HEALING AVOIDANT ATTACHMENT: HEALING ATTACHMENT WOUNDS

[Music] hey guys it's dr sage welcome back to my youtube channel if you are new and just joining me i am a licensed clinical psychologist and i am truly passionate about helping people heal their relationships both in childhood and adulthood from really all of the reasons and sources that cause these issues so we are right now in the midst of a series on healing attachment disturbances and wounds and we're just having some coffee together today and diving into how to heal your avoidant attachment style they're going to be 14 steps i'm going to discuss in this video and the next few videos will explore anxious and then disorganized styles we're going to look at back to some bodywork understanding and then i'm going to share with you a protocol that i think is a very powerful one to be using and then we'll kind of stop this series the daily posting because it's just a lot but i just wanted to get you guys up to speed really fast and then i'll continue to post probably twice a week after this next week after this week but i'm so glad you're here if you're new please consider subscribing and clicking the bell and that way you'll get notified when i post new videos and just one more little thing which is i do post once to maybe three times a day on tiktok everything pretty much related to these same topics on my channel so please feel free to also follow me there okay so if you're just tuning in i've been talking about in the last several videos the relationship between attachment and polyvagal theory and how our really our attachment story lives inside our body in our nervous system and how from the moment we're born our nervous systems are responding to whatever environment we found ourselves in was it a very anxious activated environment like an anxious attachment was it a more you know controlled less emotional more rigid environment like an avoidant was it a mix in disorganized or were you in a generally healthy dynamic but now you've found yourself with a partner with a different style than you and you're trying to understand them right so all of those can play out in different ways and your knowledge here i hope will help you no matter what relationship you're in but today's video is really about avoidant attachment and just to quickly summarize avoid an attachment historically is about repeated maternal rejection that's what the research says of course the research as i keep saying was done on moms but anyone can be a primary attachment figure but what basically happened was the child's bids and attempts for attachment their sort of needs were often shut down and dismissed especially their negative emotions like anger or crying neediness and things like that and so child sorry so the child interprets that as rejection and learns to deactivate their needs and they become little autonomous human beings and adults we're often very pseudo independent very self-reliant always kind of lean into our self reliance first and foremost we feel safest often threatened by real intimacy and vulnerability because it's scary although deep down many people will say that they long for connection but they just find themselves in many ways sort of sabotaging in ways that they can't really help or control and so today's video is going to talk about that all right so that's the summary now let's go into what you need to work on healing if you have a more avoided attachment style there are 14 points as i said i'm going to get to number one because when you were emotionally needy your needs were often dismissed or rejected you tend to shut down your needs yourself whenever you feel longings for connection or an activation of your needs you tend to even you know maybe dissociate from them numb them by substances by shutting down by you intellectualizing in your head and trying to walk yourself through it so that you don't have to feel those uncomfortable feelings but they're still there and so the first step is to begin to work on acknowledging that you have needs that it's okay to be needy to long for connection that feelings aren't necessarily a bad thing and so you want to work on learning how to identify and sort of connect to your emotions and thoughts and feelings and needs not only with yourself but with others in your life and that's a whole other video series on identifying emotion i will get to at some point but that's the first one number two is that many avoided tight parents were not comfortable with physical affection with expressing it hugging touching that those kinds of things and so i will say that many of those who are avoidant while they can be a little more touchy in the beginning and are often able to separate actual intimacy in a very you know you know what i mean kind of way but they're not so good with just like you know caressing your back or your hair or or letting themselves be touched that way they have a hard time sometimes with that kind of engagement and so you really want to work on identifying your do you have physical needs and not only you know what do those feel like like when i was talking about polyvagal theory when you think about someone hugging you or holding your hand or you doing that does that activate your nervous system in that sort of sympathetic way where you kind of feel anxious or stressed and so you want to work on doing things like connecting to your physical needs and working on you know maybe just going slowly with your partner like maybe touching pinky to pinky or hand to hand and then working your way up to holding hands or to cuddling many avoidant partners feel like they will do the cuddling thing after intimacy but they're kind of just putting their time in it doesn't feel so comfortable so you want to work on not only acknowledging it but providing it with a safe partner and you might share this issue you know i i want to be close but physical touch is kind of scary how can we go slowly and work on increasing that especially when i'm intimate or vulnerable like when i'm crying or when we're being close number three is that because of your childhood you expect that your negative emotions like crying and anger are going to be rejected that they are not going to be okay and so you have to work on first allowing yourself to have them as i've said and here is where i would go into inner child work i've been posting some videos on tik tok just little affirmations but you can google these and i will obviously hopefully come back to more but this idea of honoring your inner child's feelings all of them whether they're you know feelings of anger or sadness or fear or jealousy whatever they are and also here i would encourage you to do some self-compassion work kristin neff's website self-compassion.org has great exercises but learning how to talk to yourself like a loving human and parent saying like you know it's okay that you feel sad or scared or it's okay that you're angry learning how to internalize that self the inner child work and self-compassion can be really helpful number four that leads into re-parenting i'm going to do a whole course on re-parenting in fact i'm about 75 done with it but this is the idea of learning how to internalize and repair some mothering or fathering or parenting wounds and then how to begin to lovingly give yourself that type of support and connection and healing as a new parent to yourself and rewiring those messages and feelings so re-parenting work can be really helpful the next one is number five because your parents were often rigid and controlling and often strict or very judgmental you might also be rigid strict judgmental not only of yourself but of others so looking at where do i do that you know because oftentimes your needs for empathy and emotion were shut down and so you might need to do some work on developing compassion watching other people's stories catching yourself when you're being judgmental and trying to remember that everyone is a jerk for a reason if they're being a jerk and that you really don't know someone's story you really don't you never know what people are going through i can promise you even in stories where every box is checked on the outside and life looks perfect it is not and so doing some work on your own judgment is important number six is that you weren't encouraged to be your unique self that's part of the childhood challenge and so really what what is it about you that makes you unique and this is a whole other thing i've included in the in the series i'm doing on healing of the parenting and reparenting and it's also in my upcoming course but how do you identify who you are what you love what makes you you and then working on developing those parts of yourself that you may have shut down because they weren't acceptable so like you know did you really like hippie kind of stuff but it was you know you lived in a very sort of cut and dried preppy household and so do you want to you know check what that means out in terms of your style or your fashion or are you interested in certain kinds of music or art or sports whatever it is working on developing not only like how you see yourself but pursuing things that maybe are outside the box that you thought were acceptable in childhood number seven is as i kind of said before it really is that combination of judging others but also for being their unique selves and so looking at where maybe you have some jealousy or resentment towards others because they're able to be their unique selves but you were never really able to and then looking at well what parts am i jealous of because oftentimes resentment or jealousy has information to lead us to parts of ourselves that we feel or are disconnected from and so that kind of unique self-judgment and judging others and their unique selves looking at what that looks like for you number eight is really about honoring your self-reliance and actually making a gratitude list for all of the things that this part of you this independence this autonomy has helped you survive and allowing it to be one of your strengths i know most of this video is going into what you can work on and change but i really do think it is a profoundly important thing to say you know what i needed this to survive my childhood and it helped me and there are some very positive upsides to having parts of yourself be avoided because the truth is that need to be autonomous and independent often helps us take care of ourselves survive you know push ourselves in the world in ways that other people might not quite yet have the capacity to do so honor that your self-reliance is a superpower it's just that you don't want to always have it be your go-to and so it's about honoring it and loving yourself for it and like i said maybe making a gratitude list about all of the things that kind of went into this part of you how you can be non-emotional sometimes in a crisis right or be the person in the room who is in control it's just that what you want to do on the flip side is honor that even though you have this and it is basically a superpower you don't want to use it all of the time there are times when it is important to ask others for help and there is nothing wrong with not always being self-reliant so learning how to tap into do i need to be kind of autonomous here or you know what i really don't and it could serve me to let someone else in right now can i ask for help do i want to ask for help i can ask for help and so you kind of want to learn to wield and honor your self-reliance but try to balance it a bit more with when you need to not be self-reliant so much and when you want to reach out to others and ask for help number nine is that at the core you often feel that relationships are draining and that you cannot trust others and that's safer to go alone and so you want to work on doing healing work around understanding that there are ways to be engaged in healthy and safe relationships and that challenging yourself whenever you go to that idea of that oh i can't trust anyone it's like well is that really true where did that come from oh that's my childhood and even if it's a pet you have a safe relationship with pets can actually be a very good place to start especially if you are very avoidant now are you drained by your pet i mean yeah taking care of pets can be exhausting especially if you're depressed for example but there is something about that risk reciprocity and that love that feels so good that isn't draining you know most of the time and that template can be applied to adult relationships yes i know adults when humans are a hundred thousand times more complicated but you want to look at this idea of being alone and that ties into number 10 which is being alone is usually an issue for you because that is often how you regulate it in childhood removing yourself going to that sort of dreamy self-auto regulation stage to deal with all your feelings and so for example i can be like with my kids and they can be in a needy state and i could have just had some experience where i'm feeling kind of disorganized inside an estate and i really just want to be alone i'm an only child i'm an introvert i regulate alone but in those moments it's not appropriate for me to go do that i need to be present for them and so what i want to do is like i've talked about the last video do some breathing slow down try to get face to face eye to eye and centered even thinking about putting my little stress in a container i've discussed the container exercise and i need to make a new one so i'll probably do that too but like finding ways to just put it away put it in a drawer in your mind for now so that you can stop trying to do that auto regulation alone thing every time and work on what it feels like to be face to face eye to eye and present with someone else in distress and to tolerate their negative emotions and even the ones it's bringing up in you but not running away to do so number 11 is working on internalizing the shame you have the oftentimes there's a shame we have with avoidant where we we feel bad for our needs we've learned to shut them down so much that we often carry a toxic shame we've internalized for our neediness and so you might want to go back to self-compassion to exercises on dealing with shame to re-parenting to begin to acknowledge to yourself that it is okay to have those needs there is nothing wrong with you number 12 is to learn and work on as i mentioned yesterday i'll make a video at the end of this on self-soothing techniques you can google poly bagel theory or you know calming the vagus nerve if you want to get ahead you know doing things like breathing mindfulness cardio exercises meditations yoga guided imagery which i really love even just techniques in the moment just maybe just you know gently like pat yourself and love yourself do this kind of thing where you're just gently caressing your hands tapping butterfly tapping back and forth but working on your self-soothing techniques so that you can then calm yourself and then go back in to engagement not use those techniques to further isolate number 13 is to work on attracting and encouraging healthy relationships and some healthy dependency on others learning how to ask for help how to reach out how to be in relationships that feel reciprocal and where you can safely share your vulnerabilities really important and remember we don't just want to like dump everything or never share we want to slowly build and earn as brene brown talks about earn vulnerability with others and lastly is a technique i'm not going to share today but it is a way to internalize and create new parent models and i'm going to post that at the end of this week but it is a very important practice you can use and you want to kind of cultivate it like a meditation it's really about healing the parent figures inside and so i will come back to that so those are the 14 at least this at this moment i can really um based on the research share with you each one of course could be its own video and as i'm trying to balance i've got to finish my courses and so of course i did this daily series right when i was trying to finish my courses and so i'm even spending the rest of today working on my course and other courses i'll be sharing but i will keep talking about these topics and once we get through all this kind of healing stuff i really want to go into the adult relationship parts and share more videos there too and always also tying back to childhood so i think this video is a little bit longer but i do think it's an important one and i hope you found it helpful once again thank you so much for joining me i love it when you guys share and it makes me feel when i see little notes like oh this made sense or thank you i don't need thanks in that way but you know when you're doing this and it's growing and it's growing but growing slowly you know you think okay am i doing this right you know what should i be doing differently and so it's been quite the journey but at the end of the day you know i just i i really believe this stuff can change your life so thanks for watching please stay safe and well and i'll see you tomorrow bye guys [Music] [Music] do [Music] [Music] you

Channel: DR. KIM SAGE, LICENSED PSYCHOLOGIST

Views: 97,662

Keywords: healing attachment, healing avoidant attachment, avoidant attachment style, healing avoidant attachment style, attachment styles, healing attachment styles, dr kim sage avoidant, healing attachment wounds, attachment wounds, attachment disturbances, anxious attachment style, disorganized attachment style, childhood trauma, complex ptsd, cptsd, healing relationships, relationship advice, healing childhood trauma, dismissive attachment, dismissive avoidant attachment

Id: Sgw5Zb34bgM

Length: 19min 11sec (1151 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 09 2021