good. You have to drag yourself back into your new story. And the more you do that, the more your brain is like, hey, I feel safe here. Hey, she's teaching me that I'm safe, I'm secure, I'm safe. And you do that over and over again, and that becomes your new lifestyle. So that's how you break a habit, that's how you shift a story, and that's how you change your reality. It's through repetition and landing and embodying safety.
[00:23:44] Speaker A: Clock it. Clocking it.
[00:23:45] Speaker B: I'm done yapping.
[00:23:47] Speaker A: And just to close out, I think this was a really great conversation just to close this out. I just want to say that it is our job and it is our responsibility to try to do this work to really make ourselves better. Because by making ourselves better and able to navigate the world with awareness, we essentially contribute to making the world better and helping other people also be aware. So do the work. Do the work. Make yourself better to make the world better.
Have a great day, y'.
[00:24:12] Speaker B: All.
[00:24:12] Speaker A: See you on the next.
