Anxious Attachment 101

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1:16There is a reason they have been one of my favorite candies literally forever. They are soft, they are chewy, and they have that classic sour than sweet flavor. You get that little sour kick at first and then, oh, it's sweet right after. Honestly, they're just fun and I feel like we could use a little bit more of that. If you're looking for something that has that balance of sour and sweet, Sour Patch Kids are always a solid option. Lean into your mischievous side with Sour Patch Kids. Daddy gang, welcome back to another Sunday session. I want to just get right into it today I want to talk about attachment styles.

1:55I posted on my social media about this and there were so many people that were like, wait, what are attachment styles? And I was going to go more in depth on one thing. And then I was like, oh wait, if people don't even know what this is or don't know fully about it, I was like, this is a great jumping off point. First of all, attachment theory is not just some like BS trendy TikTok lingo that we are all seeing today. It is the literal blueprint of your brain. It dictates essentially everything you do. It's almost like, it's basically like this like invisible puppet master behind you of like the why you make decisions and quite frankly, like why some of you are living in a self-inflicted cycle of absolute chaos or unrecognized patterns.

2:46And like, it is not your fault because it is almost like ingrained in you and innate. And so today I want to, I want to dive deep into it all. Okay. Because this will literally relate to every single person watching. So to kick us off, I want to ask a couple questions and I just want you to be brutally honest with yourself. Okay. Sit back, relax. Don't close your eyes if you're driving, but close your eyes if you're just sitting. Okay. For some of my ladies listening, why is it that the moment someone actually treats you right and, you know, they show up on time, they tell you they like you, they aren't hiding three secret families in different area codes, you suddenly are like, yeah, I'm bored.

3:36Bored. Like why does a healthy relationship feel like a chore, but a toxic text at 2 a.m. It feels like a spark. It feels like chemistry, right? If you relate to that, we are going to get to you. Don't worry. To other girlies listening, why do you get physically sick to your stomach if someone doesn't reply to a meme you just sent within 45 minutes and then you immediately are convincing yourself, oh my God, they literally hate me. If that is you, do not worry. I will get to you. And then for my independent woman out there, why does the thought of actually telling someone you missed them make you feel like you basically want to jump out of a moving vehicle?

4:26You're like into oncoming traffic actually sounds way better than doing this. Why is your first instinct the second someone gets close, you're like, pack my bags, find a flaw. Well, I've also got you too. All of these are kind of alluding to different attachment styles. And I think the hard truth about attachment styles is how you attached to your caregivers when you were a literal toddler, a baby, an infant, is currently running your adult life. and it decides who you sleep with, how you argue, how you behave at work, and it basically completely influences how you trust the world. And so if you don't understand your attachment style, it's basically like you're driving a car with your eyes closed, wondering why you just keep slamming into brick walls and getting in accidents.

5:27And then you're like, I don't know what, I guess It's the wall's fault for being there. What else could it be? And it's like, no, no, no. It's just because you don't understand what is actually driving you. So today, I want to help everyone, including myself, open our eyes so we don't just keep ramming into walls and be like, why did that happen? And I'm basically going to try to show you exactly how this wiring is impacting your sex life, your friendships, and your self-esteem and your future. So grab a drink, get comfortable, and let's get into it.

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8:32We need to take care of ourselves. So if this is your sign, if you're like, oh, Alex, you're so right. Summer's coming. I want to feel good. I want you can you literally can support a balanced gut microbiome with ritual symbiotic plus save 25 % on your first month at ritual.com slash call her daddy. That's ritual.com slash call her daddy for 25 % off your first month. Enjoy, Daddy Gang. At its core, an attachment style is your subconscious blueprint for how you behave, how you communicate, and how you react in close relationships. It's basically like how your brain reacts to intimacy and threat, and it's developed when you are a baby, right?

9:25I kind of just said that. But the annoying part is it then shows up when you're like 24, 25, 26, 30, 32, 33. Like, and you're like, oh my God, why is this impacting me? You're like crying over an unanswered FaceTime and you're like, why am I so emotional about this? It goes all the way back to childhood, honey. I know. So fucking annoying. And so everyone is believed to fit one or some people more attachment styles. But if you are watching today, you have an attachment style and you fall into basically one of these four categories. So we have secure attachment, we have anxious attachment, we have avoidant attachment, and then fearful slash disorganized attachment.

10:13Today I kind of want to just focus on anxious attachment and then I will do episodes the next few weeks dedicated to each of the other attachment styles because I was going to try to cram it into one and then I was like I feel like literally each one needs ample time to be discussed and dissected because there is so much to each of these and so here we go anxious attachment okay so let's first start off with like you may be like am I an anxious attached person I don't know, Alex. So I'm going to kind of just walk you through. If you have ever been called crazy, needy, too much, or, you know, dramatic by someone who couldn't even manage to text you back, this episode is going to hopefully be your holy grail.

11:07And I'm going to try to explain exactly what is happening in your brain, why you keep choosing people who make you feel like you're essentially starving. And more importantly, at the end, we're going to try to talk about how do we change this? How do we stop this? So we're going to start with a little self-diagnosis. Very fun today. Very light stuff. Everyone's like, this does not feel light. I know, but I promise it's going to be helpful. I am going to paint a picture and you basically just decide if this sounds familiar, right? So you're dating someone. It's going well. You had a great date on Tuesday, but now it's, let's say, Thursday afternoon and you send a text.

11:51It's casual. Maybe you're sending a funny meme or a quick question. And then one hour passes. nothing. Two hours, still nothing. Now, a normal secure person's brain goes, oh, maybe they're just busy at work. Let me finish my emails, right? But your brain, your brain goes into full-blown DEFCON 1 alert. You're like, okay, I got to open the chat. I have to reread every single text we've ever exchanged. You go to Instagram. You see if their follower count went up a little bit, right? You're checking their location. And even if you don't have their location, you find a way to find their location, okay?

12:30And your heart is quite literally beating through your chest. You're sitting at your desk. You're physically unable to focus on your actual job because you are convinced that they have suddenly realized you are a hideous, unlovable bridge of a troll. And they are never, ever going to speak to you again, obviously, right? Right? And then three hours later, they text back. And instantly, your nervous system, it just floods with relief. You literally feel high. It feels like a high, right? You feel safe again. And you're like, oh my God, I think I'm in love with them. And I think it's really important to acknowledge that daddy gang, that is not love.

13:21that is an anxious attachment trigger response, okay? So let's rewind. Why are we like this? Why can't we just be chill, enjoy our relationships? I'm obviously not a therapist, but I read the books and I talked to my therapist and I did a lot of research on this so that you don't have to, okay? It all goes back to your childhood. If you have anxious attachment, when you were a baby, your primary caregivers, usually that would be your mom or your dad or both, right? They were likely inconsistent. So some days they were incredibly, you know, warm and present and loving. And then other days they were stressed, cold, felt emotionally unavailable.

14:16And because you never knew which version of your parents you were going to get, your tiny baby brain essentially learned this survival mechanism, which is hypervigilance. OK, you realized that if you, you know, whimpered softly, nobody came to your rescue. But if you screamed and you cried and you clung to their leg, they would finally pay attention. See how I'm going here. OK, flash forward 20 years. You're in a bar in West Village and you meet a man who behaves exactly like your inconsistent parents. One day he's obsessed with you. The next day he's cold. And so your adult brain goes, oh, my God, this feels this feels familiar.

15:11This is what love feels like. This is what was modeled to me as a kid. And you are subconsciously then choosing partners who recreate the exact environment where you had to fight for attention. Because your brain literally thinks, understandably, that that is the only way to get it. That's the first thing you were taught as a child. So let's talk about behaviors, okay? Because when our anxious attachment gets triggered, we do some truly wild things to try and regain control. And psychologists call these protest behaviors. Okay. And I'm going to throw out some hopefully relatable examples of how this can show up in real life because I'm using big words and it's like, okay, Alex, how does this actually apply to me?

16:03A good example would be when someone is triggering you and you're an anxious attachment, you give the cold shoulder. You ignore this person's text for four hours to punish them. But what you actually want is you want them to panic and ask, is everything OK? OK, another example is threatening to leave. What you do is you text something like, you know, maybe we should maybe we should stop talking. but what you actually want is you want them to fight for you and say, no, please stay. I feel like another common behavior that came up when I was researching this is like keeping score, right? So what you do is you wait exactly 43 minutes to reply because they took 43 minutes to reply.

16:55But what you actually want is you want to feel like you have some power too in this relationship. And so a really common behavior is the over explaining when you are this anxious person, right? Even if you were being cold for a second, finally, when it's time to talk, it's like what you do is you send a 14 paragraph text dissecting your feelings at 2 a.m. But then what you actually really just want is you want them to finally understand and you just want them to reassure you. Now, if this is at all hitting home and this feels relatable and applicable to your life, this is a pattern that you know very well and you're very familiar with.

17:43You're watching this being like, yep, uh-huh, let's go. Ooh, did that the other day, Alex. Did that literally five minutes ago, Alex. And I think what's hard to hear, but it's the truth, is these kind of protest behaviors that you're doing, they always backfire, always. You do them because you desperately want the closeness and the reassurance from your partner, but to the other person, it literally just looks like you're playing mind games, you're being dramatic, or you're just starting fights literally out of nowhere. And so inevitably, it then pushes your partner further away, which then triggers your anxiety even more and then the cycle just continues.

18:29You unknowingly and unintentionally are actually hurting yourself more. Now, if you're listening to this and you're crying in your car right now, babe, I see you, okay? And I just want to, first I just want to express empathy because it is exhausting to live this way. It feels like you are just constantly on an emotional roller coaster that you didn't ask to get on. And you're like, why is this happening to my life? And I feel like we see people online just joking, using the words like, this person's clingier, I'm clingier, I'm needy. Or like they joke about like being an FBI agent, you know, because they're like looking up their partner's location.

19:13But the actual internal reality of living with anxious attachment is it's incredibly painful and it's lonely and it's physically exhausting. And so there are some people who will never understand what that actually feels like to live with this on the day to day. And so if you are someone who is listening, who maybe cannot relate to this at all, but maybe your partner has anxious attachment, right? Or you've known someone that has anxious attachment, even if it's a friend or a family member, or you look back at an ex that had anxious attachment. I think to understand what these people are going through is to understand the emotional toll of what happens inside this person's body and mind during one of these like single very common anxious attachment triggers okay what someone with this attachment style is dealing with is a basically it's like a constant war between their logical side of their brain and then their nervous system.

20:23They're constantly at war. It's like a dual brain conflict. There is just a complete internal split going on. When you have anxious attachment style, basically, first of all, I wanna make everyone, like you're not stupid, you're not overly emotional. No, your rational brain is you are intelligent, okay? But when a trigger happens because of all that's happened in your childhood, like example a partner suddenly you know they sound cold on the phone or they sound cold over text your logical brain says to you oh he's just tired he had a 12 hour shift today it's fine like it's totally fine but then your survival brain which is so much louder is saying he's pulling away he's pulling away because he did not realize that you're boring and you need to fix this right now or you will be abandoned.

21:16And so that pain, this then means that you are forced to basically sit there fully aware a lot of the times that you are overreacting while your body physically reacts as if you are standing in front of a threat. Like you can logically be like, I know this is crazy, but your body is operating at a level that you kind of can't control or it feels that way. Right. And so the physical and the emotional toll is so fucking heavy. And you can go through so much in just a few hours. First, it's the physical toll, right? The fight or flight response. The moment a partner pulls away, your brain, it's like, guys, this is science that I research.

22:05your brain basically releases a flood of cortisol and adrenaline the minute this happens, right? And then your chest tightens, your stomach drops, that like literal sick to your stomach feeling, it happens, your heart rate spikes, and you can't distract yourself because your body is flooded with so much stress and so many stress hormones designed to just keep you awake and alert because that's what, it feels literally like danger. which again, like even just hearing this, if you're not someone that has anxious attachment, like you immediately have empathy, right? You're like, oh my God, I didn't realize this is what they go through.

22:45And so for this person, they then suddenly essentially experience a loss of mental autonomy. They lose control, right? For those three hours of silence that he hasn't texted you back, your brain is basically hijacked and you can't read a book, you can't, maybe you're at work, you can't focus on that presentation, you can't enjoy dinner with your friends or your family because your mind is entirely preoccupied by one task, which is solving the mystery of why they are pulling away. And so you reread past text messages looking for clues or, you know, like, wait, when did the vibe change and it feels like your peace of mind is entirely in someone else's hands and then to add on to that you eventually will leave that state and then you will enter what feels like a shame hangover okay when they finally text you back with a lot of times something normal the panic goes away it evaporates but then it's immediately replaced by this wave of just like intense shame and in it and it feels like self-loathing right you can't help but think like oh my god this is so embarrassing like why did I get myself that worked up I was that stressed and worked up I am so pathetic for caring this much and overreacting like I'm a grown adult why can't I just be normal and react normally?

24:30All my friends were like, it's fine, babe, like don't freak out. And I couldn't, I couldn't control myself. And so imagine running the cycle three, four, five times a week over months and years even, right? That emotional toll is just going to it's going to create sheer exhaustion and it's so depleting it can impact your self-esteem because you're constantly feeling like you're just you're basically a hostage to other people's moods and it makes you feel deeply unsafe in one space that you are supposed to feel the most secure, which is your most intimate relationships, right? And so I know this is probably triggering to some people right now, understandably, and it may be scary for some people.

25:29If you are a partner, this may be providing clarity to your situation with your loved one, right? You can't say that you experience it personally, but you are experiencing it because your partner experiences it and therefore this kind of also consumes your life but the positive that you can find in this and take from this I never leave you hanging guys is you can heal this you can you do not have to live your life like this forever I promise you you don't and I do hope that that makes all of you watching feel a little bit better because I know we just went through the trenches and it's like, okay, I need to go cry.

26:15Obviously my biggest advice always is therapy. It's always going to be my number one recommendation, always and forever. Therapy has literally changed my life and it will never be a bad idea to invest in yourself. Understanding yourself, helping yourself, like how is that anything but good, right? But if you are someone who for whatever reason, therapy just, it's not happening right now. I am going to do my best. I'm not a therapist, obviously, but I want to share some of this knowledge that I have to maybe help some of you in like, what's the game plan, okay? Your game plan to start trying to move from anxious to secure.

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29:09Tinder, it starts with a swipe. Download Tinder today must be 18 plus. Okay. That was the heavy, heavy. Now let's lift it up. Now let's fix our problems. So first and foremost, you have to start to try to recognize that anxious spark that sets all of this into motion. It is a prerequisite. You won't be able to solve this unless you can start to identify these triggers. It is a must. So you basically have to accept that when you feel that overwhelming, obsessive, almost in moments like butterfly inducing spark with someone who is emotionally unavailable, you have to try to recognize that it is actually your nervous system screaming in panic.

29:57Okay? I know this shouldn't be controversial, but somehow it is. Guys, real love. It feels calm. It feels safe. And honestly, it could feel a little boring compared to what you have been used to in your past. So to break this cycle, you got to recognize at the very jump, when it's beginning. You can't fix what you don't notice. And so that may literally require you to start tracking your triggers. Like you need to be able to write down exactly what sets you off. Everyone's gonna be different, right? So maybe for you, it's when your partner takes four hours to reply. Or maybe your partner used to randomly always have like a flat tone with you in moments.

30:49you need to note what is the physical sensation in your body does your chest tighten does your throat close up like being able to be like oh this feeling kind of arises when this has always happened to me in relationships naming that trigger it basically strips away it just being in your subconscious and you actually now can have power over it before when you're like i don't know why this happened and you keep going over and over and over and doing the same thing, understandably it's like how would you know how to fix something if you don't know what is actually causing it? So literally start writing down what did do it in the past and then be cognizant.

31:29Obviously if there's something directly in the moment that's happening, write it down. The next step though is when you feel a trigger coming on, this is, seems simple but it's, I understand it's actually way harder said than done you basically need to force yourself to self-soothe before you react this is something we didn't get to clearly do when you were children if you have this anxious attachment style right so you need to teach yourself how to do this when your partner does not text you back and the spiral begins the cycle is about to start do not text them put your phone in the other room, okay?

32:12Go do something physical. Maybe go on a run, take a hot shower, clean your room, okay? You basically need to try to prove to your nervous system that you can survive 30 minutes without this person's validation or communication. Because again, when you're triggered, it's like your brain's panic button just takes over, right? Like I said earlier, it's like it starts to block that logical side of your brain. So there's no point to try to think or talk your way out of a spiral, right? Your first job actually is purely physical. A trigger starts happening. You need to physically lean into your body.