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Hello and Welcome to my blog! Today I want to share my most recent podcast with you.
I recently published my 39th podcast where I talk about the 4 obstacles of Anxious Attachment.
It will be a four part series, in these episodes I am going to talk about the 4 major obstacles I have noticed that people with anxious attachment have and how to overcome them using thought work and learning how to develop the skill of feeling hard emotions.
As I really reflect on my life with anxious attachment I see these 4 obstacles over and over again. They are what keep coming up, they are why I am so thankful for the tools I have learned to manage my mind and be aware of my thoughts. They are what I need to know how to process and manage because if I don’t they can make little problems in relationships into big problems.
The first obstacle that occurs often when my anxious attachment is activated is overthinking of anxious filled thoughts, obsessive thoughts, that are most often are negative creating a lot of uncomfortable emotions. The second obstacle is the inability to feel the uncomfortable feelings these thoughts produce, such as fear of rejection or abandonment, overwhelm, and stress. Bringing me to the third obstacle our deep fear of abandonment, the fear that someone is going to leave, or reject us. Our fear of not being loveable and being left, is such a deep fear for people with anxious attachment that when we feel these emotions we don’t feel safe, our brain tells us that we are not emotionally safe and have to take action now to ensure that we stay safe. This inability to feel intense uncomfortable emotions often creates an urgency to hurry up and react to a situation. Which leads us to the final obstacle, the need for external validation, the need for other’s approval or praise to feel good enough, to feel loved, to feel secure, to feel seen or valued.
So to recap, the 4 main obstacles people with anxious attachment encounter are overthinking, inability to feel uncomfortable emotions without taking action, fear of abandonment, and seeking external validation.
Today I will be focusing on Obstacle 1: Overthinking
So what is overthinking, if you are listening to this podcast you most likely are no stranger to overthinking but in case you are new- over thinking can look like several different things. It can look like replaying situations in your head over and over again- analyzing- trying to figure out what happened, what went wrong, what others are thinking or feeling- without actually talking to the people involved. It can be analyzing someone's reaction over and over again. It can look like your brain is just being mean and giving you unhelpful anxiety producing thoughts that go to the worst case scenario like: “They are going to leave me” “What if something goes wrong?” “What if they realize who I really am and leave me?” “it is all over” “they don’t love me anymore” “they won’t like me anymore” - “did I do something wrong”- “are they okay”
Overthinking is putting too much time into thinking about or analyzing something or a situation in a way that is more harmful than helpful, creating worry or anxiety.
Overthinking doesn’t always look or sound the same to everyone, so you have to learn to observe your thoughts and see what it looks like for you.
Us with Anxious attachment Overthinking is what happens when we experience something “that doesn’t feel right/ something feels off” and as a result we are filled with a lot of anxious filled thoughts that create more anxious filled thoughts.
For example: for me overthinking is what happens frequently when things don’t go as planned, or there is some kind of “problem”
Triggering events may look like: A friend gets upset at me, or I think someone is upset at me because of my own thoughts about how I did something. My partner doesn’t respond in the way I think they should respond to something I have said. My partner says something that my brain makes me think I did something wrong. Plans get canceled, plans change.
Recently my partner told me that the ride home with me was awkward or uncomfortable- I had a hard time with my toddler and shut down. I became frustrated with myself and became overwhelmed and overstimulated- as a result I shut down-she was sharing that she doesn't know what to do when that happens, she can’t tell if I want affection or I don’t because I shut her out. Instead of being able to talk to her about what happened when she brought this up- I shut down even further because my brain started its overthinking and it sounded like “see you made things uncomfortable for her, see you are too much too handle, this isn’t going to last, she won’t always be this patient with you, you ruin everything, why can’t you just be happy and handle overwhelm differently, you aren’t a good mother and you aren’t a good partner, you get so easily overwhelmed and it just kept beating me up.”
These thoughts produce so much sadness, fear, overwhelm that I went into a stress state- so my stress response in this situation was to freeze. I couldn’t talk. I feel so stuck in what my brain is telling me. Even now doing this work for as long as I have I get stuck in my brain wiring. I knew what my brain was saying wasn’t true and that it wasn’t helping AND yet I felt stuck. I felt like if I said something it was going to be the wrong thing or I was going to be misunderstood and I already felt so not good enough. So I just shut down and I started to cry. Man do I hate when this happens and yet it happens. I let her know I was okay but that’s all I could do in that moment. I held her hand, cried and fell asleep.
I am extremely blessed because I have a partner who knows me, who loves me and gives me space for my emotions and who knows I will come back to this.
The next day I apologized for freezing and shutting down. I explained what happened, I explained how I saw things. We talked it out. You see this used to take me days and sometimes weeks because it was too hard to bring up these feelings- so it was too hard to face. Now it typically takes me less than a few hours- in this case I was exhausted and was living on 5 hours of sleep and I had no mental or emotional capacity to get to ready before I slept.
The thing about overthinking with anxious attachment is that it triggers our deep rooted feeling of fear: fear of abandonment, or fear of rejection, or fear of not being liked and accepted, fear of not being good enough. Which triggers our BIG emotional Reactions- and it is not just one feeling that we feel when these events take place it is numerous feelings all at once that is finally topped with fear of not being enough and fear of abandonment.
Since these thoughts create such intense emotions it feels too big not to do anything about it, so we either seek attention and reassurance or we shut down.
In this situation I shut down. I couldn’t talk. When I shut down I created temporary relief- no more pain was able to come in and I didn’t have to process my emotions or communicate the hard things with my partner.
It is hard for me to be completely vulnerable with my partner because I’ve spent a lot of my time in relationships that 1) didn’t truly value me 2) didn’t truly understand me 3) never took the time to understand anxious attachment and how it shows up for me and made me feel like I was too much, too much drama, too much emotions, bar too high- basically my feelings and thoughts were always wrong and never validated. So it is terrifying to share my innermost anxious thoughts and feelings because my brain is used to them being a problem.
So even though my partner now does value me, does everything to understand or see where I am coming from, who works to understand how anxious attachment affects me, and never tells me I am too much, and always validates my feelings- these conversations are still hard.
It is not easy to say “Hey it’s me I am the problem- oh hey my anxious attachment really got the best of me and I am shutting down temporarily because I am stuck and can’t really do anything else. Or hey I am sorry I made you feel uncomfortable- I was trying to process a lot of emotions while combating a really mean brain and it took all I had in me. It is not easy to say Yes I shut down and I am sorry I hurt you in the process, it has nothing to do with you- it’s me I am the problem, here is what was happening for me and I am working on this. (We are not really the problem- we just have a brain that causes some internal problems we have to problem solve)
The good news is that it is always problem solvable when we know it is our anxious attachment.
IF you want to learn more about your anxious attachment cycle or how to stop your overthinking it come work with me, I currently have spots open for my twelve week 1:1 coaching program. Don’t forget to get on my email list- follow me @anxiousattachmentsolution on IG!
See you next week!
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