So many of you keep asking me for a video on attachment trauma or how to work with attachment trauma, and I. I actually have a video. I did a YA video on that about a year ago, but it's tricky to find because it was done in this Inner Child the Doubt series that I did back then. So I'm gonna just sort of simply replay the video here because thinking about attachment trauma and working on it is very, very helpful because.
Our families really model sort of a very specifically our parents. If you grew up in childhood trauma, kind of a, a really kind of horrific blueprint about what intimacy and secure attachment is. And it's very powerful to really take a deep look at it and to really think about how we have our own attachment style and how we can actually do some work around that.
So all of that is gonna be explained in the following video. Which I'll play in just a second, but before, if you are a therapist or a life coach or anybody working in the healing arts or as or a holistic practitioner coming up on March, Saturday, March 5th, 2022, I'm offering a childhood trauma training.
It's a four hour training that goes through all my specific tools. On how to work beyond just being trauma informed and how to help clients take a deeper dive into their family system and become more comfortable talking about it using these very specific tools. I would love to see you there, and you can just click on the white kind of bubble up here to get more information on registration.
So without further ado, here is how to work on attachment trauma. And at the end, I've added some journal prompts that you can get into at the, at the end of the video that I'll explain. The adult in her child work that I do is designed to help the abuse survivor connect and fix the attachment wound that they have in a good enough way.
We've all heard the annoying phrase, you gotta love yourself first man. And by now it's a vague cliche statement that people make, whether in recovery, culture or whatever. And it's, it's kind of annoying. And what is annoying about is that no one explains how that's done. It's just more of a command to go do that.
I'll do my best. And I hope that the takeaway from this video is to get you guys to have a game plan about some concrete steps about moving towards self-love. It's not just like. Poof. You got a haircut and you now you're like, sort of like you have some self-love going on. It's a process. As a childhood trauma therapist, I'd say that 99% of us, essentially all of us, is that we try to fix our childhood wounds through our romantic partner.
Whether that's trying to get somebody who was really shut down to awaken or to try to get somebody to see us in a certain way. I really feel like that's what these inner children are sort of doing, and there's no adult present to stop that process. This is why things get really stuck and really mucky in our relationships.
We wanna partner, but we're actually sort of fighting with our parents and fighting through our childhood stuff through that partner. So let's dive in. There are four major attachment styles. And it's helpful to figure out what is primarily your major romantic attachment style before we can figure out like, how does that apply to our inner child?
So usually, um, the four attachment styles are explained on an XY axis with the two variables on variables on that axis being. Avoidance and anxiety. There are other really cool ways to explain attachment, like sort of trust and low self-esteem, but I really like these two because they are sort of adult and inner child centric.
So here is a super overly simplified rundown of the four attachment styles. So outta the four styles. The first is secure attachment, and it's obviously sort of the ideal goal for us to be moving towards two in a good enough way. The securely attached person means that there is low anxiety and low avoidance.
It doesn't mean that everything in the relationship is perfect for them, but the secure person or the secure couple has the ease and the skills and the personal safety. To fix and repair, conflict and roll with stuff that comes up in every relationship, so that is secure. The next is something called anxious preoccupied.
It is low avoidance and high anxiety. Anxious, preoccupied, people want the relationship, but they're often acting out in the relationship, feeling like they will lose the partner at any given time. This style is known to be needy. Their neediness comes from needing to prove their worth and prevent the loss of the partner, or they need constant confirmation from that partner.
That they're gonna stay. And even when they get that reassurance, it doesn't last. Due to the childhood trauma belief system, they make themselves uncomfortable by being hypervigilant about how things are going in the relationship. And in a relationship they can really idolize their partner and diminish themselves.
So that is anxious, preoccupied. Next is the attachment style of dismissive avoidant. Is they have low anxiety and they are okay with themselves, but they have high avoidance. These folks are fine being alone and they can, you know, easily throw relationships away. Dismissive, avoidant people aren't really attached enough and they can move between relationships with ease because of their fiercely independence, and they tend to not value relationships so much.
They can be super casual about connecting. They can be aloof. They can be indifferent, and they can be shut down. And in a relationship they often behave like they have one foot out the door, whether that's known to the, to their partner or not. So next up is fearful. Avoidant. Fearful avoidant is high anxiety, high avoidance.
They wanna be in a relationship, but they're highly comfortable being in one, and they tend to act out from a place of criticism, followed by fearing abandonment. There is this vibe of like, I love you, I hate you, and that in this attachment style creates a lot of chaos and a lot of turbulence. They may not really believe in trust or love, but they can't stand being alone.
You can see that as kind of like a huge conflict and in a relationship they can be very hot or cold, which creates some chaos. So in an overly simplified view, guys, I tend to look at attachment as combinations of people who are runners and who are chasers, anxious, preoccupied people chase their partner.
There's that neediness, dismissive, avoidant people. They run from intimacy because they're independent and they, they're pretty much not experiencing the full range of emotions, so they're out of there. And the Fearful avoidant does a combination of both running and then chasing, which creates that sort of chaos.
Two side notes here. These styles can be known as different names, such as fearful avoidance is also known as disorganized attachment. It might get confusing if you sort of jump in and try to, well, I would recommend this to do some research on your own and read more up about it. I'm giving a very overly simplified version of this stuff, but just know they have different names.
Um, so that can be a little bit of a bump in the road. The second side note is that people can be paired with the same attachment style or your opposite. For example, I find trauma survivors. They can be often paired with a runner and a chaser, but that's no, there's no hard and fast rule to that stuff.
I've had couples who were both sort of like anxious, preoccupied, and that's kind of a mess because they're both, um, they're both constantly questioning how the other one's doing. Hopefully that makes sense. So there's lots of videos and literature that you guys can dive into to help you make more sense of your romantic style and maybe your partners and to look for your personal patterns of relationships.
But in this video, the takeaway is I want you to be thinking about like, what is the quality of your attachment with yourself? How do you treat yourself and how do you feel about yourself? And I'm trying to get people to look. Inward and connect with themselves as opposed to trying to sort of get their needs met from such external sources or not have it all be, that is what I'm trying to say.
Let's come back to the axis of that infographic about avoidance and anxiety. Remember those two variables? This is why I like it because these two variables, they're adult and inner child centric. In my mind, avoidance is a, is a behavior. Which is something that the adult part of us actually has control over.
Meaning if we get our adult in shape, our adult has the capacity to have self-control over how much we avoid ourselves, how much we avoid our own issues and our own emotions, as opposed to just like sort of acting out unconsciously what that looks like when we, when if we did have control, it means we wouldn't act out in a relationship.
We would spend more, turn more time learning to control our emotions and not avoiding ourself. And we would most importantly set personal boundaries, self boundaries. Like we're not gonna continue to date unavailable people 'cause it's me and you kid. We're not gonna continue to try to like get our partner to see us as good because you need that from me.
Yeah, those kinds of ideas. The avoidance here isn't about avoiding connection with a partner. The avoidance is, how I'm framing it, is that the person no longer tries to avoid themselves and their inner child. That's the name of the game. Let's focus on how we disregard ourselves. Unconsciously and unconsciously act out from a place of the inner child's anxiety.
The other variable, the anxiety on that axis, is simply the inner child's emotional memory system from childhood. And those vibes are beliefs such as Love isn't real, um, I have to get people to stay, or I can't deal with this and I can't deal with you. You could see that each one of those statements is, is significant to one of the attachment styles.
Which ones? Testing you guys a little bit. So, so I've broken down each of the, the three dysfunctional attachment styles from the perspective of getting our adult in place, or having our adult have it together more on behalf of this kid and focusing on our inner child instead of trying to fix our relationships through our partners.
So for anxious attachment, here are the parent re-parenting task. The general vibe of anxious preoccupied is, are we okay? And the re-parenting task is that first is the adult needs to buy into the strong tendency to project abandonment onto others, namely their partner. The second task is that the adult needs to establish consistent, loving dialogue with their inner child to help with their trauma beliefs.
And the third is that the adult needs to practice setting healthy limits with our inner child about the tendency to project. The first suggestion of buying in really means to become painfully aware. Or painfully conscious of how the inner child acts out with others by projecting abandonment. This looks like, uh, I can tell you're mad at me from your mood.
It looks like putting the partner on a pedestal and diminishing ourselves, and it looks like ignoring flaws or ignoring issues that need to be brought up due to feeling that there's gonna be abandonment if we do bring those up. Hopefully that makes sense. The dialoguing, that second suggestion means to do the work.
Of connecting with our inner child. I'll be doing more videos on this. I'm developing a dialoguing resource from my website in the future to help you guys with that. And for now, I placed a couple books in the description of this video that are excellent to learn how to do inner child dialoguing. Hands down, these are the best two that I know.
The third suggestion is the personal boundary setting with our inner child. This looks like. Saying to our inner child, we're not gonna avoid bringing up this hard thing with our partner. It looks like we're not going to constantly ask them if they're okay with us. It looks like we're not. We're gonna, it looks like we're gonna slow this thing down and really see if this person is safe for us, because anxious, preoccupied, they may have a tendency to rush, um, and not really see the person, not really spend the time seeing if the person is safe or not.
Okay, so lastly on this is the anxious, preoccupied person tries to self-regulate through feeling okay with their partner or feeling that the relationship is okay instead of self-regulating with their inner child and taking care of that inner child's emotional state. Okay, so four. Let's move on to dismissive avoidant.
Here are the re-parenting tasks, dismissive, avoidant. The general vibe is, I don't need anything from anyone. It's a very independent vibe that the dismissive, avoidant person has. The re-parenting task are the adult needs to buy into valuing their emotions and valuing intimacy more. The second suggestion is the adult needs to establish consistent, loving dialogue with their inner child to help with their trauma history and help with their core beliefs.
And lastly, the adult needs to seek and practice resources around reconnecting with repressed emotional spectrum and experience. I know that that's a mouthful, but I'll explain. The first suggestion of buying in really means to become conscious of how the inner child and the adult. Do not value relationships or the full range of their emotions.
What this looks like, it looks like being shut down, looks like being somewhat numb or aloof in relationships, and it also means to really question their own value system of their independence. It's not exactly healthy or good for them to be that independent or not needing anybody. It's not usually keeps their world pretty small and not connected.
And the adult loving dialogue and connection is the same for anxious, preoccupied, and each of these styles needs to do that dialoguing footwork with themselves and reparent their amazing inner child. The third suggestion is getting help with opening up. And what that means is going to therapy with somebody who's safe, like a safe therapist, going to groups.
The dismissive avoidant person had a great strategy in childhood is to be really siloed and be really independent, and they're too self-sufficient, to be honest. The battery icon that I have in that infographic is there because this attachment style needs a jumpstart. It's like their battery is dead.
And through therapy or learning about emotions or being with Save people is designed to get them to awaken. Um, hopefully that makes sense. The dismissive avoidant person tries to self-regulate through independence and not feeling their full spectrum of emotions. That's the opposite from like learning how to be open and experiencing deeper emotions, which are for them really repressed and underground.
Um. And to self-regulate in a different way. Hopefully that makes sense. Lastly is, uh, the fearful avoidant attachment style. The general vibe of this attachment style is get away from me. Wait, come back. I've got a rollercoaster icon there because this is a very turbulent sort of attachment style.
Unfortunately, it's exhausting for the person and it's exhausting for the partner usually. And the re-parenting task are the adult needs to buy into the strong tendency to create chaos or turbulence in order to create. Personal distance and safety, they're doing it for a reason. So in some of this stuff, it may seem judgy you guys, but you guys are doing this stuff for a very specific good reason.
Adults need to establish consistent, loving dialogue with the inner child to help with their trauma history and their core beliefs. And the adult needs to seek and practice resources for emotional sobriety and regulation, and to also develop a filter. So the first task, like the others, is the buy-in to really know that you're creating distance and turbulence as a way to keep yourself safe.
This looks like criticism of self criticism of your partner. There's sort of a, you suck an I suck vibe to this attachment style, and I know it sounds like a paradox, but discomfort and distrust are more familiar to this attachment style than being emotionally sober and accepting and chill with your partner.
There could be a lot of negative self-talk with this attachment style fights in the head with their partner. It can look like the fearful avoidant person. It looks like they want to be in, but they need to control the parameters and the safety, and they are creating this push pull environment in actually a very convincing sort of way.
You know what I mean? It's like, it's, it's actually hard to know what's going on there, um, during the present sort of upset. The second suggestion is, you know, the adult loving dialogue. The same as the other two attachment styles. Each style needs to do the footwork of connecting with themselves and reparenting their amazing inner child to move forward.
And the third suggestion is for the adult to learn about becoming emotionally sober. Unlike say, the dismissive avoidant, the fearful avoidant person has too much emotion where the dismissive avoidant doesn't really have enough and they have too much relational chaos. This style needs help from therapy about grounding themselves, about cultivating self safety and chill on behalf of their inner child.
Who does, who kind of fuels the acting out? Um, some ideas is like therapy, some mindfulness work, some DBT. Like skill sets and practicing protecting their partner from themselves by developing a filter. What that looks like is like, I feel like I want to sort of like either have a fight or disengage or whatever and let's not, let's not sort of maybe provoke them in some way and we'll take care of ourselves first.
That's what I mean about a self boundary. The fearful avoidant person might try to self-regulate through upset and conflict. I know that that sounds ridiculous. I know that that sounds like a paradox, but they do that instead of, the goal would be to embrace being loving and show with their inner child so that maybe they don't need to act out.
So some closing thoughts. These three styles are on a scale. Uh, for most people. You may identify with some of these qualities, but not all of 'em. You may em all and say like, oh my God, that's me. And you may have sort of more of an intense version of it. But it is on a scale. Not everyone checks off all the boxes for these attachment styles.
So there is sort of, um, severity to it. Hopefully that makes sense. The other is, and this might be a little bit conti, more, more confusing, is that, um, I think we all identify with the three aspects of these attachment styles through different relationships and different periods in our, in our life. But we are looking for more of the, the patronized one that we tend to gravitate, gravitate towards.
And hopefully that's helpful. So I hope that this video was helpful to you guys and I'll end with that, with that sort of prayer statement and from the other videos, which is, um,
