Whether you know it or not, your relationship with others is influenced by something called Attachment Styles. The style in which we attached to others can cause us great joy, or great pain. So what are Attachment Styles? How do they form and what can we do about them? Listen to the first in this 5 part Attachment Style podcast series to find out. During the episode I mention two of my mentors who have trained me in this field - Georgia Rose and Chantelle Raven. You can find out more about Georgia here on Facebook: www.facebook.com/georgiaroseevents and here on on Instagram: @georgia_liberate And Chantelle here: embodiedawakeningacademy.com/Here also are 2 different questionnaires on attachment styles for you to find out which dominant style you are: https://www.attachmentproject.com/attachment-style-quiz/ https://traumasolutions.com/attachment-styles-quiz/
Whether you know it or not, your relationship with others is influenced by something called Attachment Styles. The style in which we attached to others can cause us great joy, or great pain. So what are Attachment Styles? How do they form and what can we do about them? Listen to the first in this 5 part Attachment Style podcast series to find out.
During the episode I mention two of my mentors who have trained me in this field - Georgia Rose and Chantelle Raven. You can find out more about Georgia here on Facebook: www.facebook.com/georgiaroseevents
and here on on Instagram: @georgia_liberate
And Chantelle here: embodiedawakeningacademy.com/Here also are 2 different questionnaires on attachment styles for you to find out which dominant style you are:ย
https://www.attachmentproject.com/attachment-style-quiz/
https://traumasolutions.com/attachment-styles-quiz/
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You can connect with me on:
Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/livingthroughheart)
Instagram (@livingthroughheart)
Youtube (https://www.youtube.com/@livingthroughheart/)
LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/donnajoyusher) ย
Welcome to the Living Through Heart Podcast. ย
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I'm Donna Joy Usher. ย
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And I'm an analytical hypnotherapist psychotherapist, a spiritual healer, a magnetic mind coach and a multi award winning best selling author. ย
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I believe that everybody is capable of creating whatever they want, if they can just get out of the beliefs and stories in their head. ย
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This podcast is an audio blog of my thoughts as I go on a journey to heal my soul, surrender into my feminine power, and to live from the present moment in heart. ย
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I hope you find it amusing, interesting, thought provoking, touching, raw and inspiring.
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Hi, I'm Donna joy, Usher. ย
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Welcome to my podcast, Living Through Heart. ย
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If this is the first episode that you've listened to, this is episode 28. ย
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And I'm starting a five part series on Attachment Styles today. ย
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So in this episode, we're going to go through kind of an overview of what are attachment styles, and how do they form. ย
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And then I'm going to spend one podcast each on one of the main four types of attachment styles. ย
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And the reason I want to do this is because in the last six months, I've come to personally understand how important this is within us and within our psyche. ย
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Now, when I studied to be an analytical hypnotherapist and psychotherapist a few years ago, we did kind of touch on this theory. ย
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But at the time, I really didn't get it, I was at that point, kind of at the end of a very long term relationship, 25 year relationship. ย
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And it's been two years now since I left my husband. ย
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And in that two years since that time, I have held myself apart very, very consciously helped myself out of any sort of entanglement or relationship or anything because I knew I needed to heal. ย
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And I've been working on my own healing. ย
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And then about six months ago, I got triggered up into an anxious attachment. ย
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And I'll go through anxious attachments in a separate podcast. ย
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But basically what happened is I got triggered up, and anxiety and fear of rejection and all this pain, oh my God, it was it was terrible. ย
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But luckily, I was in a space, kind of coming into Tantra and starting to learn about this sort of stuff that I was able to recognize what it was and to realize that for the wounding pattern within me that it was, so I could work through it and heal it.
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And I've spent the last pretty much six months going into my anxious attachment, triggering it up consciously and on purpose and then sitting with the pain of it and holding myself within it so that I could move into it and process it and follow it back to where it began all the different beliefs, all the different memories, all the different things that had happened to me, that had caused this anxious attachment to be there.
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And I'm really lucky to have discovered two main mentors actually here in Perth. ย
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So two women who are basically embodiment practitioners and also into tantra, and one is Georgia Rose, and one is Chantelle Raven, and I'm working with both of those women.
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Working with Georgia rose, doing courses and going to events that she runs. ย
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And with Chantelle Raven, I'm actually working through her one year practitioner training. ย
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So her Tantra embodiment practitioner training at the moment. ย
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So learning how she works with clients and what it is that she does. ย
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And both of these women, I have learned about attachment styles from, thankfully, so that I could do what I've done to help myself.
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So what are attachment styles? ย
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So what is attachment theory? Right? ย
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So attachment theory was created by a guy called John Bowlby. ย
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So back in the 1950s.
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And he was observing parents and caregivers and how they responded to their children and basically how they shaped the child's development and relationships. ย
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And it's this relationship between the caregivers and it can the parents, it can also be older siblings, it can be, you know, aunts, uncles, friends of the family, things that are actually involved in caretaking the child. ย
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But more often than not those the strongest attachment sort of styles comes from the parents themselves, because they're the most heavily involved in the child. ย
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Obviously, these things are always different from family to family. ย
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But with how the caregivers react to the child and respond to the child, creates a feeling of basically a feeling of safety within the child. ย
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And everything goes back to feeling safe. ย
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Everything goes back to our ability to be safe and everything that happens within us in that form for like those first few years when we're forming our belief systems, it's all about how to stay safe. ย
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So how our caregivers respond to us and to our needs creates either a sense of safety or a sense of not being safe within it. ย
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And we have to bond to our caregivers to have that safety. ย
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So when we have a caregiver that is abusive, or is neglectful, even though we have to bond to them, then there's different anxieties that can be created and trauma that can be created, particularly if the caregiver is abusive, then the child has to bond to the caregiver that is abusive, for safety, but then they're also fearful of the caregiver. ย
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And that can be a real knock around. ย
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The other thing that can happen is you can have caregivers that actually mean well for the child, but they're absent. ย
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And that may be that they're not there all the time. ย
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Maybe they're so busy that they're not able to be there when the child needs things, or they're misinterpreting what the child needs. ย
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So there's a cycle that happens. ย
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And it's the breakdown of this cycle that can creates problems with attachment styles. ย
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So actually, let me just talk briefly about the four main types of attachment styles. ย
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So there's attachment styles secure, there's anxious, there's avoidant, and then there's disorganized. ย
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They're the four main types of attachment styles, and I'm gonna go into each one of these in a podcast of its own. ย
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So secure attachment is like, obviously, what is healthy?
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Secure attachment means that the child can securely attach to someone without needing, without being anxious. ย
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They don't have to be avoidant, and there's no confusion surrounding it, and they can flow in and out of relationships and feel quite safe and secure within relationship. ย
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Anxious attachment comes from when there has been a breakdown within the healthy attachment cycle which are going to a minute and the child is not sure whether or not the needs are going to be met, and they can get anxious. ย
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Avoidant happens when there's basically a wall. ย
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So with the anxious there becomes a neediness, a fear of rejection, a fear of not having your needs met.
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With avoidant, there is like a whole wall that goes into place where they're not allowed to feel emotions, and that can come either from the being so much pain, from needs not being met, that they just put this wall up where they're not, not allowed to have basically, they don't allow themselves to attach because it's too painful. ย
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Or it can be if there's an overbearing parent, often a mother that's over controlling, that their energy is flowing in to the child and the child needs to learn to put a wall up to keep them this energy at bay, to protect themselves basically. ย
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And then there is disorganized, which is kind of like the hardest one to work with, as a therapist.
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Disorganized is a combination of anxious and avoidant happening at once within this person.
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So they're anxiously wanting to attach. ย
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But then they're also like wanting to repel at the same time. ย
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And it's quite a cacophony of emotions, that's happening inside them. ย
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And this comes from when the caregiver is particularly abusive, and can be emotionally abusive, sexually abusive, in any sort of way, where they have to bond to this caregiver for safety, yet the caregiver is abusing them, and they're fearful of the caregiver.
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So what is the healthy attachment cycle?
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So the healthy attachment cycle is when the baby, or a toddler, or a child...
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So this is in the formative years, from the moment they're born, you know, it can also really start in womb, right is the child getting what they need from the mother,
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When they're when they're being formed. ย
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And it can be also like, you know, I've been to many memories of children in the womb, but like when they're in the womb already, and they can feel the energy of the mother is absent towards them, they're not loved, they're not wanted, maybe the mother is in an abusive relationship. ย
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And this can or is already setting up problems within the child, already belief patterns, their lack of safety is there even within the womb, right. ย
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But once the child is born, they have a need, so then they might have a need, might be hunger, they might be in pain, they might be uncomfortable, but they might be cold. ย
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And then so that need creates an arousal inside them. ย
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So the arousal might be they might get cry, they might get upset, might be grisly, they might get angry. ย
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And then after the arousal is the relief of the need being met, okay, so they have the arousal, they let their need be known, then their caregiver meets that need, and then there's relief. ย
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And then because of that need being met, and the gratification that comes from that, and the safety that comes from that, they develop trust, and they have this belief that I'm okay, you know, adults are okay, they develop this trust, and then the cycle goes round around, they have a need, there's the arousal, the need is met, the trust develops. ย
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And if there was a breakdown between their arousal and their need being met, then that's when an attachment style that's not secure develops. ย
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Now in saying that, if you're a parent, and you're listening to this, don't freak out. ย
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I don't know how they work out this percent, but they've worked out that between the arousal and the relief, the need being met, it only has to be met about 38% of the time for the child to go in to be able to securely attach. ย
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And sometimes it can be to also that...
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there can be also sometimes you know, when you're when you first got a newborn baby, and maybe it's your first child and they're crying, you don't know what the problem is, right? ย
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So they're trying to work it out. ย
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Maybe you're not meeting the need, but the child can feel that you are there.
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They can feel your energy they can feel your care, they can feel your love, look and feel that you're trying to meet that need. ย
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So even if you don't get it right the first time all the time, it's the fact that you're there willing to meet their needs, that's really what is important. ย
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So when this cycle is broken between the arousal and the relief, that's when these attachment styles form. ย
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So each of these attachment styles is a spectrum. ย
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It's not black and white, it's it does shift. ย
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And you can have secure attachment relationships with some people, and then being anxious with others and being avoidant with others. ย
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And what's really interesting is it this energy that is created within this attachment style, creates polarity between people, as well. ย
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And I don't know if you've ever had a moment where you met someone, and it's almost like your energies collide, and it's like this instant, like you've known this person, you recognize it. ย
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It's like, "Oh, my God, this is amazing. That's fireworks, you fall into a fast relationship, you know, maybe the sex is amazing. And you it's like, oh my God, these souls were destined to be together." ย
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And then like a month later, it all starts to go wrong.
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And this polarity is created because ironically, anxious attaches. And as I said, I'll go into this more in future podcasts because this is interesting. ย
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Anxious attaches and avoidant attaches, the polarities attract each other. ย
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And it's because we fulfill each other's belief systems. ย
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So an anxious attacher has a fear of being rejected. ย
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And they don't have boundaries, they flow into other people's energies, and they have a need that needs to be met.
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And they need somebody else to meet this. ย
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And this wounding, this unhealed wound that's there within them, because their needs were not met as a child. ย
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And when they have somebody in their life, when they when they have somebody showing them attention and showing them love, it's like this bomb that's applied to a wound. ย
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And everything is right in the world and all of that unconscious pain and discomfort that they're often even unaware of. ย
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It might be like an underlying anxiety that's there, you know, they might have like, habits and addictions that come from these things, right? ย
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Because that's what happens since we have like, you know, might be eating or we might be you know, social media scrolling or watching off the telly and stuff to hide this discomfort, right? ย
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But when somebody comes into our life and shows us love and affection, attention, often it has to be I mean, it can happen with friends, but in an intimate relationship with a partner, that's where the wounds like it really filled up.
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And that get healed though right? ย
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It's like this person's energy flows in and that makes everything okay for a while. ย
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So the anxious attacher has somebody coming in and that like all their needs are being met, right and then offerings an avoidant attached to the avoidant attachment comes in. ย
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But then what happens is the avoidant starts to get triggered up, and they pull back. ย
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And then the anxious one starts to feel this rejection, and then they get triggered up. ย
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And then we've got these two people that are getting triggered out by each other. ย
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And it's basically the self fulfilling prophecy. ย
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The anxious attachment fears rejection is but getting rejected. ย
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And the avoidant attachment who fears lack of like a freedom right, is losing their freedom, because this anxious attachment is now coming at them needing and grasping and wanting what they were giving them initially, right until they pulled back. ย
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So this is how this happens in our life. ย
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And as I said, I won't go into more detail on each of these in a separate podcast each. ย
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But you know, we all have these styles of attachment. ย
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And every single relationship that we have with somebody, there is an attachment style within that. ย
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And with some it's secure, where you know, those people like your best friend, and no matter what, they love you anyway, and you just come out, whatever.
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And they can laugh at you but love you wholly and you can do the same with them. ย
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And you know, maybe you've got a secure attachment with one parent, but not with the other. ย
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Maybe you've got a really secure attachment with your mother, where you can confide in them and you can trust them and you know that they're there for you but you might not have with your father or vice versa. ย
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And then maybe with your partner, you're stuck in this like avoidant anxious patterning, or maybe you're insecure attachment. ย
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What tends to happen if two anxious people come together in a relationship, one will either they're not actually attracted to each other, right? ย
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Or one will be more anxious than the other and will turn the other into avoidant because it's like this ooh, neediness and you pull back, right? ย
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It's like that grasping like kind of like creepy energy starts to come in. ย
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But it's just that they've got this anxious energy coming in and then you tend to avoid it. ย
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So even within ourselves, we can flow from anxious to avoidant depending on how we need to stay safe. ย
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Rather than being able to be secure and being out have boundaries in place and be able to say no, we will pull back and go avoid and start to avoid people and not message them back and start to go back into this patterning. ย
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So we can flow from one attachment style to another. ย
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We can have different attachment styles happening within our lives with different people.
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And you know, if you have a secure attachment with your mother, but insecure like maybe an anxious one with your father, you might find that you are very good at forming secure attachments with females, but anxious with men. ย
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So this is a very much a flux and a flow thing. ย
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Now the beautiful thing about this is that once you become aware of it, you can start to observe it within yourself and heal it, sit with the energy of it and heal it. ย
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And if you are in a relationship, just say you're in an anxious relationship, avoidant relationship, rather, so just so you're anxious, and you're with an avoidant partner, if both of you are aware of it, and are willing to work together, it is the most beautiful way. ย
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It's the most beautiful way to heal. ย
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Because when you're triggered up, you can sit with it and have a conversation with it and have that person be able to support you within going through what you need to go through to calm down. ย
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And to know that you are safe. ย
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And vice versa, when the anxious person goes into fear of rejection, they can sit in it and they can...
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And it's not a case of then forcing your avoidant partner to give you what you need, but to be sitting in the wound and to work into the pain of it and to release it and let go of it and to move back into secure attachment with your partner. ย
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Not to expect them, not to need them to heal you. ย
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But for you to be able to sit in and heal yourself. ย
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And when you trigger up in them, they're avoidant pattern,
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they start to pull back being able to to make them aware of it or have them observe it so that they can sit and to for them to be able to give themselves the freedom that they need rather than to try and get away from you to have that freedom, they need. ย
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So to be aware of each other's our attachment styles also allows you to not feel rejection when your avoidant partner pulls back, or to not feel smothered, when your anxious partner gets triggered out, but to be able to have a conversation about it, and to be able to start to heal together. ย
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Unfortunately, if you're in attachment style relationship, where one is willing to work on it, and the other just is totally unaware of it and not not willing to work on it, then it's long term, it's not going to work. ย
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If you're healing and they're not healing, then this, this polarity is going to get pulled out of out of kind of get skewed and you're going to get to the point where maybe you're insecure attachment, but they're still in their anxious or in their avoid and they're not willing to heal. ย
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And you're going to outgrow them. ย
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So things within ourselves that come from our attachment style is really how we feel about ourselves, how we feel about others, how we communicate with others, our ability to have boundaries in place and to have healthy boundaries.
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As sexuality how we are with a sexually with our partner, and how we can be within that. ย
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And then what our key belief around relationships are. ย
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So I'm going to go into four as I go into each podcast. ย
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And each time I'm going to go into them in more detail so that you can start to see and feel where you might be in each attachment style. ย
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And as I said, you might find that sometimes you're anxious with some people, you might be avoidant with others. ย
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And you can start to be more aware of this. ย
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The other thing I'm going to do in the podcast notes, I'll do this for all five of these episodes, ย
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I'm going to drop a couple of links to different questionnaires that you can do, ย
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they're going to show you different attachment styles within you. ย
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And with some of them, it shows you one of them, which shows you your attachment style, kind of like ย with your mother, your father, things like that with your relationships. ย
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And another one, it's kind of like what is your main attachment style. ย
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So as I said, you might be secure with mum, insecure with dad, you might be insecure, you might be you know, anxious with your partner. ย
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So it's good to do these questionnaires to start and start to get an idea of where you're at. ย
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So you can start to observe yourself. ย
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And the first stage to any healing that we do within ourselves is the being able to observe ourselves not being so stuck within it, that we're kind of like lost in the woods. ย
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But to be able to float up the woods to look down into it and observe ourselves within it. ย
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So when stuff is triggered out become aware of it, we're able to sit with it, work into it, work out where it's coming from and to heal it.
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Now, the other thing too, about attachment styles is, you know, I've talked about how it's the primary caregivers that that you know, helped create it within us but it can also be influenced by distressing or traumatic situations that have happened to us in our formative years and even later on in life. ย
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So it's anything that takes away from a sense of safety, right, it's going to create different attachment style and is how we how we learn to stay safe within that. ย
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So whether or not we learn to just kind of like we end up being anxious because of it or whether we learn to avoid it, or whether we can stay secure within it. ย
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So things like you know, like a medical trauma or a loss or a death in the family. ย
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So character environments like war zones, things like that can really create attachment style issues, natural disasters, illnesses, moving house or country, you know, children who had to move school a lot when they were kids, even if they had really loving parents that were insecure attachment with them if they had to keep getting ripped out of schools and moved a lot, and having to, you know, go in and then face that potential being bullied or teased, or you know, always be the new kid at school that can influence them. ย
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So all of these situations can have an impact on our sense of safety, and can disrupt healthy attachment. ย
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And the other thing too, about that is the effects of these situations and attachment styles can actually be passed down generationally. ย
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So we can have intergenerational trauma and attachment imprinting. ย
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So this is, you know, we're talking about ancestral things, information that we're born into, and it can, it's like, part of the information that we're born into in the field, but then also observing our parents and learning from them. ย
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So attachment styles can also be influenced through things that seemingly non relationship, relational factors, so religion, right? ย
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Culture, racial and social conditioning, exposure to media, and films and TV, things like that. ย
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So if we're, I remember, you know, when I brought up, I was always into rom com, you know, loved rom com movies, and our romantic movies and stuff like that. ย
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And, you know, within that it's quite often a woman and anxious attachment, right, and said, that whole, like needing to be loved, needing to be complete, you know, that feel of like that needing and wanting, and, you know, I think, possibly, I mean, it probably was compounding my attachment style, but I was really drawn to it because of my attachment style as well, right. ย
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But, you know, we can be influenced by socio demographic factors, by environment, and personal collected disconnect, and disembodiment. ย
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Religion is a big one, and culture as well. ย
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So, these cultural beliefs, which are also ancestral, as well.
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When we're born into a particular culture and race, the beliefs that are there, and religion is going to create, you know, it creates a lot of things to do with attachment styles as well. ย
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You know, as we grow as well, you know, observing the relationships within our families, you know, this is how we learn, right, by observation. ย
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So observing, like our parents, how they relate to each other. ย
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So if our parents have a beautiful, secure attachment, together, then the way they treat us is probably going to also create a secure attachment, but observing them, we get to feel safety and security, we learn that relationship is safe. ย
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So if there is push pull dynamics, abusive dynamics, emotionally weird, turbulent, toxic relationship, things like that, then that's gonna impact us if that's what we're observing. ย
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And that's what we're learning. ย
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And you know, if that's what we think, is real, that's what we think, is a relationship. ย
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Then obviously, that's going to impact us and how we are able to relate to people and how we're able to attach to people. ย
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You know, we learned so much through imitation, that if we're continually observing unhealthy patterns or behaviors, then through our role models, then we tend to repeat that, because that's what we learn. And that's, that's how we learn. ย
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So you can see that there's a lot and I mean, I'm just touching on the surface of it. ย
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There are lots of different things, very life experiences, and interactions and things we learn to believe about ourselves some things we learned to believe about relationships and things we learned to believe about the world. ย
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You know, systems is imprinting, there's all these things that come together. ย
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And it forms our belief system, and it gets downloaded. ย
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It's like a software program in our brain, right?
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And it's how our nervous system forms. ย
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Our brain is wired through this, through these foundational belief systems and whether or not we're safe. ย
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And you know, there's things that are there, when we talk about triggers. ย
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And so what happens is when something happens, that makes us feel not safe, then the body the nervous system kicks in and starts to try to get us to move to a point of safety. ย
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So hormones are released, adrenaline is released, all these things are happening, you know, anxiety, fear, sometimes you've got these sensations and emotions in your body, you have no idea why.
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It's because the unconscious mind is recognizing something that's not safe, and it's triggering this up within you. ย
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So this is what's happening within our minds when we come into relationship with people and with these attachment styles. ย
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And it's like influencing affecting how we attach to people. ย
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But the good news is that we can change this software, you know?
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Our foundational belief system may have been created by a toddler that we're now we're still running off.
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I sometimes say to my clients, it's like you've got this most amazing computer in the whole wide world, but it's got the simplest software program in it, it was written by a child.
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And by observing it and sitting with it, and allowing a sense of safety to come in to the body and allowing these parts, these inner children to feel safety and to battle let go and to process this emotion, this fear, we can start to come back to center and we can start to heal these wounds and we can and start to come into secure attachment in our life where we're able to let go and just be in flow and be in the present moment and not always be looking out for danger and looking out for things that are going to harm us and we can just live you know, from the present moment creating as we go be curious about the future and not trying to control it. ย
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And that is a beautiful place to be. ย
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Okay, I hope you enjoyed this first part of the five part series on Attachment styles. ย
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So next time, I'm going to talk about Secure attachment. ย
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So we'll talk about what the goal is, of what is a beautiful place to be in with in our relationships with people. ย
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Secure Attachment. ย
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I hope you enjoyed this episode of the Living Through Heart Podcast. ย
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To find out more about me and Living Through Heart, check out donnajoyusher.com and livingthroughheart.com
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There you'll find links to everything you need, including some free tools to help you and ways you can work with me on your own soul healing journey.