HEALING ANXIOUS ATTACHMENT STYLE | DR. KIM SAGE

hey guys i am dr kim sage welcome back to my youtube channel and to this series on healing your attachment wounds and disturbances we are really into the series right now focusing on how to heal those deeper wounds that first occurred in relationship to the environment you were born into please keep in mind though that as i discussed in a few videos ago that your nervous system and your attachment system are deeply wired together and so to work on healing your attachment wounds and disturbances this is the first step understanding looking at where their research says we need to go to work on healing and to also understand that that corresponds and relates to working on your body responses and soothing your body as well at the end of this next few videos i have a protocol i'm going to be posting that i hope you will be able to apply regardless of your attachment style and i hope that these videos are helpful and lastly a little further down the road i would like to keep focusing on attachment as it plays out in our adult relationships with our partners and kids and things like that so if you are just new here i am a licensed clinical psychologist and i would love for you to subscribe and click the bell and that way you'll get notified when i post new videos okay let's get into i think it's 15 steps i have written out today i'm going to try to make them relatively quick so these videos aren't too long but let's talk about sort of what it looks like when you have a more anxious or preoccupied attachment style now really quickly as a quick reminder i would say that the parenting or caregiving style that goes with this one is often called an outside in orientation and what that really means is that the child because of the parents inconsistencies inability to be you know have a good timed response in terms of attunement because of the parents anxiety the child learns to be hyper vigilant and to be always focusing first on the caregiver to see what the caregiver needs and so that creates an outside in where it's like we're always looking for other people on the outside to then determine what we are supposed to feel on the inside and so that is the heart of what this style does and i would say that compulsive care taking people pleasing rotating around others and at the core having a deep fear about relationship dynamics and health and sort of always being overly focused on you know are they are they going to leave me are they safe is this a good attachment can i trust them that's always being focused on them on their actions on how they respond to you and so it's really hard to feel a sense of security when you're always sort of giving all of that internal security to someone else because people get busy they have their own issues right we can't always rely on them so this work is about learning how to internalize and soothe your own attachment so you can show up in calmer more secure ways first with yourself and obviously with partners okay so the first issue is that because you were this sort of outside in orientation uh type behavior in your childhood where you tend to focus on others state of mind at the expense of your own meaning you sacrifice your own state of mind you don't even really look at it first you have learned to be more focused as i said on others needs more than your own and so the first step is learning how to begin to identify your own needs well what do i want in this situation what would feel right for me how do i feel and in my body about this decision does this feel like a good regulated decision or am i just sort of like a ping pong ball reacting so the first step is even just learning how to identify your own feelings and your own emotions the second step is addressing your parent if you have this relationship still going on as an adult or you know young adult if you are still rotating around that parent if you have an enmeshed relationship if you don't have a good separate sense of self in terms of this parent even if it's you know you're in a marriage but you still talk to your parent every single day and their mood and their needs or their marital issues are always coming back to you when you're trying to take care of them i would say look at that relationship and start to rethink using the rest of these concepts how you can work on setting healthier boundaries and and less focus on rotating around and managing that parent probably like you just did in childhood right you're just still stuck in that and so i know that's a hard thing to do but very important the next one is to work on addressing the same dynamic this role in other relationships where do you tend to rotate around everyone else and look to how they're feeling now according to adult attachment theory you're going to most do this of course in your adult romantic intimate partnerships but i would encourage you to look at friendships right do you tend to freak out if you text them and they don't text you back within a certain amount of time do you over read the amount of emojis and assign meaning and i think we all do this to a certain extent but when you have a more anxious style you're just always over reading everything and that can really apply in any relationship even your work relationship number four is watch out if you are inadvertently doing the same thing to your kids because you learn to be this sort of rotating around a parent are you expecting your kids to do that are you expecting your kids to help manage your emotions and your feelings and solve your adult issues you know where do you need to look at how that anxiety might be showing up and or is it showing up in a lot of fear or a lot of multitasking so much that you have a hard time being fully present even for five minutes face to face eye to eye we often tend to parent at least in some regard the way we were parented even if we decide we don't want a parent that way it's often times the first initial response so take a look at the patterns in your own relationship with your kids and if you don't have kids but you want to someday you might want to start thinking about these patterns and how important it is to really work on changing this dynamic number five is your tendency to overread others their nonverbals their tone of voice and to interpret everything as a threat or an assessment of the relationship so you're often basically doing what you did with your parent you're sort of reading mommy or daddy you're the caregiver at all times what's their face say what do they need and then if they're okay i'm okay and so you might want to start looking at where you do this identifying how it's not serving you look at how you often over analyze and frankly oftentimes you might be wrong in their interpretation right because just because it looked a certain way in your childhood doesn't mean it looks the same way in your partner but you've got the volume on full blast on analyzing and reading everybody and that is not going to serve you so you want to start working on how to check in with yourself and say you know what i know you think that's true why don't you clarify with that person why don't you give it a little bit of time and pause before you freak out and text a response or demand a response and so that's an important skill i would say the next thing is as a result of this style you might struggle with managing your emotions and so you want to work on your own emotional regulation skills working on things like mindfulness and breathing and hitting the pause button using the container exercise learning how to sort of navigate and manage and even compartmentalize sometimes because actually in some ways it's not a bad thing sometimes to say you know what i'm going to like take some breaths i know i'm freaking out i'm going to try to calm down i'm going to put this away for now because i have to be with my kids or i have to be at work or deal with some issue and i can come back to it later so working on emotion regulation skills i know each of these could be a whole video and maybe at some point i'll do that but it's important to work on how to manage emotions and remember like i said you often tend to misinterpret too and so you want to get more centered around those skills the next one kind of relates to that it's learning to deal with really strong sudden surges of emotion which can often be panic anger extreme anxiety and learning how to tolerate the uncomfortable emotions or feelings or thoughts that drive that so it's like you're going along in your day and then all of a sudden you know you realize that the partner hasn't texted you back and it's been several hours and they always do but today they didn't and so you just immediately go into oh my god they're in a car accident oh my god they're going to leave me they're cheating on me whatever it is and you can't tolerate the reality that maybe they're in you know maybe they're a doctor maybe their surgery went long maybe they're in a business meeting and their cell phone died it's like you have to work on ways to calm and soothe whether it's anger or like i said panic with kind of circling back to mindfulness and breathing but the core is learning how to tolerate uncomfortable negative feelings first of all in your body in your nervous system right because your nervous system hit that sympathetic most likely for you if you're anxious and it feels really almost impossible to manage so i would you know encourage you to do like counting backwards getting some ice as we do in like panic there's a lot of videos um around about dealing with panic and i'll probably get to those soon too but work on navigating and how to calm and soothe the thoughts and emotions and the experiences that are driving that response in your body the next one is to identify and set the strong exploratory goals you want and what does that mean this means that as kids with this style because we were clingier and more fearful we often were inhibited in our exploratory behavior we're less likely to go climb at kilimanjaro right because we might have already manifested 10 different ways we would die i mean that's obviously a risky thing to do but people do things right and so it's like try to identify places outside your comfort zone things you might have always wanted to do but your anxiousness has gotten in the way and maybe set little goals like little attainable goals and then work your way up to larger goals but look at where have you held yourself back in terms of exploring literally the world around you or you know hobbies or jobs or relationships or whatever the next one is to work on developing mutuality and communication in relationships and what does that mean that means that you're so used to being the main person who reads everything that you oftentimes need help in learning how to deal with the person in front of you to understand it's a reciprocity that occurs in a relationship and what fuels that is communication and so working on when you're panicked before you just jump to an assumption or freak out learn how to reach out and say hey i'm feeling a little anxious right now but i'm having this thought would you mind if i shared it with you or what do you think about that you know working on your communication skills with everyone before you kind of jump to conclusions and really focusing on the fact that it takes two or more to have a reciprocal dynamic it's not just you trying to rotate around and take care of everybody else the next one is to honor and this kind of goes back to what i said in the avoidant video but to honor that parts of this style are really beautiful they're about being loving and being a good caretaker and being mindful of other people right your challenges you're probably overly sensitive to the world and to others but there is a beauty in that and so you know letting yourself also honor that this helped you survive your childhood this is how your nervous system had to deal with and respond to the system you were born into and there are some good parts it's just we don't want to live in this place all of the time and so i would say write down some qualities about your caregiving or how you respond to people i mean i would say even many therapists might have this background too because we learn to read people and it can be a real skill in therapy to be able to say you know to watch someone across the room who that little eye muscle just twitched and yours you know and we would say something like let's just stop for a second what just happened there if you're not trained to read other people you might not be so good at that now you don't need to be a therapist obviously to find this valuable but just you know focus on the self-love there about there are some beautiful parts of it you just don't want to be there all the time and then number 13 is to work on the boundaries because you tend to overdo and overtake others in terms of over caretake work on what is healthy and appropriate what you will do and what you will not do and the key to that one is looking at where you feel resentment consistent resentment that is often a key to where we feel like we have been doing more and we need to start working on setting boundaries and then i would say the last two are really i'm sorry the last three are looking at your protest behaviors protest behaviors are really any attempts to reconnect to a partner when we feel disconnected in their very common and anxious attachment and they look like excessive attempts and like calling or texting emailing or withdrawing game playing keeping score acting you know kind of cranky or hostile threatening to leave being manipulative trying to get them to respond to you to reinforce and calm and soothe that sympathetic anxious vibe you've got going on but the heart of it is you're doing things to test to push back to reassure yourself and so i would really encourage you to work on that i will definitely make a video about protest behaviors if i haven't already it's been a while and how this can play out with our style and how to help our bodies heal too and then the last two are really like i said looking at where you need to where you've sacrificed yourself where all of this caretaking has really left you high and dry maybe it's your health maybe it is in boundary setting maybe it is in sacrifices you've made it work that are just not serving your relationship or your life in some way and so looking at where you need to put the light back on yourself more and then creating a plan in order to do that and lastly i'll be posting in the next few days this internalized parent protocol to help work on healing parts of your attachment wounds and disturbances so i hope this video was helpful i know it was a lot of information and yeah i do understand that but i was really wanting to get it posted today so thank you so much for watching please stay safe and well and don't forget to subscribe and or also follow me on tik tok where i post as i said pretty much once a day if not two or three times a day all around these topics on my channel so take good care guys and i will see you tomorrow [Music] [Music] you

Channel: DR. KIM SAGE, LICENSED PSYCHOLOGIST

Views: 365,555

Keywords: anxious attachment, healing attachment wounds, healing attachment, attachment wounds, anxious attachment style, avoidant attachment style, healing attachment styles, anxious and avoidant attachment, dr kim sage, dr kim sage avoidant, childhood trauma, complex ptsd, cptsd, healing childhood trauma, attachment and trauma, healing trauma, relationship repair, healing relationships, relationship advice, couples therapy, attachment relationships, attached, relationship issues

Id: U0d4p6vA4cc

Length: 16min 39sec (999 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 10 2021