hey guys I'm Heidi Priebe welcome back to my Channel or welcome if you're new here on this channel we talk about attachment Theory and in general how we can work with our own patterning to help us have healthier better lives and relationships so today I want to kick off a series about the types of mistakes or the types of cognitive errors that each attachment style each insecure attachment style that is tends to make repetitively in relationships that can keep you feeling like you're kind of going in circles so I think that the first thing to
note here is that everybody of every attachment Style no matter how much this doesn't seem to be true tends to get out of a relationship and do some reflection right like they'll look at what did I not do well what made that relationship go the way it did and how can I make sure that I'm not repeating those same patterns in future relationships and then what happens you get into another relationship it seems very different on the surface and then six months or two years down the road you're right back in the same situation repeating
the same old patterns and I think that the reason this happens for every attachment style it's going to be different in its expression but the same in its structural problem so the structural problem here is that most of us when we go to make changes tend to double down on our strengths instead of tending to what is in our blind spots and when we do this especially when it comes to relationship patterns it's kind of like riding a try bicycle with one wheel that's completely deflated and another wheel that's kind of half pumped up and
so we're going okay I remember what I did to get the air into that tire and it was better when I put the air in that tire right so now if I can just inflate it the rest of the way then I'm going to be able to smoothly shift my life in my relationships in the direction that I want them to go in the problem is that that totally deflated wheel is what's in your blind spot so you can inflate that other wheel you can get really good at your strengths but until you are balancing
out your strengths with the opposite and equally important skill you're just gonna get on that tricycle and go perpetually in circles right so this video is about drawing your awareness if you have an avoidant attachment style to what it is that's in your blind spot and how you can start working with it in order to get off that Merry-Go-Round of unhealthy relationships or unhealthy friendships or frustrating work situations whatever it is your life that you feel like is interpersonally going in circles we're going to tackle through this video so first I want to start off
with talking about what that area of strength is for those who have avoidant attachment Styles so what is that wheel that you are trying perpetually to inflate more and more and more because you see that you're getting some benefit out of it so those who have avoidant attachment Styles learned from a very young age that processing emotional pain was not as important as understanding why things happened the way they did so you learn to rely very heavily from a very young age on cause and effect or if then thinking right you learn to analyze sequences
of events and understand what led to what in order to produce what outcome and this is probably still the same type of reasoning that you use to try to understand what happens in your relationships and how you can have better relationships so you might get out of a bad situation and go okay I remember all of these fights that we had all of these conflicts that cropped up all of these ways that things happened what can I do to make sure that that sequence of events does not repeat itself in my next relationship and what
you're going to be naturally inclined to do is to kind of review the sequence of your relationship almost like it's a movie or like it is a clinical video you have been assigned to watch and make sense out of and so you'll go back over the relationship in your head and be like okay these types of interactions tended to lead to these types of fights when I would do this my partner would do this and you can get really good at identifying these behavioral patterns including what your inciting role was in those behavioral patterns so
what you did that would lead to a certain counter response in your partner and you can actually take this so far as to go okay now that I understand what happened the way it happened I could even go back to that same relationship and I bet I could do it better and that can be a worm that gets in your brain if not with that particular person but with the next person like you can get so enamored with your own analyzes that it can almost feel like okay now I'm excited to go back and try
again and see if changing my Approach and doing things differently in this specific way is going to work now is this a bad thing no that is a phenomenal skill right it's really really important in relation to understand sequencing and pattern recognition and knowing which things lead to which other things you absolutely need and should never lose that skill secure people use that skill all the time but the problem is that if you cannot balance out that skill with an awareness of your own emotional responses to those situations you're going to get stuck in these
Loops because it is our emotional responses that help us make Intelligent Decisions so there have been many cases throughout the history of psychology where people experience significant brain damage in areas of their brain that are heavily related to emotion processing and one of the biggest problems if that happens is that these people become incapable of making decisions because in order to make good decisions or any decisions at all we have to be in touch with our emotional state right and this completely applies to logical decisions like let's say I decide that I want to save
a very significant portion of my take-home income every month and put it into a retirement savings account and in order to do that I have to give up a lot of things that I want and that might be what I associate with my kind of impulsive emotional state right like I can't just order food whenever I want it I can't just go on vacation whenever I want to I'm making The Logical decision to handle my money responsibly but what's really motivating that what's really motivating that is I like the feeling of knowing that I have
some security for myself later in life it allows me to relax it allows my nervous system to regulate better because I'm no longer feeling chronically stressed about what's going to happen in my retirement so I might not be using impulsive emotion to make decisions but I am using emotion I want to have the feeling of security and stability now here's where attachment style comes into play here at a very young age those using dismissive avoidant attachment strategies learned that it's not that important to focus on negative emotion so in non-attachment related Realms you can easily
use negative emotion to make decisions right it felt bad when I knew that I had no savings so I'm going to start piling up some savings but in attachment relationships you learned very early on that when you were to focus on and really get loud about expressing your negative emotions it probably meant you would either get rejected or you would not get what you want or you would even get punished in some situations if it worked for you you would have done it you would have cried more you would have tugged on your parents sleeves
more you would have made more of a Ruckus about when you weren't feeling good if you got caregiving in return from that but because some part of that did not work for you at an early age you learned instead to notice patterns notice event sequencing and understand how to get what you wanted via paying attention to what happened when and again good skill secure people use it all the time but secure people also know how to be present with absorb and learn from negative emotion and this is your greatest blind spot because it's not like
you have all of this negative emotion that you're just shoving down and purposefully avoiding or ignoring right that is the totally uninformed stereotype that I think a lot of people have about dismissive avoidance your pain is not something you're hiding from other people it's something your brain is hiding from you when you have emotional pain as a dismissive avoidant when it is in your conscious awareness you tend to be just as willing as the next person at least the next secure person to process and work through that but the ways in which you are in
pain in your relationships often are not apparent to you because your brain has learned to cover it up with frustration and contempt so instead of feeling wounded or feeling hurt when something painful happens to you your brain has developed this defense mechanism of going okay this person who did that thing to me who said that cruel thing to me was not thinking logically or clearly and I can Comfort myself with the fact that I know better than them and this leads you into a lot of relationships where you end up let's say getting accused of
things a lot or having people blow up on you a lot and the way that you protect yourself from feeling the pain is by going this doesn't matter to me because the things this person are expressing are a logical irrational and I don't need to pay attention to them now it's not that you're wrong in this sense it is likely that you're dealing with people who have emotional dysregulation issues because insecurely attached people tend to get together right but the problem is that you get stuck in these Cycles because you are not being present with
and processing the pain that these Cycles are causing you so sometimes the way that I like to explain dismissive avoidant attachment to other people especially if you're coming from a more preoccupied mindset it's like imagine that every night when you go to sleep this little man breaks into your room and he sticks a syringe into your head and extracts like 70 percent of the pain from your memories so as soon as you're not in a situation that is activating and that's causing you to become frustrated overwhelmed distressed it's like your brain kind of just neutralizes
the memory in your own head because you learned it's not important to focus on the negative right it's not important to keep the memory of negative events super strong in your mind and in fact it's often adaptive to do the opposite and to kind of take the emotional charge out of your memories without realizing you're doing that so that you can get better at analyzing them and figuring out the sequence of events that you might not have noticed transpiring in the moment because you are distracted in the Moment by being in a heightened emotional state
now the problem is when you go back over these memories in a more regulated State what you're not keeping active in your awareness is how emotionally activated you were at the time of all of this going down and so what you're not factoring in for the future is the fact that you will once again become emotionally activated it in these situations and this will give way to the situation playing out differently than you might expect while you're sitting there thinking about it right now now of course you do not get emotionally activated the same way
let's say an anxious preoccupied person does so you might not be yelling and screaming but what your activation might look like or deactivation in attachment terms is looking at this person and being unable to really hear or listen to what they're saying because that defensive side of you is coming up and going this doesn't make sense I need to point out all of the ways in which this doesn't make sense because in the past being able to do that was what kept me safe right but in this situation it's going to just polarize you and
your partner so if you're not accounting for your deactivation in that high stress moment you're not going to be able to carry through the plan that you had maybe identified when you were analyzing what went wrong in the past so this kind of reminds me of the show The Rehearsal by Nathan Fielder who's a comedian very like morally a questionable show but very entertaining where basically he gets people to rehearse interpersonal interactions they're going to have with people in their lives that they think are going to be difficult or might not go well and in
the first episode of the show he has this guy who he runs through like all of these iterations of how this difficult conversation he needs to have might go in the future but he forgets to prepare him for the emotional side of things for the fact that in that situation this man is going to experience a heightened emotional response so then he does all these elaborate things to get the rehearsal to try to match the stakes that the person's going to be in emotionally at the time that they're having this conversation but the point here
is that this is also often your error if you have an avoidant attachment style is you're not factoring in what the emotion of the moment is going to be doing to your attachment system and what defenses are going to be popping up for you as a consequence of that and the biggest problem with your own defense system is that it Shields you from feeling the pain of what is happening to you in the moment right so when your partner is dysregulated they're yelling at you maybe they're saying nasty things about your character it's unlikely that
you are feeling the pain of that what's likely is that your defensive and dismissing them either out loud or inside of your own mind and the problem is that because the pain of the situation is not really getting through your defense wall you're unable to learn the important lesson that this type of situation is painful and ought to be avoided because unfortunately your emotional system can be impacted even by things that don't in theory on the surface make sense now I have historically aired avoidant on the attachment spectrum and this has by far been one
of my biggest and most frequent mistakes is thinking that I can go back into these high pressure situations with a better more logical plan and have it turn out differently not accounting for what it feels like in the moment and so the last time I had a really high pressure emotional situation that I felt was unwarranted I felt the other person was being ridiculous unreasonable disregulated I didn't have to listen to what they were saying because what they were saying was not coming from a rational place and I chose to try something different and go
okay I'm gonna picture myself and my avoidant defenses that I feel coming online right now in the form of me criticizing this person in my head as kind of like fists that I'm putting up right like I'm now kind of psychologically like this and nothing they say is going to really get through to me because I'm ready for an attack and then I pictured myself taking those fists psychologically and just completely letting them drop away and just get hit by this person like just take everything they're saying is like blow to the face blow to
the stomach blow to the side right and I walked away from the interaction being like I feel beat up psychologically like I just let this person take a whole bunch of hits at me and yeah it hurt like they were being unreasonable I don't believe that what they were saying was true but it is hurtful to me that somebody said that to me anyways somebody I love and care about was that disrespectful to me that hurts even if what they're saying is not true it hurts and that was the first time I felt like I
was ever actually able to see that situation for what it was emotionally it was the first time I was able to really notice the kind of blows that my inner child was taking when my adult self was out there with their fists up right I was still feeling all of the pain on some subtle felt level I just wasn't experiencing it consciously and the first time the very first time I ever actually allowed myself to stay present undefended and feel the pain come in of that interaction it was so clear to me where I needed
to draw my boundaries and I don't mean like avoidant boundaries I don't mean oh I need to back away and take some space I mean very clear very unquestionable very non-debatable boundaries because the thing about emotional pain is that it gives us with discernment if we don't know what hurts and what doesn't because we're never really allowing the pain in then we never learn what to do and not do we just decide I can bear anything I can get through anything so I will just accept any situation and then figure out how to logically maneuver
my way through it we are robbing ourselves of the ability to put ourselves in better situations by listening to our body and the pain that we are absorbing through unhealthy interactions and then we can put ourselves in situations that are actually healthy from the get-go and use both our logic and our emotional discernment skills to navigate better situations effectively all of this is to say you are really good at figuring out what leads to what and how to get through certain situations and how to strategize about your human interactions that is a great thing keep
that skill and balance it out as much as you can with learning to be present undefended and allow yourself to feel the pain consciously that you usually defend yourself against and that skill is going to be the thing that helps you finally set clear meaningful boundaries we need negative emotion to help us break Loops of bad behavior and start choosing different things and if you are blocking yourself off from all negative emotion that you believe is beneath you right so choosing that kind of high ground instead of leveling yourself out with the other person intentionally
and going when they hit me emotionally it hurts and allowing yourself to be kind of hit without defending yourself or coming back at them in some sort of passive aggressive way you're going to learn pretty quickly what situations you need to stop putting yourself in and then you are by default going to begin to choose better healthier situations just because you can figure out a way to navigate through these complex difficult situations does not mean you have to now there is a lot more to say on this I think I'm going to make a whole
other video on just avoidant attachment and the value of integrating pain as well as communicating pain to other people I think the single biggest hurdle I have had to face in my attachment healing journey is getting rid of the eye idea that it's useless to communicate any negative emotion to other people and learning that there actually are people out there I can learn from in an interactive way and who can give me something emotionally that will help me develop even if nobody out there understands my situation better than I do which is true but there
are people out there who can see my blind spots and I need to be able to capitalize on that if I want to actually grow in a way that is not just continuing to be more and more one-sided but for now this video is getting long so I'm going to cap it as always if you have any questions let me know in the comments let me know what you're thinking about what this does or doesn't bring up for you also as always I love you guys I hope you're taking care of yourselves and each other
and I will see you back here again really soon foreign [Music]
