Latest / The Sex, Porn & Love Addiction Podcast / How Your Attachment Style Shapes Your Sex Life — And Why It Goes Wrong (Part 2)

Transcript

How Your Attachment Style Shapes Your Sex Life — And Why It Goes Wrong (Part 2) · The Sex, Porn & Love Addiction Podcast

• 1:11
  SPEAKER_00: Sex porn love addiction is all about self-soothing to manage your emotions.
• 1:16
  SPEAKER_00: It got set up back in the childhood development years.
• 1:20
  SPEAKER_00: It's just not about sex, it's not about porn.
• 1:23
  SPEAKER_00: It's all about the repeated use to set up the physiology to crave those dopamine, serotonin, oxytocin, self-manufactured drugs in the body.
• 1:33
  SPEAKER_00: It's impacting women, men, children, age 10 to 75 across all the age ranges, the sexes, the cultures, the professions.
• 1:43
  SPEAKER_00: It increased exponentially during COVID lockdown and impacting so many lives.
• 1:49
  SPEAKER_00: The Kairos Center has created the first online comprehensive sex porn love addiction.
• 1:55
  SPEAKER_00: It's a video on demand recovery program which you can access from anywhere in the world and begin to see identifiable changes just within six weeks of beginning this weekly program.
• 2:08
  SPEAKER_00: Kairos means your appointed time.
• 2:10
  SPEAKER_00: Isn't it your time to reclaim your life?
• 2:13
  SPEAKER_00: Bring colour back to life without shame.
• 2:16
  SPEAKER_00: Click the link below and begin your journey.
• 2:20
  SPEAKER_00: You owe it to yourself and to others.
• 2:22
  SPEAKER_00: There's an interesting book by Emily Nagoshki entitled Come as You Are.
• 2:32
  SPEAKER_00: It's entirely sexual.
• 2:35
  SPEAKER_00: Emily Nagovsky is actually somebody called a sex educator.
• 2:41
  SPEAKER_00: And in that book, she delves into attachment theory and its impact on sexuality.
• 2:54
  SPEAKER_00: She says that securely attached people, the ideal outcome, remember, have been found to have the most satisfying sex lives.
• 3:08
  SPEAKER_00: Secure attachers have more positive emotions during sex, more frequent sex, higher levels of arousal and orgasm, and better communication about sex.
• 3:26
  SPEAKER_00: Anxiously attached individuals are more likely to have anxiety-driven solace sex.
• 3:39
  SPEAKER_00: And what that means is they're using sex as an attachment behavior, which can make sense intense, but without it necessarily being entirely pleasurable.
• 3:56
  SPEAKER_00: Avoidant attachers start having sex later in life and typically have sex less frequently.
• 4:07
  SPEAKER_00: And those avoidant attachers experience as experience sex as less connected with their lives and with their relationships.
• 4:19
  SPEAKER_00: Interesting.
• 4:20
  SPEAKER_00: Let's look at that a little bit more.
• 4:22
  SPEAKER_00: That article entitled Your Attachment Style Influences Your Sex Life.
• 4:27
  SPEAKER_00: And it adds even casual sex.
• 4:31
  SPEAKER_00: And it's by the attachmentproject.com.
• 4:37
  SPEAKER_00: This article was published on the 13th of September 2020.
• 4:43
  SPEAKER_00: It talks about attachment stars play a role in the way that we approach and experience sex.
• 4:55
  SPEAKER_00: While secure attachment is associated with more fulfilling sex life, insecure attachment stars, preoccupied, anxious, dismissive avoidant, and disorganized, have been linked to less satisfaction and more casual sex in intimate relationships.
• 5:20
  SPEAKER_00: So they take a tour of what that looks like out of the bedroom in order to explore why and how these early attachment styles affect our sexual behaviors and experience later in life.
• 5:43
  SPEAKER_00: So they look at how attachment styles affect us in the bedroom, first of all.
• 5:51
  SPEAKER_00: And remember the attachment styles are formed during the early childhood stage, but stay with us throughout adulthood.
• 6:00
  SPEAKER_00: They affect the way we perceive ourselves as individuals as well as the way we view social bonds.
• 6:08
  SPEAKER_00: Our attachment patterns predict to a large extent the way we approach and act in relationships, and sex is a central and important part of intimate relationships.
• 6:22
  SPEAKER_00: And so it would be logical to expect the attachment stars to affect us in the bedroom.
• 6:29
  SPEAKER_00: Each of those four attachment stars, remember the secure attachment on this hand and the three insecure attachments on that hand, all four attachment stars predispose us, set us up with a propensity for us to view, approach, and experience sex in a particular way.
• 6:56
  SPEAKER_00: It's worth it's worth focusing on this attachment style when it comes to sex.
• 7:09
  SPEAKER_00: So I've already said that the secure attachment often correlates with a fulfilling sex life.
• 7:17
  SPEAKER_00: While the other three insecure attachments often lead to more problems in intimate relationships.
• 7:28
  SPEAKER_00: They break down those three insecure styles and their part in intimate relationships in and out of the bedroom.
• 7:38
  SPEAKER_00: The anxious attachment uses sex for approval, falls in love easily, and generally mistrusts their partner.
• 7:50
  SPEAKER_00: This anxious, preoccupied attachment style is generally characterized by excessive worries about how one is perceived by the others.
• 7:59
  SPEAKER_00: Therefore, they're anxious.
• 8:02
  SPEAKER_00: And by an extreme desire for closeness, proximity, connection, and merger with the other person, the attachment figure, they become preoccupied with this.
• 8:20
  SPEAKER_00: People with this attachment style often become obsessive and emotionally labile.
• 8:27
  SPEAKER_00: Don't think I know what that word labile is, L-A-B-I-L-E, in their intimate relationships due to strong fears of rejection.
• 8:40
  SPEAKER_00: Even the most insignificant sign of unavailability from the attachment partner might lead to extreme jealousy and demonstration of anger and distrust.
• 8:54
  SPEAKER_00: Anxiously attached people also tend to feel underappreciated or misunderstood by their lovers, by their partners, by their sexual partners, or generally dissatisfaction with the way they are being loved.
• 9:12
  SPEAKER_00: Such individuals will often become clingy, needy, and dependent on the attachment figure, their lover, which paradoxically might put off their partners and cause even more conflicts and frustration in the relationship.
• 9:30
  SPEAKER_00: And of course, the cyclical pattern is if the attachment figure breaks off the relationship, there's a sense of I knew it would happen, I knew.
• 9:42
  SPEAKER_00: And so they're hurt, stay away from relationships for a little while, but try again, get back in, dependent upon their attachment style.
• 9:55
  SPEAKER_00: Remember, I should have said that when I did read the information about those three insecure attachment styles, don't necessarily feel that you have to fit all of the descriptions in one category.
• 10:14
  SPEAKER_00: It may be that you actually exhibit different traits in all three insecure attachment styles, but what I'm asking is for you to look at the one where you can more readily identify with a lot more of the characteristic traits, and that one is more likely to be you.
• 10:38
  SPEAKER_00: So continue with this article, The Anxious Attachment.
• 10:42
  SPEAKER_00: When the relationship ends, it often leaves bitterness and resentment in the anxious individual.
• 10:47
  SPEAKER_00: In other words, it's not likely that you can just be friends afterwards with that anxious attached person when the sexual involvement comes to an end.
• 11:03
  SPEAKER_00: Anxiously attached individuals will constantly try to satisfy their need for feeling approval, appreciation, and that they're desired.
• 11:17
  SPEAKER_00: They are likely to fall in love easily, even though they rarely believe that their partners are their true love for life.
• 11:29
  SPEAKER_00: This is because anxiously attached people often expect others to be unavailable and not interested in long-term commitments.
• 11:42
  SPEAKER_00: This is possibly because anxiously attached people often expect others to be unavailable and not interested in long-term commitment.
• 11:53
  SPEAKER_00: That's their presumption expectation.
• 11:58
  SPEAKER_00: Additionally, anxious individuals tend to hold a generally negative perception of themselves and thus have lower self-esteem.
• 12:09
  SPEAKER_00: They perceive themselves as unattractive and often doubt themselves and their worth and their ability.
• 12:19
  SPEAKER_00: If we combine anxiously attached individuals, negative expectations and distrust towards the partner, alongside their worries about their worth and attractiveness, we see that this is a recipe for sex not going well at all.
• 12:46
  SPEAKER_00: This doesn't necessarily mean that the sex itself is bad, not good, but it's not necessarily satisfying at a high level and certainly not so pleasurable.
• 13:00
  SPEAKER_00: Because remember, as a sex therapist, psychosexual therapist that I am, we have the knowledge that great sex, fulfilling enjoyable sex, doesn't happen down there in the genitals, it's all about what's going on up here, the activity that's going on up here.
• 13:23
  SPEAKER_00: And so accordingly, the anxiously attached group hold a negative perception of their sexual experiences.
• 13:41
  SPEAKER_00: After all, you can always prevent abandonment and rejection in your fantasy, unlike real life partners whom you can't easily trust.
• 13:55
  SPEAKER_00: Of course, this lends itself very much to a world of cyber sex, sex addiction, porn addiction, love addiction, porn viewing.
• 14:05
  SPEAKER_00: Safer.
• 14:06
  SPEAKER_00: Of course, that is also a breeding ground for narcissism and shame.
• 14:14
  SPEAKER_00: Me, myself, and I.
• 15:51
  SPEAKER_00: the thought processes unconsciously.
• 15:56
  SPEAKER_00: On the positive side, despite the likelihood of having many lovers, sexual partners, anxious individuals tend to remain cautious in the bedroom when it comes to using protection sexual protection.
• 16:15
  SPEAKER_00: Contraception.
• 16:21
  SPEAKER_00: Is that a positive?
• 16:24
  SPEAKER_00: You decide.
• 16:38
  SPEAKER_00: You decide whether that's positive or negative or just neutral.
• 16:43
  SPEAKER_00: Send me a message.
• 16:45
  SPEAKER_00: It's time to get your relationship back onto a better footing for your future.
• 16:51
  SPEAKER_00: Let's do some work without shame and bring colour back to life.
• 16:57
  SPEAKER_00: Send the email, send the message to me, Gary McFarlane at the Kairos Center.
• 17:04
  SPEAKER_00: And let's begin to reclaim your quality of life.