HWL - Vacillator

good morning to uk oh good morning yes you know i just want to say a quick word to the singles here and we're so glad you're here and uh when you're listening to this uh what we're hoping that you're really gonna get out of it um is a better understanding of who you are when you are in a dating relationship because these attachment styles really bloom in primary relationships you can sort of be in college or be you know single for a while and not dating and you won't you won't see them manifest as strongly as when you actually enter into a primary relationship then they really come into full bloom so we want it to help you understand yourself who you might be dating and we want to say probably anyone you choose to date will have one of these styles it's not like you're going to find the perfect person who doesn't have you can try though you could try but you probably have one so um and the goal is not to find the perfect person it's to find the person who's willing to grow if there's one um i think thing that's important in the person you're dating and we we advise couples who are dating to read this book because it gives you a really clear signal right away is someone willing to look at themselves as someone willing to say oh yeah i do have that tendency or that weakness and i am willing to own that that's a keeper that's a keeper if someone's willing to own because eventually in a relationship the more you're each willing to own your own part and work on your own part the more successful your relationship's going to be so because everybody has issues that's right so we all have some issues going on so either you will know what they are and anim they you'll manage them and grow out of them or they'll manage you and you'll have no idea what's going on you're going to have this racehorse inside of you that's heading in directions and you can't control it so that's why this has helped us take our core dynamic and slow it way down into a highly controllable place to where it's almost non-existent anymore that's really true did that make you feel good the way i said that really good as a recovering pleaser that was a joke for you guys they're not they're not really fully awake yet okay all right well either that it was a very weak joke yeah yeah uh let's talk tell you that well you can do that you do anyhow so um i always get a joke debrief when we we leave here and and uh you know the laugh no laugh i rank all the jokes and see which one has a higher ranking let's talk about the vacillator okay vacillators often are produced that injured lifestyle is produced when you have a parent that is sporadically available most fascinators do get some good solid connection growing up and what it gives them a taste and a longing for more but often the parent that is creating this style is sort of in and out as a parent they're a very fun engaged parent and then they're sort of they're you know sort of off in their own world until they're ready to re-engage again my dad was a lot like this he could be very fun if we had fun in my houses because of my dad and you know on some nights he might play hide and go seek or cook some wild thing in the kitchen with with us and then on another night he might come home and for weeks or months you could just tell he was in a bad mood and you don't go near and you don't ask him anything so the connection was very sporadic and it was entirely based on his mood rather than what the needs of my sisters and i were at any given time and so what this creates in a kid often is it kind of turns their longing for connection on high but leaves it unsatisfied so a lot of times vacillators by the time they're made to wait for that connection to happen again then they become the child actually starts to become angry that they've been made to wait so now they have this dilemma inside i want connection but i'm really mad at you for making me wait and wait and wait and i'm really mad at you for it being so much on your terms and not on my terms and so when the connection is then offered there's this conflict inside so many times vacillators grow up and they love the dating um time of a relationship because it's all about connection and usually in that honeymoon period the connection is on high the feelings are intense and vasculators are on a quest to find that consistent connection that they missed as kids consistency is the key word so dating feels like that oh and i found my prince charming or i found the woman of my dreams man this is it and in that idealized state they tend to idealize new relationships they feel like they found what they've been looking for and then they get married and then time moves on and of course in marriage you have to wait there's kids there's work um you know there's so many things that take up our time as a couple so when they have to wait all those old feelings start coming back and when they're disappointed they sort of go from all good it was amazing too i'm so disappointed i'm so hurt vacillators use strong words i'm you betrayed me you hurt me you duped me i thought you were this and now you're that and so they go from sort of being all in love to feeling very disappointed and angry and unlike pleasers vacillators will will get angry and they'll let you know they're angry a lot of vasculars tend to think they're pleasers because they do want connection and they are there's parts of a vast leader that are very kind and generous and wanting people to connect with them the difference is when they are disappointed they get angry and um pleasers that's a very under underdeveloped emotion of the pleaser val sitters that are extroverts usually get it's a loud anger um it's an anger you can't miss um sometimes introverted vacillators are more have a tendency to just withdraw they just go off and pout my dad could do both he could be really angry and then i remember times and even in their marriage where i knew something was going on because he was he was not talking to anyone so it's sort of a silent withdrawal but he was certainly expressing his anger through that so what would you add well in the attachment literature and again even here at missouri university uh the schools of psychology and sociology are studying i've even read some journal articles right out of this town on attachments so it's not an unfamiliar thing again in all the major universities but they call the vacillator the ambivalent because they are ambivalent about their relationship with you sometimes they're hot sometimes they're cold this is sort of the i love you hate you sort of good bad split type of a person male or female they are also called in the attachment literature preoccupied preoccupied because they're preoccupied about how they're doing in relationship with others so when they go away from an event they will sit and rethink that event over for sometimes days about how they were received or not received whether somebody gave why somebody gave that person a hug and not them a hug or this person didn't say hi to me and it's probably because and they'll develop a whole rabbit trail as to why that person didn't say hi to them and they'll be preoccupied and think about that for a long time ever heard of anybody like that yes yes okay amen brother all right so so that was the heartiest amen we've had in this session thank you dusty uh and uh uh that's that so they're very self-conscious as a result of that and they are easily embarrassed and shamed and if they think they're not in good graces within a uh a social venue or with you they all of a sudden feel very ashamed and then they get mad that they feel that way but they blame you see they will be very mad at you for making them feel that way they are not aware that their sensitivities are on ultra high you know their sensitivities are very high and that you walk into any meeting and sometimes you do get hugged and sometimes somebody does miss your hand and somebody doesn't say hi to you and greet you as warmly as the person in front of you but they don't think that way they just think there is something that um you don't like about them and then they'll spend the day thinking about that now and let me just take that back to the root often in my own childhood i would contemplate and think about what am i doing wrong with my dad why why why doesn't he want to spend more time with me you know what what is it that's am i doing something so even as a child there can be a lot of preoccupation around how to get the attention of this parent and you know there really is no way to get the attention until they're often willing to give it and of course again this exists on a continuum from mild to medium to strong but the vasculator um parent often makes this child feel at times like a bother when you get down under all the rubble a lot of times at the core a vac later at their heart of heart feels like they're a bother and they're too much for people and so when they start to feel that they they get very anxious and that anxious quickly turns to anger and they're mad at that person for making them feel bad they say that a lot you're making me upset you're making me feel bad and yet they have a hard time really coming up with other feeling words that describe what's going on inside of them so the past is flooding in to the present many times but they really think it's just the person in front of them that's making them feel these feelings of abandonment or um not being available not being available enough and of course if they're married to an avoider that person probably isn't available enough we'll talk about that in a minute did you want to say anything more about the parenting or did you have anything that you want to say more about generally in the vast layer i would just say make one more distinction about vacillators again they do what we call a good bad split you can be really good one moment and you know with them and then good standing and then all of a sudden boom if they feel bad it now it's all bad and there's it's like a it's not a good scene so this good bad split there's no middle ground they have to learn to integrate good and bad even in every moment that no moment is perfectly ideal if your goal is to maintain an ideal state of connection constantly ideally connected well that's going to get disappointed every day but they don't feel they don't understand that inside and again it's not all on the left brain a conscious thing this is very that right brain thing the implicit memory remember that part we talked about last night this thing back over here very strong and powerful so started here in early childhood but it can pop up at 30 40 50 60 years old etc and feels just the same as here so i put it slightly behind me like this to help you see that it's not something that's readily visible but it's a very strong feeling that pops up so here's one last thing vacillators like zero degrees of separation by that i mean if if it's opinions thoughts feelings if you correct they don't like to be corrected they don't like to be disagreed with they don't like to have somebody say something different because they view that as a separation that we're somehow that separation we want now here's the deal if you separate from them they get really wobbly uh could be anyway ideas feelings thoughts opinions etc but if they separate from you it's okay it's fine because they're in control and they're not being abandoned they're in charge of it so they're fine if they make an independent decision or do something or or have a different opinion so it's like you make this the movement away they get upset they make the movement away they're okay all right is that clear all right anybody ever seen that amen yeah okay so there ain't no parenting just one second when i have one thing okay they're they're anxious about the departing because it feels like an abandonment it feels like being made to wait again but they're anxious when they come back because they don't know if you're really going to see them and meet their needs great point so they kind of have anxiety on both sides and oftentimes the thing that isn't in the book that we've really been able to kind of a phrase we've been able to coin since we wrote the book was that vacillators desire connection without they don't want to be vulnerable they want this intense connection but they want it to all be lined up just perfectly before they enter in and and try and go deep and so many times when i really especially if i'm working with an avoid or vasculator couple i can give you a clear example i worked with an avoider mayor to a female vassalater and i re he really grew in his ability to connect and to entertain feelings and to be more vulnerable and so i thought they were ready for a holding so i had him holding her that will demonstrate later and i thought to myself i bet she's going to sabotage this because when a vass leader really starts to get the thing they said they've always wanted they're scared to death because now you have the power to really hurt them if they take it and then you decide to leave again so he was holding her and it was he was making amazing eye contact and he was talking to the little girl part of her and he was really with her and she said your hair is so greasy when did you wash it last and i just said wow you're really scared i said you just sabotaged that moment and it was really an amazing moment and i said you look inside right now and ask yourself are you scared like you're getting the very thing you've told me that you wanted since you came into therapy and now you're making that that's scaring you and you're making it go away and she acknowledged that she was and she could identify with that so vasculators you know want that connection but they don't want to have to be vulnerable and in that holding vulnerability was required of her too to receive what was going you know really take it in vasslaters have a hard time as much as they want to take it in they don't trust it to last and so they they're doing this all the time so if you're married to a vasculator you feel like you're kind of getting the message come here no go away oh that's too far come back okay no go away and so it's kind of confusing being the spouse because you feel like either you're in being invited in or you're being pushed out and you never kind of know when it's going to switch um this is where i was talking about genders yesterday um i can have a couple at nine o'clock in the office in my in my office in the morning nine o'clock male vacillator female avoider female pleaser at 10 o'clock i can have the female be the vacillator and the male be the avoider or pleaser and the issues they raise what we're doing is exactly the same there's no difference in the complaints the issues the problems the tensions and the difficulties makes no difference that's why i say the gender is far less of a weight in our offices than these particular attachment styles they are king attachment styles are king as our queen is whatever it might be with respect to leading you and guiding you should we go on to the parent point okay why don't you start that okay as a parent i've kind of given you a couple examples of my dad um they can be very engaging and they're they're dedicated parents they're just distracted parents um they really care about their children most of the time they really want to be involved at some point it's just that they're distracted with all the unmet attachment needs in their life and so they have a lot of internal processing going on all the time we have a gal in our family who's a vass later and i asked her um how what do you think how often what goes to your mind after a family gathering how long you know what do you think about and she goes oh i for about two days i go over every conversation and who said what and how did i respond and did they receive that or did i make a fool out of myself or did i hurt their feelings or you know maybe they hurt my feelings and i'm trying to figure out if i should do something about that so she was preoccupied for two days after a family gathering and so that's going to affect how available she can be for her child so there's a degree of preoccupation that keeps a parent from really sometimes seeing what their child is doing what they need what they their cues they're sending to mom or dad so it's hard for them to have attunement it's hard for them to have attunement so they can be if they lack attunement with the child because they're preoccupied with their own mind swirling then all of a sudden if they come out of that swirl then they see the child and they'll just they'll go oh child and they will then want to engage with that child and sometimes a child could be playing you know little legos or something or other but they'll jump right in and say hi mommy's here daddy's here and then they'll want the child to be responsive to them because mom or dad now just showed up and when the child kind of pushes them away a little bit because they're playing with their legos what happens to the vascular parent what happens they get angry they get hurt that the child what separated from them see how this all works and so they tend to be kind of intrusive or distant intrusive or distant or what we call enmeshed a bit fused with the child or distant uh i think oftentimes vaccinators do really well with babies they're great connectors early amazing connectors because they do know something about connection and babies are pretty much just give you positive feedback and they need you and they don't know how to say no yet there's two times where kids really learn the art of separating and that's two in teams and you know they stamp their foot no and i don't want you and you know go away and and they resist connection and they they're trying to establish a bit more independence and that's a difficult stage for vasculators because they take it personally they feel rejected by their child and then they struggle with that so that's a difficult um stage um when vacillators get angry they actually feel a lot better inside it's sort of like they emptied out that building tension of um am i connected or disconnected and they sort of want everybody in the family to now be okay because they feel better and they often don't really have a very clear picture of how their anger is affecting their family and um there's sort of a lot of leftover um feelings about what just happened and the vacillator often is now in a good mood and the whole family just sort of goes along with it to not set up another you know another time of anger so there's often a lot of unprocessed feelings in kids about the anger that can go on in the home another thing that happens with the vasculators parent is that they do they are such great especially moms they're so attuned with their babies they just really get excited about this connection right here and the dependency and the delight that the child has because an infant is hardwired to gaze into the mom or caregiver's eyes and just respond and coo and delight and so they're very responsive and they avoid the vacillator mother just just loves that so to vacillate her dads but if it's a vascular mom and there's so much they're so great with the the baby stage that when all of a sudden as k said the kids begin to differentiate and move away become different or individuals they they feel lost so i see a lot of the vacillator females especially in my office and through it in and out of my offices uh they want to keep having kids i'm not saying this is 19 and counting but i am saying that that they do want to maintain that so they will often want to adopt they will want to maintain that that that baby stage because they really are excited about it and they're kind of lost when the child isn't as responsive as they once were and i think it's a bit different for vacillator dads they kind of feel threatened by that connection with the mom yes because all of a sudden mom's gaze is turned somewhere else and of course babies take a lot of time so the vas leader is a male sometimes they can feel very pushed away and threatened even though they may love their child dearly those old feelings from very young start to pop up and you know it's like well where's my place and aren't i important and now i had your attention and now i don't have your attention at all so the key for the vast later you know i want to mention too we really haven't said this yet but in our book um there's a chapter of course on each of these love styles and in the back of the paperback that is outside for sale there's a workbook that's quite thorough and quite deep that will take you on a journey of growth whether you're the avoider the vast leader the pleaser and we've had one comment from that workbook and it's the same over and over wow it changed my life but it was hard that was you ask hard questions in that book in that workbook and we do and it we just say just go slow and don't stop don't overwhelm yourself but if there's some great conversation starters in even the first chapters when you're looking back at your family of origin so just know that if you feel like okay i know what i am but what am i supposed to do it's all in the workbook you don't have time to go through as much material here as is in the workbook available for you so again if you are a pleaser or an avoider mom and you're married to a vacillator male and you have a baby i've seen seen some vacillator males at that moment get so angry and jealous of that baby and the split off attention from them it really creates one of their first major crises in their marriage just because the attention is diverted and i you know we get this comment a lot oh i'm a vacillator i don't really want to say it but i'm well we love vacillators a they do know something about connection and b they want connection so um i think for some reason there's some sort of a negative association with vaseliners and we're really trying to spell that because all these are attachment injuries and there's a wound under every single style and understanding the wound is what it starts to give you compassion for your spouse understanding that there's a wound under their behavior and again these exist on a continuum as case said this morning mild moderate or severe so that you got to keep that in mind okay let's talk about vacillators sexually okay this will be a little wake up thing um sex xx we're gonna talk about that now all right what about the vacillator sexually again it's sort of the same uh it's on or off hot or cold want to expand on that just a little bit well back to the dating years vasculators like connection they can feel they like they often mistake intimacy or they mistake intensity for intimacy in other words if it's intense it's therefore intimate even a good fight to them is very intimate because we're going at it the police are an avoider are not finding it to be and so many times um even in early dating it's like there's a lot of tension sexually because it's it's an intense connection you can feel so um often i talked to a vassalator recently and she had such a clear description of herself she said i realize i can make any man fall in love with me i know exactly how to do it and i love the feeling of that falling in love and the attention and having the focus uh the strong connection going on she's but i never really stop and ask myself who is this person is this a person i really want do they have characteristics that i like she says it's just all about the falling in love face and then once i'm married i'm so disappointed and i can't remember any of the good and she's divorced now and she says and i'm starting to see that i do the same thing in dating i get all excited when it's new but she says the minute i'm disappointed i i want to run vacillators say two things all the time i'm done i'm out of here and sometimes they literally do remove themselves from wherever they are for a while but their poor spouse if they're married or the person they're dating is like well it's over and then the next day you know well or the next five minutes later or an hour later the vast later comes back and often acts like nothing's wrong and oh i guess we're not getting a divorce so they tend to use extreme language vacillators will love sex because it creates proximity closeness intensity so proximity seeking sexually oriented becoming close is one of their goals so their goal then for sex isn't just to please you or to please himself it is a proximity seeking event to make their anxiety about separation go away so what they will do if they're anxious they might initiate sex to try to create closeness because in that closeness it sues that anxious core makes them feel better and then they feel close to you again and they can then rest in that non-anxious state so sex has an ulterior motive it's a it's a mood stabilizer it's a tranquilizer it's something to settle down that anxious core and uh in addition to that um would you talk about the all or nothing with sex the yeah i mean there's a high value on sex until they're mad and then it can become a weapon to you know well i'm not going to have sex with you because i'm mad at you um and even in the the whole you know we talked about the avoider um [Music] you know they're going to have an affair the avoider it's probably going to be a one-night stand or um you know some sort of internet pornography or something like that it's not going to have emotional connection right pleasers are usually too fearful to have affairs and their affairs if they do happen usually happen somewhere in the mid part of a marriage where they're tired of being the giver and they don't have any idea that they don't really know how to ask or receive so they're just fed up with you know giving giving giving and everybody taking and pleasers are vulnerable at that stage because they're mad and they don't care as much vacillators always have affairs that are an emotional connection they always start with oh he was just so good to talk to her you know she just helped me so much with my feelings or um you know they they like you know they tend to flirt because again it's it's an attention thing and then oops we just went too far and so um every person i've ever worked with who's a relationship addict who has a string of affairs and that is their addiction you know three four five six affairs in a marriage is always a vaccinator and what happens is they start to have problems in their marriage and it's so painful and they don't know how to make it go away or what to do about it and so if you go over here and start something secret and something intense it's almost like a medication for what's going wrong over here that's male or female right male or female i see it equally across the board so you know vasculators have to really realize when they're entertaining something out here it's really a very addictive behavior to get rid of the bad feelings over here because they just don't know what to do with it again we're not saying all these have affairs we're just saying the tendencies that we see in each style if affairs do happen and um just a couple of other quick points uh before we move on um vacillators when let's say you've had a big fight and then you're back together again and you're doing well the makeup sex is phenomenal i mean we're talking really intense because it's just absolutely again all or nothing they'll just be in 100 percent you just go wow where did this come from or how come that wasn't here this morning as a result of this idealization and what k was talking about about the emotional affairs vaseline vacillators are very likely to have pregnancies out of wedlock and so they're very likely to have a child because they get so caught up in the emotional relationship they just go i just love this person so much sex is just an easy leap for them because it is an extension of this intensity that they mistake for intimacy they don't know the person they just feel really great around them they don't know all the red flags and they don't know all the baggage we all have baggage i don't though i have luggage in this little monogram leather handles and stuff but the rest of you have bags very pretty and it's nice stuff and um orvis you know a little fly fishing stuff and uh so um but that is how they operate and so they're charming people and they will dress lovely and they as case said they can be seductive and flirtatious even when they're married if they catch the eye of somebody they just get a jolt of adrenaline just knocks their socks off and they can love that so they do tend to be flirtatious anything more you want to say then yeah one more thing okay many times um when we talk about sex in terms of desire level the the standard you know belief is that men desire sex more and women desire sex less and in many marriages that's true where we often see it reversed is when the female is a vast later in the marriage and they're married to an avoider or sometimes a pleaser and many times in that marriage it's the female that has the higher desire level and the male that is more resistant so often times when we see the genders flip-flopped from what is you know more common it's that combination but would you agree with this comment that it's not a sex drive it's a connection drive yeah i think it's both um but it yes it's very much a drive for connection yeah okay it's a drive for connection john so you

Channel: Jonnell Ashley

Views: 7,193

Keywords:

Id: TjwCr3Hvklk

Length: 33min 55sec (2035 seconds)

Published: Sun Dec 13 2020