156. Dating with an anxious attachment style ft. Thais Gibson
Dec 29, 2023
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Thais Gibson, an author and speaker, joins the podcast to discuss dating with an anxious attachment style. They explore challenges such as insecurity, mistrust, and fear of abandonment. They emphasize the importance of vulnerability, healthy love, and boundary setting to challenge and heal attachment styles.
Anxiously attached individuals struggle with feeling secure, mistrust, and fear of abandonment.
Anxious attachment styles often prioritize others' needs over their own and struggle with setting boundaries.
To overcome anxiously attached tendencies, individuals should advocate for their own needs, practice self-soothing techniques, and challenge ingrained beliefs and stories about relationships.
Deep dives
Understanding Attachment Theory
Attachment theory is the work of John Bowlby, which explains how our childhood experiences of love and connection shape our adult relationships. Every person has an attachment style that influences their expectations and behaviors in relationships. The most common attachment style is secure, where individuals feel safe, worthy of love, and can form healthy relationships. Anxiously attached individuals, the second most common style, experienced inconsistent love in childhood and fear abandonment in relationships. They often engage in people-pleasing behaviors and struggle to prioritize their own needs. Anxiously attached individuals are frequently attracted to avoidant attachment styles, which perpetuates their patterns of self-abandonment and difficulty in expressing their needs. To move past anxiously attached tendencies, individuals can focus on advocating for their needs, practicing self-soothing techniques, maintaining a balanced life outside of relationships, and questioning their ingrained stories and beliefs.
The Impact of Anxious Attachment in Relationships
Anxious attachment styles can create challenges in relationships as individuals prioritize others' needs over their own, engage in people-pleasing, and struggle to communicate their boundaries effectively. In the early stages of relationships, anxious individuals may put on a facade, trying to win the person over and avoiding expressing their true selves and needs. As the relationship progresses, difficulties arise, often leading to power struggles and emotional turmoil. Anxiously attached individuals may experience intense emotional reactions, as their childhood wounds of self-abandonment are triggered. This can lead to a cycle of seeking validation, feeling hurt when needs are not met, and recreating familiar relationship dynamics that reinforce their attachment style. The hurt is magnified for anxiously attached individuals and hinders their healing process if they continue to prioritize others over themselves. Breaking this destructive cycle requires self-advocacy, self-soothing, and fostering a balanced relationship with oneself.
Overcoming Anxious Attachment Tendencies
Although attachment styles are conditioned early in life, individuals can work on changing their attachment style and developing a more secure mindset. Anxiously attached individuals can start by identifying their needs, such as certainty, presence, safety, reassurance, and transparency, and communicating these needs in healthy ways to their partners. It is essential for anxious individuals to practice self-soothing techniques and provide themselves with the love and care they seek from others. They should also ensure they maintain a balanced life, focusing on other areas like career, physical health, mental well-being, and relationships with friends and family. Creating a sense of fulfillment and independence outside of the romantic relationship can help anxious individuals feel more grounded. Moreover, challenging ingrained beliefs and stories related to relationships, questioning self-limiting beliefs, and nurturing self-love are crucial for reprogramming attachment patterns. With repetition and emotional reconditioning, anxiously attached individuals can overcome their tendencies and build healthier, more secure relationship dynamics.
Understanding Anxious Attachment Styles
Anxious attachment styles often engage in people-pleasing behaviors in the dating and honeymoon stage, but experience turbulence in the power struggle stage of relationships. They may feel unseen and unheard by their partners, leading to resentment and communication issues. In this stage, it is important for anxious attachment styles to be vulnerable with their partners, expressing their needs and fears. By dropping their mask and sharing their true selves without conditions, they create the opportunity to be loved more unconditionally and deepen their relationship.
Navigating the Power Struggle Stage
The power struggle stage is statistically the stage where most people break up in relationships. However, it is also an opportunity to build deep roots in a relationship. The key to navigating this stage is vulnerability and expressing needs. Anxious attachment styles can overcome fears and anxieties by communicating openly and honestly with their partners. By lowering their defenses and allowing themselves to be loved unconditionally, they create the potential for a stronger and more fulfilling relationship. This stage may involve bickering and arguments, but with proper communication and vulnerability, success can be achieved.
Dating with an anxious attachment style comes with a number of challenges: struggling to feel secure, requiring constant reassurance, mistrust, a fear of abandonment, feeling unworthy of love or difficulty setting boundaries. But your attachment style is not a life sentence, it is something you can challenge and heal by embracing vulnerability, healthy love, boundary setting and applying the love you crave from others to yourself. We are joined by the wonderful Thais Gibson, an author, speaker, leader in the personal development field and founder of The Personal Development School as we break down what it means to date and love as someone who is anxiously attached.
