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  • Welcome back team.

  • Today we're gonna be talking about how to deal with and how to end anxious attachment.

  • Now this is a man's guide to and it's going to be approaching this from a very male-centric point of view.

  • But if you are a woman listening to this or watching this, there is going to be a lot of this that applies to you.

  • If you haven't seen my other parts of this series, I have done a man's guide to ending codependency which is about an hour long.

  • I do a deep dive into it and I've done a man's guide to ending avoidant attachment.

  • I will be doing others in this series so stay tuned.

  • Make sure you hit the notification to subscribe on whatever platform you are tuning in to me on so that you get notified of these videos.

  • And let me know, message me, hit me up whether it's on Instagram or you can email me through the website and let me know if there are other versions of these a man's guide that you would like me to dive into.

  • I will be covering a ton of psychological topics.

  • So with all that said, let's dive in to a man's guide to ending anxious attachment.

  • Now, where do we begin?

  • I want to begin with the sort of core essence of anxious attachment.

  • What is actually at the core of this attachment style?

  • And at the very center of it is a very simple notion.

  • And that notion or belief or that physical experience that people have who have anxious attachment is I'm not okay unless you're okay.

  • Or I need you to be okay in order for me to feel okay.

  • So there's this dependency that has emerged for the anxious person that says I need to make sure I'm constantly hypervigilant on you, how you're feeling, what you're thinking, what you're doing, how you're relating to me, and how you're doing will predicate and dictate how I'm doing.

  • Now, as we are going to talk about, as you're going to discover, this essence, this core of anxious attachment is developed early on in life.

  • And there's a lot of different factors that can into a person's development of anxious attachment.

  • But at the very essence of it, what I want you to take is that for the anxious person, their needs, their wants, their desires, their sense of safety even are always secondary to someone else's.

  • They've been trained in childhood.

  • They've gone through experiences that have led them to believe that my desires, needs, and wants are secondary to yours.

  • And the only way for me to get mine met are to make sure that you're getting yours met.

  • So there's this very hypervigilant external focus that can happen.

  • Again, their sense of safety, their well-being, their sense of worth and value can also be externally dependent.

  • And again, like I said, this is a very much a learned behavior.

  • And it's usually something that is sometimes witnessed in parents.

  • So that person may have seen this behavior played out in a parent.

  • They maybe were raised to do so, like a child having to parent their parent in some way.

  • So constantly having to caretake one of their parents in order to make sure that their safety as a child or their needs as a child could be met, but it was always on the other side of caretaking a parent.

  • And it could have come from a bunch of other things that we're going to talk about in a moment.

  • But the main point here is that you were probably, if you are an anxious person, or if you have a partner who is an anxious person, because this video is going to be very helpful if you are with an anxious person.

  • If you were or if you are an anxious attachment, the point is that you were a child who was probably put in impossible situations in some points.

  • Impossible for you to solve a problem between your parents, and it caused you an immense amount of anxiety, right?

  • Maybe there was volatility or, you know, they were constantly arguing and you couldn't de-escalate them.

  • Or it was impossible for you to fix a financial situation that your parent was going through.

  • Or is it possible for you to get it right, right?

  • You constantly felt like you were walking on eggshells because no matter what you did, you didn't know if you're going to yell that or if you're going to get approval.

  • And it was very unclear as to what would result in you being okay.

  • Or maybe it was impossible for you to save one of your parents or one of your siblings.

  • Maybe you grew up with a sibling who had an addiction.

  • Or maybe you had a parent who was struggling with addiction.

  • And so that anxiety was you constantly trying to figure out how do I get them to be okay?

  • How do I save them?

  • How do I solve something?

  • But again, behind the anxious person is this impossible situation of I have to give you something.

  • I have to do something for you.

  • I have to solve something or figure something out for you to make sure that you're okay before I can be okay.

  • And that's at the very core of it.

  • And when I say okay, it can mean a number of things.

  • It can be safety, security.

  • It can be okay in the sense of worth or value.

  • It can be okay in the sense of, you know, worthy of being loved, worthy of being happy, okay to be happy.

  • All of those different pieces.

  • So the anxious person is constantly sort of like laying in wait, right?

  • Their whole physical system is spun up saying I have to make sure that everything's okay outside of me so that I can get my needs met.

  • And I want you to remember one thing because this is going to be very, very helpful as we talk about moving towards secure attachment.

  • And it's the simple idea that secure people seek support, whereas anxious people seek validation.

  • Secure people seek support, whereas anxious people seek validation.

  • So the anxious person, whereas the avoidant pulls away and isolates, the anxious person is hyper externalized, hyper externalized.

  • So the avoidant person is more internalized.

  • They're more recluse.

  • They're more aloof.

  • There's a less likelihood you're going to know what's going on with them or what's happening inside of them.

  • The anxious person has a hyper vigilance to the external world.

  • They have been, I use the word trained, you know, but they have been conditioned is another life circumstances that a lot of their sense of being okay in the world requires them to have a very real hyper vigilance, right?

  • What are you thinking?

  • What are you doing?

  • Are you okay?

  • Are we okay?

  • And if you and we are okay, then maybe I can be okay.

  • And so there's this constant focus.

  • And this can be very frustrating for the partner, right?

  • If you're with somebody who has a very high level of anxiety or anxiousness or their attachment, their sense of okay and belonging within the relationship is very externally focused and they're constantly asking you, what's wrong?

  • Are you okay?

  • How are you feeling right now?

  • They're text bombing you, they're love bombing you, all those types of pieces.

  • That can be very frustrating.

  • And so again, coming back to this one notion, secure people seek support while anxious people seek validation.

  • They want validation.

  • They need validation from outside of themselves that everything is okay, that they're safe, that they belong, that they are loved, that they're okay.

  • All of that, all of those different pieces.

  • So let's move into talking about the causes of anxious attachment.

  • What actually develops anxious attachment?

  • Because again, knowing what causes it, being able to identify it within yourself or within your partner and having that conversation with them, not that it's your responsibility, right?

  • This is something that you should probably get into with a therapist or a well-trained coach or a psychologist.

  • But understanding the causality of it will give you an indication of what needs to be healed in your life and will probably give you a very clear insight into how it's showing up in your present day relationship or past relationship.

  • So I'm going to give you the causes, but I'm also going to give you examples of what that would look like in your present day relationship.

  • So let's just start at the very beginning.

  • One of the primary causes of an anxious attachment are inconsistent parental responses.

  • Okay?

  • Inconsistent parental responses.

  • This is when caregivers are inconsistent with meeting their child's needs, with responding to the child's emotions or what they're asking for, sometimes being unattentive when a child is needing nurturing or care.

  • It might be that, you know, the parent is constantly distracted and unable to give that child attention.

  • And so the child's constantly trying to get attention, right?

  • They might be acting out, they might be asking for food, they might, you know, be needing something from a parent and it's very few and far between.

  • And the child isn't able, and this is the really big piece that's important, the child is not able to figure out what is going to get attention from the parent.

  • So that's inconsistent parental responsiveness.

  • Because for secure attachment to build between a child and a parent, there has to be some level of consistency.

  • There has to be some level of, because kids, you know, they're trying to figure the world out.

  • And you were once a child trying to figure the world out.

  • And your sense of safety and belonging, again, was dependent on your parent.

  • And so as a child, you went through a period, a phase of life where you tried to figure out, how do I get my needs met from mom and dad?

  • How do I get my needs met from my caretaker, right?

  • Whether you were adopted or in a foster care system, whatever that looked like, whether you were raised by grandparents, etc.

  • You went through a period where you tried to figure out, how do I get my needs met from my caretaker?

  • And if your parents or your caretakers were inconsistent in responding to your needs and responding to your desires, then, you know, again, it could be you asking to play, it could be you to read a book or whatever it is.

  • If they're very inconsistent and you aren't able to figure out a consistent method of getting attention, of getting your needs met, what will happen is, within a child, they'll start to code that as something's wrong with me.

  • There's something wrong with me and I can't figure out how to get your attention.

  • And later on in life, you know, this one's a very clear through line, later on in life, this will show up in relationships where you will be very anxious, you're not certain as to whether or not you're going to get the attention, whether or not your needs are going to be prioritized.

  • And so, for example, your mother and father may have had pretty wild mood swings.

  • This can be a really good example, where they're loving and joyful in one moment and then, like, the next moment they're, you know, they're abusive and yelling.

  • And they may have been caring and attentive on a regular basis, but then they might have also been completely disengaged and cold.

  • And for you as a kid, it was very unclear as to which one you were going to get, right?

  • You weren't sure if I act in this way, am I going to get joyful caregiver, am I going to get joyful dad, joyful mom, or am I going to get hostile, cold, shut down, yelling parent?

  • And it almost didn't seem to matter which one you operated from, right?

  • Whether you were acting out or whether you were acting in line, whether you were misbehaving or you were behaving, it didn't seem to matter.

  • And so, it was very confusing because you could never get a consistent result from that parent.

  • And so, an example of what this might look like in your modern day relationship is that you might constantly seek reassurance or validation from your partner if you're the anxious person, or if you're the partner, you're constantly feeling like your partner is asking you for validation, fearing that your partner's feelings or that their level of commitment, closeness, connection can change at the drop of a hat, can just change in a dime.

  • And this is mirroring the unpredictability that you experienced in childhood, right?

  • So, for a lot of anxious attachments, this is a very primary driver of what creates that anxiety, right?

  • It's this massive level of unpredictability.

  • So, if you are an anxious attached person, I'd love for you to just write down the question, how was my upbringing unpredictable?

  • Or where were my parents unpredictable?

  • Where were my caregivers unpredictable as parents?

  • And that might be unpredictable with their emotions, unpredictable in when they would shut down, unpredictable in when they would punish you, unpredictable with their moods, but start to examine what role, and this is a really good way of putting the question for you to journal on, what role did unpredictability play in my childhood?

  • And that's going to start to inform you as to how that anxiety started to form in the first place.

  • This is talking about like the roots of your anxious attachment.

  • So, start to dig in that question because the likelihood that it's showing up in your current day relationship, or if you're single in your previous relationship, is very, very high.

  • And it might look like you over texting.

  • It might look like you over sharing.

  • It might look like you constantly checking in to make sure that what you think your partner is feeling or thinking is right.

  • That's a very big one for a lot of anxious attachments, not just this one.

  • But there's this need for the anxious attached person, the anxious person, to constantly verify, are you thinking what I think you're thinking?

  • Are you feeling what I think you're feeling?

  • Because if I can get that right, then maybe there's a chance that I'm okay, that I'm safe, that my needs are being met or can be met.

  • And so, there's this external validation or verification that is constantly going on within the anxious attached person.

  • And you need, in order to uproot that, you need to start to identify where did that actually begin?

  • Where as a child did you actually need to constantly verify where your parent was at?

  • Where your caregiver was at?

  • And where were you trying to overcome uncertainty as a child?

  • So, that's number one.

  • Number two is overly intrusive or overbearing caretakers.

  • Now, this is another interesting one because there are caregivers who are very intrusive or overly involved in a child's life.

  • I think modern day commentary calls it like helicopter parenting, right?

  • Where they are swooping in at every drop of a hat, right?

  • And they're constantly worried about whether or not a child is going to get hurt.

  • And these caregivers often do not allow the child to develop a sense of agency, sovereignty, or independence.

  • And there's this dependency that's created between the child and the caregiver.

  • You may have had a parent who is constantly checking in on you.

  • You may have had a parent who didn't let you take any risks whatsoever.

  • They were constantly worried like, oh, don't touch that.

  • Oh, don't do that.

  • Oh, don't jump off of that.

  • Oh, yeah, we just don't do that.

  • Oh, I'm sorry.

  • And so, there's this constant sort of wet blanket that's been put on top of you and they're intruding into your ability to take risks.

  • Now, when this happens, it creates a nervous system within you as a child that says the world's scary.

  • The world is dangerous.

  • It's not okay for me to And this is the big one.

  • You end up outsourcing that risk profile, that psychological skill of being able to identify what risks are okay and what risks are not okay.

  • You end up outsourcing that to the authority of your parent.

  • Now, this is the really, really big piece.

  • If that happened to you in your childhood, that's likely going to carry on in your adult relationships.

  • And so, what these types of people have happened, if this is you or if you're with somebody like this, they end up or you end up outsourcing your inner authority for risk taking and risk management onto your partner.

  • So, there's a constant fear of I don't know if I can do that.

  • I don't know if I should do that.

  • And you're constantly looking to your partner to help you decide whether or not you should take a risk, whether or not it's okay for you to step out of your comfort zone or push a boundary or whatever there may be.

  • Now, on the other side of this, because that's the sort of overly intrusive part and that can also be overbearing, you may have had a parent that demanded to know everything in your life, like everything.

  • And they were constantly or they were constantly oversharing about their life, right?

  • All the details and information that you wanted to know nothing about.

  • You're sort of acting as like their best friend or their counselor or their therapist in some capacity.

  • And they're telling you information that you should not know.

  • You know you shouldn't know as a child.

  • Or when you look back, you're like, that was really strange that they were talking to me about the divorce or they were with.

  • And so that type of intrusiveness is what we call penetrative, okay?

  • So it penetrates and pushes through your boundaries as a child.

  • And that intrusiveness puts you in a position where you are acting as an adult role that you should not be in at all.

  • And for a child, that's incredibly anxiety provoking.

  • It produces anxiety within a child because suddenly they're not in this taken care of position.

  • They are in a position where it becomes apparent to them that their parent is no longer protecting them, no longer providing safety for them, and is sharing information with them that they should not know.

  • And it can feel like closeness at first, but then it can feel very overburdening at another point.

  • And then finally is the point where a parent is very intrusive and overbearing about your life.

  • They're going through your journal.

  • They're going through your room.

  • They're listening in on your phone calls.

  • They're intrusively asking people that you date in junior high or high school about you know, everything about the relationship.

  • And so they're really invasive into your world.

  • And it feels like you have no privacy.

  • It feels like you have no sovereignty.

  • And so any type of privacy gets broken down.

  • And how that shows up in a relationship is that you feel like you have to share everything all the time.

  • And there's an anxiousness that starts to show up that says, if I don't tell you everything that's happening inside of me, if you don't know everything that's happening in my life, then our relationship is going to be in jeopardy.

  • Something will happen.

  • Something bad will happen.

  • Because the likelihood that your parent or your caregiver that was intrusive punished you for not telling them things is very, very high.

  • They probably punished you when you tried to set boundaries, when you tried to have some type of independence or sovereignty.

  • So how all of this can show up, there's a myriad of ways that this can show up within your current day relationships.

  • But usually individuals have a hard time giving their partner space.

  • So you end up going into the role of being overbearing, of being intrusive.

  • And you fear abandonment, right?

  • Because what you're used to is this very intrusive dynamic where somebody who loved you was intruding and penetrating through your boundaries.

  • And so you end up becoming somebody who does the same thing in relationships.

  • So you're going through your partner's phone, you're reading through their journal, you're checking through their emails, you're constantly needing to check in on them about everything, how they're feeling, what they're doing, etc.

  • And you become that, quote unquote, wet blanket, for lack of a better term, that starts to smother their life and smother their sense of independence.

  • And that's largely because there's a fear that if you allow your partner to have independence, it'll create too much separation and too much space.

  • So that's number two.

  • Number three is emotional dependence encouraged by caregivers.

  • I'm gonna just try and condense this down.

  • Essentially, some caregivers will directly or indirectly, consciously or unconsciously, encourage a child to remain dependent on them for some type of support, whether it's emotional support, psychological support, financial support.

  • And this is often due to the caregiver's own insecurities.

  • And so this parent might try and keep you dependent on them.

  • And this can create anxiety because again, what happens is that it doesn't allow the child to really mature and learn how to do some of the things that they know they need to do as an adult.

  • And it can be very crippling.

  • So things like doing your taxes, creating a resume, you know, just basic things that you need to be able to do as a human being to function in our society.

  • That parent will oftentimes have created a dependency where you need them to do all these things, whether it's talk about your emotional process, what you're feeling, what's going on in the relationship.

  • And this could really be by guilting you.

  • This is a really big thing when it comes to emotional dependency encouraged by caregivers within this category.

  • These types of caregivers will have guilted the crap out of you as a child.

  • There's just no way around it.

  • They will have leveraged guilt and shame to keep you close and to try and maintain that dependency.

  • And there's this sort of like, you need me in order to function and be okay and survive.

  • You cannot be independent.

  • You cannot be sovereign.

  • You cannot have your own independence.

  • You need me.

  • And without me, you will not be okay in the world.

  • And so what happens for these types of folks, if you grew up with a parent like that, who created this type of dependency, you'll get into relationship with people and you will begin to be clingy.

  • This isn't to hate on anybody.

  • This is just to crack a joke and make some of this light because this should still be fun, right?

  • Everything we're talking about should still be fun.

  • This is the stage five clinger comes from, right?

  • Generally, kids that had a parent or a caregiver that created this type of real strong dependency will turn into the really clingy dependent person in the relationship where you as the anxious person looks to have the partner fulfill all of your emotional needs.

  • And usually this is where the codependency shows up.

  • You might be constantly demanding your partner to open up and share things with you constantly.

  • You might reinforce with them like, you'll never do better than me or you need me.

  • So that experience that you had as a kid starts to manifest in your relationship or vice versa, right?

  • You might feel like, oh my god, I can never live without you.

  • My life can't function without you.

  • I need you in my life.

  • This sort of world is ending catastrophic thing when your partner doesn't text back or they don't want to talk about the deep emotional thing or they don't want to have the conversation and it can spin you out emotionally and dysregulate you internally.

  • Next, and there's only two more so I'm going to make these brief.

  • Next is the parental unavailability or absence or rejection or neglect, right?

  • So that's kind of a big category or bucket.

  • But unavailability, absence, neglect, or rejection.

  • So you may have had a caregiver who was an addict and there's a saying in addiction that addiction is choosing one thing over everything else.

  • And so oftentimes what happens for children that grow up around a parent who has a substance abuse problem is they always feel second and they feel a lot of anxiety because they feel a deep level of rejection, of neglect, because that parent is constantly choosing something else above them.

  • They're constantly choosing alcohol or some substance, right?

  • Whether it's gambling or whatever it is.

  • But they're choosing something else above them and that produces this shame internally within the child, but it also produces this anxiousness of I'm not okay.

  • How do I figure out how to help you?

  • How do I figure out how to solve this so that I can get my needs met so that we can be in a secure attachment together so that we can have a healthy attachment?

  • So just notice that all the examples that I've given you are, for lack of a better term, they're broken attachments between the caregiver and the child.

  • Another way of putting it is that there are impasses or interruptions to the attachment between the caregiver and the child that are quite severe that cause questioning within the child.

  • So you can grow up with a parent who is rejecting, who nothing's ever good enough for them.

  • They're sort of like the perfectionist parent.

  • It might be they have mental health issues and you don't know what you're going to get or they're very harsh.

  • They're abusive.

  • They refuse to talk to you about certain things and neglect you.

  • You make it very clear what you need and want.

  • They're not capable of showing up for you.

  • They say they're going to be at the game and then they don't show up.

  • They say they're going to be at the school event and then they're not there.

  • And so there's this constant level of anxiousness and shame within you as a child that, as you get into adult relationships, starts to permeate the relationships where you're constantly worried and anxious about whether or not you're going to be good enough.

  • The other person is going to show up for you and there's this very deep anxiety of, are you going to love me?

  • Are you going to stay?

  • Are you going to be consistent?

  • Are you going to neglect me or abandon me again?

  • Last but not least is abuse, trauma, or PTSD.

  • So some people that have experienced abuse or had traumatic events show up will have a very anxious attachment and that anxiety is oftentimes linked to the trauma.

  • So whether it's or physical abuse or verbal abuse, there's an anxiety that when things start to get intense in any way, shape, or form in the relationship, there's an anxiousness that will start to show up and that those two things are connected, usually for the person that has an anxious attachment and has experienced some type of abuse or trauma, that when things start to get in any kind of intensity, whether it's anger, whether it's the intensity of love and connection, will start to produce this very anxious stirring within the individual.

  • And so they might ask if everything's okay constantly, they might have that hyper-vigilance externally that we talked about before.

  • So what do we do?

  • Let's close this out with talking about how do we end anxious attachment and how do we become more secure?

  • Now at the base of all this, I'm going to circle back to the very beginning, at the base of the anxious attachment is the simple experience of if you're not okay, I'm not okay.

  • And so I need you to be okay in order for me to be okay.

  • Now this is the opposite of the avoidant.

  • This is really important to understand.

  • I'm going to do a whole separate video on how to work with the anxious and avoidant relationship because it's oftentimes an anxious person and an avoidant person will get into a relationship and it's very chaotic and it's very hard to manage.

  • I'm going to do a whole separate video on that because it needs that.

  • So just know that that's coming.

  • But this is opposite of the avoidant who says, I don't need anyone to be okay.

  • I don't need you to be okay.

  • Or trusting others will only get in the way of me being okay.

  • And this is what creates the real big fire between the anxious attachment and the avoidant attachment, right?

  • I need you to be okay from the anxious in order for me to be okay and I don't need you in order to be okay.

  • And so one's constantly trying to pull away and the other one's constantly trying to get very close and it creates a lot of tension.

  • And even if the one person is secure for the anxious person that I need you to be okay can create this disruption.

  • Even if you are a secure person, it can create this disruption within a lot of people that are secure depending on the level of anxious attachment that their person has that says, am I all right?

  • Am I okay?

  • Should I be talking about these things?

  • Because the anxious can sometimes be so overbearing and questioning and so externally focused and hypervigilant on the secure partner that it can start to make them question whether or not they are okay, whether or not they are secure, whether or not they should be talking about those things or it can just be tiring and exhausting, right?

  • So that's the experience that a lot of people will have when it's being with an anxious partner.

  • So all this is important because while the avoidant needs to repair the pain of not being able to trust someone, not being able to rely on others and to actually lean into building that trust and that connection with them, the anxious actually needs to repair the trust and ability to trust the self, right?

  • The trust within themselves.

  • So whereas the avoidant, it's not so much like I need to trust me, it's I need to lean into feeling safe trusting you, that it's okay to trust you.

  • And for the anxious, it's I need to learn how to trust myself.

  • Because again, underneath all of this is the feeling of I'm not okay if you're not.

  • I'm not, you know, I can't ask for my needs if your needs aren't already met.

  • So the anxious attachment needs to trust that they can make good decisions and choices.

  • They have to trust that they can produce safety within themselves and their lives without being punished or hurt or any of those other things from the outside world, from a parent or a caregiver or a partner.

  • And the anxious person needs to do one thing.

  • So I'm going to give you some tactical things that are really important to move out of anxious attachment.

  • So this is the big finale here.

  • So number one for the anxious person is being able to learn self-regulation techniques.

  • Learning how to regulate yourself.

  • Because anxiety is just the going off, the alarm system in the body going off saying something is wrong.

  • And because the majority of anxious attached people have gone through circumstances in their childhood that taught them to set off the alarm system, even if nothing's wrong, right?

  • It's like, I remember in school, people used to pull the fire alarm, even though there was no fire, right?

  • In like elementary, it was like this funny thing.

  • I think I did it once, gotten in a lot of trouble, but that's neither here nor there.

  • So that's what anxiety is like.

  • The fire alarm's going off, but there's no fire.

  • The alarm in the body is going off, but there's nothing actually wrong.

  • And so an anxious person needs to learn how to use the breath to what's called down-regulate the body.

  • And maybe I can do another separate video on going deeper into some of these pieces.

  • But you need to learn to use the breath to down-regulate the body.

  • Because when anxiety happens, your body is in a stress state.

  • So when you look at the brain under MRIs or fMRIs, when you look at the brain and what's happening in the brain when you're stressed versus when you're anxious, it's almost identical.

  • It looks quite similar.

  • So your brain is, when you're anxious, producing cortisol and putting your body into a stress response, and you're in this fight, flight, or freeze mode, your breath rate per minute starts to spike.

  • So the more anxious you feel, the more that you start to breathe quickly, which is why when people have a panic attack, they hyperventilate, right?

  • Because their breathing goes completely out of control.

  • And interesting fact, the reason why they tell you to use a paper bag, or this is the old way of doing it, you'd have to breathe into a paper bag, is that the faster you breathe, the more you oxygenate your blood system, and you reduce the CO2.

  • You actually reduce the carbon dioxide in your body, and that's what creates this sort of lightheadedness effect.

  • And so by breathing into a bag, you actually force your system, you force your body to intake CO2, to intake carbon dioxide.

  • Because you're breathing into this bag, and you're breathing out CO2, and then you're breathing it back in, and then it starts to level off the amount of CO2 in your body.

  • There are other ways to deal with panic attacks, but that's for a different piece.

  • So learn how to regulate your body.

  • You have to learn how to use the breath.

  • Big, big, big piece.

  • If you are an anxious person, check in with your breath as often as possible, and do a couple things.

  • Number one is slow it down.

  • Slow it down, okay?

  • So two is breathe in and out through the nose as often as you can.

  • I'm a little congested right now, but here we go.

  • So deepening the inhale and extending the exhale.

  • Letting the exhale be longer than the inhale, okay?

  • Really big piece.

  • And as often as you can throughout the day, just start to get in the habit.

  • If you're an anxious person, start to get into the habit of just checking in with yourself.

  • How's my breathing?

  • Deepen the inhale and extend the exhale.

  • And as you do that, a couple of things are going to happen.

  • Number one, by extending the exhale and letting the exhale be longer than the inhale, you are going to force your breath rate per minute down.

  • Meaning that you're going to take less breaths per minute, which in turn is going to force your heart rate to lower.

  • So the more breaths you take per minute, the higher your heart rate.

  • The lower the breaths per minute, the lower the heart rate.

  • And as you lower your breath rate and you lower your heart rate, you move your body out of the anxious state, out of the stress state, and into what's called more of a parasympathetic dominant state, or more of a calm rest and digest state.

  • So learn to use the breath.

  • Also with anxiety, it's very common that anxious people have an abundance of energy in their body.

  • And so you're probably somebody that has a lot of energy in your body.

  • And a good analogy that I heard for people is, and I experienced this too when I was dealing with anxiety in my life, was it felt like everything on the outside of my body was going really quickly, but everything on the inside felt like sludge.

  • Right?

  • So I like, I kind of felt tired on the inside, but I was like buzzing on the outside.

  • So learning how to work with your own energy.

  • Like where are your energy levels at?

  • It's very common that anxious people feel a lot right up in here.

  • So there's a lot of focus and attention on the head, on the energy in the head, and then straight down in the middle of the chest.

  • For a lot of people, it can feel like, I don't know, like there's this like opening right here and there's a lot happening in the neck and in the front of the chest.

  • You might feel stuff in your hands and your feet as well.

  • But learning how to slow down the energy and slow down the thoughts in the body are very, very, very important.

  • You can use box breathing.

  • So that's inhaling for four, pausing for four, exhaling for four, pausing for four.

  • That's a good exercise.

  • Or you can use the 4-6 technique, which is inhaling for four through the nose, pausing at the top for two, and exhaling out the mouth for six, and pausing for two.

  • And if you do this for a couple minutes, it will quote-unquote down-regulate your body, your nervous system, and put you into a more relaxed state.

  • So if you're wanting more techniques like this, comment on the video below.

  • If you're watching this on YouTube or hit me up on Instagram and let me know and I can do more techniques that will help you to down-regulate and regulate your nervous system.

  • Because again, as the anxious person, that is the biggest piece.

  • Most anxious people have outsourced the regulation of their nervous systems and their bodies to a partner.

  • And that, again, is usually not their fault.

  • It's usually something that they were conditioned to do in their childhood, right?

  • So if you're an anxious attached person watching and listening to this, you learned to outsource your sense of safety and your sense of regulation to someone else.

  • And the biggest piece of healing anxious attachment and becoming secure is reclaiming your ability and the skill, because it is a skill, but reclaiming your ability and the skill to regulate your mind and your body by using your breath.

  • Okay?

  • Big, big, big piece.

  • Number two is exposure therapy.

  • I have a joke that there's a reason why trigger warnings don't work, but that's a different piece.

  • But usually it's because when we are trying to avoid the hard things that cause us anxiety, it produces more anxiety, right?

  • It's like the worst thing that you can do for yourself when you're feeling anxious is to say, oh no, I'm feeling anxious.

  • I don't want to feel this way.

  • I shouldn't feel this way.

  • That produces more anxiety.

  • It becomes cyclical and we get stuck in that thing.

  • So you need to actually try and lean into what's called exposure therapy, meaning the things that give you anxiety I want you to start to move towards.

  • So if having a hard conversation would produce anxiety with your partner, that's something that you can start to move towards.

  • If not texting them every hour or not texting them after an argument would produce anxiety, I want you to move towards that.

  • You have to actively move towards the things and I'm not saying, you know, give yourself a panic attack, okay?

  • I'm just making myself very clear.

  • But what I am saying is that you have to expose yourself and this is proven time and time again to work, right?

  • Like if you have a phobia, if you are, you know, really afraid of spiders or elevators or escalators or whatever it is, one of the surest ways to end that phobia is to slowly expose yourself to the thing that you're afraid of, to the thing that causes you terror and fear and anxiousness.

  • And so for the anxious person, usually it's security within the self.

  • Usually it's not looking to the other person to reaffirm that you're okay or that the relationship's okay, you know, that the world's not going to fall apart, etc.

  • Usually it's that.

  • And so you have to start to move towards that of like, okay, normally I would text him or her after a conflict and so I'm going to expose myself to what it feels like to not do that.

  • Now you might want some support to do this, whether it's a coach, a therapist, a psychologist, a counselor, a really good friend, but you are probably going to want some accountability as you walk through this part.

  • But expose yourself to the things that you are afraid of and use the regulation in that moment.

  • Number three is work on your sense of self-esteem and self-worth.

  • For the majority of anxious people, because of the experiences that they had growing up, their sense of self-worth and self-esteem has again been outsourced.

  • It's been outsourced because your sense of worth and value and safety was externalized because of the circumstances that we talked about before in this video, right?

  • Your sense of worth, value, and safety was externalized.

  • And so you have to start to work on reclaiming that sense of I am valuable, I have a sense of self-esteem, and how you do that is you start to validate and appreciate yourself.

  • Rather than seeking this constant external validation and appreciation of who you are and what you do, you start to develop a system internally.

  • So that might mean that you keep a journal, you keep a gratitude journal.

  • One of the things that I found to be very helpful is instead of just saying, I'm grateful for this, or I appreciate myself for that, I wrote down when I went through about nine to 10 months of self-esteem journaling.

  • And one of the things that I found super helpful was I wrote down the what I want to validate myself for is.

  • And then I followed up with two things.

  • It's important because, this is important because, and how it makes me feel is.

  • So you have to intellectually anchor in the gratitude and you have to attach an emotion or a feeling to the gratitude.

  • So you can say what I want to validate myself for is I'm grateful because you can say, I want to acknowledge myself for, that's another really good prompt for your gratitude journaling.

  • And then always follow it up with, this is important because, and how it makes me feel is.

  • Because you want to intellectually have a reason why your brain can say, actually, yeah, that is very important.

  • And then you want to have an emotional anchoring to say, yeah, I feel that within me.

  • I feel that appreciation.

  • I feel that validation.

  • Next, and last but not least, is detaching worth and safety from others' validation.

  • Detaching worth and safety from others' validation.

  • Jung said you cannot heal what you cannot separate from or what you cannot separate from you cannot heal.

  • And so if we're not willing to create some separation from a partner, from the normal routines that would spin up our anxiety, it's going to be impossible for us to heal.

  • So we have to learn the art of healthy detachment.

  • Healthy detachment.

  • Not swinging the pendulum all the way to the end of the spectrum where we become avoidant, but just moving into a place where we can say, okay, I'm going to disconnect from the neediness that I'm feeling.

  • I'm going to disconnect.

  • I'm going to start to detach a little bit from the need to text bomb them right now or the need to follow up.

  • Or I'm going to just detach a little bit from the need that I feel to check in on them.

  • It's like I already checked in on them twice today.

  • I'm going to disconnect from that a little bit and just start to pull back.

  • And then in that space, again, when we start to detach a little bit, we have room to validate ourselves.

  • We have room to regulate ourselves.

  • We have room to expose ourselves to anything that might come up, the stories, the anxiousness, etc.

  • So those are the four big, big pieces when it comes to helping you heal anxious attachment.

  • There's a couple of pieces I'm going to share at a later time, but comment below.

  • Let me know what you thought about this.

  • Share this episode with somebody that you know needs to hear it.

  • And by all means, listen to this with a partner.

  • If you are somebody that is anxious, listen to this with a partner.

  • If you are with somebody that's anxious, listen to this with them.

  • Actually, allow yourself to go through some of this work if you are in a relationship.

  • If you're not, that's okay.

  • This might be something that you send to a friend who's also identified that have an anxious attachment and you go through with them.

  • But go through this work with somebody else.

  • So thank you so much for tuning in.

  • Let me know your thoughts on this.

  • Until next week, this is Conor Beaton signing off.

Welcome back team.

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A Man's Guide To: Anxious Attachment

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    yuri 發佈於 2024 年 12 月 15 日
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