Note: this transcript is not 100% accurate.
00:01
It’s extremely important who you pick as a partner. And the dangerous part is that anxious people usually love avoidant people and avoidant people usually love anxious people at the beginning. Both people fear rejection ultimately or abandonment ultimately, but they show it the symptoms are very different. What is the pairing that works the best? Would it be like a secure with a secure or a secure with an anxious?
00:34
Welcome to Uncover Your Eyes, a podcast where we uncover the struggles that we face every day. Today, we are welcoming back for a part two on attachment styles, Jess Phillips. She is a psychotherapist, an attachment coach, and the host of The Living Out Loud Podcast. Welcome back, Jess.
00:55
Thank you so much, Jess, for joining us on a part two, because I was talking too much about myself last time. But I do want to touch on like attachment styles. So that’s a big thing. I want to say there’s a few different types of attachment styles and they affect us and, you know, probably cause some generational trauma from some generational trauma. So can you go through them with us? Yeah, for sure, for sure. So.
01:21
Yeah, it touches on a lot of the stuff that we were talking about in part one is really this idea of what was formed between birth and 10 years old. So you’ll see attachment styles all over social media right now, all over TikTok. But it’s difficult too, because again, like your question around, you know, imposter syndrome or people pleasing, we really fundamentally want to understand where it comes from. So.
01:49
The study was first done by Mary Ainsworth and John Bowlby. So what they did was they conducted a study where they left children in a room and the children would watch the parents leave the room and they would study the reaction of the child watching their parents leave. Probably wouldn’t be the most like ethical study that they could do today. But what was formed was this idea of a specific child would be like,
02:18
maybe cry for two seconds and then, oh, they’re gone. And then they would continue to play with another friend or continue to play with the toys. Another child could be completely like inconsolable, know, hyperventilating. Where’s my mom? Where’s my mom? And so on and so forth. So what they came up with was basically four different umbrella attachment styles. the first is secure, which a lot of people do not come to work with me for. So.
02:47
More often than not, people will start to acknowledge or notice that there’s an issue with attachment once they get into romantic relationships. Some people can experience them in friendships. you, you know, I might hear from clients, for example, like when they were in high school, let’s say one of their friends was busy, they would experience this a large sense of like insecurity or abandonment or
03:16
fear that the person didn’t want to hang out with them anymore. for the sake of this episode, more often than not, you’ll start to notice your attachment style with your romantic partner. So let’s start with secure. So a securely attached person will go into a relationship with a healthy amount of vulnerability, a healthy sense of self, right? In part one, we talked about the fractured sense of self. So anybody with a fractured sense of self,
03:44
will often look to another to help them heal that fractured sense of self. And while that’s OK, right? Sometimes we do need people encouragement, validation, but it can’t be the only source. So a securely attached person will have a healthy sense of self. It’ll look like they grew up in a home where they would come home. And not that there’s any idea of perfection out there, but they would come home and they knew what they were going to get.
04:14
Mom and dad were cooking, they were eating a family dinner together, homework, bath. There was not a lot of fighting going on in the home. There was no alcoholism, no addiction, no mental health issues. So the temperament was just chill. Everybody was chill. The kids could be silly, self-expressive, and everything was flowing. So by the time these kids get older and they go to date, they have this inner knowing of
04:43
If I express how I feel to someone, hopefully it’s going to land and the person’s gonna like me too. But if they don’t, I’m gonna say, oh, okay, that’s too bad. And I’m gonna move on to the next. So that’s secure. And let’s just put that one off the table because- I’m assuming not many people fall into that category. They’ve done studies. I don’t know how easy it is to create these studies and you
05:13
test people from all over the world. But the numbers are, if I remember correctly, it’s around 30%. Okay. Yeah, which is not bad. Yeah, not bad. I mean, even myself, and maybe you can think of some people, but even some of my friends that I grew up with, like, pretty standard, they went off, they might they married their high school sweethearts, they kind of knew what they wanted to do for a living. There was really no big bumps in the road.
05:38
And when I would go to their house, like it felt like a family home, like we were all talking and laughing together and it just, was a different experience. So that’s secure. And then we have anxious, avoidant, and then there’s different names for it, disorganized, preoccupied. So disorganized would be a mix of both anxious and avoidant. So let’s start with anxious. So somebody who’s anxiously attached will often have grown up with
06:08
hot and cold behavior. So for example, mom one day can be like I was mentioning in the first episode, very happy, go lucky. And then the next day drunk as a skunk, let’s say. And then the next day making your lunch and all over you and very happy, right? So now the child is saying like, uh-oh, wait a minute. I don’t know what is steady. I don’t know what’s coming.
06:34
So there can be, you know, like a highly critical parent can cause it just not feeling settled inside. So if a child grows up enough with that or this idea of the fractured sense of self, low self-esteem, what can happen? Because I don’t love it today because people are using, oh, I just have anxious attachment. And it’s like, no, you can lean because there’s some people.
07:04
So an avoidant, for example, if they experience a heightened level of emotion, they shut down. They go into their cave. They say, oh my God, this is too much for me. Oh my God, this reminds me of when my mom used to freak out or overpower me. And as a kid, I went under the stairs and I hid until it was over. So in an avoidant home, they’ve learned like, boys don’t cry.
07:30
You know, you shouldn’t behave like this. You shouldn’t have this heightened sense of emotion. So they learn to stuff it. Where anxious people, they feel so triggered inside that their view is come here so I can reconnect and feel better. And the avoidant is saying, please go away so I can feel better before I reconnect. Interesting. And the dangerous part is that
07:57
Anxious people usually love avoidant people and avoidant people usually love anxious people at the beginning. So that’s where we get into a bit of this dance. So you hear a lot of these like hot topics on relationships and things like that. an avoidant person and it’s tricky because it’s the flip side of the same coin. Both people fear rejection ultimately or abandonment ultimately, but they show it the symptoms are very different.
08:25
And then when we go into the fourth category, disorganized is a push and pull between the two. And I’ve struggled with this before, especially in my twenties, early thirties, come here, go away, come here, go away, come here, but don’t get too close. Oh, you’re too close. I’m going to run and get away because I wasn’t, I was used to having my needs met, but not emotional needs met. So if I felt like I knew somebody was going to stay over there, I felt safe to warm up.
08:54
But if somebody was like, I’m wearing my heart on my sleeve and I’m ready to give you the world, I’m like, uh-uh, I don’t know what that looks like. I’ve never experienced that in my home. So I would become the runner. It’s very interesting work. And again, it’s not this label that you can just slap on yourself or say, I’m anxiously attached because also too what’s happening is that
09:19
people don’t realize it’s extremely important. Say you do lean a little bit more anxious. It’s extremely important who you pick as a partner. Because if you pick somebody who’s wildly avoidant and not interested in doing the work or is narcissistic or uncommunicative, you’re going to stay anxious. And then you’re going to say, oh my God, it’s me. It’s all my fault. I just struggle with anxious attachment. It’s like, honey, you’re in the wrong relationship for
09:48
So the pairing of two people, and it’s not to say that an anxious person can’t be with an avoidant person, two people can do great work as long as they’re both doing the individual work. Yes, I totally get that, you know, people can be together, doesn’t matter which style of attachment, but in your experience, what is the pairing that works the best? Would it be like a secure with a secure or a secure with an anxious because they can kind of balance each other out? Like what would be the ideal pairing?
10:19
having one secure partner is usually always going to be ideal. Because if you have somebody who is really insecure, let’s say has to work through a lot of stuff. And then, you know, I’ll take myself for example, let’s say like in my late 20s, I was all over the place. I was like, you couldn’t console me for the even if you tried, right? And then
10:45
I had a very egoic partner at the time and our energies just did not work with each other at all. And then I remember getting into a healthier partnership and the person was unfazed by my mood. Like they weren’t reactive at all. And it was the most interesting thing because I was like, it automatically calmed me down because you weren’t playing. And I really wanted you to come in the ring with me.
11:14
I was like setting up traps. I was to attack you. I was to attack. I was PMSing. I was asking if I looked good in this outfit when I already knew the answer to it. There was booby traps all over the place. And then I remember when I started to date people who weren’t, they just weren’t affected by that. I was like, my strategy stopped working. So it is very important. I wouldn’t say it has to be, I mean,
11:40
I think rarely do you find an anxious and another anxious person maybe at the beginning together, but those energies won’t really, the reason that an avoidant won’t work either. It will, it can, it can, but again, if both people are aware of their own character defects. So why that pairing is so attracted to each other is because if somebody is struggling with
12:09
emotional avoidance. When they meet a more anxious person, at the beginning, anxious people predominantly present as like very warm and loving and caretaking and very chill, very go with the flow. But they’re anything but go with the flow. just, they’re go with the flow if you’re doing what I want.
12:34
But the moment that avoidance not doing what they want, they’re not very go with the flow. So at the beginning, when both people are interviewing very well, somebody who leans more avoidant will be very attracted to how emotionally expressive the anxious person is. And they’re very caretaking and they’re like, oh, you don’t talk much? That’s okay. I’ll open you up. I’ll get you to talk. I’ll make it safe and cozy and everything. I’m gonna give and give and give and give and give until…
13:04
you’re ready to start giving back to me. But if that person, if that taker never becomes a giver, then it’s war in the relationship. So we have to be very careful of the expectations. And like you said in episode one, the people pleasing, are we masking when we’re dating? Are we hiding parts of ourselves? It took me a long time to be able to say, hey, just so you know, I can lean pretty anxious. And when I am anxious, it looks like this.
13:33
What are we gonna do if that happens? Right, before I would hide all of it and I would play Mrs. Cool Girl, that nothing bothered me and then I had a nuclear weapon on my shoulder about three months later and the person was shocked and they didn’t know what to do with me.
13:50
I’d like to have that camera going around you just to watch your life. Let’s just blame our parents again. Generational trauma. So the avoidant person, that actually scares me a little bit because I want to say I’ve had friends or friendships that were like that. And I’ve kind of had to cut them off because I can’t handle that personality. How do you deal with an avoidant personality?
14:20
I want to assume there’s generational trauma behind that where they just can’t deal with the situations. They just block it out. So, you know, a child, but how do you get them to talk? Like, that, okay, we got to go for therapy or, you know, we got to fix things because they avoid things and it’s easy for them. And it’s almost like, I feel if they broke up with us, like as a friend or as a partner, they almost don’t care. Like they’re avoiding. So you’re the ones that choice to avoid this situation. So most people scare me.
14:49
So how do we deal with that in terms of any relationship or friendship? Yeah, yeah, yeah, it is. It’s a terrible feeling. It’s a very confusing feeling. The first place that I would look is really, you know, friend of mine always says the light is at the beginning of the tunnel, not the end. And it’s made me go back and reflect on my relationship. So I always encourage people to reflect on what they noticed.
15:19
at the beginning because if you take a people pleaser or a more anxious leaning person who gets their sense of self from being others focused, we’re gonna try really hard. So I work with a lot of people who have over given in terms of, I had one client over give with another girlfriend in terms of like giving her furniture and jewelry and all of this stuff. And then when the relationship severed,
15:48
It was this awful feeling of how come I just gave this person so much and now this person is okay with never talking to me again? Where it’s really not that the person is okay with never talking to you again. They’re hurting on the other end, but they have no idea how to articulate that.
16:07
They do not have the skills and to them hiding seems way safer than facing what you have to say. And it is very sad and it is very hurtful, especially when it’s in a romantic relationship. It has enough power to rip a person’s heart out because that makes them feel like, you not ever love me? Was none of this real? So we have to be very careful too with…
16:36
How much are we? And more importantly, what are our expectations of this other person? Because a lot of people feel like if I just support this person enough, if I do enough for this person, then they’re going to change. They’re going to turn around. that’s what’s so dangerous in relationships. A good friend of mine was in a relationship for four years, and for four years he was waiting for his partner to change.
17:03
So that means that we’re actually not fully in love with the person right in front of us. We’re in love with the fantasy. And the reality and the fantasy, those are often two completely different worlds. So we have to make sure that we’re not over here in fantasy land when the person is actually continuously showing us who they are. Yeah. I remember when I, you know, my best friend,
17:31
had said to me when I was gonna get married, she was like, only marry somebody who, whatever their bad qualities are, multiply it by 10. And if you’re okay living with that, that’s how it’s gonna become. Otherwise you’re not marrying that person. And I still remember that to this day that, yeah, like, mean, because it’s all not, you know, roses, you know, years later. And like you said, you know, that light is at the beginning of the tunnel. And then as you get older and tireder and things kind of fizzle off, right?
17:59
I want to talk a little bit about rejection sensitivity. You know, there’s a lot of chatter around that. Can you speak to that and how it affects relationships? Yeah, for sure. So yeah, rejection sensitivity is quite the buzzword right now. So they’ve done a lot of studies where they’re noticing higher rates of rejection sensitivity with individuals diagnosed with ADHD.
18:21
So there’s a large correlation between this idea of limerence, let’s say, for example. So this over consumption, over obsession of a person in your life who might not even be a partner. They could just be this object of desire and this idea of obsession and what we create in our minds. So that’s really where the kind of buzzword of rejection sensitivity is coming from. But I think a lot of people vary on how
18:51
They struggle with rejection. And of course, a more anxious leaning person is going to not that they’re going to struggle with rejection more, but they’re going to look like they’re struggling with it more. Because an avoidant person is rarely going to tell you that really hurt my feelings. That really they’re going to run and hide and they’re going to deal with it themselves. They might be in a whole lot of pain, but they’re not an anxious.
19:19
person is going to call 30 girlfriends be like, what do think? What do you think? What do you think? What do you think? What do you think of this? You know, so it, it, and then we, we feed the machine again. We really, really feed it, but rejection sensitivity is brutal. have dealt with rejection sensitivity my entire life. It’s like the big bad monster in the closet. It can be really, and it’s difficult because the logical mind can say, you know, I have experienced rejection sensitivity even when I wasn’t rejected.
19:50
Even when I’ve rejected the other person, even because the story that’s created in my mind after it doesn’t match what actually happened. And I think it’s very closely tied to these old wounds, right? Brene Brown says this, she says, if you walk around the world looking for evidence that you don’t belong, be careful because you’re gonna find it.
20:14
Right? And it’s the same thing with rejection sensitivity. I have a very large rejection wound as a result of how I was raised. So I could have 99 people that love me and I will hyper fixate on the hundred. That’s like, eh, I’m not so sure about you and I’ll make it my mission. I’m like, come here. You got a bond. I can’t handle this. There’s the people pleasing. Exactly. Exactly. So it’s, it’s this, this, this exaggerated feeling.
20:44
of reality, of what happened, of, and again, how important you’re making this other person at the time. Because there has to be a power differential there. Because two equal people, if you’re feeling a sense of equanimity with others, you can’t be that rejected that badly. If you’ve placed somebody on a pedestal, then of course, if they reject you, it’s like, oh my.
21:11
God, right? So we also have to ask ourselves, are we making this person more important than us in our heads, bigger than who they really are, giving them a stronger sense of importance going into that fantasy land, because then the ego is really gonna say like, see, you’re not good enough. Does everybody not have a sense of rejection sensitivity? Like everybody should feel bad if they feel like they’re rejected.
21:38
is just some are hyper sensitive to it and some may not be as sensitive to it, correct? I don’t know if she listens to any of these, but I always talk about my best friend. My best friend grew up in a decently secure household and I watched her start to put a lot of effort into her dating probably around like 23, 24. Like she was dating to marry. She wanted to marry, she wanted to have kids and she would go on these dates. She was scheduling like three a day. She was doing like
22:07
Coffee, breakfast, mini pot, and I was like, good for you girl. And we would talk after and I would ask her and I would be like, so did you hear from him? She’s like, no. And I’m like, are you okay? She’s like, yeah, his loss. And she just move on to the next one. I was just like, she does not have the same fractured sense of self as I had before. I have had to work so hard for what came to her. She knew her worth.
22:36
She knew her values. She knew what she was looking for. She didn’t entertain stuff that wasn’t aligned with her. I think it can vary. I think age and wisdom and resilience and all of this for sure adds to that. mean, like if you go onto YouTube right now, there’s all these people in their 60s and 70s making videos of like what I wish I would have done when I was 20 and 30. And it’s like, well, I appreciate your video, but life doesn’t work that way. Otherwise we would all be doing it, right?
23:04
Hindsight’s always 20-20. Wisdom only comes at an older age, unfortunately. But no, I’ve seen it range from, and maybe some people are faking it, maybe it’s saying that they don’t bother them, but rejection sensitivity specifically, no, I don’t think that everybody struggles with that. Interesting. Yeah.
23:28
Thank you so much, Jess. I mean, and thanks for doing this part two, cause I know, you know, we had a lot to talk about, a lot to unpack. three is everybody needs to tune into your podcast, Living Out Loud. So you can catch Jess more episodes, more about her great talks on everything. So thank you so much, Jess. And we’re going to link everything in the show notes and thank you for your time today. Super fun. My pleasure.
23:57
Thank you listeners and viewers for tuning in. If you want to catch more episodes of Uncover Your Eyes, make sure to follow or subscribe on your favorite podcast platform and on YouTube. To learn more about me, follow me on Instagram @Dr.MeenalAgarwal Until next time, keep those eyes uncovered!
24:22
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