Hi guys, and welcome back to another new episode of You Need Therapy. My name is Kat. I am the host. And you know, if today was going to be a day that you are here, today is the day to be here because we are running it all the way back to the very beginning, and we are going to talk about something that I talked about in the very first ever episode of You Need Therapy, and we're going to go into a little bit more detail. And if you're like Cat, what is it I just started listening last week, or Cat, I have no idea what your first episode was about that was so long ago. I will tell you, and you actually probably already know because I probably put it in the title. But we are going all into attachment and attachment theory and what it is and are the Tiktoker's right? And is that book attached worth reading? And who we even started this whole thing? And why has nobody ever told me about this before we're doing it today? So if you're new or newer, let me before we get into all of this, remind you that I am a therapist. I am, and that is why we talked about these things and why is there this podcast? But this is not therapy. It's not a replacement for therapy. It's just a thing that might lead you to therapy. It might help you dig deeper into your own therapy journey, but it's not a replacement. But now that we have that out of the way, let's just get into it right. What I'm going to do is we're going to do a nice overview and that's today. That's today's episode of Attachment Theory. We're just going to talk about some stuff that's been on my mind, and then I'm going to do two separate episodes. One episode will be on insecure avoidance or dismissive if you've heard that word, and insecure, anxious or preoccupied. We're going to two different episodes on those because those are the two insecure types that I get asked the most about, and I think people really want to learn more about. If you're like, I don't even know what you're talking about, just stay with me and eventually you'll get it. Promised. So I've already done a couple of episodes on attachment. You can go back and listen to the first one and then the other one Attachment two point oh. We actually just re released in January and early January. Go listen to that one those It's all good information. Some of what you're going to get as information you might have already heard from me, and some of it is going to be new. I'm doing this because you guys love learning about attachment. I love talking about attachment. It's actually what all of my work as a therapist is based off of. But I also know we have a lot of new people here, and in the past, like probably a year or so, I have never heard or experienced so many people wanting to know about attachment theory and so many people talking about attachment theory that don't have to talk about it because of their job. People are just interested in it for their lives. So we're gonna talk about it. And again I'll start by saying I'm attachment focused therapist, meaning all my work with clients is rooted in this information. And because of that, I also feel very strongly about the integrity of this information and how we use it. And learning about attachment is not a tool that we then get to use as a weapon to psychoanalyze our exces with. It's a psychological theory that has forever changed the way we understand human behavior in relationships and how to really help us heal from hurt and pain that has been cost to us. It's a very big deal to me. So you guys are like, Okay, what is it. So we're gonna go all the way back to the beginnings of it. Okay, We're gonna go back to the very beginning, and I want to talk to you about this guy named John Bowlby who gets a lot of credit when it comes to attachment theory because it was developed by him. He was a psychiatrist and a psychoanalyst that lived years ago, and he would be known as the father of attachment theory. And without him, we would be sad. We would hopefully eventually have figured this out, but we might have had to, you know, do some extra work that some of us didn't want to do. He did it for us. So after World War Two, he saw as he was working in orphanages where he saw children who were given like food and like shelter and medical care. But these kids like weren't thriving, and there weren't any theories to describe what was going on and help somebody understand why somebody who's been given all of their needs they've all been met. Essentially, why these people aren't thriving and some of them are actually suffering like a lot of significant damage and loss, and and they're not developing properly. So he developed this theory. And I'm skipping a lot of stuff, but for the sake of trying to keep this not four hours long. Um, he developed this theory that basically says humans are born helpless and hardwired to search and attached to caregivers. Now, usually this would be seen as the mom primary caregivers, mom or dad, but it can be any close human who's providing for them. And basically, if the search is met with success, then you create security, and if it's met with failure, you create insecurity. And the success or failure of that search shapes the developing brain and creates a set of beliefs of how the world and relationships work. So fun fact of why this is so so, so, so so so important in our earliest development isn't just the only reason. But I find this just so fascinating that I love telling people about it. That as an infant, our brains are creating twenty thousand neural connections new per second. Now compare this to that of an adult. We create maybe seven hundred per day. So you see why the neural connections that you're making as a kid are so important because you're making them at like this rapid speed. You're doing a lot. So with that, what is wired as an infant really sets in, and we can change that thanks to something called neuroplastics. The it is more difficult as an adult to change this than if you would have just learned these things as children. But the attachment is not one and done. It's something that continues to affect how we view the world our entire life. And um Billy used the phrase from the Cradle to the grave explaining that the search for attachment and the search to attach is something that we start doing before we even have memories, and it lasts until we die, literally until BRANDI grave. We were born to connect, and that is what I want you to hear, very very loud. I'm going to stay it a lot. We were born to connect. As long as we are alive, we will never stop needing, not wanting needing to connect. We might not want to connect, but we need to connect. And the human species is a social, relational bonding species. This means that the need for connection is something that we cannot deny. Our connection to others is what shapes how we respond and eventually survive and thrive. Our bonds with other people actually have proven through research, Like not just people looking at things and be like, oh, this seems like a nice theory. Through research, it's improven that this is one of the most essential survival strategies that we have. So it's not just like, oh, we are a species that can have relationships, No, we are a species that has to have emotional relationships. So attachment is directly related to our emotional regulation, and there's a high, high, high emphasis on fear and how we respond and regulate fear specifically, when we have predictable and stable emotional connection with somebody, we're more likely to be able to regulate and be okay and sit through times of high intensity or distress or anything like that. And when we're able to regulate during those times, which when I say distress, we're going to pull in that emotion fear. So I said attachment deals a lot with fear specifically. Okay, so what's just think about when you might be distressed in your life. Let's say you're inn start a new job and you don't know anybody. It's a new environment, all these new things. So that's gold be a distressful environment if you don't know where you're going or or what it's going to be like. So we are probably a little bit scared in that time, right, So if we're able to regulate that, we're more able to move through that and be comforted through that and know that it's going to be okay, because what I know from the world is that it's safe and it's manageable, and I can expect that people are going to be good and my needs are going to be met, and I'm going to be okay. Right. If I have what we're going to talk about as a secure attachment, I'm going to be able to regulate my fear and move through that. If I have an insecure attachment, I might not be able to regulate my fear and it might keep me from even going to work that day, or it might keep it might have me like actually having like physical ailments, like my stomach might really start to hurt. It might affect me going to the bathroom, might not might not be able to sleep, and that affects how you might even perform at work the next day if you do make it. So there's these two really important parts of creating attachment, and they are called a safe haven and a secure base. A safe haven is somewhere where you can go and feel like you're going to be okay. Right, It's somewhere you can go back to and feel like, okay, this place literally is safe. And with the safe haven, there's usually something in that called a secure base, which is usually no, not usually it is a human being. A secure base is literally what it sounds like. It's a place and a person for you to be connected to so you can move from and explore and then come back. You get a sense of safety and stability in the world from this figure. And like I said earlier, oftentimes in early development it's the primary caregiver. Now, contrary to some mixed beliefs, the dependence on security figures actually increases ability to build autonomy later in life, which we're going to talk about as we move forward. But I just want to give this example to like, imagine you're a young kid and you go to the playground with a parent. A secure basis somebody that might be sitting on the bench watching you. But as a kid, you like, when you get there to the park, you might be really nervous because you don't know a lot of other kids, and so you're clinging to your mom. And then you know that your mom isn't going to leave you, and um, you can count on her to provide for you from the experiences that you've had so far with that figure. So eventually you can start to like inch away and you might just like, you know, walk over to the sandbox because you can still see mom, and like make it a little farther away, and then you can walk over to the slide and you can still see mom, and Mom hasn't left, And eventually you might start talking to the other kids. And then if some kid says something or maybe you like fall down, you can you run back to your mom and you or dad and you know that they're going to be there to help you when you experienced a sense of distress. But a lot of times people are like, oh, you don't want to have the like en measurement in your relationship with your parents, but you do want to have a sense of dependence, especially in those ages where you actually have to depend on mom and that dependence in the creation of the security, and that dependence ends up helping you actually move away and go try out things and explore and then mess up, and then you're able to come back, and then you can go out and mess up again. And you're going to hear this continuously. There's a lot of emphasis put on your primary caregiver here, which your parents, which is appropriate. These are usually the people that you spend the most amount of time with and they're responsible for meeting your needs as a small child and infant baby. They are your first experience of a relationship and they give you a mirror in a sense of how to identify and relate to the world. But I also want to emphasize here that your biological parents are not the only end all be all here. If that was the case, then a lot of us would just be screwed. Because this is the experience you had growing up. Doesn't mean you're doomed. And if you didn't have a secure base with the primary caregiver, you could have had somebody else that was a secure base, or you might have found a secure base later in life, or maybe you haven't found it yet. You can still find that. And I will say just because you did have a secure base, it doesn't mean your life will be perfect and you'll never have anxiety. And I gotta say this because I feel like I can't do an episode these days without saying something like this. But I think that a lot of what you're seeing on social media, especially about attachment, might be oversimplified, Like on Instagram and specifically TikTok, they oversimplify what it looks like to have certain attachment styles and where they come from. And it gets under my skin because it spreads misinformation and it also causes people unnecessary anxiety. This is not an always. If this happened you, then you will do this always. And if this didn't happen to you, then you will do this always. There's always an exception, is what we know. There always is. But I think when we simplify just the characteristics of this or the characteristics of that means you have this attachment that attachment, we're not looking at the full picture. So as you listen to this, and as you continue to listen and learn about attachment, I want you to look at the full picture and not just take this one part of it and be like, Okay, this is me, this is now my life, and I'm maybe doomed or I'm perfect. So let's say you did have a less than supportive upbringing. The good news is that something that's constantly involving is your attachment. It's not fixed. You may create a tendency to lean to one side or the other when we're talking about the insecure spectrum, but your relationship later in life can affect your attachment as well. And we're going to keep talking about this as we go. The attachment system, I think that we've kind of already established this is a fundamental part of a human being, just like any other system like your a reproductive system or some digestive system or something like that. What this does is it helps us create things called mental models. And these are like patterns of how of interaction, of how we kind of like code the world, and these guide our responses and how we like walk through a move through life. Now, remember these are not fixed. Mental models can change and when we have new interactions, we can create more or new models. They're they're what something would call working models. Now, the working models associated with attachment ask questions like can I count on you? And am I worthy of your love specifically looking at when I say you can I count on the people in my life. And attachment is all about emotional safety, right and security. And because we are relational, emotional connecting species, this is just as important for s rival as something like our reproductive system. This is explaining why in the orphanages Bobby was seeing these kids, but these babies who weren't thriving but they were getting all their needs met is because we were missing one of the needs. And it's just as important as something like your digestive system. If you're missing your digestive system, you would see that the kids might have some issues. Right, So you might be like, what are you talking about, Like how does emotion have that much of an impact on our survival? Like don't we just need to like you know, eat and sleep, drink water. Well, let me explain this to you. Attachment influences our mental health in such a deep way, Like such a deep way. If we create an insecure attachment, we're still going to try and get our needs met because this is an innate thing that we're born with. We're gonna try to figure out a way to get these emotional needs met, whether it's through shutting them down or exploiting them, or any extreme measures. We will take extreme measures if we have to. And I'm going to go back to this story that I've told countless times at this point in my life, and told it on the podcast before many times. And it's the story that this man named Gobor Mote told in a lecture that I listened to him give years ago. He was working in harm reduction clinics, which are clinics that help people who have tried to get sober and doesn't work for them, So it's an alternate route to healing addiction. What harm reduction is for another day, anyway. So he was asking these people like why are you doing heroin? Like I don't get it. You know, this drug is deadly. It's not like a fun party drug, Like, why why are you doing this? You talked to this one guy that you describe as somebody who looked like like a bouncer, this bigger guy, like a tough guy, and he said, I don't have any other way to describe it to you except have you ever been sick and your mom wraps up in a blanket, puts you on her lap, and feeds you chicken? Noodle soup. That's what heroin feels like, and so goodbor Mote was, Okay, well, I know what you're describing. You're describing the feeling of love. You're describing the feeling of love and connection. And so these people are willing to take life threatening drugs in order to feel a sense of love. They might not know that's what they're doing, but we are so resilient as beings that we will do that. So moving right along, we're going to go back a little bit based on our our primary caregivers or whoever is taking care of us in our early ages, based on their responses to meeting our needs, we end up answering those two questions can I count on you? And am I worthy of your love? Based on the answer to those questions, you will develop one of four main attachment styles. You have secure, which is what we want. And from the most recent research that I have, that's fifty people. So most people are getting that. And I also will say this isn't based on your caregivers giving you your getting your needs met every single time. It's like if seventy of the time they're not perfect, but a large majority of the time they're mating your needs, you'll have a secure attachment. Then we have these two main insecure types, insecure anxious and insecure avoidance. And then we have a third and secure type that is called disorganized. Now you'll see more that being called fearful avoidance. We're not going to talk about that one too much. You know what I say, we do a whole episode on it. We'll do it on all three. We're gonna do an episode on each of these insecure types. But because secure is not getting its own episode, let's talk about that for a second. What you want is a secure attachment. And if you didn't get it when you're growing up, good news is you can still create that. We can still find that you can create something called an urn secure attachment. Now, in a secure attachment, the child infant will experience a sense of security with its caregiver. The caregiver shows up and they create this idea that people are generally good. Um. They believe that their partners will be loving and will be there for them. They're able to communicate their needs, and there's an expectation that I am valuable and I can count on people to meet those and when they do get rejected, it's not they're not overly sensitive to it, right, because they know that they are good and they can't count on people, and that people love them and they can be loved. So rejection is just like part of life and it's not anything more than it needs to be. They are just programmed to expect like good out of people and that people will be there and be able to love them, and they're pretty comfortable with intimacy. So if a child is not getting their needs met, what they're going to do are these things called attachment behaviors and their signals of distress that usually end up in them getting their needs met. Right, So they're gonna cry or cling or seek, and if that goes well, If they have this lack of a need being met and then they do this attachment behavior and that goes well and they get what they need, you can move from this place of somewhat insecurity of what's going on to security. So that's all of this to say with secure attachment. The reason I'm saying this part is it doesn't mean they don't ever have anxiety or they're not ever distressed. It's that like when they are, then they usually get this experience that it's going to be okay. If that doesn't go well, over and over and over. Let's say even created a secure attachment and then all of a sudden things aren't gonna getting met anymore and you're not popping back up to security, then what's going to happen is you're going to form a form of an insecure attachment. So you have the anxious and avoidance and then just the disorganized, fearful. The thing about them is they all have the same inside feelings, but they have all very different ways of expressing or taking care of those inside feelings. All of those people are afraid of abandonment, interjection, and their behavior is to avoid feeling that. Now, other than this is just wildly fascinating information, and I think it's very helpful. Why are we going to do a whole episode on each of those insecure attachments. It's because when you have an insecure attachment, it is increasing your vulnerability to having two of the problems that are most common only discussed in therapy, the most common problems that people come to therapy with and you've heard of them, anxiety and depression. When you've an insecure attachment, you're more likely to experience those things. What secure people have is an ability to stay engaged and stay like attuned to themselves with distressing emotions going on, without the fear that they're going to lose control or just lose something big loser relationship, be overwhelmed. They can regulate their emotions. Somebody with an insecure attachment has issues regulating their emotions. There comes anxiety, there comes depression. Sundy with a secure attachment doesn't need to block or deny emotions. They can feel them and they cannot like them, but they also know that they're going to be okay. So I started reading a new to me book, not like a new book to just come out, but it's new to me because I haven't read before, called Attachment Theory and Practice, and it's written by Sue M. Johnson. It's a fantastic book. However, I would not recommend anybody reading this who isn't a clue s And it's reads somewhat like a textbook, And there's other literature out there that I think would be more like helpful and interesting for you guys to read on attachment then this, But you can also read it if you want to. But in the beginning of the book, she talks about some common misconceptions and adult attachment that are swirling around, and I want to address them here as well. So we're going to get into those. And when I say adult attachment, so when I started talking in the beginning of this episode, we're talking about John Bobby's research and what he found out, what he created, and what he discovered, and that's what this early childhood attachment. When I started as a therapist and I started learning about this, that's where we kept that. It was like, while we knew that this thing can change and it's not fixed any of these working models, we kind of like discovered this thing and then it sat there and everything was focused like mainly on those earliest interactions. And now that we are doing more research and attachment is becoming such an important integral part of psycho apology and therapy and all of that, Like we can't survive without this stuff. We have more information and there's a lot more push, I guess is the right word, but emphasis on adult attachment, So our attachment later in life and how that moves and and how that shifts and changes. So we're gonna kind of move more towards this space of adult attachment now, right, So one of the myths that she talked about is, and we mentioned this earlier, that dependency on others is harmful and what it actually is is helpful. In the past, reliance on other people as they move into adulthood, right as they moved past these stages of life where they have to depend on caregivers, was seen as like bad clinicians would use the word maladaptive, and you would call all of these people and meshed are codependent. And while those are very real things, also, I think now we're seeing that interdependence, like dependence on other people and relationships is now a very good thing and a very healthy thing, and a very helpful thing. What we know now is that the idea of secure basis right even in adulthood, and ability to rely on people and on our connections to other human enhances our self efficacy. So when we feel secure, we're way more likely to grow. When we feel secure, we're way more likely to take risks and explore, kind of like that example of the kid on the playground, we're taking that into adulthood. Now. Any of you guys listened to that excited about fear and like the fear of failing, failing and all of that. People who are more secure and have more secure attachments and are more connected to people are more likely to be able to take those risks and not see things not working now as failure and like life ruining moments. Now, the other myth that is talked about are one of the their myths is that our attachment doesn't change. And that's kind of what I was talking about before I got into this. I got ahead of myself what's new, And it used to be more accepted that your attachment style is based solely on your earliest experiences, and then it just kind of stuck there. And now we can see that attachment is fluid and it's more of a working model, and that changes as the things we see in the world change. New experiences align with the neuroplasticity, like the ability for our brain to like change, and we can create new ways in which we view ourselves and relationships. This is what a lot of attachment focused therapists do. They present a new example and a new experience of relationships for their clients. I will say, the only way that somebody's attachment can't be changed because sometimes it can't be changed. When that happens, that's because of the rigidity of the individual. So they might not allow new experiences in their life. They might constantly engage in self fulfilling prophecies and they kind of like prove this thing to be real for themselves. And if you latch onto the ideas that you learned previously and you don't allow space for something different to exist, then you can get stuck and you can create like narratives that like build off of each other. Right, So here's an example, like somebody might say to a therapist or think about their therapists like people only care about me if I pay them to And so you play into your avoidant tendencies here, and then you continue to cancel appointments and then your therapist ends up firing you and you say, see, I told you so all you care about is getting her money, when really that might not be. Why the therapist fired you was because there was no consistency. You weren't sharing it for appointments and it was not working out. Um, I didn't have to do at all with the idea that people can only love will only love you if you pay them, Okay, And then here is another myth. The last myth we're talking about is that romantic relationships don't have anything to do with attachment. Used to be like, this is your attachment and then you play it out in your relationships. But your romantic relationships have just as much as an impact on your attachment as any other relationship. They're very similar to your early childhood relationships. Secure bases are similar here, right. The more security you feel in a relationship romantic wise, the more you will be able to explore in that relationship. And that even moves into like sexuality and how your sexual relationship shows up. So when you have a secure partner, what we see is that people self report a more relaxing and satisfactory like sex life because you're more able to like, feel okay, and then do what you want to do. An avoidant attachment is seen with negative sexual experiences, and what we'll see here as partners are more concerned with performance but report lower levels of satisfaction. So I want appear okay and appear good, but I might not be getting what I want. And here's the thing, guys, sex as a bonding experience. When somebody sex and they have orgasm, they release a bonding hormone called oxytocin, and it's actually during sexual experiences that the physical attunment and marrying kind of behaviors that you see in like a mother infant relationship are most apparent in adults. Which we're not gonna get too much into this, but when you think about sexual trauma. One reason why this is can have such an effect on our attachment and ability to create meaningful and safe relationships. It's because of this right here, This experience that is meant to bond you with a safe person and join together pleasure, satisfaction, attunement, safety, and affection gets categorized differently when it's with an unsafe person that isn't attuned us. This experience that is supposed to bring us pleasure or does bring us pleasure, also is joined with his intense fear, lack of safety, and disregard for attunement. That's going to mess up how you see relationships, how you're going to see the world, how you're going to see yourself. Then those the bonding hormones that are being naturally released sometimes can create a bonding experience. Is was someone that elicits those feelings and that can become your baseline for relationships. So if you have sexual trauma, especially early on, that's your baseline for relationships. And that's going to affect what safety means to you, and what normal means to you, and what attractive bonding means to you. So we're going to kind of wrap up here because I could keep talking for hours on end about attachment, and we will because we're going to do the rest of these episodes. But what I want you guys to leave with is this idea of what attachment really is talking about, and it's talking about this undeniable need for us to connect with people and what happens and how we actually function and how we are affected and how our behaviors are changed by us not getting that attachment is all about connection and emotional regulation and the manner and what you engage with your emotions will shape your suffering, so calls you more suffering, it will help you manage your suffering. And more on that as we get into the insecure types. But what I want people to know is that helping if you have an insecure attachment, the way to heal that is not just giving you coping skills. It's not just giving you information, so you're not going to heal your attachment by reading about it. You might identify it, but that's not how you going to heal it. We can't just teach people how to contain emotions. What we have to do is teach people from what is a bottom up approach. We have to create felt senses of security through distressing times, and therapy has to be a safe haven for clients for it to be successful, and a therapist has to become a secure base for that client. That's what we do, and that's what a lot of my job literally is. It's not the like information that I teach clients. It's not the experiential exercises that we do, it's not the art projects, it's not any of that. What it is is I'm creating an environment and a relationship where somebody feels safe and heard and loved and cared about and or they know they can come back even when they mess up. And when you first learn how to be a therapist, and if you are a therapist or you're somebody in school, you'll relate to this as you're taught this humanistic approach that was developed by Carl Carl Rogers. They are essential parts of being a good therapist. These essential things you need, and one of them is this need to be fully present, engaged in the process with your clients. This is kind of modeling, I guess, a surrogacy type of way of what a parent would have provided but maybe didn't. Okay. And so if you are somebody who is identifying with these insecure types of attachment, two things I want you to hear right now. One, it does not mean your parents ruined you and your parents are bad. None of this is about blame. None of learning about this is about blame, because what we also know is blaming some buddy for a problem doesn't fix anything. So that's one thing. This isn't about demonizing anybody. It's about learning about yourself. It's about learning about your experiences. It's about making sense of your experiences. The other thing is this can change. You have to remember it's fluid. But for something to actually be fluid, for it to change, you have to believe it can change. You have to give yourself the opportunity for that to happen, and oftentimes a way to do that is through therapy. Because a therapist does end up being a surrogate attachment figure. Now, if you can't afford therapy, you don't have access to it, you're not doomed there either. But this is part of therapy that I never used to explain and now I love talking about because what happens in the room feels like magic, but it's not. It's connection. It's connection. It's emotional, safe connection. That's what we're all wanting and not all acknowledging. And that's one of the very basic reasons I created this podcast to acknowledge that we all just want connect. So again, if you can't afford therapy and you're like, well you just said learning about it's not going to help me, that's okay. You can still find safe people, but you have to eventually let yourself attached and connect to those people fully safe people. We've got to look at the people that you're trying to connect with, because if you're trying to connect with another insecure person, if you're an anxious person, you're trying to attach to an avoidant person, you're just creating more of those self fulfilling prophecies, which again we'll get into. I just want to keep talking about, but I can't stop. But yeah, I want to leave you with that that, like, this is the reason I started this podcast, so we could acknowledge louder and together that we really just all want to connect. And connection is like the healing agent upon healing agents. Yeah, it's that simple, and it's also that complicated. So with that, I'm going to leave you with some things to think about, right and in the next couple of months will be putting out those other episodes and we're going to dive deeper into this. For now, though, I hope you guys are having the day you need to have and I will talk to you guys on Wednesday for couch Talks m M.

Hi guys, and welcome back to another new episode of You Need Therapy. My name is Kat. I am the host. And you know, if today was going to be a day that you are here, today is the day to be here because we are running it all the way back to the very beginning, and we are going to talk about something that I talked about in the very first ever episode of You Need Therapy, and we're going to go into a little bit more detail. And if you're like Cat, what is it I just started listening last week, or Cat, I have no idea what your first episode was about that was so long ago. I will tell you, and you actually probably already know because I probably put it in the title. But we are going all into attachment and attachment theory and what it is and are the Tiktoker's right? And is that book attached worth reading? And who we even started this whole thing? And why has nobody ever told me about this before we're doing it today? So if you're new or newer, let me before we get into all of this, remind you that I am a therapist. I am, and that is why we talked about these things and why is there this podcast? But this is not therapy. It's not a replacement for therapy. It's just a thing that might lead you to therapy. It might help you dig deeper into your own therapy journey, but it's not a replacement. But now that we have that out of the way, let's just get into it right. What I'm going to do is we're going to do a nice overview and that's today. That's today's episode of Attachment Theory. We're just going to talk about some stuff that's been on my mind, and then I'm going to do two separate episodes. One episode will be on insecure avoidance or dismissive if you've heard that word, and insecure, anxious or preoccupied. We're going to two different episodes on those because those are the two insecure types that I get asked the most about, and I think people really want to learn more about. If you're like, I don't even know what you're talking about, just stay with me and eventually you'll get it. Promised. So I've already done a couple of episodes on attachment. You can go back and listen to the first one and then the other one Attachment two point oh. We actually just re released in January and early January. Go listen to that one those It's all good information. Some of what you're going to get as information you might have already heard from me, and some of it is going to be new. I'm doing this because you guys love learning about attachment. I love talking about attachment. It's actually what all of my work as a therapist is based off of. But I also know we have a lot of new people here, and in the past, like probably a year or so, I have never heard or experienced so many people wanting to know about attachment theory and so many people talking about attachment theory that don't have to talk about it because of their job. People are just interested in it for their lives. So we're gonna talk about it. And again I'll start by saying I'm attachment focused therapist, meaning all my work with clients is rooted in this information. And because of that, I also feel very strongly about the integrity of this information and how we use it. And learning about attachment is not a tool that we then get to use as a weapon to psychoanalyze our exces with. It's a psychological theory that has forever changed the way we understand human behavior in relationships and how to really help us heal from hurt and pain that has been cost to us. It's a very big deal to me. So you guys are like, Okay, what is it. So we're gonna go all the way back to the beginnings of it. Okay, We're gonna go back to the very beginning, and I want to talk to you about this guy named John Bowlby who gets a lot of credit when it comes to attachment theory because it was developed by him. He was a psychiatrist and a psychoanalyst that lived years ago, and he would be known as the father of attachment theory. And without him, we would be sad. We would hopefully eventually have figured this out, but we might have had to, you know, do some extra work that some of us didn't want to do. He did it for us. So after World War Two, he saw as he was working in orphanages where he saw children who were given like food and like shelter and medical care. But these kids like weren't thriving, and there weren't any theories to describe what was going on and help somebody understand why somebody who's been given all of their needs they've all been met. Essentially, why these people aren't thriving and some of them are actually suffering like a lot of significant damage and loss, and and they're not developing properly. So he developed this theory. And I'm skipping a lot of stuff, but for the sake of trying to keep this not four hours long. Um, he developed this theory that basically says humans are born helpless and hardwired to search and attached to caregivers. Now, usually this would be seen as the mom primary caregivers, mom or dad, but it can be any close human who's providing for them. And basically, if the search is met with success, then you create security, and if it's met with failure, you create insecurity. And the success or failure of that search shapes the developing brain and creates a set of beliefs of how the world and relationships work. So fun fact of why this is so so, so, so so so important in our earliest development isn't just the only reason. But I find this just so fascinating that I love telling people about it. That as an infant, our brains are creating twenty thousand neural connections new per second. Now compare this to that of an adult. We create maybe seven hundred per day. So you see why the neural connections that you're making as a kid are so important because you're making them at like this rapid speed. You're doing a lot. So with that, what is wired as an infant really sets in, and we can change that thanks to something called neuroplastics. The it is more difficult as an adult to change this than if you would have just learned these things as children. But the attachment is not one and done. It's something that continues to affect how we view the world our entire life. And um Billy used the phrase from the Cradle to the grave explaining that the search for attachment and the search to attach is something that we start doing before we even have memories, and it lasts until we die, literally until BRANDI grave. We were born to connect, and that is what I want you to hear, very very loud. I'm going to stay it a lot. We were born to connect. As long as we are alive, we will never stop needing, not wanting needing to connect. We might not want to connect, but we need to connect. And the human species is a social, relational bonding species. This means that the need for connection is something that we cannot deny. Our connection to others is what shapes how we respond and eventually survive and thrive. Our bonds with other people actually have proven through research, Like not just people looking at things and be like, oh, this seems like a nice theory. Through research, it's improven that this is one of the most essential survival strategies that we have. So it's not just like, oh, we are a species that can have relationships, No, we are a species that has to have emotional relationships. So attachment is directly related to our emotional regulation, and there's a high, high, high emphasis on fear and how we respond and regulate fear specifically, when we have predictable and stable emotional connection with somebody, we're more likely to be able to regulate and be okay and sit through times of high intensity or distress or anything like that. And when we're able to regulate during those times, which when I say distress, we're going to pull in that emotion fear. So I said attachment deals a lot with fear specifically. Okay, so what's just think about when you might be distressed in your life. Let's say you're inn start a new job and you don't know anybody. It's a new environment, all these new things. So that's gold be a distressful environment if you don't know where you're going or or what it's going to be like. So we are probably a little bit scared in that time, right, So if we're able to regulate that, we're more able to move through that and be comforted through that and know that it's going to be okay, because what I know from the world is that it's safe and it's manageable, and I can expect that people are going to be good and my needs are going to be met, and I'm going to be okay. Right. If I have what we're going to talk about as a secure attachment, I'm going to be able to regulate my fear and move through that. If I have an insecure attachment, I might not be able to regulate my fear and it might keep me from even going to work that day, or it might keep it might have me like actually having like physical ailments, like my stomach might really start to hurt. It might affect me going to the bathroom, might not might not be able to sleep, and that affects how you might even perform at work the next day if you do make it. So there's these two really important parts of creating attachment, and they are called a safe haven and a secure base. A safe haven is somewhere where you can go and feel like you're going to be okay. Right, It's somewhere you can go back to and feel like, okay, this place literally is safe. And with the safe haven, there's usually something in that called a secure base, which is usually no, not usually it is a human being. A secure base is literally what it sounds like. It's a place and a person for you to be connected to so you can move from and explore and then come back. You get a sense of safety and stability in the world from this figure. And like I said earlier, oftentimes in early development it's the primary caregiver. Now, contrary to some mixed beliefs, the dependence on security figures actually increases ability to build autonomy later in life, which we're going to talk about as we move forward. But I just want to give this example to like, imagine you're a young kid and you go to the playground with a parent. A secure basis somebody that might be sitting on the bench watching you. But as a kid, you like, when you get there to the park, you might be really nervous because you don't know a lot of other kids, and so you're clinging to your mom. And then you know that your mom isn't going to leave you, and um, you can count on her to provide for you from the experiences that you've had so far with that figure. So eventually you can start to like inch away and you might just like, you know, walk over to the sandbox because you can still see mom, and like make it a little farther away, and then you can walk over to the slide and you can still see mom, and Mom hasn't left, And eventually you might start talking to the other kids. And then if some kid says something or maybe you like fall down, you can you run back to your mom and you or dad and you know that they're going to be there to help you when you experienced a sense of distress. But a lot of times people are like, oh, you don't want to have the like en measurement in your relationship with your parents, but you do want to have a sense of dependence, especially in those ages where you actually have to depend on mom and that dependence in the creation of the security, and that dependence ends up helping you actually move away and go try out things and explore and then mess up, and then you're able to come back, and then you can go out and mess up again. And you're going to hear this continuously. There's a lot of emphasis put on your primary caregiver here, which your parents, which is appropriate. These are usually the people that you spend the most amount of time with and they're responsible for meeting your needs as a small child and infant baby. They are your first experience of a relationship and they give you a mirror in a sense of how to identify and relate to the world. But I also want to emphasize here that your biological parents are not the only end all be all here. If that was the case, then a lot of us would just be screwed. Because this is the experience you had growing up. Doesn't mean you're doomed. And if you didn't have a secure base with the primary caregiver, you could have had somebody else that was a secure base, or you might have found a secure base later in life, or maybe you haven't found it yet. You can still find that. And I will say just because you did have a secure base, it doesn't mean your life will be perfect and you'll never have anxiety. And I gotta say this because I feel like I can't do an episode these days without saying something like this. But I think that a lot of what you're seeing on social media, especially about attachment, might be oversimplified, Like on Instagram and specifically TikTok, they oversimplify what it looks like to have certain attachment styles and where they come from. And it gets under my skin because it spreads misinformation and it also causes people unnecessary anxiety. This is not an always. If this happened you, then you will do this always. And if this didn't happen to you, then you will do this always. There's always an exception, is what we know. There always is. But I think when we simplify just the characteristics of this or the characteristics of that means you have this attachment that attachment, we're not looking at the full picture. So as you listen to this, and as you continue to listen and learn about attachment, I want you to look at the full picture and not just take this one part of it and be like, Okay, this is me, this is now my life, and I'm maybe doomed or I'm perfect. So let's say you did have a less than supportive upbringing. The good news is that something that's constantly involving is your attachment. It's not fixed. You may create a tendency to lean to one side or the other when we're talking about the insecure spectrum, but your relationship later in life can affect your attachment as well. And we're going to keep talking about this as we go. The attachment system, I think that we've kind of already established this is a fundamental part of a human being, just like any other system like your a reproductive system or some digestive system or something like that. What this does is it helps us create things called mental models. And these are like patterns of how of interaction, of how we kind of like code the world, and these guide our responses and how we like walk through a move through life. Now, remember these are not fixed. Mental models can change and when we have new interactions, we can create more or new models. They're they're what something would call working models. Now, the working models associated with attachment ask questions like can I count on you? And am I worthy of your love specifically looking at when I say you can I count on the people in my life. And attachment is all about emotional safety, right and security. And because we are relational, emotional connecting species, this is just as important for s rival as something like our reproductive system. This is explaining why in the orphanages Bobby was seeing these kids, but these babies who weren't thriving but they were getting all their needs met is because we were missing one of the needs. And it's just as important as something like your digestive system. If you're missing your digestive system, you would see that the kids might have some issues. Right, So you might be like, what are you talking about, Like how does emotion have that much of an impact on our survival? Like don't we just need to like you know, eat and sleep, drink water. Well, let me explain this to you. Attachment influences our mental health in such a deep way, Like such a deep way. If we create an insecure attachment, we're still going to try and get our needs met because this is an innate thing that we're born with. We're gonna try to figure out a way to get these emotional needs met, whether it's through shutting them down or exploiting them, or any extreme measures. We will take extreme measures if we have to. And I'm going to go back to this story that I've told countless times at this point in my life, and told it on the podcast before many times. And it's the story that this man named Gobor Mote told in a lecture that I listened to him give years ago. He was working in harm reduction clinics, which are clinics that help people who have tried to get sober and doesn't work for them, So it's an alternate route to healing addiction. What harm reduction is for another day, anyway. So he was asking these people like why are you doing heroin? Like I don't get it. You know, this drug is deadly. It's not like a fun party drug, Like, why why are you doing this? You talked to this one guy that you describe as somebody who looked like like a bouncer, this bigger guy, like a tough guy, and he said, I don't have any other way to describe it to you except have you ever been sick and your mom wraps up in a blanket, puts you on her lap, and feeds you chicken? Noodle soup. That's what heroin feels like, and so goodbor Mote was, Okay, well, I know what you're describing. You're describing the feeling of love. You're describing the feeling of love and connection. And so these people are willing to take life threatening drugs in order to feel a sense of love. They might not know that's what they're doing, but we are so resilient as beings that we will do that. So moving right along, we're going to go back a little bit based on our our primary caregivers or whoever is taking care of us in our early ages, based on their responses to meeting our needs, we end up answering those two questions can I count on you? And am I worthy of your love? Based on the answer to those questions, you will develop one of four main attachment styles. You have secure, which is what we want. And from the most recent research that I have, that's fifty people. So most people are getting that. And I also will say this isn't based on your caregivers giving you your getting your needs met every single time. It's like if seventy of the time they're not perfect, but a large majority of the time they're mating your needs, you'll have a secure attachment. Then we have these two main insecure types, insecure anxious and insecure avoidance. And then we have a third and secure type that is called disorganized. Now you'll see more that being called fearful avoidance. We're not going to talk about that one too much. You know what I say, we do a whole episode on it. We'll do it on all three. We're gonna do an episode on each of these insecure types. But because secure is not getting its own episode, let's talk about that for a second. What you want is a secure attachment. And if you didn't get it when you're growing up, good news is you can still create that. We can still find that you can create something called an urn secure attachment. Now, in a secure attachment, the child infant will experience a sense of security with its caregiver. The caregiver shows up and they create this idea that people are generally good. Um. They believe that their partners will be loving and will be there for them. They're able to communicate their needs, and there's an expectation that I am valuable and I can count on people to meet those and when they do get rejected, it's not they're not overly sensitive to it, right, because they know that they are good and they can't count on people, and that people love them and they can be loved. So rejection is just like part of life and it's not anything more than it needs to be. They are just programmed to expect like good out of people and that people will be there and be able to love them, and they're pretty comfortable with intimacy. So if a child is not getting their needs met, what they're going to do are these things called attachment behaviors and their signals of distress that usually end up in them getting their needs met. Right, So they're gonna cry or cling or seek, and if that goes well, If they have this lack of a need being met and then they do this attachment behavior and that goes well and they get what they need, you can move from this place of somewhat insecurity of what's going on to security. So that's all of this to say with secure attachment. The reason I'm saying this part is it doesn't mean they don't ever have anxiety or they're not ever distressed. It's that like when they are, then they usually get this experience that it's going to be okay. If that doesn't go well, over and over and over. Let's say even created a secure attachment and then all of a sudden things aren't gonna getting met anymore and you're not popping back up to security, then what's going to happen is you're going to form a form of an insecure attachment. So you have the anxious and avoidance and then just the disorganized, fearful. The thing about them is they all have the same inside feelings, but they have all very different ways of expressing or taking care of those inside feelings. All of those people are afraid of abandonment, interjection, and their behavior is to avoid feeling that. Now, other than this is just wildly fascinating information, and I think it's very helpful. Why are we going to do a whole episode on each of those insecure attachments. It's because when you have an insecure attachment, it is increasing your vulnerability to having two of the problems that are most common only discussed in therapy, the most common problems that people come to therapy with and you've heard of them, anxiety and depression. When you've an insecure attachment, you're more likely to experience those things. What secure people have is an ability to stay engaged and stay like attuned to themselves with distressing emotions going on, without the fear that they're going to lose control or just lose something big loser relationship, be overwhelmed. They can regulate their emotions. Somebody with an insecure attachment has issues regulating their emotions. There comes anxiety, there comes depression. Sundy with a secure attachment doesn't need to block or deny emotions. They can feel them and they cannot like them, but they also know that they're going to be okay. So I started reading a new to me book, not like a new book to just come out, but it's new to me because I haven't read before, called Attachment Theory and Practice, and it's written by Sue M. Johnson. It's a fantastic book. However, I would not recommend anybody reading this who isn't a clue s And it's reads somewhat like a textbook, And there's other literature out there that I think would be more like helpful and interesting for you guys to read on attachment then this, But you can also read it if you want to. But in the beginning of the book, she talks about some common misconceptions and adult attachment that are swirling around, and I want to address them here as well. So we're going to get into those. And when I say adult attachment, so when I started talking in the beginning of this episode, we're talking about John Bobby's research and what he found out, what he created, and what he discovered, and that's what this early childhood attachment. When I started as a therapist and I started learning about this, that's where we kept that. It was like, while we knew that this thing can change and it's not fixed any of these working models, we kind of like discovered this thing and then it sat there and everything was focused like mainly on those earliest interactions. And now that we are doing more research and attachment is becoming such an important integral part of psycho apology and therapy and all of that, Like we can't survive without this stuff. We have more information and there's a lot more push, I guess is the right word, but emphasis on adult attachment, So our attachment later in life and how that moves and and how that shifts and changes. So we're gonna kind of move more towards this space of adult attachment now, right, So one of the myths that she talked about is, and we mentioned this earlier, that dependency on others is harmful and what it actually is is helpful. In the past, reliance on other people as they move into adulthood, right as they moved past these stages of life where they have to depend on caregivers, was seen as like bad clinicians would use the word maladaptive, and you would call all of these people and meshed are codependent. And while those are very real things, also, I think now we're seeing that interdependence, like dependence on other people and relationships is now a very good thing and a very healthy thing, and a very helpful thing. What we know now is that the idea of secure basis right even in adulthood, and ability to rely on people and on our connections to other human enhances our self efficacy. So when we feel secure, we're way more likely to grow. When we feel secure, we're way more likely to take risks and explore, kind of like that example of the kid on the playground, we're taking that into adulthood. Now. Any of you guys listened to that excited about fear and like the fear of failing, failing and all of that. People who are more secure and have more secure attachments and are more connected to people are more likely to be able to take those risks and not see things not working now as failure and like life ruining moments. Now, the other myth that is talked about are one of the their myths is that our attachment doesn't change. And that's kind of what I was talking about before I got into this. I got ahead of myself what's new, And it used to be more accepted that your attachment style is based solely on your earliest experiences, and then it just kind of stuck there. And now we can see that attachment is fluid and it's more of a working model, and that changes as the things we see in the world change. New experiences align with the neuroplasticity, like the ability for our brain to like change, and we can create new ways in which we view ourselves and relationships. This is what a lot of attachment focused therapists do. They present a new example and a new experience of relationships for their clients. I will say, the only way that somebody's attachment can't be changed because sometimes it can't be changed. When that happens, that's because of the rigidity of the individual. So they might not allow new experiences in their life. They might constantly engage in self fulfilling prophecies and they kind of like prove this thing to be real for themselves. And if you latch onto the ideas that you learned previously and you don't allow space for something different to exist, then you can get stuck and you can create like narratives that like build off of each other. Right, So here's an example, like somebody might say to a therapist or think about their therapists like people only care about me if I pay them to And so you play into your avoidant tendencies here, and then you continue to cancel appointments and then your therapist ends up firing you and you say, see, I told you so all you care about is getting her money, when really that might not be. Why the therapist fired you was because there was no consistency. You weren't sharing it for appointments and it was not working out. Um, I didn't have to do at all with the idea that people can only love will only love you if you pay them, Okay, And then here is another myth. The last myth we're talking about is that romantic relationships don't have anything to do with attachment. Used to be like, this is your attachment and then you play it out in your relationships. But your romantic relationships have just as much as an impact on your attachment as any other relationship. They're very similar to your early childhood relationships. Secure bases are similar here, right. The more security you feel in a relationship romantic wise, the more you will be able to explore in that relationship. And that even moves into like sexuality and how your sexual relationship shows up. So when you have a secure partner, what we see is that people self report a more relaxing and satisfactory like sex life because you're more able to like, feel okay, and then do what you want to do. An avoidant attachment is seen with negative sexual experiences, and what we'll see here as partners are more concerned with performance but report lower levels of satisfaction. So I want appear okay and appear good, but I might not be getting what I want. And here's the thing, guys, sex as a bonding experience. When somebody sex and they have orgasm, they release a bonding hormone called oxytocin, and it's actually during sexual experiences that the physical attunment and marrying kind of behaviors that you see in like a mother infant relationship are most apparent in adults. Which we're not gonna get too much into this, but when you think about sexual trauma. One reason why this is can have such an effect on our attachment and ability to create meaningful and safe relationships. It's because of this right here, This experience that is meant to bond you with a safe person and join together pleasure, satisfaction, attunement, safety, and affection gets categorized differently when it's with an unsafe person that isn't attuned us. This experience that is supposed to bring us pleasure or does bring us pleasure, also is joined with his intense fear, lack of safety, and disregard for attunement. That's going to mess up how you see relationships, how you're going to see the world, how you're going to see yourself. Then those the bonding hormones that are being naturally released sometimes can create a bonding experience. Is was someone that elicits those feelings and that can become your baseline for relationships. So if you have sexual trauma, especially early on, that's your baseline for relationships. And that's going to affect what safety means to you, and what normal means to you, and what attractive bonding means to you. So we're going to kind of wrap up here because I could keep talking for hours on end about attachment, and we will because we're going to do the rest of these episodes. But what I want you guys to leave with is this idea of what attachment really is talking about, and it's talking about this undeniable need for us to connect with people and what happens and how we actually function and how we are affected and how our behaviors are changed by us not getting that attachment is all about connection and emotional regulation and the manner and what you engage with your emotions will shape your suffering, so calls you more suffering, it will help you manage your suffering. And more on that as we get into the insecure types. But what I want people to know is that helping if you have an insecure attachment, the way to heal that is not just giving you coping skills. It's not just giving you information, so you're not going to heal your attachment by reading about it. You might identify it, but that's not how you going to heal it. We can't just teach people how to contain emotions. What we have to do is teach people from what is a bottom up approach. We have to create felt senses of security through distressing times, and therapy has to be a safe haven for clients for it to be successful, and a therapist has to become a secure base for that client. That's what we do, and that's what a lot of my job literally is. It's not the like information that I teach clients. It's not the experiential exercises that we do, it's not the art projects, it's not any of that. What it is is I'm creating an environment and a relationship where somebody feels safe and heard and loved and cared about and or they know they can come back even when they mess up. And when you first learn how to be a therapist, and if you are a therapist or you're somebody in school, you'll relate to this as you're taught this humanistic approach that was developed by Carl Carl Rogers. They are essential parts of being a good therapist. These essential things you need, and one of them is this need to be fully present, engaged in the process with your clients. This is kind of modeling, I guess, a surrogacy type of way of what a parent would have provided but maybe didn't. Okay. And so if you are somebody who is identifying with these insecure types of attachment, two things I want you to hear right now. One, it does not mean your parents ruined you and your parents are bad. None of this is about blame. None of learning about this is about blame, because what we also know is blaming some buddy for a problem doesn't fix anything. So that's one thing. This isn't about demonizing anybody. It's about learning about yourself. It's about learning about your experiences. It's about making sense of your experiences. The other thing is this can change. You have to remember it's fluid. But for something to actually be fluid, for it to change, you have to believe it can change. You have to give yourself the opportunity for that to happen, and oftentimes a way to do that is through therapy. Because a therapist does end up being a surrogate attachment figure. Now, if you can't afford therapy, you don't have access to it, you're not doomed there either. But this is part of therapy that I never used to explain and now I love talking about because what happens in the room feels like magic, but it's not. It's connection. It's connection. It's emotional, safe connection. That's what we're all wanting and not all acknowledging. And that's one of the very basic reasons I created this podcast to acknowledge that we all just want connect. So again, if you can't afford therapy and you're like, well you just said learning about it's not going to help me, that's okay. You can still find safe people, but you have to eventually let yourself attached and connect to those people fully safe people. We've got to look at the people that you're trying to connect with, because if you're trying to connect with another insecure person, if you're an anxious person, you're trying to attach to an avoidant person, you're just creating more of those self fulfilling prophecies, which again we'll get into. I just want to keep talking about, but I can't stop. But yeah, I want to leave you with that that, like, this is the reason I started this podcast, so we could acknowledge louder and together that we really just all want to connect. And connection is like the healing agent upon healing agents. Yeah, it's that simple, and it's also that complicated. So with that, I'm going to leave you with some things to think about, right and in the next couple of months will be putting out those other episodes and we're going to dive deeper into this. For now, though, I hope you guys are having the day you need to have and I will talk to you guys on Wednesday for couch Talks m M.