A Man's Guide To: Anxious Attachment

welcome back team today we're going to be talking about how to deal with and how to end anxious attachment now this is a Man's Guide too and I'm going to be approaching this from a very male Centric point of view but if you are a woman listening to this or watching this there is going to be a lot of this that applies to you um if you haven't seen my other parts of this series I have done a man's guide to ending codependency which is about an hour long and I do a deep dive into

it and I've done a man's guide to ending avoid an attachment I will be doing others in this series so stay tuned make sure you hit the notification to subscribe on whatever platform you are tuning in to me on so that you get notified of these videos and let me know message me hit me up whether it's on Instagram or you can email me through the website and let me know if there are other versions of these a Man's Guide that you would like me to dive into uh I will be covering a ton of

psychological topics so with all that said let's dive in to a man's guide to ending Ang anxious attachment now Where Do We Begin I want to begin with the sort of Core Essence of anxious attachment what what is actually at the core of this attachment style and at the very center of it is a very simple notion and that notion or that belief or that physical experience that people have who have anxious attachment is I'm not okay unless you're okay or I need you to be okay in order for me to feel okay right so

there's this dependency that has emerged for the anxious person that says I need to make sure I'm constantly hypervigilant on you how you're feeling what you're thinking what you're doing how you're relating to me and how you're doing will predicate and dictate how I'm doing now as we are going to talk about as you are going to discover this Essence this core of anxious attachment is developed early on in life and there's a lot of different factors that can play into a person's development of anxious attachment but at the very essence of it what I

want you to take is that for the anxious person their needs their wants their desires their sense of safety even are always secondary to someone else's they've been trained in childhood they've gone through experiences that have led them to believe that my desires needs and wants are secondary to yours and the only way for me to get mine met are to make sure that you're getting yours met so there's this very hypervigilant external Focus that can happen again their sense of safety their well-being their sense of worth and value can also be externally dependent and

again like I said this is a very much a learned behavior and is usually something that is sometimes witnessed in a parent so that person may have seen this Behavior played out in a parent uh they maybe were raised to do so like a child having a having to parent their parent in some way so constantly having to caretake one of their parents in order to make sure that their safety as a child or uh you know their needs as a child could be met but it was always on the other side of caretaking a

parent and it could have come from a bunch of other things that we're going to talk about in a moment but the main point here is that you were probably if you are an anxious person or if you have a partner who is an anxious person because this video is going to be very helpful if you are with an anxious person um if if you were or if you are an anxious attachment the point is that you were a child who was probably put in impossible situations in some points impossible for you to solve a

problem between your parents and it caused you an immense amount of anxiety right maybe there was volatility or you know they were constantly arguing and you couldn't deescalate them or it was impossible for you to fix a financial situation that your parent was going through or was it possible for you to get it right right you constantly felt like you were walking on eggshells because no matter what you did you didn't know if you're going to get yelled at or if you were going to get approval and it was very unclear as to what would

result in you being okay or maybe it was impossible for you to save one of your parents or one of your siblings maybe you grew up with a sibling who had an addiction um or maybe you had a parent who was struggling with addiction and so that anxiety was you constantly trying to figure out how do I get them to be okay okay how do I save them how do I solve something but again behind the anxious person is this impossible situation of I have to give you something I have to do something for you

I have to solve something or figure something out for you so make sure that you're okay before I can be okay and that's at the very core of it and when I say okay it can mean a number of things it can be safety security it can be okay in the sense of Worth or value it can be okay in the sense of uh you know worthy of being loved worthy of being happy okay to be happy all of those different pieces so the anxious person is constantly sort of like laying in weight right their

whole physical system is spun up saying I have to make sure that all everything's okay outside of me so that uh I can get my needs met and I want you to remember one thing cuz this is going to be very very helpful as we talk about moving towards secure attachment and it's the simple idea that secure people seek support whereas anxious people seek validation secure people seek support whereas anxious people seek validation so the anxious person whereas the avoidant pulls away and isolates the anxious person is hyper externalized hyper externalized so the an the

avoidant person is more internalized they're more recluse they're more aloof there's less there's a less likelihood you're going to know what's going on with them or what's happening inside of them the anxious person has a hypervigilance to the external World they have been uh I use the word trained you know but they have been conditioned is another way of putting it they've been conditioned through their life circumstances that a lot of their sense of being okay in the world requires them to have a very real hypervigilance right what are you thinking what are you doing

are you okay are we okay and if and if you and we are okay then maybe I can be okay and so there's this there's this constant focus and this can be very frustrating for the partner right if you're with somebody who has a very high level of anxiety or anxiousness or their attachment their sense of okay and belonging within the relationship is very uh externally focused and they're constantly asking you what's wrong are you okay how are you feeling right now they're text bombing you they're love bombing you all those types of pieces that

can be very frustrating and so again coming back to this one notion secure people seek support while anxious people seek validation they want validation they need validation from outside of themselves that everything is okay that they're safe that they belong that they are loved that they're okay all of that all of those different pieces so let's move into talking about the causes of anxious attachment what actually develops anxious attachment because again knowing what causes it being able to identify it within yourself or within your partner and having that conversation with them not that it's your

responsibility right this is something that you should probably uh get into with a therapist or you know a well-trained coach or a psychologist but understanding the causality of it will give you an indication of what needs to be healed in your life and we'll probably give you a very clear insight into how it's showing up in your present day relationship or past relationship so I'm going to give you the causes but I'm also going to give you examples of what that would look like in your present day relationship so let's just start at the very

beginning one of the primary causes of an anxious attachment are inconsistent parental responses okay inconsistent parental responses this is when caregivers are inconsistent with meeting their child's needs with responding to the child's emotions or what they're asking for uh sometimes being unattentive when a child is needing nurturing or care it might be that you know the the parent is constantly distracted and unable to give that child attention and so the child's constantly getting trying to get attention right they might be acting out they might be asking for food they might you know be needing something

from a parent and it's very few and far between and the child isn't able and this is the really big piece that's important the child is not able to figure out what is going to get attention from the parent so that's inconsistent parental respon iess because for secure attachment to build between a child and a parent there has to be some level of consistency there has to be some level of because kids you know they're they're trying to figure the world out and you were once a child trying to figure the world out and your

sense of safety and belonging again was dependent on your parent and so as a child you went through a period a phase of life where you tried to figure out how do I get my needs met from Mom and Dad how do I get my needs met from my caretaker right whether you were adopted or in a foster care system whatever that looked like whether you were raised by grandparents Etc you went through a period where you tried to figure out how do I get my needs met from from my caretaker and if your parents

or your caretakers were inconsistent in responding to your needs and responding to your desires then you again it could be you asking to play it could be you ask asking to read a book or whatever it is if they're very inconsistent and you aren't able to figure out a consistent method of getting attention of getting your needs met what will happen is within a child they'll start to code that as something's wrong with me there's something wrong with me and I can't figure out how to get your attention and later on in life you know

this one's a very clear through line later on in life this will uh show up in relationships where you will be very anxious you're not certain as to whether or not you're going to get the attention whether or not your needs are going to be prioritized and so for example your mother and father uh may have had pretty wild mood swings this can be a really good example where they're loving and joyful in one moment and then like the next moment they're uh you know they're they're abusive and and yelling and they they may have

been caring and attentive on a regular basis but then they might have also been completely disengaged and cold and for you as a kid it was very unclear as to which one you were going to get right you weren't sure if I act in this way am I going to get joyful caregiver am I going to get joyful dad joyful mom or am I going to get hostile cold shut down yelling parent and it almost didn't seem to matter which one you operated from right whether you were AC out or whether you were acting in

line whether you were misbehaving or you were behaving it didn't seem to matter and so it was very confusing because you could never get a consistent result from that parent and so an example of what this might look like in your modern-day relationship is that you might constantly seek reassurance or validation from your partner if you're the anxious person or if you're the partner you're constantly feeling like your partner is asking you for validation fearing that your partner's feelings or that their level of commitment closeness connection can change uh at the drop of a hat

can just change in a dime and this is mirroring the unpredictability that you experienced in childhood right so for a lot of anxious attachments this is a very primary driver of what creates that anxiety right it's this massive level of unpredictability so if you are an anxious attached person I'd love for you to just write down the question how was my upbringing unpredictable or where were my parents unpredictable uh as where were my caregivers unpredictable as parents and that might be unpredictable with their emotions unpredictable in when they would shut down unpredictable in when they

would punish you unpredictable with their moods but start to examine what role and this is a really good way of putting the question for you to journal on what role role did unpredictability play in my childhood and that's going to start to inform you as to how that anxiety started to form in the first place this is this is talking about like the roots of your anxious attachment so start to dig in that question because the likelihood that it's showing up in your current day relationship or if you're single in your previous relationship is very

very high and it might look like you you over texting uh it might look like you oversharing it might look like you constantly checking in to make sure that what you think your partner is feeling or thinking is right that's a very big one for a lot of anxious attachments not just this one but there's this need for the anxious attached person the the anxious person to constantly verify are you thinking what I think you're thinking are you feeling what I think you're feeling because if I can get that right then maybe there's a chance

that I'm okay that I'm safe that my needs are being met or can be met and so there's this external validation or verification that is constantly going on within the anxious attached person and you need in order to uproot that you need to start to identify where did that actually begin where as a child did you actually need to constantly verify where your parent was at where your caregiver was at and where were you where were you trying to overcome uncertainty as a child so that's number one number two is overly intrusive or overbearing caretakers

now this is another interesting one because there are caregivers who are very intrusive or overly involved in a child's life I think modern day commentary calls it like helicopter parenting right where they are swooping in at every drop of a hat right and they're constantly worried about whether or not a child is going to get hurt and these caregivers do often do not allow the child to develop a sense of agency sovereignty or Independence and there's this dependency that's created between the child and the caregiver you may have had a parent who was constantly checking

in on you you may have had a parent who didn't let you take any risks whatsoever you know they were constantly worried like oh don't touch that oh don't do that oh don't jump off of that oh oh yeah we we just don't do that oh I'm sorry and so there's this constant sort of wet blanket that's been put on top of you and they're intruding into your ability to take risks now when this happens it creates a ner service system within you as a child that says the world's scary the world's dangerous it's not

okay for me to take risks and this is the big one you end up Outsourcing that risk profile that psychological skill of being able to identify what risks are okay and what risks are not okay you end up Outsourcing that to the authority of your parent now this is the really really big piece if that happened to you in your childhood that's likely going to carry on in your adult relationships and so what these types of people uh have happened if this is you or if you're with somebody like this they end up or you

end up Outsourcing your inner Authority for risk-taking and risk management onto your partner so there's a constant fear of I don't know if I can do that I don't know if I should do that and you are are you're you're constantly looking to your partner to help you decide whether or not you should take a risk whether or not it's okay for you to step out of your comfort zone or you know push a boundary or what whatever there may be now on the other side of this because that's the sort of overly intrusive part

and that can also be overbearing you may have had a parent that demanded to know everything in your life like every and they were constantly or they were constantly oversharing about their life right all the details and information that you wanted to know nothing about you're sort of acting as like their best friend uh or their counselor or their therapist in some capacity and they're telling you information that you should not know you know you shouldn't know as a child or when you look back you're like that was really strange that they were talking to

me about the divorce or they were talking to me about their dating and you know know the guy that they were with or the woman that they were with um and so that type of intrusiveness is what we call penetrative okay so it penetrates and pushes through your boundaries as a child and that intrusiveness puts you puts you in a position where you are acting as an adult role that you should not be in at all and for a child that's incredibly anxiety provoking it produces anxiety Within child because suddenly they're not in this taken

care of position they are in a position where it becomes apparent to them that their parent is no longer protecting them no longer providing safety for them and is sharing information with them that they should not know and it can feel like closeness at first but then it can feel very overburdening um at another point and then finally is the point where a parent is you know very intrusive and overbearing about your life they're going through your Journal they's going through your room they're listening in on your phone calls they're you know uh intrusively asking

people that you date in junior high or high school about you know everything about the relationship and so they're really invasive into your world and it feels like you have no privacy it feels like you have um no no sovereignty and and so any type of private y gets broken down and how that shows up in a relationship is that you feel like you have to share everything all the time and there's an anxiousness that starts to show up that says if I don't tell you everything that's happening inside of me if you don't know

everything that's happening in my life then our relationship is going to be in Jeopardy something will happen something bad will happen because the likelihood that your parent or your caregiver that was intrusive uh punished you for not telling them things is very very high they probably punished you when you tried to set boundaries when you tried to have some type of Independence or sovereignty so how all of this can show up there's a myriad of ways that this can show up within your current de relationships but usually individuals have a hard time giving their partner

space so you end up going into the role of being overbearing of being intrusive and you fear abandonment right because what you're used to is this very intrusive Dynamic where uh somebody who loved you was intruding and penetrating through your boundaries and so you be you end up becoming somebody who does the same thing in relationships so you're going through your partner's phone you're reading through their Journal you're checking through their emails you know you're constantly you you know needing to check in on them about everything how they're feeling what they're doing Etc and you're

you become that quote unquote wet blanket for lack of a better term that starts to smother their life and smother their sense of Independence and that's largely because there's a fear that if you allow your partner to have Independence it'll create too much separation and too much space so that's number two number three is emotional dependence encouraged by caregivers I'm going to just try and condense this down essentially some care givers will directly or indirectly consciously or unconsciously encourage a child to remain dependent on them for some type of support whether it's emotional support psychological

support financial support and this is often due to the caregiver's own insecurities and so this parent might try and keep you dependent on them and this can create anxiety because again what happens is that it doesn't allow the child to really mature and learn how to do some of the things that they know they need to do as an adult and it can be very crippling so things like doing your taxes uh creating a resume you know just basic things that you that you need to be able to do as a human being to function

in our society that parent will often times have created a dependency where you need them to do all these things whether it's talk about your emotional process what you're feeling how what's going on in the relationship ship um and and this could really be by guilting you this is a a really big thing when it comes to emotional dependency encouraged by caregivers within this category these types of caregivers will have guilted the crap out of you as a child there's just no way around it they will have leveraged guilt and shame to keep you close

and to try and maintain that dependency and there's there sort of like unique need me in order to function and be okay and survive you cannot be independent you cannot be Sovereign you cannot have your own independence uh you need me and without me you will not be okay in the world and so what happens for these types of folks if you grew up with a parent like that who created this type of dependency you'll get into relationship with people and you will you will begin to be clingy this is where the uh and this

isn't to hate on anybody this is just to crack a joke and make some of this like cuz this should still be fun right everything we're talking about should still be fun uh this is where the like stage five cleaner comes from right generally kids that had a parent or a caregiver that created this type of real strong dependency will turn into the really clingy dependent person in the relationship where you know you as the anxious person looks to have the partner f fill all of your emotional needs and usually this is where the the

codependency shows up you might be constantly demanding your partner to open up and share things with you constantly um you might reinforce with them like you'll never do better than me or you need me so that that um that experience that you had as a kid starts to manifest in your relationship or vice versa right you might feel like oh my God I can never live without you my life can't function without you I need you in my life you know this sort of world is ending catastrophic thing when your partner doesn't text back or

they don't want to talk about the deep emotional thing or they don't want to have the conversation and it can spin you out emotionally and disregulated you internally next and there's only there's only two more so I'm going to make these brief next is um the parental unavailability or absence or rejection or neglect right so that's kind of a big category or bucket but unavailability absence neglect or rejection so you may have had a caregiver who was an addict and when an you know there's a saying in addiction that addiction is choosing one thing over

everything else and so often times what happens for children that grow up around a parent who has a substance abuse problem is they always feel second and they feel a lot of anxiety because they feel a deep level of rejection of neglect because that parent is constantly choosing something else above them they're constantly choosing alcohol or some substance right whether it's gambling or whatever it is but they're choosing something else above them and that produces this shame internally within the child but it also produces this anxiousness of I'm not not okay how do I figure

out how to help you how do I figure out how to solve this so that I can get my needs met so that we can be in a secure attachment together so that we can have a healthy attachment so just notice that all the examples that I've given you are for lack of a better term their broken attachments between the caregiver and the child um another way of putting it is that they there are um impasses or uh interruptions to the attachment between the caregiver and a child that are that are quite severe that cause

uh questioning within the child so you can grow up with a parent who is rejecting who nothing's ever good enough for them they're sort of like the perfectionist parent might be you know they have mental health issues and you don't know what you're going to get or they're very harsh they're abusive um they refuse to talk to you about certain things and you know neglect you you make it very clear what you need and want they're not capable of showing up for you you know they say they're going to be at the game and then

they don't show up they say they're going to be at the school event and then they're not there and so there's this constant level of anxiousness and shame within you as a child that as you get into adult relationships starts to permeate the relationships where you're constantly worried and anxious about whether or not you're going to be good enough the other person is going to show up for you and there's this very deep anxiety of are you going to love me are you going to stay are you going to be consistent are you going to

neglect me or abandon me again last but not least is abuse trauma or PTSD uh so some people that have experienced abuse uh or had traumatic events show up will have a very anxious attachment and that anxiety is often times linked to the trauma so whether it's sexual abuse or physical abuse or verbal abuse there's an anxiety that when things start to get intense in any way shape or form in the relationship there's an anxiousness that will start to show up and that those two things are connected usually for the person that um has an

anxious attachment and has experienced some type of abuse or trauma that when things start to get in any kind of intensity whether it's anger whether it's the intensity of love and connection will start to produce this very anxious um stirring within the individual and so they might ask if everything's okay constantly they might have that hypervigilance externally that we talked about before so what do we do let's close this out with talking about how do we end anxious attachment and how do we become more secure now at the base of all this I'm going to

circle back to the very beginning at the base of of the anxious attachment is the simple experience of if you're not okay I'm not okay and so I need you to be okay in order for me to be okay now this is the opposite of the avoidant and this is really important to understand I'm going to do a whole separate video on how to work with the anxious and avoidant relationship because it's it's often times an anxious person and an avoidant person will get into a relationship and it's very iotic and it's very hard to

manage I'm going to do a whole separate video on that cuz it needs that so just know that that's coming but this is opposite of the avoidant who says I don't need anyone to be okay I don't need you to be okay or trusting others will only get in the way of me being okay and this is what creates the real big fire between the anxious attachment and the avoidant attachment right I need you to be okay from the anxious it in order for me to be okay and I don't need you in order to

be okay and so one's constantly trying to pull away and the other one's constantly trying to get very close and it creates a lot of tension and even if the one person is secure uh for the anxious person that I need you to be okay can create this disruption even if you are a secure person it can create this disruption within a lot of people that are secure depending on the level of anxious attachment that their person has that says am I all right am I okay like should I be talking about these things because

the anxious can sometimes be so overbearing and so questioning and so externally focused and hypervigilant on the secure partner that it can start to make them question whether or not they are okay whether or not they are secure you know whether or not they should be talking about those things or it can just be tiring and exhausting right so um that's the experience that a lot of people will have when it when it's you know being with an anxious partner so all this is important because while the avoidant needs to repair the pain of not

being able to trust someone not being able to rely on others um and and to actually lean into building that trust and that connection with them the anxious actually needs to repair the trust and and ability to trust the self right the trust within themselves so whereas the avoidant it's not so much like I need to trust me it's I need to lean into feeling safe trusting you that it's okay to trust you and for the anxious it's I need to learn how to trust myself because again underneath all of this is the feeling of

I'm not okay if you're not I'm not you know I can't ask for my needs if your needs aren't already already met so the anxious attachment needs to trust that they can make good decisions and choices they have to trust that they can produce safety within themselves and their lives that without being punished or hurt or any of those other things from from the outside world from a parent or a caregiver or a partner and the anxious person needs to do one thing and so I'm going to give you some tactical things that are really

important to move out of anxious attachment so this is the big this is the big uh finale here so number one for the anxious person is being able to learn self-regulation techniques learning how to regulate yourself because anxiety is just the body going off the alarm system in the body going off saying something is wrong and because the majority of anxious attached people have gone through circumstances in their childhood that taught them to set off the alarm system even if nothing's wrong right it's like I remember in school people used to pull the fire alarm

even though there was no fire right in like Elementary it was like this funny thing I think I did it once got in a lot of trouble but that's neither here nor there um so that's what anxiety is like the fire alarms going off but there's no fire the alarm in the body is going off but there's nothing actually wrong WR and so an anxious person needs to learn how to use the breath to what's called down regulate the body and maybe I can do another separate video on on going deeper into some of these

pieces but you need to learn to use the breath to downregulate the body because when anxiety happens your body is in a stress state so when you look at the brain um under uh M MRIs or fmis when you look at the brain and what's happening in the brain when you're stressed versus when you're anxious it's almost identical they look it looks quite similar so your brain is when you're anxious producing cortisol and adrenaline and it's putting your body into a stress response and you're in this fight flight or freeze mode your breath rate per

minute starts to spike so the more anxious you feel the more that you start to breathe quickly which is why when people have a panic attack they hyperventilate right because their breathing goes complet out of control and interesting fact the reason why they tell you to use a paper bag or this is the old way of doing it they you know you'd have to breathe into a paper bag is that the the faster you breathe the more you oxygenate your your blood system and you reduce the CO2 you actually reduce the carbon dioxide in your

body and that's what creates this sort of Li headedness effect and so by breathing into a bag you're actually you actually force your system you force your body to intake CO2 to intake carbon dioxide uh because you're breathing into this bag and you're breathing out CO2 and then you're breathing it back in and then it starts to level off uh the amount of CO2 in your body there are other ways to deal with panic attacks but that's for a different uh piece so learn how to regulate your body you have to learn how to use

the breath big big big piece if you are an anxious person check in with your breath as often as possible and do a couple things number one one is slow it down slow it down okay so number two is breathe in and out through the nose as often as you can I'm a little congested right now but here we go so deepening the inhale and extending the exhale letting the exhale be longer than the inhale okay really big piece and as often as you can throughout the day just start to get in the habit if

you're an anxious person start to get get into the habit of just checking in with yourself how's my breathing deepen the inhale and extend the exhale and as you do that a couple of things are going to happen number one by extending the exhale and letting the exhale be longer than the inhale you are going to force your breath rate per minute down meaning that you're going to take less breaths per minute which in turn is going to force your heart rate to lower so the more breaths you take per minute the higher heart rate

the lower the breaths per minute the lower the heart rate and as you lower your breath rate and you lower your heart rate you move your body out of the anxious State out of the stress State and into what's called more of a parasympathetic dominant state or more of a calm rest and digest state so learn to use the breath also with anxiety is it's very common that an anxiety anxious people have an abundance of energy in their body and so you're probably somebody that has a lot of energy in your body and a good

analogy that I heard for people is um and I experienced this too when I was dealing with anxiety in my life was it felt like everything on the outside of my body was going really quickly but everything on the inside felt like sludge right so like I kind of felt tired on the inside but I was like buzzing on the outside so learning how to work with your own energy like where are your energy levels at it's very common that anxious people feel a lot right up in here so there's a lot of focus and

attention on the head on the energy in the head and then straight down in the middle of the chest uh for a lot of people can feel like um I don't know like there's this like opening right here and there's a lot happening in the neck and in the front of the chest you might feel stuff in your hands and your feet as well um but learning how to slow down the energy and slow down the thoughts in the body are very very very important you can use box breathing so that's inhaling for four pausing

for four exhaling for four pausing for four that's a good exercise or you can use the 46 technique which is inhaling for four through the nose pausing at the top for two and exhaling out the mouth for six and pausing for two and if you do this for a couple minutes it will quote unquote downregulate your body your nervous system and put you into a more relaxed state so if you're wanting more techniques like this comment on the video below if you're watching this on YouTube or hit me up on Instagram and let me know

and I can do more techniques uh that will help you to downregulate and regulate your nervous system because again as the anxious person that is the biggest piece most most anxious people have outsourced the regulation of their nervous systems and their bodies to a partner and that again is usually not their fault it's usually something that they were conditioned to do in their childhood right so if you're an anxious attached person watching listening to this you learned to Outsource your sense of safety and your sense of Regulation to someone else and the biggest piece of

healing anxious attach M and becoming secure is reclaiming your ability and the skill because it is a skill but reclaiming your ability and the skill to regulate your mind and your body by using your breath okay big big big piece number two is exposure therapy I have a joke that there's a reason why trigger warnings don't work but that's a that's a different piece uh but usually it's because when we are trying to avoid the hard things that cause us anxiety it produces more anxiety right it's like the worst thing that you can do for

yourself when you're feeling anxious is to say oh no I'm feeling anxious I don't want to feel this way I shouldn't feel this way that produces more anxiety it becomes cyclical and we get stuck in that thing so you need to actually uh try and lean into what's called exposure therapy meaning the things that give you anxiety I want you to start to move towards so if having a hard conversation would produce anxiety with your partner that's something that you can start to move towards if not texting them every hour or not texting them after

an argument would produce anxiety I want you to move towards that you have to actively move towards the things and I'm not saying you know give yourself a panic attack okay I'm just making myself very clear but what I am saying is that you have to expose yourself and this is proven time and time again to work right like if you have a phobia if you are you know really afraid of spiders one of or elevators or escalators or whatever it is one of the shest ways to end that phobia is to slowly expose yourself

to the thing that you're afraid of to the thing that causes you Terror and fear and anxiousness and so for the anxious person usually it's security within the self usually it's not looking to the other person to reaffirm that you're okay or that the relationship's okay you know that the world's not going to fall apart Etc usually it's that and so you have to start to move towards that of like okay normally I would text him or her after a conflict and so I'm going to expose myself to what it feels like to not do

that now you might want some support to do this whether it's a coach a therapist a psychologist a counselor a really good friend but you are probably G to want some accountability as you walk through this part but expose yourself to the things that you were afraid of and use the regulation in that moment number three is work on your sense of self-esteem and self-worth for the majority of anxious people because of the experiences that they had growing up their sense of self-worth and self-esteem has again been outsourced it's been outsourced because your sense of

worth and value and safety was externalized because of the circumstances that we talked about before in this video right your sense of worth value and safety was externalized and so you have to start to work on reclaiming that sense of I am valuable I I have a sense of self-esteem and how you do that is you start to validate and appreciate yourself rather than seeking this constant external validation and appreciation of who you are and what you do you start to develop a system internally so that might mean that you keep a journal you keep

a gratitude Journal uh one of the things that I found to be very helpful is instead of just saying I'm grateful for this or I appreciate myself for that I I wrote down when I I went through about 9 to 10 months of self-esteem journaling and one of the things that I found super helpful was I wrote down the question what I want to validate myself for is and then I had followed up with two things it's important because this is important because and how it makes me feel is so you have to intellectually anchor

in the Gratitude and you have to attach an emotion or a feeling to the Gratitude so you can say what I want to validate myself for is I'm grateful because um you can say I want want to acknowledge myself for that's another really good prompt for your gratitude journaling and then always follow it up with this is important because and how it makes me feel is because you want to intellectually have a reason why your brain can say actually yeah that is very important and then you want to have an emotional anchoring to say yeah

I feel that within me I feel that appreciation I feel that validation next and last but not least is detaching worth and safety from others validation detaching worth and safety from others validation Jung said you cannot heal what you cannot separate from or what you cannot separate from you cannot heal and so if we're not willing to create some separation from a partner from the normal routines that would spin up our anxiety it's going to be impossible for us to heal so we have to learn the art of healthy detachment healthy Detachment not swinging the

pendulum all the way to the end of the spectrum where we become avoidant but just moving into a place where we can say okay I'm going to disconnect from from the neediness that I'm feeling or I'm going to disconnect I'm going to start to just detach a little bit from the need to text bomb them right now or the need to follow up or I'm going to just detach a little bit from the need that I feel to check in on them right it's like I already checked in on them twice today I'm going to

disconnect from that from that a little bit and just start to pull back and then in that space when we again when we start to detach a little bit we have room to validate ourselves we have room to regulate ourselves we have room to expose ourselves to anything that might come up the stories the anxiousness ETC so those are the four big big pieces when it comes to helping you heal anxious attachment there's a couple other pieces I'm going to share at a later time but comment below let me know what you thought about this

man It Forward share this episode with somebody that you know needs to hear it and by all means listen to this with a partner you know if you are somebody that is anxious listen to this with a partner if you are with somebody that's anxious listen to this with them actually allow yourself to go through some of this work if you are in a relationship but if you're not that's okay this might be something you know that you send to a friend who's also identified that they have an anxious attachment and you go through with

them um but go through this work with somebody else so thank you so much for tuning in let me know your thoughts on this and until next week this is Connor Beaton signing [Music] off