Happy Monday and welcome to your mental Health Mini.
This week's guest is Tyus Gibson and we are talking secure
attachments. There are four major attachment
styles. The first one is the secure
attachment style. And basically they grew up with
a very secure upbringing. In other words, there's a lot of
healthy patterns modeled to them.
We have three other insecure attachment styles #1 is the
anxious attachment style. Anxious individuals tend to have
feelings of loneliness in childhood, feelings of being
unloved or abandoned. And it can be that they have
very loving parents, but the parents are inconsistent, like
they're not around all the time, they work a lot.
Or it could be that there is a real abandonment that takes
place in childhood. And So what happens is as a
young adult or going into adult years, when we start having
relationships, we end up feeling like, Oh my gosh, I'm going to
be abandoned at any moment. And the anxious attachment style
will often present as needy or clinging in their adult life
because they have a lot of these fears of people pulling away,
but they tend to cope with these fears by holding on more
tightly. On the flip other end of the
continuum is the dismissive avoidant attachment style.
And the dismissive avoidant usually grows up with childhood
emotional neglect as the overarching theme.
In other words, there's often a lot of, you know, that that
child not having their emotions be able to be expressed and have
it positively validated. And so basically, this person
grows up to feel like I don't want emotional closeness to
somebody because I'm not accepted when I'm vulnerable.
And in fact, having a lot more space from people is actually
what makes me feel more safe and more comfortable.
And as adults, you'll see that these individuals tend to be
very afraid of too much closeness and they can leave a
relationship all of a sudden. They can sometimes be
emotionally unavailable and they can really want to pull away
from somebody the moment things get too real or too serious.
And then last but not least, there's a fearful avoidant.
Fearful avoidance. Basically share in the anxious
and avoidant side of the attachment continuum.
And why this actually happens is because fearful avoiding
children grow up in households where there's a lot of extreme
associations on either side of what's happening.
So sometimes they'll feel like, OK, closeness is safe and it's a
good thing and there's love. And so they'll fear that
closeness being taken away because they've often had the
polar opposite end of that spectrum, but they'll fear
abandonment as a result. And they can have that need to
cling and hold on tight, but at the same time, they've often had
really painful experiences around connection.
So they also fear getting too close.
Basically, there's going to be this overarching theme of not
being able to trust, not knowing what you're going to get, and
also constantly feeling like you're in this push pull pattern
of wanting closeness. But as soon as it gets real or
too close, you want to pull it away.
And if anybody's listening and they're like, OK, I'm insecurely
attached. I'm one of those 3 insecure
ones. It doesn't, it's not like this
is like a formal diagnosis. It's basically just a
subconscious set of rules that you've learned about love that
you're just storing like we talked about in that warehouse
and reprojecting back out onto the world.
So basically the first thing we want to do is those big fears.
So like the anxious attachment has the big abandonment fears.
They also tend to fear being disliked, rejected, not good
enough, excluded, fearful avoidance have those abandonment
fears, but also fear being trapped or not being able to
trust or being in the wrong relationship with somebody and
feeling unworthy or like they could be betrayed.
Dismissive avoidance. They fear being shamed or
engulfed or criticized or being helpless or powerless if you're
being weak, if they're vulnerable.
So hopefully people can start to hear like, OK, those are my big
relationship fears. And one of the first things that
we do is we actually rewire those fears because you're not
born with these fears, and these fears get conditioned into your
programming through repetition and emotion over time.
The second thing is we need to learn to meet our own needs.
And I think a lot of what happens is we have this society
or this outside world that's constant kind of pressuring us
to be this mold of what societal or cultural expectations exist.
And so part of, you know, pillar number two of these five pillars
is US learning who we are in regards to our needs.
And every person has needs. Every person is run by those
needs in a really big way. For some people, they need more
reassurance or validation or acceptance.
For other people, they need more freedom or autonomy.
But it's us actually tuning into like, what makes me feel like
I'm in the most fulfilled version of my life when which
needs are met? Do I feel the best?
Anxious attachment styles tend to need a lot of that.
Validation, encouragement, reassurance.
Certainty is really big. They need to work with people,
collaborate. They need open communication,
dismissive avoidance, need that like freedom, autonomy,
independence. But they actually also respond
relationally really well to acknowledgement and
appreciation. And they also respond really
well to empathy, support and acceptance and fearful
avoidance. Basically share in both sides of
those. So you can sort of hear yourself
in there. But they also need like depth or
novelty. They need challenge and growth
and they need that connection and, and intimacy as well.
So when we know our relational needs, we can start to
understand, well, these things really define the relationship
we have to ourself. And so when we can sit down and
be like, OK, well, what do I need and how can I meet these
needs in the relationship to myself first?
So we reprogram core wounds. We learn our needs and how to
meet them. We regulate our nervous system,
which is its own beast of a topic.
It's really about like being able to spend less time in fight
or flight mode and really make sure we feel comfortable being
in our body. And a lot of that's through like
meditation or breath work or nervous system regulation habits
like light exercise, yoga, things that are actually gonna
anchor us into our body and attune us to what it feels like
to be with ourselves and be more present.
And then we go into having healthy boundaries and learning
to communicate properly what our needs are to others.
And if we can really do those five things, that's where we'll
move the needle on going from insecurely attached to securely
attached. If you enjoyed this week's
mental Health Mini, you can listen to the full episode.
It is episode 202 featuring Tyice Gibson.
A link to the full episode is in the show notes.
As always, make sure to leave a review, subscribe, share with a
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podcast. Thanks for listening.