[Applause] a few years ago my husband and i got road bikes so that we would have something to do together but what i noticed is on these road bike dates i wasn't very happy now when i rode by myself i felt scared but empowered in fact i was often singing i'm bad i'm bad i know it as i rode along but when i was getting ready to go on a road bike date with my husband i was cranky before we even left the house now it's important to know that jordan had been mountain biking for
years and he was a lot stronger than me so how these dates would typically go is that we'd start off and he's up ahead riding with ease and i'm in the back struggling to keep up and already not having fun and my feelings of irritation would just intensify as we begin climbing those first hills and he's way up ahead standing up on his bike grinding it out this cute little spandex butt and i'm down at the bottom grumbling and he'd often stop to wait for me at the top of the hill all chipper and then
i'd unleash my fury if i was at my worst i'd angrily complain things like it's hot it's cloudy my butt hurts i hate this i'm a super fun date but one day i decided to do something different i put on what i think of as my attachment hat that's basically like putting on your thinking cap but i analyzed how i was feeling from an attachment theory perspective and i managed to share something with jordan that brought us together rather than pushed us apart so more on what i said soon but first i want to help
you learn how to put on your attachment hat now if you're new to this attachment business it's basically just about the bonding that we have in our close ongoing relationships and i've been teaching students and couples about attachment for over 15 years in my roles as a university professor and relationship educator i'm drawing on the work of so many amazing attachment researchers what i'm going to be talking about is mainly about romantic relationships but you can apply it to friends and family as well i do have to warn you though attachments tends to stir us
up it makes us feel uncomfortable vulnerable hot around the collar maybe a little queasy in the stomach you might want to escape the room but i promise you're not alone in this feeling we all have to deal with this attachment business together so what do you need to know to put on your attachment hat five principles number one it's important to know that neurobiologically our attachment systems and our fear systems are intertwined and that's across our lifespans so let's imagine i experience a threat i get some negative feedback at my job and so my fear
system fires up and it says danger danger you are in trouble and stress hormones are released if during this time i reach out to someone who's a secure attachment figure for me like my husband jordan and i say oh my gosh i'm gonna lose my job he might say okay that sounds really really tough honey but it's probably not as bad as you think it is and if it is we'll figure it out together so now my attachment system is turned on it helps calm and down regulate my fear system that's pretty straightforward but what
if i call my husband jordan and he doesn't give me what i want what if he says honey you are always making a big deal out of nothing and i'm in the middle of something so let's talk about this later now i'm in a bind because the person who i needed to call my fear system is just amping it up and this is one of the things that makes our romantic relationships so hard and it ties to what bex and cone call the distress relief dynamic so i turn to you when i'm in distress you
give me some support i experience some relief and we repeat it it's pretty straightforward and it's the making of a secure attachment in any relationship but it's harder than it looks so if we think back to me on the bike i was in distress but i wasn't expressing that in a way that was going to get me the support and the relief that i needed so principle number one is that our fear and our attachment systems are intertwined principle number two is that our childhoods do affect our adult attachment experiences we didn't get to choose
as kids how well our distress was relieved or how secure attachment that we had and it may have changed over the course of our childhoods john bulby's work on internal working models tells us that in our earliest relationships we form internal working models of ourselves and others and if our caregivers were mostly safe and responsive then these models of ourselves and others are pretty positive but we all struggle in some way with our internal working models these are the basic attachment fears am i good enough am i lovable can i count on you can you
handle me and we carry these fears into our current relationships and sometimes they become self-fulfilling prophecies so back to me on the bike when i put on my attachment hat i was thinking a lot about my childhood fear of not being good enough and how that was tying into my current fear of not being fast enough to ride with jordan but this was leading me to come across as angry and irritable which was just gonna push jordan away and confirm for me that i wasn't good enough so principle number two is about how we carry
our fears into our current relationships in different ways principle number three is that our attachment styles can vary so now we're getting to what you really want to know what are the attachment styles and what's yours so when we are in distress and our attachment needs are not being met we have two choices we can either amp up which is higher attachment related anxiety or we can tamp down which is higher attachment related avoidance so when i am at my best i'm more secure when i'm at my worst i'm a more anxious and these four
attachment styles were originally developed by mary ainsworth so let's go through them one at a time starting with anxious so if we are higher on attachment related anxiety then in our dating relationships we can be worried about being rejected we can come across as a little too much in the beginning we can over share we can be hyper vigilant to our partner's cues in ongoing relationships you look a lot more excited to ride your bike with dave than you do with me what's that mean and when we're upset we ruminate we spin in our heads
and we can maximize our distress when we're upset you know it back to me on the bike we both knew i was angry but what if you're someone who tends to minimize rather than maximize your distress then we are higher on attachment related avoidance and so in our dating relationships we don't disclose as much about ourselves early on we come across as more aloof or game plane in conflicts we want to get out of there and we tend to minimize our distress and distract ourselves with tasks so my husband jordan has higher related avoidance and
what this might look like is it'll be a thursday and he'll say to me you know on monday i was really upset about such and such and i'm thinking okay i was with you on monday and i couldn't tell you were upset and number two why didn't you tell me on monday because but jordan has learned to cope with the stress by sort of ignoring it for a while and so it can take him a little while to realize what's going on whereas it takes me like 15 seconds this is why i love to ask
jordan's scaling questions on a scale of one to ten how upset are you because otherwise i can't tell now what if we're someone who's higher on both we've got more attachment related anxiety and more attachment related avoidance this is called the fearful avoidant attachment style this can happen for us when the people that were supposed to be safe that we were supposed to be able to rely on growing up just weren't that that predictable and maybe they weren't that safe and so now we're in this position of really longing for connection but feeling like it
could be dangerous and so we do higher amounts of both we move towards and then we pull away now we're on to our fourth and final attachment style secure this is like the how-to of relationships what we're all going for right um and it's when we have lower attachment related anxiety and avoidance because we all have some so people who are more secure in their dating relationships they're able to take it seriously but they're not holding on to it so tight that they think they're gonna die if their relationship ends and this was a personal
favorite and a life lesson for me since i tend to be an over sharer people who are more secure regulate their disclosures based on how much the other person is sharing in their ongoing relationships they're better able to give their partners the benefit of the doubt if you're tired or distracted that doesn't mean that you don't care about me and in conflict they're more out to understand than they are out to win so let's talk more about how these attachment styles lead into our conflict patterns so principle number four is that attachment underlies conflict so
therapist and researcher sue johnson helped us understand how attachment related anxiety and avoidance feed into a very common pattern of conflict in couples called the pursue withdrawal pattern so in my own marriage i tend to be the pursuer because i have higher attachment related anxiety than my husband and he tends to be the avoider or the withdrawal because he has higher attachment related avoidance than me but let's talk about a different couple let's talk about maya and gabby so a little background maya has higher attachment anxiety and she's learned to amp up to get heard
gabby has higher attachment avoidance she's learned to cope with the stress by putting her head down and working which she's really good at so gabby's working late and maya's home lonely and getting increasingly irritable by the time gabby comes home maya criticizes her you're always late gabby defends herself it's not all the time and it's just this temporary project it'll be over soon but as soon as one person minimizes another person maximizes so maya makes her case louder better and gabby starts to get overwhelmed she feels like okay whatever i'm saying is making it worse
so i'm just going to shut down and distract myself with tasks and then gabby's left feeling like maya doesn't care and this cycle will repeat itself maybe on another day with a different topic it also shows us four important things about the four principles of attachment that we've talked about so far so it helps us understand that number one attachment is intertwined with the stress it shows us what it looks like when that distress relief dynamic isn't working so both maya and gabby are in distress but they're unable to re to help each other number
two it shows us how our childhood fears can play out in our current ongoing conflicts right our fears that we aren't good enough and that we can't rely on the other person number three it shows us how that attachment related anxiety and avoidance can feed into a pursue withdrawal conflict cycle and number four and perhaps most important it shows us that a lot of times couples think they're fighting about someone coming home late or chores but what they're really fighting about is do you see me do you value me do you need me can i
count on you and until that gets addressed and articulated they're unlikely to be able to resolve the conflict so what do we do about this we can begin to talk and think about our attachment styles so principle number five is that attachment is key to connection so we can explore our own attachment style as well as the attachment styles of the people that we're connected to we can watch for that pursue withdrawal pattern in our relationships and when we see it we can name it oh we did that thing again where i am up and
then you tamp down and i amp up some more and then you shut down and so once we name it then we can begin to change it and then the last one is we can take a risk and share our attachment needs and fears so if we go back to maya and gabby maya might have been able to say when you are late i'm worried that it's about me and gabby might have been able to say something like you know work is how i bring value and when you dismiss that i feel really unworthy here's
how i did it on the bike so i used all five principles i understood that i was in distress and i was going to need my husband jordan to reassure me number two i realized that my childhood fear of not being good enough was getting triggered and that was leading me to come across as the more anxious attachment style principle number three and that was going to just push jordan away in that pursuit withdrawal pattern principle number four and i used principle number five to take a risk and tell him what i was feeling and
this is what that sounded like when he waited for me at the top of the hill instead of unleashing my fury i said you know what honey i've been riding along here and feeling really cranky and i wasn't sure why and i realized it's because i'm worried that you don't really want to be out here with me that you wish you were writing with mike or dave somebody faster that i'm just too slow that you're not even getting a workout and jordan being the supportive person that he is was able to say it's okay that
you're slow [Laughter] i was slow [Laughter] i was slow once too and today isn't about getting a workout today's about being together do you want to lead because we can go at your pace and i said are you sure because we could just ride separately and meet back at the house and he said i'm sure so to wrap this up talking about attachment is scary it's uncomfortable we hate it but if we can take the risk and talk about our fears then we can decrease conflict and increase connection with the people that we love thank
you um
