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101. The Attachment Series: Avoidant Attachment Style and the Anxious Avoidant Trap (which may have led to your divorce) · Dear Divorce Diary: A Fresh Approach To Healing Grief & Building A Life Of Confidence After Divorce

• 0:49
  Speaker 1: Hi love, today we are continuing our series on attachment styles and we are digging into avoidant attachment.
• 0:56
  Speaker 1: And this is so juicy.
• 0:59
  Speaker 1: Have you ever heard of the anxious avoidant trap?
• 1:04
  Speaker 1: It is when an anxious attacher and an avoidant attacher are drawn to each other.
• 1:10
  Speaker 1: And do you know if you've ever been in an anxious avoidant trap?
• 1:22
  Speaker 1: Hi love, welcome to Dear Dvoris Diary, the podcast helping divorcees go beyond talk therapy to process your grief, find the healing you crave and build back your confidence.
• 1:33
  Speaker 1: I'm your host, dawn Wiggins, a therapist, coach, integrative healer and divorcee.
• 1:38
  Speaker 1: Join me for a fresh approach to healing grief and building your confidence after divorce.
• 1:43
  Speaker 1: All right, in today's episode we're going to dig into what actually creates an avoidant attachment style and how it's probably got something to do with your divorce, and how to spot an avoidant dator if dating is on your horizon anywhere, and also how an avoidant attachment style is really really relevant to the scenario where an ex moves on very, very quickly or really really relevant to affairs in marriage.
• 2:23
  Speaker 1: Let's dig in.
• 2:25
  Speaker 1: Okay, what creates an avoidant attachment style?
• 2:32
  Speaker 1: So if you've been in on the series and you've heard me say that our attachment style is developed or cultivated in very, very early infancy and is then reinforced or not from there.
• 2:47
  Speaker 1: So when we're very, very young and we're completely dependent and we're laying there in that crib and we can't open the refrigerator by ourselves and we can't, our feet don't reach the pedals of the car and we just literally aren't able to provide care for ourselves, how our caregivers respond to us or don't respond to us is what creates that brain map for the way we experience relationships, the way we experience either that people are going to be there to support us or that we've got to go it alone, that we have to worry, preoccupied or anxious about whether or not someone is going to be there to support us or whether we got to go it alone.
• 3:26
  Speaker 1: So this is something that's conveyed in early infancy and for an avoidant attachment.
• 3:34
  Speaker 1: Their lived experience as a very young child, and perhaps persisting into throughout their years of childhood, was that caregivers were not available, that it was a lot of cry it out Like it was probably most of the time at night or at nap time cry it out and a lot of not responding when the baby needed something Right.
• 3:59
  Speaker 1: And that doesn't mean that the caregiver never interacted with the baby, because obviously that in that scenario we have, like a very a health issue, right, a failure to thrive issue where there's, you know, like malnutrition or horrible situations to do with diapers.
• 4:17
  Speaker 1: So we're not talking about the parent never fed, clothed or played with the child.
• 4:22
  Speaker 1: But when you think about if you're completely dependent and you're laying in there in that crib and you know your diapers full, or you're hungry or you're lonely and you cry and nobody comes for over an hour, what have you learned at that point?
• 4:36
  Speaker 1: And so it's more about that.
• 4:39
  Speaker 1: For that avoidant attachment, there was little to no attunement to baby's needs little to none, right.
• 4:47
  Speaker 1: So it doesn't mean that their basic survival needs weren't met, but there was little to no attunement or little to no responsiveness when baby needed something.
• 4:57
  Speaker 1: Now, fun fact, I don't know how my husband's gonna feel about this, but he is.
• 5:01
  Speaker 1: We're gonna talk about this later.
• 5:03
  Speaker 1: You're gonna hear all kinds of stuff about this.
• 5:04
  Speaker 1: But my husband is a classic avoidant attachment, bless his heart.
• 5:08
  Speaker 1: And we have worked on this a lot in our marriage.
• 5:12
  Speaker 1: But when I think about the circumstances that led to his avoidant attachment style, I really can look at them through a lens of love and compassion and understanding, because his parents both loved him very, very much.
• 5:26
  Speaker 1: But they were divorced and they both had full-time jobs.
• 5:30
  Speaker 1: His mom had primary custody of two very young children.
• 5:34
  Speaker 1: She went back to nursing school and she was a nurse, and his dad had multiple children and a demanding job in the construction industry and when he wasn't working was planning jobs and when he wasn't doing that was very, very tired, and so you can kind of just get that in our modern America, when we have two working parents and multiple children, we're stretched really, really thin.
• 6:04
  Speaker 1: And especially in the day and age where we were raised again back to that in the 1980s, 1990s it's 10 pm.
• 6:12
  Speaker 1: Do you know where your children are?
• 6:13
  Speaker 1: Where that was kind of normalized right.
• 6:16
  Speaker 1: That was the normalized culture which was, hey, kids are resilient, right.
• 6:22
  Speaker 1: I know you've heard people say that on Instagram and it is true, kids are resilient, but we do have to kind of have a sense of when we're pushing that kids are resilient thing beyond what is really meant in our design, right.
• 6:36
  Speaker 1: So when avoiding a tatcher may have had very loving parents, and so I think this is also a very interesting thing, right, because I think we can meet people's parents and say like I don't get it, I don't get it how this person acts the way they do.
• 6:49
  Speaker 1: Their parents are so nice, or maybe you've had the opposite experience, right, but it's like we can't measure the consequences of things sometimes based on how much you love someone, because that's not the only thing that makes an impact on someone's development or someone's process.
• 7:05
  Speaker 1: And so for a baby who did not have attunement, their solution to not getting their needs met in a timely manner is to deny that they even have feelings.
• 7:20
  Speaker 1: So imagine you're that baby and you've been in that crib for you know 30 minutes and nobody came right when you needed it.
• 7:28
  Speaker 1: Imagine that the adaptive, the very, very clever adaptive strategy is to start to deny that you even have a feelings or b needs and eventually, over time, as you grow, you learn that relying on yourself to get your needs met is the number one top strategy, and that's really the MO of avoid and attachers.
• 7:51
  Speaker 1: They don't find as much value in relationships, and so it's a lot easier for them to withdraw either inside of the relationship, like when there's a conflict, and it's a lot easier for them to withdraw into things like affairs inside of the relationship, and it's a lot easier for them to withdraw via accepting divorce and just say, well, oh well, okay, well, I guess that didn't work right and it's a lot easier for them to move on quickly afterwards because they just weren't as attached to the relationship as an anxious attacher or a secure attacher would have been, and that has become their neurobiology.
• 8:34
  Speaker 1: It's very, very interesting when they measure an avoidant attacher's brain right, if they hook it up to all the electrodes and whatever, and they measure their brain when there is conflict or something that's emotionally laden, their brain actually becomes less active.
• 8:50
  Speaker 1: They become less capable of reading social cues.
• 8:52
  Speaker 1: So it's so interesting to think back on all the years of my marriage to my current husband and think about all the times where we've been in conflict and he just kind of looks blankly at me and doesn't respond.
• 9:05
  Speaker 1: And I'll ask him what are you thinking Like?
• 9:08
  Speaker 1: Don't you have a response?
• 9:08
  Speaker 1: Have a response.
• 9:09
  Speaker 1: And very often he has said I don't know and that's infuriating, but the reality is is he's not making that up?
• 9:20
  Speaker 1: The brain scans have demonstrated that when vulnerability or emotional intimacy becomes part of the equation, that an avoidant attacher's brain map literally dictates that they, their parts of their brain, become less active, so they have less capacity to solve problems in an effective way in those moments.
• 9:43
  Speaker 1: There are a series of steps that have to happen and be practiced over and over again for them to become more comfortable and to be able to switch on that part of their brain in a more meaningful way.
• 9:52
  Speaker 1: So an avoidant attacher denies that they even have feelings and is going to be someone that thinks that therapy or self-disclosure is dumb.
• 10:04
  Speaker 1: They'll actually, like, tend to judge self-disclosure as weak.
• 10:08
  Speaker 1: Or, you know, you could just hear all the things.
• 10:12
  Speaker 1: Right, you've talked to all the people over the years.
• 10:14
  Speaker 1: You know people who have said that therapy is dumb or that sharing feelings is weak.
• 10:18
  Speaker 1: You, you've you've had those conversations and maybe you even relate to it to a certain extent.
• 10:22
  Speaker 1: Right, because many of us have attachment styles.
• 10:24
  Speaker 1: Aren't perfect checkboxes, right, we often have blends of our attachment styles, so you may even see parts of yourself here.
• 10:31
  Speaker 1: Or, at times, right In conflict, you may experience that it's hard for you to stay open or stay engaged, because there are moments where we all avoid.
• 10:40
  Speaker 1: I was just saying to producer Joy she was getting ready to click record that a lot of times when we're preparing to record an episode, there's a moment right before she clicks record that I'll start to get really.
• 10:51
  Speaker 1: Oh, I wonder what producer Joy would call this.
• 10:54
  Speaker 1: But, like, I start deflecting, right, I want to talk about all sorts of different things, not the episode we're recording, and it's because, before she hits record, even though I've planned out the episode and I know I know what I'm talking about I feel Vulnerable, I feel uncomfortable that I might not do a good job and that you might not like it, and PS, that's anxious attachment stuff, right there.
• 11:16
  Speaker 1: And so then my strategy becomes to avoid that moment and avoid what I'm feeling in that moment by distracting myself by Changing the subject or talking something else or what.
• 11:25
  Speaker 1: This is what producer Joy would call it squirreling.
• 11:27
  Speaker 1: Hahahaha, squirrel and and look, there's an avoidant behavior I do right there because of how uncomfortable a feeling has to do with Vulnerability, and so I know you can spot yourself in this, right, but this is an avoidant attachment MO, like on every front.
• 11:45
  Speaker 1: So I know many women I have talked to so many women over the years who have said you know, I gave it another shot in therapy, right, because I was gonna go and they begged me to stay, and so I gave it another shot in Therapy.
• 11:57
  Speaker 1: But then we got to therapy and they didn't do the work and what you can call that.
• 12:01
  Speaker 1: You can rubber stamp that avoid an attachment style right.
• 12:06
  Speaker 1: And so I think that in this anxious avoidant trap we can see how, even though an avoidant Attachers MO is to be able to talk with you openly about surface things but then avoid going deeply about personal things.
• 12:25
  Speaker 1: But for an anxious attachment love, we just perceive attention and presence and engagement as increasing our sense of security.
• 12:36
  Speaker 1: And If your attention in your engagement indicates that you like me, even better now.
• 12:41
  Speaker 1: Your presence creates a sense of security and the fact that you like me and approve of me creates a sense of security.
• 12:47
  Speaker 1: And so, even though an avoidant attachment avoids going deep and avoids vulnerable feelings and avoids conflict and problem-solving, for an anxious everything about how an avoidant does business feels soothing Until your years down the road and you've got to tackle big, heavy marital things, because life isn't always surface.
• 13:10
  Speaker 1: And Then you know it's those weeks after pregnancy and your body has gone to shit pardon my language body.
• 13:17
  Speaker 1: I love you, thank you for loving me, and you know your Postpartum and all the things right.
• 13:23
  Speaker 1: And you're in a horribly vulnerable place and your avoidant partner is so freaking distant that you can't, you know, get a drop of water for your burning tongue like.
• 13:33
  Speaker 1: And then these anxious avoidant trap dynamics start to really surface in meaningful ways.
• 13:38
  Speaker 1: Right, and so the anxious avoidant trap is this tendency for anxious avoiders to get kind of anxious attachments, pardon, to get kind of wooed by an avoidant attachment, but then it's like absolutely a trap, because there are two ways of dealing, was dealing with things crash and so when you're an anxious attacher you're not necessarily looking for deep, meaningful Conversations.
• 14:06
  Speaker 1: You may be right, because we do love merging with other people.
• 14:09
  Speaker 1: Anxious attachers love merging right.
• 14:11
  Speaker 1: But we can Misconstru certain things as merging right.
• 14:14
  Speaker 1: We can Misconstrue time spent as merging and a lot of times, while avoidant attachers may need more time alone, not for nothing, as long as the time spent doesn't feel heavy to them, it doesn't feel intrusive or it doesn't feel like laden with heavy emotions, a lot of times avoidant attachers can hang out for a really long time, you know, and so early on in relationships, if you can see some of these dynamics like, you can kind of just see how it's a perfect storm that for somebody who didn't have a sense of security, but being in relationship created a sense of security.
• 14:50
  Speaker 1: And then avoidant attachers get positive reinforcement for being independent and self-reliant people.
• 14:56
  Speaker 1: When they see anxious attachers being needy, that just validates for an avoidant attacher.
• 15:01
  Speaker 1: Oh gosh, like they're so needy.
• 15:03
  Speaker 1: I am so good over here being able to handle all my own stuff.
• 15:06
  Speaker 1: I can even help them handle their stuff and I can feel extra self-reliant and I can feel extra autonomous and I can feel extra powerful that not only can I handle my things but I can handle your things too.
• 15:17
  Speaker 1: And anxious attachers eat that up.
• 15:20
  Speaker 1: Because anxious attachers are craving a sense of security, are craving people pouring into them, and so then they fall in love extra fast anxious attachers right With people who aren't necessarily very attached.
• 15:35
  Speaker 1: And then when those relationships hit the rocks, then the avoidant withdraws, the anxious pursues and that causes the avoidant to run even further away.
• 15:45
  Speaker 1: And you can see how this dynamic of distancer the avoidant attacher and pursuer the anxious attacher just creates a negative feedback loop of both people feeling like they aren't getting their needs met and then neither can kind of figure out how to get their needs met.
• 16:00
  Speaker 1: Because when the avoidant withdraws, the anxious gets more anxious right, and now the avoidant is saying like I don't feel the same sense of well-being that I did when things were balanced and you didn't need me quite as much.
• 17:04
  Speaker 1: You were just satisfied with my presence, you were just satisfied with my good morning babe, texts right.
• 17:09
  Speaker 1: And then the moment it got deeper.
• 17:11
  Speaker 1: And then when these relationships end, it's devastating for the anxious attacher, while the avoidant moves on a lot more easily, and then that becomes grief 2.0 after the fact.
• 17:24
  Speaker 1: And so if you can spot this anxious avoidant trap in your own life or in your bestie's life or wherever, it is right, I want you to really be aware of these things, because when you're dating, you can spot an avoidant attacher by kind of noticing how personal they get in their conversations, how vulnerable they are or not, how well they can tolerate intimacy, and so vulnerability isn't just talking about uncomfortable things, it's about Vulnerability is about feeling exposed, and so an avoidant attacher will rarely voluntarily expose themselves to potential rejection.
• 18:03
  Speaker 1: They'll always be a little bit of dance, a little bit of aloofness there.
• 18:08
  Speaker 1: Right, they may be charming, but it's charming within aloofness, where they feel protected enough, they feel not invested enough that you could hurt them if you walked away.
• 18:17
  Speaker 1: And so you know when we think about, in our common culture, the habit of ghosting.
• 18:22
  Speaker 1: The behavior of ghosting is so much to do with attachment styles, right, the avoidant attacher will ghost because they don't want to deal with feelings and so they can't just say how they feel or how they experienced something and they're not attached enough to care about how you feel about it and they don't have the capacity to tolerate that kind of intimacy, so they just don't respond.
• 18:48
  Speaker 1: So when you experience that kind of thing in the dating world, know that this is very, very much attachment to style behavior and that that was wired from early infancy.
• 18:59
  Speaker 1: And while we can become earned, secure attachers as you heard me talk about in our last anxious attachment style episode becoming an earned secure takes a lot of work and a lot of intentional work.
• 19:13
  Speaker 1: It's really a retraining of your brain and how you experience emotion, how you experience vulnerability, whether or not you're willing to practice vulnerability in a consistent way and retrain your brain, reshape those neural networks, and so you know, for those of us who have gotten into relationships and thinking, oh, like you know, it'll get better.
• 19:33
  Speaker 1: I think we did that a lot in our day, right, because we didn't understand the neurobiology of a lot of these behaviors and we didn't understand that, while they are malleable, while you can shift them, it's not an easy shift and it's not just a decision you can make one day.
• 19:49
  Speaker 1: It's a process, and so I don't want you to delude yourself into thinking in your next relationship, in your next relationship, I want you to be aware of this because I don't want you repeating the same mistakes.
• 20:01
  Speaker 1: So, no, making excuses for avoidant attachment behavior.
• 20:05
  Speaker 1: Right, you have to really notice that.
• 20:06
  Speaker 1: And, ps, you know, if you can see a history where you were attracted to avoidance, that's because in your own early childhood, when the caregiver didn't respond, that became familiar to you on some level.
• 20:20
  Speaker 1: Right, and so that inconsistent responsiveness of the caregiver is what lights up your brain like oh, this is familiar, this is how caregivers function.
• 20:29
  Speaker 1: Oh, these are my, this is my person.
• 20:31
  Speaker 1: Right, it becomes energetically familiar, it becomes neurobiologically familiar to you.
• 20:37
  Speaker 1: So when we think we're picking partners from our conscious mind, we are rarely picking partners from a place of consciousness, and this is why therapists often tell people like you have to let me help you fix your picker, you have to help me filter your potential partners, because we are making these choices from such subconscious places and it's really, really useful to have somebody kind of outside of the box helping us take a look at some of these patterns that are unfolding, based on who we're attracted to and who we're engaged with and what turns us on.
• 21:07
  Speaker 1: Quite frankly, right, there's just this old adage right, about girls being attracted to the bad boy, and not all of that is explained by attachment style, but a lot of it is explained by attachment style.
• 21:17
  Speaker 1: It's not the only piece, but it's a good chunk of it.
• 21:21
  Speaker 1: So, avoidant attachments we love you so much.
• 21:23
  Speaker 1: There's hope for you and PS.
• 21:26
  Speaker 1: Next episode in this series we're going to talk about disorganized attachments.
• 21:30
  Speaker 1: And disorganized attachments that's me.
• 21:32
  Speaker 1: We have a blend of anxious and avoidant behaviors.
• 21:36
  Speaker 1: And listen, we're not judging any attachment style here.
• 21:40
  Speaker 1: We are looking at this through the lens of compassion and understanding that none of us really got much of a say, unless you believe that you chose your parents on a soul level, which I do but we didn't get a huge say in the physical realm about how our attachment style was going to be shaped.
• 21:56
  Speaker 1: And so we want to look at this for ourselves and for others through the lens of compassion, because all of this developed when we were dependent and when we didn't have a choice and we didn't have autonomy to make it go a different way.
• 22:10
  Speaker 1: We didn't even understand what was happening to us at the time from a brain place, right?
• 22:15
  Speaker 1: So if you're spotting avoidant traits inside of yourself, great, I love you so much.
• 22:20
  Speaker 1: Now we can talk more about what you can do about that.
• 22:22
  Speaker 1: And if you've spotted avoidant patterns in your exes and in the people that you're attracted to, great, now you're going to have more tools to spot that and you're going to have more tools that, if you do end up with someone who's on the avoidant spectrum but you can see potential in terms of their willingness to become more secure and their ability to tackle conflict, you can see a real investment in learning and doing it differently.
• 22:45
  Speaker 1: You can have more tools to work with them on that and spot your own patterns within there, right?
• 22:51
  Speaker 1: So understanding that my husband loves me deeply but that struggles with avoidance helps me know how to partner with him better, right, there was a fight we got into a couple of weeks ago I may have told this story already where I said hey, I'm an attachment cry, and I mentioned it to him a couple of times.
• 23:07
  Speaker 1: But because me tell me narrating to him that I'm an attachment cry should be less less threatening to an avoidant attache.
• 23:14
  Speaker 1: Right To say like, hey, I'm kind of doing my anxious thing, I'm feeling needy, should feel less threatening than me, like sobbing hysterically and saying like I'm needy.
• 23:24
  Speaker 1: But even telling him I'm feeling needy, he never circled back around Right on that neurobiological level.
• 23:33
  Speaker 1: It's like it doesn't register for him the way that it would register for me if he said he was needy.
• 23:39
  Speaker 1: Right, I would become preoccupied with the fact that he's needy and you need and I would like be intentionally circling back around because that's how I would sense to create security in my marriage.
• 23:47
  Speaker 1: He does not experience it that way.
• 23:50
  Speaker 1: He has a completely different brain.
• 23:51
  Speaker 1: So love, understanding these things is not to judge.
• 23:55
  Speaker 1: It is to look at it all through the lens of compassion for ourselves and for others and to be in solution.
• 24:02
  Speaker 1: In our episode later this week, the Hidden Healing Gems we're gonna talk about is a go-to tool that I love for avoidant attachments and I also got a lot out of it.
• 24:12
  Speaker 1: We're gonna be reviewing that in our Thursday episode, so stay tuned.
• 24:15
  Speaker 1: Now we're gonna move into our Getting Unstuck portion of our episode, and this weekend I was on the gram with a handful of you, which I love.
• 24:28
  Speaker 1: Do you know that?
• 24:29
  Speaker 1: Do you know that I love when y'all give me a follow on the gram and DM me?
• 24:34
  Speaker 1: It's like one of my favorite things to be in conversation with you.
• 24:37
  Speaker 1: So this weekend Corinne DM'd me and she says that she is getting ready to sign her divorce papers this week and all those feelings were looming lots of up and downs, and the way she was experiencing it was she felt frozen on the couch, needed to take a shower but couldn't.
• 24:58
  Speaker 1: Felt that it sounded silly, but that she didn't have the motivation to do even the littlest thing like unload the dishwasher, switch the laundry into the dryer, get cleaned up or leave the house.
• 25:08
  Speaker 1: Felt that she was in a weird mental spot and didn't know how to shake it.
• 25:11
  Speaker 1: Gosh, corinne, I loved chatting with you because what happened next is such a beautiful part of the solution to this particular stuck spot.
• 25:21
  Speaker 1: So first things first.
• 25:22
  Speaker 1: I shared with Corinne what my experience was a paper signing day.
• 25:27
  Speaker 1: Interestingly enough, that wasn't a day that I cried, but it was a day that I shook, like my hands shook, my body shook, like everything just felt like it was shaking all day.
• 25:36
  Speaker 1: I think there was a lot of shock that I was feeling on that day.
• 25:39
  Speaker 1: It felt very, very real, but not in a way where I could really process very effectively what was happening in my body, mind, and there was just a lot of trembling.
• 25:48
  Speaker 1: And so for any of you who are in that particular season of this journey, like, oh, just take me with you to sign the papers, right?
• 25:56
  Speaker 1: Like, just imagine me just holding your hand and holding space for you, because it's a tough moment.
• 26:01
  Speaker 1: But inevitably, corinne and I started talking a little bit about, well, she's feeling frozen right now.
• 26:07
  Speaker 1: What does that mean, right?
• 26:08
  Speaker 1: Well, it's probably a little bit of nervous system freeze response, and the nervous system freeze response is just feeling like, in order to protect yourself, you have to kind of not move.
• 26:21
  Speaker 1: But there is actually a level, even below that, which is nervous system collapse, right, which is just like I can't.
• 26:27
  Speaker 1: I don't got it.
• 26:28
  Speaker 1: I literally cannot.
• 26:29
  Speaker 1: There is not enough resource inside of me to even lift my head.
• 26:34
  Speaker 1: And we think about animals.
• 26:36
  Speaker 1: When animals have been wounded or injured and we talk about them going to ground, we think about a cat who's been injured.
• 26:41
  Speaker 1: It's gonna curl up in a hole somewhere where nobody can find it.
• 26:45
  Speaker 1: An animal who's wounded is going to withdraw.
• 26:48
  Speaker 1: Right, it's going to withdraw and it is not.
• 26:51
  Speaker 1: You're not gonna see it anywhere.
• 26:52
  Speaker 1: And so that's kind of how I think nervous system collapse is like I can't and I must hide For Corinne.
• 27:00
  Speaker 1: I acknowledge that there might be a little bit of nervous system freeze or nervous system collapse and there might be a little bit of depression in there also.
• 27:07
  Speaker 1: Now, this podcast episode and our chats on IG are not therapy and they are not diagnosis right, but they're inquiries that you can be in for yourself to start feeling your way through the nuances of your, your felt sense of your body, mind.
• 27:21
  Speaker 1: And so I asked Corinne to tell me where she gets even the tiniest bit of relief from day to day, and she was able to share with me that in her day to day work she gets a little bit of relief, that it's a nice distraction from how she feels about her stuff and PS.
• 27:38
  Speaker 1: Her day to day job is one where she helps uplift other people.
• 27:42
  Speaker 1: She's an educator, and so now you can see where, when we've been in the habit of caretaking other people and we struggle to really prioritize taking care of ourselves, that that becomes an unsustainable habit.
• 27:56
  Speaker 1: But you already know that, right.
• 27:58
  Speaker 1: And so I just kept chatting with Corinne and we just kept going back and forth about what works and what doesn't work, and I asked her to tell me what she would say to one of her students, word for word, right.
• 28:10
  Speaker 1: And you know, by the end of our chat she had already gone and taken a shower and come back and had the conversation and she had shared with me that one of her biggest struggles is not feeling like she can share all these feelings with a lot of the people in her circle, that there's a lot of kind of like kind of sucking it up and acting like everything's okay, and I bet that you can relate to that a lot.
• 28:32
  Speaker 1: And so what I know happens for somebody who's in nervous system freeze or collapse when you add some support to them, it feels like resource, right, like if you think about a gas tank being on absolute empty and you add a bit of gas oh, now I can go a little further.
• 28:47
  Speaker 1: And so sometimes just being able to acknowledge how I'm feeling out loud to someone and have them receive that well, and then be a little bit of reassuring, right, add some gas to the tank, love.
• 28:57
  Speaker 1: So if you're feeling bottomed out, like your tank is empty, please feel free to DM me.
• 29:03
  Speaker 1: Know that whether you reach out to me or you reach out to somebody in your circle asking for a little bit of support, is gonna be essential to you having the resources to being able to get unstuck.
• 29:14
  Speaker 1: And I want you to think about why this is so perfect for today's episode about avoidant attachment styles.
• 29:20
  Speaker 1: Because avoidant attachers feel like they should have to handle things on their own, and disorganized attachers we'll talk about this next week feel like they can often handle things on their own, and anxious attachers don't want to be perceived as burdens, so they handle things on their own right.
• 29:40
  Speaker 1: So all of this nervous system freeze, nervous system collapse, stuck spot is related to attachment style.
• 29:49
  Speaker 1: Gosh, I love how it's all connected.
• 29:51
  Speaker 1: So catch up with me in the next episode where we talk about one of my favorite book for addressing avoidant attachment style stuff.
• 30:00
  Speaker 1: Love you so much.
• 30:01
  Speaker 1: Peace.
• 30:01
  Speaker 1: Dear Divorce Diary is a podcast by my Coach John.
• 30:08
  Speaker 1: You can find more at mycoachjohncom.