Latest / Dear Divorce Diary: A Fresh Approach To Healing Grief & Building A Life Of Confidence After Divorce / 81. How Your Attachment Style in Relationships Lead to Divorce and 4 ways to Create More Secure Attachment

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81. How Your Attachment Style in Relationships Lead to Divorce and 4 ways to Create More Secure Attachment · Dear Divorce Diary: A Fresh Approach To Healing Grief & Building A Life Of Confidence After Divorce

• 0:49
  Speaker 1: Hi love.
• 0:50
  Speaker 1: When you don't fully understand how something came to be, it's hard to avoid making the same mistake again in the future.
• 0:57
  Speaker 1: And while you may not intend to get married again, you will have more love relationships in the course of your life.
• 1:03
  Speaker 1: So listen in so you can put the pieces together around your attachment style journey, marriage and divorce.
• 1:16
  Speaker 2: Hi, love.
• 1:17
  Speaker 2: This is Dawn, and you're listening to Deer Divorce Diary with my coach, dawn, where we explore the post-divorce life and you, the woman who lives it.
• 1:25
  Speaker 2: We cover everything from trauma during and after divorce to feeling like a stranger in your own life and the new frontier of life as a single woman.
• 1:35
  Speaker 2: Cozy in for the conversations you've been longing to have about this new life.
• 1:46
  Speaker 1: By digging into this episode, you will better understand how your attachment style led to, in part, your divorce and the interesting role that addiction had to play in that.
• 1:57
  Speaker 1: You will also better understand how your attachment style was formed and the impacts that that had on your nervous system health.
• 2:06
  Speaker 1: And, finally, you'll get a perspective into why the spiritual aspect of your healing journey is integral to repairing your attachment style.
• 2:15
  Speaker 1: If you followed me for a little while, you know that I wanted to become a therapist in the sixth grade because of my parents' shit marriage and how under supported I felt in their, the entirety of their marriage.
• 2:30
  Speaker 1: They didn't get divorced until I was 17 and I was grown right, so who cares?
• 2:35
  Speaker 1: But as an only child, I'm a little bit on a tangent now.
• 2:38
  Speaker 1: But as an only child, right, when your two parents don't talk to each other like that's a pretty fractured family.
• 2:42
  Speaker 1: Yeah, you know what I mean.
• 2:44
  Speaker 1: Yeah, so right they.
• 2:46
  Speaker 1: Certainly there's generational trauma that they both embody and then that obviously affected the quality of their marriage, which obviously affected the quality of their parenting and my quality of life.
• 2:55
  Speaker 1: And as a very under supported child in a pretty intense home, I, you know, had the idea that I would become a therapist and make a difference in the world.
• 3:07
  Speaker 1: Yeah, right, so I could spare the children from the things I can't tell you or pinpoint where exactly I understood that the underpinnings of divorce is attachment trauma, right.
• 3:20
  Speaker 1: That we are neurobiologically wired for love and belonging, that attachment and connection is one of our deepest, most primal needs.
• 3:27
  Speaker 1: When our need for attachment and connection and attunement gets disrupted early on, we end up substituting something that for some people becomes addiction in the way we think of addiction.
• 3:41
  Speaker 1: For other people, like maybe me, could become addiction in the way of overthinking, over analyzing, right.
• 3:47
  Speaker 1: Thought addiction or codependency addiction, right, which is addiction to relationships, right.
• 3:54
  Speaker 1: And so we develop replacement behaviors in the place of where the secure attachment, connection and attunement needed to have been.
• 4:04
  Speaker 1: And then our attachment to those replacement behaviors is so fiercely strong that very little can come between it until we introduce a force that is stronger than that, aka a healthy connection, secure place to form a really vulnerable experience that is affirming, and not just affirming in the way where it's like oh, you can do whatever the fuck you want, but right affirming in the way I mean like attuned right, like attuned and non-judging.
• 4:36
  Speaker 1: Yeah, that's what I mean by affirming Not not like do whatever you want, but is non-judging is understanding about humanity and mistakes and the messiness of it right.
• 4:47
  Speaker 1: And so, as I started to understand that the underpinnings of divorce is attachment trauma, then I'm like oh well, that explains the divorce rates in our country.
• 4:55
  Speaker 1: So then, to truly break the cycle of divorce, we have to heal attachment styles, both in the people that are currently divorcing, because they're going to get married again If they haven't healed their attachment style, then they're going to get divorced again and then all these children that are a product of divorce if we don't heal their attachment styles.
• 5:11
  Speaker 1: Because, clearly, if you're growing up in a family where you end up going between houses, where there's high conflict, or there's addiction or there's infidelity or whatever there is right, obviously, your attachment has been.
• 5:28
  Speaker 1: Your secure attachment has been disrupted because your family unit got disrupted, right?
• 5:31
  Speaker 1: So obviously that's an attachment breach, we call it Okay.
• 5:34
  Speaker 1: So if we don't help repair those attachment breaches for kids, then they're going to go on to get divorced and so on and so forth, right, and so this just lit me up even more around working with families, which is always influenced why I became a marriage and family therapist in the first place.
• 5:50
  Speaker 1: And then, if you fast forward a little further to when I became EMDR trained and started to understand that EMDR alone can't fully like straight up and down, emdr can't fully heal an attachment style.
• 6:05
  Speaker 1: But when you add the intricate and delicate work of working with dissociative parts, parts of self right, when we add inner child work and the understanding of how dissociation functions into EMDR, now we are massively repairing anxious and avoidant attachment styles.
• 6:32
  Speaker 1: Okay.
• 6:33
  Speaker 1: So let's look at nervous system regulation.
• 6:35
  Speaker 1: Okay.
• 6:35
  Speaker 1: So what is the thing that gets disrupted when we have attachment trauma?
• 6:40
  Speaker 1: It is absolutely nervous system health.
• 6:41
  Speaker 1: Okay.
• 6:42
  Speaker 1: So when there's an attachment breach right, so I'm little there's an attachment breach.
• 6:49
  Speaker 1: Let's say you know, my parents got into a horrible fight, or I had a parent who was chronically ill or whatever happened, and the parents couldn't provide an attuned, vulnerable, connected, non-judging space, right, and so there's an attachment breach.
• 7:02
  Speaker 1: There's my sense of security and wellbeing as a very, very little being gets disrupted.
• 7:07
  Speaker 1: What happens that leads to feelings of anxiety, panic, fight or fight, fight, freeze, fawn right.
• 7:15
  Speaker 1: And so when we talk about trauma responses fight, flight, freeze, fawn that is nervous system disruption.
• 7:26
  Speaker 1: The nervous system is the information and superhighway that runs between the brain and the body, that runs all the organs.
• 7:33
  Speaker 1: It's constantly assessing the environment to determine whether or not it's safe.
• 7:36
  Speaker 1: And so when you're very, very little and you experience attachment brief, the immediate understanding in the body and thusly in the mind is I am not safe.
• 7:46
  Speaker 1: And when that becomes chronic or habitual, now the nervous system is in a chronic, heightened state of I am not safe, fight, flight, freeze.
• 7:55
  Speaker 1: And then, because the parents who created the breach probably don't know how to teach you how to get back into a sense of nervous system security, safety, rest.
• 8:12
  Speaker 1: And now the pattern has already been created.
• 8:14
  Speaker 1: Now we just have a bunch of humans running around with nervous systems I'm calling dysregulated, right, but just means chronically feeling unsafe.
• 8:25
  Speaker 1: And then we react.
• 8:26
  Speaker 1: Then we react to emails from our bosses with activated nervous systems because, without knowing it, subconsciously right, that email from the boss goes back to that preverbal pre-picture memory time where there was an attachment breach in very early childhood.
• 8:42
  Speaker 1: And so heal the attachment style, help the nervous system to spend more time in a regulated state of rest and safety.
• 8:54
  Speaker 1: That takes time to retrain your nervous system.
• 8:57
  Speaker 1: Now you have interrupted the pandemic of divorce in this country, boom, and that is why we're here on this podcast talking about these things.
• 9:07
  Speaker 1: And so then, when you add to it, let's say, things like in my healing journey, like yoga Yoga I also came to at the same time that I came to attachment disorders Yoga is a massively nervous system regulating tool.
• 9:22
  Speaker 1: So cardio is not right.
• 9:25
  Speaker 1: Cardio further activates the nervous system because you're actually pushing the heart to race.
• 9:30
  Speaker 1: When you're doing cardio yoga, while your heart does get, you know it is, it is a cardiovascular activity.
• 9:39
  Speaker 1: To do yoga most of the time You're also pairing it with deep, regular, consistent Breathwork.
• 9:47
  Speaker 1: Like yoga is all about the breath.
• 9:48
  Speaker 1: Every movement in yoga is paired with an inhaler and exhale very intentionally.
• 9:53
  Speaker 1: So when you pair that kind of breathwork with that somatic Process, right.
• 10:00
  Speaker 1: Then you're in yoga and you're doing hip openers and you're doing shoulder flexibility stuff and you're doing, you're doing all these things that are helping process emotion out of the body.
• 10:06
  Speaker 1: With that breathwork, you are retraining your nervous system, right.
• 10:09
  Speaker 1: So, 2010, I'm getting divorced and I'm in yoga.
• 10:12
  Speaker 1: I'm in 90-minute yoga lake every week without fail, and we weren't having the nervous system talk yet in popular culture, but that's what was happening.
• 10:21
  Speaker 1: Then you add spirituality, right, and I was in Al-Anon working that program.
• 10:25
  Speaker 1: We add the concept, which now, for me, law of attraction, very, very useful, right.
• 10:30
  Speaker 1: But we add the, the relationship with one's higher power.
• 10:34
  Speaker 1: Dear God, there is someone above my pay grade who has my back.
• 10:39
  Speaker 1: That's a secure attachment Opportunity.
• 10:43
  Speaker 1: That is why I'm so hell-bent on an intimate relationship With a divine creator, because it's so essential to repairing our attachment style, especially for a divorced person who probably right, like we've already established, that if the underpinnings of divorce Were attachment, breaching your childhood, it means that there's something wonky between an adult child of divorce and their adult parents.
• 11:04
  Speaker 1: It's something wonky there, right, and so for a knowledging that the parents are not the perfectly attuned partner to help repair the attachment style and the person you just divorced isn't the person to help repair your attachment style.
• 11:18
  Speaker 1: Your therapist could be one of those people.
• 11:21
  Speaker 1: Who else in your life are going to show up as those people that help repair your attachment style by Providing you the safe place to be able to go to the vulnerable connectiony stuff that Brene Brown advocates?
• 11:34
  Speaker 1: For that has to start in healing spaces like group therapy, tulsa rooms, churches or other spiritual places where we can Access that connection with each other and with a higher power, because that is how we heal attachment style.
• 11:49
  Speaker 1: It's not the whole picture but it's a big part of it, because eventually I want to attract a partner that can help further heal my Attachment style by being that safe place.
• 11:56
  Speaker 1: Yeah, but that's not gonna happen right away because at first I'm gonna keep attracting the same wonkiness, right?
• 12:04
  Speaker 1: So the yoga, the spirituality, higher power all part of attachment style healing and why it's so essential and then fast forward to homeopathy because and an energetic level, so much of this can be healed, so that consciously I'm like, oh, I have a higher power that has my back, oh, I can be vulnerable and say hard things with joy and she's gonna love me mostly unconditionally, right, she does a really good job at better than most.
• 12:29
  Speaker 1: But then there's still that energetic little residue left that's like but what if the other shoe falls?
• 12:37
  Speaker 1: But what if the shit hits the fan?
• 12:39
  Speaker 1: Because we all have that thought right.
• 12:40
  Speaker 1: Especially when things start to get good, people start saying but what if the shit hits the fan?
• 12:45
  Speaker 1: Yeah, and so how do you get that out of your vibrational craw?
• 12:50
  Speaker 1: And what I have come to find is that homeopathy Constitutional homeopathy specifically, not acute Constitutional homeopathy has taken all of that vibrational leftover, attachment trauma mess from my Preverbal, pre-picture memory.
• 13:06
  Speaker 1: Doesn't make sense when I say that Because it's so hard to work on in talk therapy or in journaling or in Spiritual study, it's so hard to work on things that I can't remember because I was six months old, 18 months old, three years old, six years old.
• 13:23
  Speaker 1: And if you can't remember it and you can't access it, yes, the somatic work and the nervous system training goes really far, but constitutional homeopathy can get back there in the timeline and that's why it's such a game-changer For attachment healing, attachment trauma which creates a secure human, which attracts another secure human, which then creates that secure relationship and boom, we've changed the whole world, we've eradicated divorce.
• 13:49
  Speaker 1: Well, in pockets of places where people wanted to do this work.
• 13:54
  Speaker 1: Yeah, and that's why we have this podcast and that's why I'm so frickin passionate about it, because the thing that broke my heart right was this toxic relationship that I was born into from two people who loved me Love.
• 14:07
  Speaker 1: They love me so much, but they couldn't love each other well and they couldn't love me that well either.
• 14:12
  Speaker 1: Not because they didn't, but because of those behaviors, because of their attachment wounds, their own addictions to their own right, which they lean on because it replaces their healthy attachment with their caregivers, right, and so on and so forth.
• 14:28
  Speaker 1: So a lot of people have questions about attachment styles, right, and what they mean and what theirs is, and a couple of things that I observe when we talk about attachment trauma is, people tend to be pretty not everybody, but a lot of people tend to feel very protective and defensive of their parents, and that's normal and in no way is it helpful for us to blame parents.
• 14:49
  Speaker 1: But it is important to understand the mechanics of how attachment breach happens Anytime.
• 14:54
  Speaker 1: A young dependent child we're not talking about 13 year olds, we're talking about early brain development, pre-age 7, because before we're 7, the top brain hasn't come online.
• 15:07
  Speaker 1: The prefrontal cortex is having limited involvement, and so the part of the brain that handles executive function and advanced thinking processes is not yet developed or online.
• 15:20
  Speaker 1: Anything before 7 that leads a child to feel profoundly unsafe for extended periods of time is going to be an attachment breach.
• 15:30
  Speaker 1: Attachment breach leads to typically one of two attachment styles.
• 15:34
  Speaker 1: There are derivations, there are variations on a theme, but let's just oversimplify it to either an anxious attachment style, which we would call a clingy child, or an avoidant attachment style, which we would call kind of a loner child that avoids connecting right.
• 15:49
  Speaker 1: Whether or not you become clingy or avoidant probably has way more to do with there is literature that says it has to do with the parent's attachment style, but I also think that a lot of that has to do with genetic predisposition and personality right, whether or not you become clingy or avoidant.
• 16:09
  Speaker 1: Now, in particularly chaotic homes, there is a mixed version attachment style, and this one is important to reference.
• 16:18
  Speaker 1: It's the attachment style that I most closely associated with.
• 16:22
  Speaker 1: I very much identified it as a disorganized attachment.
• 16:26
  Speaker 1: At any given moment I could be insanely clingy and at any given moment I could be cold as ice.
• 16:33
  Speaker 1: Shut you out, ice you out, completely emotionally unavailable.
• 16:37
  Speaker 1: Now, anxious and avoidant are both actually not available for intimacy.
• 16:42
  Speaker 1: Neither attachment style can tolerate intimacy.
• 16:45
  Speaker 1: This is an important thing for people to note, right, we tend to think of good codependence as anxious attachments and asshole men as narcissistic men, as avoidant attachments.
• 16:56
  Speaker 1: And we tend to think of those asshole, narcissistic men as avoidant attachments as being not available for intimacy.
• 17:01
  Speaker 1: But anxious, codependent attachments are not available for intimacy either.
• 17:05
  Speaker 1: They cannot tolerate feedback, they cannot tolerate true vulnerability or honesty with themselves or others.
• 17:11
  Speaker 1: Right, everything is about presenting a certain picture and perfectionism and service to others and let me not tell you my true thoughts and feelings because, oh god, you might reject me and so neither attachment style is available for intimacy.
• 17:23
  Speaker 1: That's an oversimplification of attachment styles.
• 17:26
  Speaker 1: But I think we've covered here the highlights really effectively, right Anxious, avoidant, disorganized and that none of them have the capacity for intimacy, and it's a process of repairing and healing them, right?
• 17:42
  Speaker 1: So we've talked about a lot of the tools that can do that having a spiritual program that's not the best word, but having a spiritual program and regulating your nervous system through tools like yoga, walking, resting yeah, emdr, there are so many subconscious tools for healing attachment.
• 18:02
  Speaker 1: These are the ones I'm passionate about right Homeopathy, emdr, journaling there are many.
• 18:07
  Speaker 1: Find the ones that feel right for you right.
• 18:09
  Speaker 1: Find the ones that resonate with you and know that while you're dating, unless you've done a good amount of attachment style repair, you're going to keep attracting anxious, avoidant or disorganized attachers, which is just going to perpetuate.
• 18:27
  Speaker 1: And so so often people think that they're attracting a different type of partner because they check different boxes than their previous partner checked.
• 18:36
  Speaker 1: But in reality you are subconsciously attracting an attachment style that echoes your parents attachment style from pre-picture, pre-verbal memory.
• 18:48
  Speaker 1: And so until that gets worked on, judged, massaged, until there's a level of awareness where you've connected the dots and you can catch it happening in real time and you could spot it in yourself and in other people, you're going to repeat the past, and that is attachment styles and what it has to do with.
• 19:02
  Speaker 1: What motivates me to do this now.
• 19:05
  Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah.
• 19:10
  Speaker 1: So thanks for listening to this episode.
• 19:12
  Speaker 1: That's super chatty.
• 19:13
  Speaker 1: That noodle session turned episode.
• 19:15
  Speaker 1: Love you, peace.