Send Adult Attachment with airSlate SignNow

Save adult attachment

hi everyone my name is dr. Jennie rosier with the relationships love happiness project and today we are going to talk about understanding adult attachment if you would like to follow along you can go to our Facebook page which is facebook.com slash relationships love happiness and you can go to the pinned post that's at the top of the page and there is a link to a free e-guide and if you download the e-guide you can follow along its most of what I'm going to be talking about today so it can be really helpful so go ahead and go and download the eager-eyed so that you can follow along with what we're talking about today all right so we are going to start with discussing what attachment theory is so attachment theory is this idea that was created by dr. John Bowlby a British psychologist in the 1940s and he wanted to understand the bond between mothers and their children and so he started studying when mothers were separated from their children and the may be positive or negative things that the children experienced and he came up with this idea that parent that children use their parents their primary caregivers to down regulate their own distress and so they use the bond that they create with their parents to calm down themselves and so what's interesting is that an attachment bond is created between a parent and a child based on a long period of pattern of behaviors so every single time a child is in distress or an infant you a very small infant from birth is in distress every they cry the parent should respond to that child in a caring sensitive quick manner and during these interactions babies start to develop these mental frameworks in their brains about how they can trust their parents to help them their primary caregiver whether it's the father or the mother or the grandmother or the babysitter whoever's with them the most they develop this bond and sometimes the bonds are extremely secure sometimes the parent is consistently sensitive other times parents are maybe flip-flop back and forth sometimes they're consistent sometimes they're not and this can cause some attachment issues in the baby by the time a child is about 18 months old there they have a pretty secure or pretty solid attachment style foundation and interestingly this foundation helps them either continue to have a secure attachment to other human beings for the rest of their life or it could if it is an insecure foundation it could cause them to have problems creating friendships creating romantic relationships family relationships down the road attachment theory is known as a cradle to the grave theory because it affects you from birth until death the attachment bonds that you build with your primary caregivers in the first 18 months to 3 years of life go on to impact how you are able to form friendships how you are able to form romantic relationships and not just form them but keep them it also has a pax how you're able to end those relationships so it's not always just about forming and keeping relationships but if you're able to end them if you're able to know when you should stop being friends with that person or when you should stop being in a relationship with that person interestingly attachment goes with you throughout life so you create this foundation so as a parent you create this foundational attachment style with your baby when they're really really young and then that attachment style goes with that child forever there are things it's not set in stone though so it's not like concrete it's not 100% set in stone hijack but it is definitely a foundation that is hard to mess to mess up so if you create a secure attachment that will help your child deal with life stressors later create friendships create romantic relationships as an adult but there are things that can happen throughout a person's life that can change their attachment style so any kind of traumatic life experience could change your attachment style for the worse potentially so the divorce of parents the death of a parent the death of someone very close to them moving around a lot changing schools a lot any kind of like a house fire any kind of traumatic life experience could make a child who had a very secure attachment in toddlerhood and infancy haven't turned into having an insecure attachment later likewise it could go the other way so children could be raised with a and have a really insecure attachment style when they're really young and through a significant amount of emotion coaching and letting adults letting that child know that they are cared for that they are they're always there for them that they are supported they can change their insecure attachment to a secure attachment so if you go to the second page of the e guide you can see this little like trajectory that I've created so this is how attachment theory happens or how attachment happens so babies experience distress of some kind and cry babies experience distress of all kinds whether it's the typical things like hungry you need a change change diaper or tired right those are things we usually go to but it could also be things like something in their environment scared them or they're just lonely it's a lot of times babies are just lonely they just want to be held and so they experience distress and they cry based on the interactions that the parent has or the primary caregiver has with that child and attachment style is developed they're carried throughout life with the child impacting how they develop relationships with other human beings adults when you become an adult you then use your attachment style to create adult romantic relationships and typically your attachment figure then becomes your other your romantic partner and so when you were a baby or even a child of any age your attachment figure was your parent was your mom or your dad or your grandma or your babysitter or whoever you were with the majority of the time but when you become an adult and you get into a serious relationship even as a high ten even as a young adult and you get into any kind of serious relationship you start to shift from have from using your parents as a secure base as using your parents as an attachment figure to using your romantic partner as your attachment figure and so you start to get all of your attachment security or you don't get your attachment security from this adult attachment figure from your adult romantic partner and so then your attachment bond with the adult partner that you have helps you down regulate stress or hinders you from down regulating your own stress so you've had a stressed-out day a lot is going on you feel like maybe you can't handle and you use the relationship that you have with your partner you use the bond that you have with your partner to help you down regulate that stress to help you calm down to help you get through it if you have a secure relationship right if you have a secure attachment style to that partner people who have insecure attachments tend to have more of a difficult time using their attachment using their adult romantic partner as an attachment figure adult attachment is interestingly measured by the typical amount of anxiety that you feel while in a romantic relationship and this is on a continuum so some people have really low to minimal at best anxiety when in relationships and other people have extremely high anxiety when in relationships and most of us fall somewhere in the middle though most of us are not on one of the extreme ends of the continuum and so that's one dimension that we measure adult attachment on the other one is amount of avoidance that you feel in a romantic relationship and again that's on a continuum so some people are extremely dependent and they don't want to avoid all they want to connect to other people to an extreme right they want to be with them 24/7 all the time and then there's other people that really are independent and don't feel like they you know want to be with someone very often they avoid a lot and this is avoiding like physical proximity avoiding emotions of your own and of your partner's just avoidance in general avoidance of intimacy so most of us again fall somewhere along the middle of the continuum not on the extreme ends but this is how we measure adult attachment and so I actually have a nice little graph if you look on page three of the e guide which is available to you for free on the pinned post at the top of the Facebook page you can see that the avoidance and the anxiety create this quadrant system so individuals who have extremely low anxiety and extremely low avoidance so they want to be around their partners a lot and they have really low anxiety about being in relationships those are the people that tend to be securely attached so when we talk about adult attachment we tend to categorize people into these four groups childhood attachment we tend to categorize children into three or four groups depending on what researcher you're following but with adult attachment and there are variations but for the most part there are these four groups so the first one is secure securely attached people tend to have low anxiety about relationships they don't tend to fear that they are going to be abandoned by their partner they rarely question if their partner loves them they feel safe with their partner they feel like they are comfortable with intimacy and independence so there's a nice balance between being close to another person but also still maintaining this sense of Independence in your life they also tend to not worry that their partners are going to accept them so they're a little more comfortable in their own skin they don't need to they don't feel like they have to filter very much they can just be themselves and they don't worry that other people are going to accept them they also tend to be highly sociable people so a lot of people who are securely attached like being in groups like going on group dates like being out and about and talking to people because they feel pretty secure about themselves about their their ability to form relationships with other people and other people's ability to formulation ships with them they tend to be open when expressing emotions in romantic relationships they don't they're not brick walls some of the other attachment style tend to put brick walls up when they talk about their emotions they also tend to feel okay about the world in ways what I mean by that is they tend to believe that other people are good intentioned so securely attached people are not usually worried that other people are have or have malicious intentions with them they tend to believe that they're good people and other people are good people they view themselves positively and they view other people positively now there's three other attachment styles that are all considered insecure three different insecure attachment styles and one of them is called anxious preoccupied and here an anxious preoccupied attachment style person would have high anxiety so a lot of anxiety very worried about what the other partner thinks of them very worried about the security of their relationship worried about the future of their relationship but they have low avoidance so they don't put up brick walls they tend to disclose their emotions frequently and sometimes maybe excessively people who people who have an anxious attachment style they sometimes in the media they're referred to like as the stage five clinger the person who is always wanting to move a relationship forward very quickly and so this is the person who you know most of us are waiting in the grocery line of self-disclosure in a romantic relationship and we're going in a normal pace the anxious preoccupied individual gets in the express lane they want to disclose things about themselves quickly because they know that self disclosure increases intimacy so sometimes they might want to push that because they want that intimacy so bad and they want it to be done very quickly so they will push the intimacy very quickly and the best way that they know how is to self-disclose and so sometimes people who are anxious preoccupied might self disclose a significant amount of information in a very short amount of time they also might profess their love for someone me too early and by too early I mean most people would say we you can't you shouldn't really tell someone you love them in the first two or three weeks of knowing them but an anxious preoccupied person again they're in expressly they really want to move the relationship forward so that they can because they hope that if they can move things forward and they can get a commitment and they can have a solid relationship they believe that their anxiety will go down and so and this is again these are extreme examples some many of us don't fall into the anxious preoccupied category but we have anxious preoccupied tendencies right and I'll talk about tendencies again in a little bit anxious preoccupied people tend to have a strong desire for approval from others they really want other people to like them whether it's friends or family or romantic partners but they might sacrifice things to get people to like them because they really like sacrifice things about themselves or act in a way that maybe is uncharacteristic of themselves in order to elicit that liking from others sometimes they can become obsessive that stage-five clinger idea they can become obsessive in relationships and want to be with someone all the time and they could come off as clingy when really what they're doing is just expressing that they really like that person and the best way that they know to do that is to move things fast is to get in the express lane they want intimacy in relationships they are they have low avoidance so they are not concerned about being too intimate too fast or anything but sometimes they can become too dependent on other people and by dependent I mean in every way that you can imagine so emotionally too dependent on another person or physically too dependent financially to depend yeah all of those all of those things but at the same time they're moving things forward their self disclosing they're being open with their emotions but at the exact same time they are terrified that you are going to leave them they are scared that their partner is judging them they are scared that their partner is not in love with them the same way that they are in love with their partner they question they might question their partners commitment question their partners loyalty question their partners love and to someone who is not anxious preoccupied so if you are dating someone who isn't a who is anxious preoccupied and they are consistently questioning you it can be very off-putting you know like why don't they trust me why don't they believe that I love them why don't they believe that I'm going to be there forever or that I plan to be with them forever right and it can be very difficult to be in a relationship with someone who is questioning you a lot I'm a lot of anxious preoccupied feelings manifest in jealousy I think what's important to note if you are dating someone or in a relationship with someone who is anxious preoccupied I think it's important to note that it likely has little to do with you and it likely has everything to do with the partner it likely has very little to do with something that you have done you probably have done nothing to make the person believe that you're less committed than you are or you love them any less than they love you it is it is in their mental representations of what a relationship partner is and so they they tend to have this desire to seek assurance and sometimes this can get tiring and so I would say that if you are with someone who is anxious preoccupied one of the best things that you can do is assure them as much as possible assure them repeatedly in unique in different ways not just the same exactly you know I love you I love you you know I love you like that's not not enough right you need to try to find ways to assure them over and over again verbally non-verbally through your actions through your behaviors through your time that you are in it to win it because at the core of what it's like to be anxious preoccupied is where I said secure individuals have positive views of themselves and of other people anxious preoccupied people have positive views of other people but they have low opinions of themselves and so this is why they have this anxiety because they feel like they're not good enough for their partner even if they're even if they probably are like is onlookers see like wow you're kind of better than your partner you know your partner doesn't deserve you it's internal it's in their mental frameworks in their brain and it makes it very difficult for them to see that and so they view themselves negatively as maybe not adequate enough romantic partners and they view their partners as much much better partners and so this this is where the fear comes in of their partners leaving them so speaking of fear the third the second insecure attachment style and the third attachment stop it's called a fearful attachment style individuals with a fearful attachment tend to have high anxiety so similar to an anxious preoccupied person who has high anxiety a fearful attachment also has high anxiety but they have high avoidance so these people have high anxiety high avoidance they're just like the last example they are worried and concerned about their relationships future about their partners commitment about their partners love for them but they are also not going to really talk to you about it because they're avoiding so they engage in high amounts of avoidance they put up brick walls they don't like to disclose their emotions and so they're kind of dealing with these their anxiety internally and they're rarely going to express it to you so I mean I don't know about you but if I'm with a romantic partner it's gonna be very difficult for me to be with someone who's fearful who has a fearful attachment because they're not expressing their emotions so if you are with someone who has a fearful attachment what you can do is work really hard at creating a safe space work really hard at reassuring your partner that what is said between the two of us is between the two of us and you can trust me and it's gonna take the same amount of reassuring as it does with the anxious preoccupied attachment style but the problem is that you might not ever know that they're experiencing anxiety if they never tell you and so fearful attachment can be very tricky to figure out because they could be experiencing lots of anxiety and you you just wouldn't know they tend to want close relationships but they have really hard time trusting other people they have a hard time trusting people they view themselves negatively and they view other people negatively so they're not really good relationship partners and other people aren't really good relationship partners so you know kind of what's the point I really want to be in a relationship but I'll never find anyone that's good enough they tend to desire intimacy but they have a strong fear of sharing their emotions so they like logically know that sharing emotions is part of being intimate it and you can't really build a relationship without sharing emotions but the fear might overcome them at times to where they are they just can't do it where is what the ex is preoccupied person they want that intimacy and they are totally fine with sharing emotions right they're willing to tell you everything and anything about their relationship about themselves and about their opinions of your relationship they you know have like emotional word vomit whereas a fearful attachment wants to but they're gonna put up a brick wall and so they tend to emotionally retreat fail to express their opinion their feelings at all in relationships and so again these can be this can be a difficult person to date if you are someone who has a fearful attachment then you need to start realizing I mean the only way the only advice that I can give here is that you need to start realizing that the world is good and that other people are genuinely good intentioned and that is it's a part of the human experience to be in a romantic relationship and to share things about yourself with other people and then it feels better when you do and so I think there's there's a lot of self work that has to go on with the person who has a fearful attachment the last attachment style is dismissive avoidant and dismissive avoidant people they tend to have low anxiety but high avoidance so they're gonna put up the brick wall and they're not really worried about anyone caring about them putting up the brick wall so they don't fear that their partner's don't love them they don't feel that their partners are gonna abandon them they don't fear that their partners are going to cheat on them they're not worried about those things they're not anxious in their relationship but they also have extremely high avoidance dismissive avoidant people are typically single they are people that sometimes they crave independence so much and they claim that they don't need a partner to be happy we all friends who you've heard say this right you know I don't need a man to be happy or I don't need to date someone to be to feel fulfilled and I don't need to get married that's not part of my you know life trajectory I don't need that to feel whole and one of the reasons for that is because they have a positive self-image of themselves I'm really great I'm really wonderful and a negative view of everyone else no one will ever live up to my standards there's never going to be anyone that's good enough for me I'm never gonna find anyone that I feel like I can connect with and so they put up the brick wall they tend to retreat socially they don't really want to be part of the social scene and a lot of times when they're in relationships if they ever get in one they avoid intimacy so they might end up having a lot of superficial relationships and not a lot of very intimate relationships all right so those are the four attachment styles we know that adult attachment is important it has a lot of benefits we know that our adult romantic partners become our attachment figures and they allow us to down regulate our own stress or they enable us to down regulate our own stress we know that attachment is formed in infancy and that we carry this style with us forever so okay so what what do you do what it what do you do if you are dating someone or you're married to someone and you feel like your attachment doesn't match up you know what are some things you can do well attachment impacts a lot of different things in your relationship one of the main things that it impacts is your communication so like I said earlier an anxious preoccupied person is going to communicate more jealousy than someone who has another insecure attachment but there is good news the good news is that as long as one person in the relationship is securely attached has a secure a secure attachment style that relationship can be successful and so a secure person with a secure person successful a secure person with an avoidant dismissive person successful secure and anxious preoccupied successful secure and fearful successful now is it gonna be a little more work for the secure person yeah they're gonna have to do some work but sometimes relationships are worth it the extra work I would say that when you have two avoidant people so too dismissive people it can be kind of difficult right I mean I don't know how and I'm not really sure how those relationships would work out but those could be difficult um anxious preoccupied and anxious preoccupied again that could be difficult but it could work could work some things out but research has actually shown that the relationship that is the worst one to be in is anxious preoccupied and avoidant and so those two attachment Styles do not work well together and relationships are rarely successful when those are the attachment styles of the couple so where do you fall on this continuum interestingly most people don't fall like in one block and their dot is like all the way over here and they're 100% dismissive avoidant actually what happens is most people they're their dot of the of their attachment style is in one of the quadrants but closer to one of the other lines so for instance let's say that you are securely attached but your dot is right here you are securely attached with maybe some dismissive tendencies okay so you're not all the way over here you're securely attached with some dismissive tendencies or you're over here and you're securely attached with some anxious preoccupied tendencies the majority of the population is securely attached but we all have insecure tendencies and those tendencies can whose backwards sorry this tendencies can can make it so that with different relationship partners or in different situations you have some insecure tendencies you can get the guide on you can get the guide on our Facebook page it is in the pinned post the pinned post on Facebook you can download the guide for free so you can see it not backwards but yeah so most of us have yeah good most of us have a secure attachment but we have some tendencies of insecurity and that's okay that's expected there are some things that you can do about it and I will refer you to this awesome book this book right here I know it's probably it's backwards but I'll read you the title it's called attached the new science of adult attachment and how it can help you find and keep love it's by a mirror levine le vie I and II and Rachel Heller this is an amazing book about attachment and if you want to review what we talked about today you can watch the video again tomorrow there will be a blog post up on relationships love happiness calm that summarizes a lot of what we talked about and I am going to include a link to the adult attachment style survey where you can answer a series of questions about romantic relationships and you can find out where your dot is on that quadrant it'll show you which is pretty cool I'll actually include it on our Facebook page afterwards so that is a very basic overview of adult attachment hi