Latest / The Sex, Porn & Love Addiction Podcast / Why You Panic When Someone Pulls Away (Attachment Expert Explains)

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Why You Panic When Someone Pulls Away (Attachment Expert Explains) · The Sex, Porn & Love Addiction Podcast

• 1:11
  SPEAKER_01: Sex porn love addiction is all about self-soothing to manage your emotions.
• 1:16
  SPEAKER_01: It got set up back in the childhood development years.
• 1:20
  SPEAKER_01: 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_01: It's impacting women, men, children, age 10 to 75 across all the age ranges, the sexes, the cultures, the professions.
• 1:43
  SPEAKER_01: It increased exponentially during COVID lockdown and impacting so many lives.
• 1:49
  SPEAKER_01: The Kairos Center has created the first online comprehensive sex porn love addiction.
• 1:55
  SPEAKER_01: 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_01: Kairos means your appointed time.
• 2:10
  SPEAKER_01: Isn't it your time to reclaim your life?
• 2:13
  SPEAKER_01: Bring colour back to life without shame.
• 2:16
  SPEAKER_01: Click the link below and begin your journey.
• 2:20
  SPEAKER_01: You owe it to yourself and to others.
• 2:23
  SPEAKER_01: Let's go and look at the second of those insecure attachment styles, and it's called in this article, the first one that I'm reading is ambivalent anxious.
• 2:37
  SPEAKER_01: Some adults are inconsistently attuned to their children.
• 2:43
  SPEAKER_01: At times they are responsive and their response is appropriate and nurturing, but at other times they are intrusive and insensitive.
• 2:58
  SPEAKER_01: And children with this type of parenting are confused and insecure, not knowing what type of treatment to expect on any one occasion.
• 3:09
  SPEAKER_01: They often feel suspicious and distrustful of their parent, but at the same time they act clingy and desperate.
• 3:20
  SPEAKER_01: Remember, desperate for a child is life and death.
• 3:26
  SPEAKER_01: This is their only world with the parents, the secure base with their parents.
• 3:31
  SPEAKER_01: This is major trauma.
• 3:33
  SPEAKER_01: Where a child gets anxious about the availability of a parent, it's a really big deal.
• 3:38
  SPEAKER_01: Don't look at it through your adult lens.
• 3:42
  SPEAKER_01: These children have what is called an ambivalent anxious attachment with their unpredictable parent.
• 3:52
  SPEAKER_01: Here's what it looks like in that other second article, if you will.
• 4:00
  SPEAKER_01: And it's called anxious preoccupied.
• 4:03
  SPEAKER_01: It's the same one, remember.
• 4:05
  SPEAKER_01: Ambivalent anxious is the same as anxious preoccupied.
• 4:10
  SPEAKER_01: And here's what that article with anxious preoccupied says about this category of people.
• 4:17
  SPEAKER_01: People who are anxious or preoccupied with attachment tend to agree with the following statements.
• 4:24
  SPEAKER_01: I want to be completely emotionally intimate with others, but I often find that others are reluctant to get as close as I would like.
• 4:34
  SPEAKER_01: I am uncomfortable being without close relationships, but I sometimes worry that others won't value me as much as I value them.
• 4:46
  SPEAKER_01: And people with this style of attachment seek high levels of intimacy, approval, and responsiveness from their partners.
• 4:57
  SPEAKER_01: That's a big deal.
• 4:59
  SPEAKER_01: Responsiveness.
• 5:01
  SPEAKER_01: So when you do one of those actions that I was talking about, turn two, the olive branch, it's a serious, serious impediment and problem.
• 5:14
  SPEAKER_01: When the other gets a rebuff or doesn't get the turn two that they were seeking, it's another rejection, another nail in the coffin.
• 5:26
  SPEAKER_01: It's such a big impactful want to say behavior, but negative behavior by not going towards them.
• 5:35
  SPEAKER_01: It is received powerfully as an attachment impact.
• 5:45
  SPEAKER_01: So such anxious, preoccupied individuals, people with this style seek high levels of intimacy and approval and responsiveness, but they also value intimacy to such an extent that they become overly dependent on their partners.
• 6:10
  SPEAKER_01: Compared to securely attached people, these who are anxious preoccupied tend to have less positive views about themselves.
• 6:23
  SPEAKER_01: They often doubt their worth as a partner and blame themselves for their partner's lack of responsiveness.
• 6:33
  SPEAKER_01: They may exhibit high levels of emotional expressiveness, worry, and impulsiveness in their relationships.
• 6:45
  SPEAKER_01: Let's look at some of the traits that will come out of this anxious attachment.
• 6:55
  SPEAKER_01: I am afraid I will lose my partner's love.
• 7:00
  SPEAKER_01: I often worry that my partner will not want to stay with me.
• 7:05
  SPEAKER_01: I often worry that my partner doesn't really love me.
• 7:10
  SPEAKER_01: I worry that romantic partners won't care about me as much as I care about them.
• 7:17
  SPEAKER_01: Can you imagine going through life not even recognizing that this underpins an individual's patterns of behavior and interaction in relationships not just with a partner but with many others?
• 7:31
  SPEAKER_01: Probably all others.
• 7:34
  SPEAKER_01: And you don't know or realize.
• 7:39
  SPEAKER_01: Therefore you won't realize through the lens in which you are interpreting people's actions towards you.
• 7:48
  SPEAKER_01: Really impactful.
• 7:50
  SPEAKER_01: You need to know you better.
• 7:55
  SPEAKER_01: Let's go on to that third style.
• 7:59
  SPEAKER_01: That third insecure style.
• 8:02
  SPEAKER_01: And that third insecure style is called disorganized attachment in this first article.
• 8:12
  SPEAKER_01: When a carer or parent is abusive to a child, the child experiences the physical and emotional cruelty and frightening behavior as being life-threatening.
• 8:30
  SPEAKER_01: And the child is caught in a terrible dilemma.
• 8:35
  SPEAKER_01: Their survival instincts are telling them to flee to safety, but safety is the very person who is terrifying them.
• 8:50
  SPEAKER_01: The attachment figure is the source of the child's distress.
• 8:57
  SPEAKER_01: And in these situations, the child typically learns to disassociate, dissociate, separate themselves from themselves, from their body, so that it is being done to them, but a part of them has floated off.
• 9:16
  SPEAKER_01: And I see it as a hot air balloon.
• 9:19
  SPEAKER_01: They separate from themselves, the body stays here, but the emotions taste them off to somewhere else.
• 9:27
  SPEAKER_01: It's a coping strategy, it's the protection.
• 9:31
  SPEAKER_01: But set up in childhood, remember, and practiced repeatedly in childhood, the minute in adulthood, because throughout life it has been happening, there's something the individual sees that seems to trigger the brain as a reminder of the past.
• 9:47
  SPEAKER_01: Instantly, that defensive strategy is going to come out.
• 9:52
  SPEAKER_01: So in those situations of the disorganized attachment, the child detaches from what is happening to them and what they are experiencing is blocked from their consciousness.
• 10:09
  SPEAKER_01: Children in this conflicted state have what is called a disorganized attachment with their fearful parental figure.
• 10:21
  SPEAKER_01: Let's look at it in the other article, where it is actually called fearful avoidant.
• 10:33
  SPEAKER_01: And people with losses or sexual abuse in childhood and adolescence often develop this type of attachment and tend to agree with the following statements.
• 10:45
  SPEAKER_01: I am somewhat uncomfortable getting close to others.
• 10:50
  SPEAKER_01: I want emotionally close relationships, but I find it difficult to trust others completely or to depend on them.
• 11:01
  SPEAKER_01: I sometimes worry that I will be hurt if I allow myself to become too close to others.
• 11:09
  SPEAKER_01: And I know some of you are identifying with this, and it's really feeling emotional and tearful because you're seeing something, you're beginning to understand something of your pattern of behavior and why.
• 11:26
  SPEAKER_01: And people with this attachment style have mixed feelings about close relationships.
• 11:32
  SPEAKER_01: On the one hand, they desire to have emotionally close relationships, but on the other, they tend to feel uncomfortable with emotional closeness.
• 11:42
  SPEAKER_01: And these mixed feelings are combined with sometimes unconscious, often unconscious, negative views about themselves and actually negative views about their partners as well.
• 11:55
  SPEAKER_01: They commonly view themselves as unworthy of responsiveness from their partners and others, and they don't trust the intentions of their partners and others.
• 12:08
  SPEAKER_01: Similar to the dismissive avoidant, people with this fearful avoidance style seek less intimacy from partners and frequently suppress and deny their feelings, their own feelings.
• 12:23
  SPEAKER_01: Instead, they are much less comfortable expressing affection.
• 12:28
  SPEAKER_01: It's not safe.
• 12:30
  SPEAKER_01: They have a past experience, and that past experience the brain remembers, even if you don't at a conscious level, because your brain dissociated, remember, back there in the past, but there's a layer of your brain that is carrying the experience, even if you're not remembering it in any great detail.
• 12:48
  SPEAKER_01: And that part of the brain is gonna seek to protect you and avoid anything that has the glimpse of looking like the past, it's gonna jump in and protect you and cause you to manifest certain types of behaviors in the relationship.
• 13:04
  SPEAKER_01: But that person, that partner, is not necessarily the abuser of the past, but they might be perceived as doing things, saying things that is triggering the past.
• 13:17
  SPEAKER_01: This is such a big deal.
• 13:18
  SPEAKER_01: So some of you, this is set up a whole emotional roller coaster ride that might mean you have some individual sessions with me, particularly this thing called EMDR, eye movement, desensitization, reprocessing, where you don't have to go through the trauma in any great detail like you might with CBT.
• 13:45
  SPEAKER_01: It can help to process stuff out of your body because the test of whether the stuff is still there and on process is for you to think about the issue back in the past, the trauma, the distress, the upset, talk about it for just 10-15 minutes, then scan your body with a scanner from top of your head down to your toes.
• 14:09
  SPEAKER_01: See where you're feeling something in your body of a disruption.
• 14:14
  SPEAKER_01: And where you know you're feeling some disruption in your body.
• 14:20
  SPEAKER_01: You know the stuff is unprocessed, unresolved, and I would encourage you to get some individual therapy, maybe come as a coup as a maybe come as a couple initially, but it may be we can do some work in EMDR as a couple.
• 14:39
  SPEAKER_01: You can work together in EMDR as a couple.
• 14:43
  SPEAKER_01: I have this level of training where I can work with couples to do EMDR together, one on the other.
• 14:52
  SPEAKER_01: Or it might be individual therapy, individual EMDR.
• 14:57
  SPEAKER_01: Maybe necessary or more appropriate.
• 15:01
  SPEAKER_00: Have a chat with me.
• 15:03
  SPEAKER_00: Send me a message.
• 15:05
  SPEAKER_00: It's time to get your relationship back onto a better footing for your future.
• 15:11
  SPEAKER_00: Let's do some work without shame and bring color back to life.
• 15:17
  SPEAKER_00: Send the email, send the message to me, Gary McFarlane at the Kairos Center.
• 15:24
  SPEAKER_00: And let's begin to reclaim your quality of life.