**Attachment & Nervous System Wiring 101: How Childhood Shapes Your Thinking and Self-Regulation — Transcript & Summary | SozAI**
Source: https://sozai.app/transcript/attachment-nervous-system-wiring-childhood-shapes-thinking-self-regul/

Heidi Priebe explains how attachment styles (secure, anxious, avoidant, fearful-avoidant) shape nervous system development and self-regulation, and how each style can heal toward security.

## Key Takeaways

- Your attachment style reflects how your nervous system was shaped by early caregiving, not a moral failing
- Attachment patterns with others mirror your relationship with your own distress signals
- Healing toward security differs by style: anxious needs earlier self-regulation, avoidant needs to trust bodily signals, fearful-avoidant needs nonjudgmental presence
- Understanding your own attachment tendencies is necessary before applying generic nervous system regulation advice

## What the video covers

- Introduces the idea that attachment orientation with others mirrors one's relationship with their own nervous system
- Critiques the popular saying that anxious attachment equals avoidance of self and vice versa, calling it inaccurate
- Explains that infants depend on caregivers to act as their nervous system until they can self-regulate
- Describes a 1-10 distress scale, with secure parents typically responding in the 3-5 range before distress escalates
- Outlines how secure parents provide both protection (boundaries and safety) and comfort (validation of hard feelings)
- Describes the anxious attacher's hypervigilance to distress and attachment-seeking as a way to get co-regulation
- Describes the avoidant attacher's tendency to dismiss or criticize their own feelings and push through distress until burnout
- Describes fearful-avoidant disorientation, with spikes of distress alongside shame about feeling the 'wrong' thing
- Recommends that anxious people build self-regulation skills earlier, avoidant people let their nervous system lead, and fearful-avoidant people practice nonjudgmental witnessing
- Advises viewers to watch the secure section first as a template for movement toward security

## Chapters

1. 00:00 Introduction: Nervous System Regulation and Attachment
2. 02:46 Myths About Anxious and Avoidant Attachment Self-Relationships
3. 04:38 Anxious, Avoidant, and Fearful-Avoidant Patterns Overview
4. 05:30 How Secure Attachment Develops: Parental Attunement and the 1-10 Distress Scale
5. 08:00 Secure Adults and Early Intervention in Distress
6. 16:40 Anxious Attachment and Healing Through Self-Regulation Skills
7. 26:40 Avoidant Attachment and Letting the Nervous System Lead
8. 39:50 Fearful-Avoidant Attachment and Nonjudgmental Witnessing

Answers

## Questions about this video

What is the 'anxiously attached is avoidant of yourself' saying, and why does Heidi Priebe reject it?

Heidi Priebe says the saying is catchy but wrong. She argues that attachment orientations with others are a direct extension of one's relationship with their own nervous system, so anxious attachers are hypervigilant to their own distress rather than avoidant of it.

How does a secure parent typically respond to a child's distress?

According to the video, secure parents respond to distress in the moderate 3-5 range on a 1-10 scale, providing both protection through boundaries and safety, and comfort by validating that life can be hard. This teaches the child a blueprint for how to respond to their own distress later.

What healing approach does Priebe recommend for fearful-avoidant attachment?

She recommends staying present with and nonjudgmentally witnessing one's inner experience long enough to discern which signals should be acted on versus which reflect a trauma response. She notes that trauma patterns may require trauma-informed support to resolve.

## Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown

00:00

Speaker A

Hey guys, I'm Heidi Pribb. Welcome back to my channel or welcome if you're new here. This week on this channel, we have been doing a deep dive on nervous system regulation, particularly for those of us who grew up with chronically

00:13

Speaker A

disregulated systems. And today we're going to be talking about how your attachment style or your attachment orientation influences the way your nervous system develops as you grow up as well as the relationship that you have to your own body and its distress

00:30

Speaker A

signals. So this is about trying to get into a secure relationship with your own nervous system. And the reason why this is important, among a lot of other things, is because there is so much advice out there on the internet about

00:43

Speaker A

how to do nervous system regulation work. But if you don't know what your natural tendencies are in the first place and how you're predisposed to respond to your own distress signals, it can actually be really easy to develop

00:56

Speaker A

in the wrong direction and to take advice on how to regulate your system that is in fact just pushing you further into your own patterning that's already not working for you. So, what we're going to look at today is how the

01:07

Speaker A

anxious, avoidant, fearful avoidant, and secure nervous system develops, as well as what relationship you might have to your own body and your own nervous system by virtue of your attachment style. So, there's a saying that I've seen floating around the internet quite

01:22

Speaker A

a bit that goes to be anxiously attached is to be avoidant of yourself. And to be avoidantly attached is to be anxiously attached to yourself. And I totally get why people love this saying. It's very catchy. It's very clever. It is also

01:35

Speaker A

entirely wrong. So the attachment orientations that we have with other people are a direct extension of the relationship that we have with our own nervous systems. So to be anxiously attached essentially means that when you experience distress in your system, it's

01:54

Speaker A

very hard for you to dissociate from or get away from that distress. And so a lot of the attachment seeeking behavior that you do as an anxious attacher, getting really fixated on whether other people are responding positively to you,

02:07

Speaker A

if they like you, if they want to be close to you, you're actually doing because you are very distressed about your own distress. And your system is trying to keep other people close so that you'll have co-regulation available

02:20

Speaker A

to you. So, while you might be willing to self-abandon in moments in order to do that keeping of people close, the reason you're trying to keep them close is because you are in fact quite hypervigilant about any pain or distress

02:32

Speaker A

that you might be experiencing and you generally struggle to self-regulate around it. Now, this is not a moral failing. It is actually a feature of the way that your nervous system developed inside of the caregiving environment that you were raised in, but we're going

02:46

Speaker A

to get to that in a couple of minutes. And then on the flip side of things, those who air avoidant, just as they tend to be a little bit dismissive of and tuned out from other people's distress, they are the exact same way

02:58

Speaker A

with their own distress. So the avoidant spends a great deal of time thinking about how they want to feel and criticizing themselves or trying to find ways to change their inner experience if it does not conform to the way that they

03:10

Speaker A

think they should or the way that they want to feel inside. And then with fearful avoidance, essentially there's a disoriented response to your own nervous system. So you have those spikes of distress just like the anxious attacher.

03:22

Speaker A

And you have that dismissive quality of the avoidant attacher where you often shame yourself for feeling the wrong thing or thinking that you ought not to express yourself because your emotion doesn't make sense. But you're often confused and disoriented about which

03:38

Speaker A

signal in your nervous system to listen to and express or bring into the rest of your life when. And so the routes to healing towards a more secure system are going to be very different for each of these three styles. So the anxious

03:51

Speaker A

attacher basically needs to learn skills for self-regulating before they get to a distress point where the only option available to them is co-regulating by any means necessary. And the avoidant attacher has to learn to let their nervous system take the lead more often

04:07

Speaker A

and instead of assuming that they are wrong when they are feeling something that doesn't make sense, listening to what their nervous system might be trying to tell them. And then the fearful avoidant has to learn to stay present and be a witness to their inner

04:21

Speaker A

experience without judgment for long enough to discern which of their inner signals need to be listened to and acted out versus when they might be experiencing a trauma response. So, we're going to go over all four attachment styles and we're going to

04:36

Speaker A

start with secure. Now, if you're inclined to skip ahead and just watch the part of the video that pertains to your attachment style, I totally get that. But I do recommend that you stick around and watch the secure part first

04:48

Speaker A

because this is going to give you a template of the place you want to be moving towards if you're trying to go from a more insecure attachment style to a more secure one. So we all come into the world as a giant bundle of needs.

05:02

Speaker A

And we also come into the world having no capacity to self-regulate. So in the first couple years of our lives, our parents essentially serve as our nervous systems. and the point at which they intervene with our distress signals

05:16

Speaker A

often sets the blueprint for the rest of our lives for how and when we will naturally respond to our own distress signals. So the way that our parents respond to us in those first couple of years basically becomes the rulebook for

05:28

Speaker A

us when we're adults around what counts as distress in our system and how and when we will attend to it. So we're going to put distress on a scale of 1 to 10 for the purpose of this video. And if

05:40

Speaker A

you were raised in a secure environment, what that means is that your parents were more or less attuned to you and they were generally able to tell when you were approaching the moderate range of distress. So really low levels of

05:53

Speaker A

distress generally we don't need to attend to it when it's like a 1 to three out of 10. A lot of that kind of stuff goes away on its own or doesn't even make it into our conscious awareness.

06:04

Speaker A

But as soon as we're in the kind of 3 to six distress range, what's often happening for us internally is that we're uncomfortable and we need to find some sort of resolution for whatever it is that we're feeling discomfort about.

06:19

Speaker A

And if you have an attuned enough parent, so this does not mean a parent who is hypervigilant to your every single move, but a parent who is reasonably aware of what you're feeling and when and who can interpret your

06:30

Speaker A

distress signals reasonably well. They're going to be responding to your distress signals in that three to five range. So the job of a secure parent is to provide their child with protection and comfort. Protection means that you're able to give your child enough

06:47

Speaker A

boundaries and rules and restrictions so that they stay safe in the world both practically but also emotionally. Okay?

06:56

Speaker A

And that part's important. We're going to double click on it quite a bit throughout the course of this video. So the secure parent is able to teach their child that sometimes we have to make hard choices that feel not great in the

07:09

Speaker A

moment but that prevent us from experiencing future distress that is unnecessary. And the comfort piece is also important because what the child learns when they're in that moderate range of distress and a parent competently intervenes and both protects

07:24

Speaker A

them so helps them solve whatever logistical problem they're having that's creating the distress in a way that prevents it from reoccurring unnecessarily in the future and gives them comfort around the fact that life kind of sucks sometimes. This becomes

07:38

Speaker A

the blueprint for how the child learns to respond to their own distress as they grow up as well as when they think it's time to intervene. What the child is learning through this process is that my distress matters before it reaches a

07:53

Speaker A

crisis point. And if I deal with it at a lower level in a way that both protects me from things getting worse and comforts me around the hard decisions that I need to make for myself in order to keep myself protected. Now I'm going

08:08

Speaker A

to have a better experience in the long term of self-management and of living my life. And this is exactly how the secure adult operates. They don't wait until things get to a crisis point before they take their own feelings and needs

08:21

Speaker A

seriously. they deal with them at a low level. And the reason why that's really important is because dealing with your distress at a low to moderate level is kind of like going grocery shopping when you're barely hungry. You're just able

08:34

Speaker A

to make healthier choices because you are not desperate to relieve your hunger in like the next hour. So secure attachers are generally not trying to do things like set boundaries when they are already totally over their head in

08:47

Speaker A

distress, right? they're going to do it at a much lower level, which generally means they have a much more flexible range available to them in how they can deal with the problems in their lives.

08:58

Speaker A

Because again, at that 3 to five level, there's usually a lot of things you can reach for. Like if you're feeling uncomfortable in your relationship, but it's just a moderate discomfort, you can try talking to your partner about it and

09:09

Speaker A

see how that goes. You can try setting a new boundary and see how that goes. you have time to kind of play around with different options and outcomes before your distress level has peaked into like an eight or nine range, at which point

09:21

Speaker A

you basically just need a way of relieving the distress. And you often don't really care how healthy that way is. The same way if we go grocery shopping at like a 9 out of 10, we might end up with a cart full of frozen

09:33

Speaker A

pizzas. Now, the next style we're going to talk about is the anxiously attached style. If you grew up in an environment that produced an anxious attachment style, generally what that means is that your parents responded to your distress

09:45

Speaker A

when it was somewhere around the 7 to9 range. And in the 7 to9 range, essentially we're already outside of or close to outside of our window of tolerance. So inside of our window of tolerance, which is a term that was

10:00

Speaker A

coined by Dr. Dan Seagull. What it means is that it's the nervous system range within which we're able to be pretty present. So when we're in our window of tolerance, it means that we're regulated enough that even if we're experiencing

10:13

Speaker A

something like discomfort or upset, we're still able to be present with those feelings and to be at choice when it comes to how we respond to them. But once we start hitting either the upper or the lower limits of our window of

10:26

Speaker A

tolerance, meaning we are either too aroused physiologically to be able to deal with things from a place of presence, generally it means we're in a fight orflight response, or we're too shut down, so maybe we're in a freeze

10:38

Speaker A

response, to be able to respond properly to the situation at hand. And if you grew up anxiously attached, you often had your distress tended to when it was already kind of creeping its way out of that window of tolerance. Now, the

10:52

Speaker A

reason for this is because often the parents of anxious attachers are quite competent at responding to their child's distress cues, but they do so inconsistently. So, this might be because you had a parent who was working a lot of the time and they didn't always

11:07

Speaker A

have the time or the energy to be as attuned to you and what you were feeling as the secure parent did. It might be that you are the youngest of several children and so by the time that you

11:17

Speaker A

came along, your parents attention was just spread more thin. So, this does not mean that your parent was necessarily a bad parent or that they didn't care about you. It simply meant that in order for you to get your needs met for

11:29

Speaker A

whatever reason, you had to tune in to your feelings of distress when they came up in your body and you had to escalate them in order to get someone to come give you the care and support that you

11:40

Speaker A

needed. But at least enough of the time that care and support would come and it would be useful. The problem is that if we are having our distress intervened with when it's at, let's say, a 7, 8, or

11:52

Speaker A

9 out of 10, because we're not in that window of tolerance where we're able to be really present, we're not actually absorbing the tactics that our parents are using to regulate us. The same way a child who is secure is absorbing in that

12:05

Speaker A

3 to six range what their parent is doing to help them regulate. So, while the secure child grows up with these kind of body-based memories of, "Oh, yeah, we did this and this when I was a child and I felt distressed. Let me try

12:17

Speaker A

that for myself as an adult." The anxious attacher does not learn those self-regulation skills in the same way because by the time we're out of our window of tolerance, we're not really able to learn and absorb in our bodies

12:29

Speaker A

what is happening to help us stay regulated. So what the anxious attacher learns when they are in that 3 to six range is I need to start focusing on how to make my needs known now because if I

12:43

Speaker A

can make them known and if I can get my parents attention I know that I will get comfort from my distress. But what they don't always get is protection from their distress. So remember in that 3 to six range for the secure child, their

12:58

Speaker A

parent intervenes and helps them solve whatever problem is causing the distress in such a way that it's unlikely to reoccur. Of course, if this is something like hunger, it's going to reoccur. But if it's something like getting in a

13:11

Speaker A

fight with your sister, the secure parent is going to help the child when they're feeling moderately annoyed and they're going to teach them things like conflict resolution skills, like setting boundaries or sharing what they're feeling when they're not already

13:23

Speaker A

overwhelmed. But if the parent is only attending to the child once they're already in distress, it's too late to teach those preventative skills. All they can do is help them soothe the distress until they get back into that window of tolerance.

13:38

Speaker A

And so what the anxious child learns as they grow up is that there is no way to protect myself from distress. But what I can do is I can keep people close to me who can help me regulate when not if I

13:51

Speaker A

spike into a distress response. So like the secure child has that kind of natural stopping point in the 3 to six range where they stop and go okay what do I need to do to take care of myself

14:03

Speaker A

here? The anxiously attached child in that 3 to six range has their attention naturally getting drawn towards how do I keep people close to me and make sure that their attention stays trained on me. So there's this kind of trope that

14:16

Speaker A

you might hear floating around the attachment world that anxious attachers are unusually needy. Like they just have more needs than other people. But that's actually not true. Anxious attachers have the exact same amount of needs as everybody else. The problem is that they

14:32

Speaker A

have not learned to be proactive about caring for their own needs and setting the boundaries and being self-protective about their energy the way that the other styles have in their own ways. And so the anxious attacher tends to

14:46

Speaker A

concentrate too many of their needs on their relationships. So rather than thinking how do I disperse my needs and do some self-regulating, some co-regulating with my partner, some co-regulating with my community members, etc., They tend to look at one

15:00

Speaker A

relationship as their main source of regulation and put all of their needs in that particular bucket. So the route to secure attachment for those who air more anxious is to learn to disperse those needs more dusely. Not to have less

15:14

Speaker A

needs but to diffuse them more. And a major way to start working in that direction is to start recognizing when your distress is in that 3 to six range and start looking for ways other than co-regulation to attend to your distress

15:28

Speaker A

at that point. Now what I'm not saying is that co-regulation is bad and should never be reached for. What I'm saying is that you already know about co-regulation as one possible route to lessening your distress. So that muscle

15:42

Speaker A

is kind of overdeveloped and what you want to work on is the other underdeveloped muscle of self-p protection. So if you notice you've been feeling okay and kind of regulated for a while but suddenly you're getting really focused on does this person like me or

15:57

Speaker A

not like me? Are they mad at me? Has their tone changed? Was there something weird about our last interaction? This is actually probably a signal that you are in a 3 to six distress range about something in your life. It could be

16:10

Speaker A

about your relationship. It could be about your job. But your brain has learned to fixate on keeping others close when you're feeling moderate distress. So, what you want to do when you're in that region is start looking at, is there a boundary that I might

16:24

Speaker A

need to set right now? Is there a conversation I might need to have right now? Is there a way that I might need to change my routine or change my approach to a given problem or stop doing something that is perpetually hurting me

16:39

Speaker A

in my life in the name of self-p protection? And then can I find a way to soo myself around the fact that self-p protection often does not feel very good. So a big problem is that because anxious attachers are used to getting their

16:58

Speaker A

comfort but not their protection needs met. The nervous system has kind of internalized that anything that feels bad is bad. But sometimes things that are really good for us like setting boundaries or standing up for ourselves or being in a necessary conflict with

17:12

Speaker A

someone feel bad but are good for us in the future. Because setting our boundaries early, making it clear that we're uncomfortable with something or that a relationship is not working for us before it reaches a crisis point is

17:27

Speaker A

going to be a self-protective move that saves us future pain. And if we have not learned to make self-protective moves in that middle region, all we're going to be able to do is make the same painful moves over and over again until we find

17:41

Speaker A

ourselves in that eight or nine distress region. And then we don't really care how we're getting comforted. and we just need comfort. So, if the only person who we think is capable of comforting us is the person that we're very mad at, we're

17:54

Speaker A

probably not going to care in that moment and we're going to go do whatever it takes to get that person's attention on us, even if it means self- betraying in some way so that our comfort can get soothed. And so what I often see anxious

18:07

Speaker A

attachers assuming is that to be secure means to be kind of calm and relaxed inside of that 8 to9 level distress when that's not the case at all. To be secure essentially means to take your own distress seriously at a low level and

18:24

Speaker A

set up a life where your boundaries are in place clearly enough that you very rarely get to that eight or nine distress level in the first place.

18:34

Speaker A

Everybody once they are outside of their window of tolerance and functioning from some sort of trauma response is going to have trouble self-regulating. So your job is not to become calmer when you're freaking out and in a trauma response.

18:48

Speaker A

Your job is predominantly to learn to prevent that situation from coming online in the first place. So it's to develop that stopping mechanism that secure people have in the 3 to five range when you go, "Wait, I'm not

19:01

Speaker A

feeling good. How do I attend to that? How do I change my own behavior at a low level of distress to make sure that I'm protecting myself from future pain? Now, the next style we're going to talk about

19:14

Speaker A

is the avoidant attachment style. So if you heir avoidantly attached, what that generally means is that you grew up in a caregiving environment where your desire for comfort or emotional closeness was very frequently and consistently met with subtle rejection by your caregiver.

19:33

Speaker A

Now, this does not necessarily mean that your caregiver was overtly abusive or intentionally rejecting. Very often this is just a product of a parent who is maybe a little more avoidant leaning themselves and who never learned to feel

19:46

Speaker A

comfortable with the experience of emotional intimacy. And so it's not like they're looking at their babies and going stop crying and man up, right?

19:53

Speaker A

It's that they're going to experience very subtle, sometimes totally unconscious discomfort responses when their child is trying to get really close to them or when their child needs comfort from them. And because when we are babies, we are just giant bundles of

20:08

Speaker A

nerves, we notice incredibly subtle signals and neurons that fire together wire together. So basically, if you are a baby and you notice that anytime you're making a lot of eye contact with your parent, they are breaking eye contact. Or anytime you are expressing a

20:26

Speaker A

need for comfort, anytime your body feels like it wants closeness, your parents body kind of stiffens in response. What is happening is that the part of you that is experiencing a need for comfort and closeness and the part

20:38

Speaker A

of you that is experiencing rejection are firing simultaneously. So that experience gets fused in your brain. And what you learn from that on an unconscious level is that wanting closeness and intimacy with other people is shameful.

20:54

Speaker A

And so as you grow up, this part is really important. It's not that your conscious mind is going to be feeding you thoughts like don't get close to anybody. What is going to be happening is that you're actually going to be kind

21:06

Speaker A

of tuned out from your own desire for closeness. Because our bodies learn to naturally not focus on information that we think is unimportant. So if from a young age you learn that your desire for closeness and intimacy just didn't really get you

21:21

Speaker A

anything positive, you're just going to stop paying attention to those signals in your nervous system when they come up. The same way most of us don't think very much about flushing our cash down the toilet because there's just not

21:33

Speaker A

really a reason that makes sense to do that. And so we very rarely if ever think of it and this is the case for those of us who air more avoidant. Our nervous systems have just kind of learned that when a desire for intimacy

21:45

Speaker A

or comfort comes up inside of our systems, it's not that important to pay attention to. So the nervous system just kind of naturally develops an aversion response to thinking about that and instead it tries to wire our attention

21:57

Speaker A

towards what is going to be a high reward activity. And generally what those who air more avoidant learned was that when they were displaying the signals that their parent or their caregiver thought they should be feeling which generally parents feel pleased

22:11

Speaker A

when their children are happy and upbeat. When those responses were online they tended to get a lot of attention and positive reinforcement. And so what the nervous system learns is that it's important to pay attention to what is

22:23

Speaker A

expected of you and to try to get your body to essentially conform to whatever inner state is going to help you achieve what is expected of you. And what is expected of you totally changes based on the environment you're in, etc. But

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Speaker A

essentially, this is the beginning of the avoidant attacher dismissing their own internal signals as they authentically arise and instead referencing their environment and figuring out how they think they should be feeling, which becomes the main experience that the avoidant detacher

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Speaker A

has with their own nervous system for the majority of their lives. So what they learn at a young age is that it's possible to protect myself but not to comfort myself because they learn that if I behave in a way that is right based

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Speaker A

on what I've internalized to be right based on the environment that I grew up in then I will prevent myself from the future distress of getting rejected.

23:16

Speaker A

But if I am rejected I'm just going to be left alone with it. So what you learn on a very deep level is that if you are in pain you have to deal with that alone. But what you can do is work hard

23:28

Speaker A

to protect yourself and put yourself in situations where pain is less likely to occur. And this is mostly happening unconsciously. So it's not that avoidance are resisting reaching out for care or comfort when they're struggling in life. It's that a they usually don't

23:43

Speaker A

even notice that they're in distress in the first place. And b, if they are, reaching out for care and comfort does not even occur to them. it would just feel to them like now I'm putting that burden on other people when I could just

23:55

Speaker A

use that same energy to fix my problems and make things better for myself. So, a major sign that you might be in that 3 to six distress range as an avoidant if you're an adult now is that you notice

24:07

Speaker A

you are trying really hard to get your inner experience to conform to what you think you should be feeling. So, you might be under a lot of stress and pressure at work, but instead of giving yourself comfort or rest or whatever it

24:20

Speaker A

is that you need, you're just going to be getting perpetually frustrated with yourself because you can't seem to perform at the level that you think you should or need to be performing at. And so there's going to be this struggle

24:32

Speaker A

that comes online, this kind of fight between the self and the nervous system when you are in that moderate distress range as an avoidant because you have not learned to listen to your body's cues for things like having enough rest.

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Speaker A

You might assume, well, if I've had 8 hours of sleep at night, that's enough rest. But maybe your system needs a lot of decompression time if you've been under a lot of stress recently. Maybe the amount of rest your body needs is

24:57

Speaker A

like a full week off even though you've had enough technical rest. But again, the avoidant externally references goes well. Everyone says 8 hours of sleep is enough rest. Air go. If I've had 8 hours of sleep, I must be rested. And they

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Speaker A

ignore and dismiss the cues from their body saying, "Hey, actually, you haven't had enough rest. Actually, I'm still really stressed out here." So again, a cue that you are in that 3 to six distress range in the first place can be

25:24

Speaker A

that you are just doubling down on things that you're trying to get done despite your energy kind of kicking its heels up and saying no. And then you're going to have that war with the self-develop. Why can't I just push

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Speaker A

through and get this stuff done? So you might start getting really impatient with your own emotions, especially your emotions that are oriented around needs that you think it is not reasonable for you to be having. So you might just

25:50

Speaker A

overall start feeling really frustrated that you can't simply snap out of it despite the fact that you don't even really know what it is. And the route towards secure attachment for the avoidant is to learn to take the signals

26:04

Speaker A

of your nervous system more seriously at a lower level. and at least some of the time learn to let your nervous system lead. So to be in a secure relationship with another human being means that there is a fairly equal power dynamic in

26:19

Speaker A

the relationship. So approximately half the time one person is taking the lead and approximately half the time the other person is taking the lead. And the same is true when it comes to developing a secure relationship between your mind

26:33

Speaker A

and your body. If you want to be insecure connection with yourself, what that means is that you have to learn to take the cues your nervous system is telling you, even if they don't make sense, as real data points that need to

26:47

Speaker A

be listened to. Because the avoidance version of that 910 distress range often looks like total burnout and collapse or things that might look like self- sabotage. Because just like the anxious attacher is willing to cross their own boundaries to get comfort from other

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Speaker A

people, the avoidant attacher is willing to basically burn themselves into the ground to try to get themselves to a place where they are no longer feeling the discomfort that they are feeling without realizing that if you attend to

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your discomfort, if you care about it, if you allow yourself to co-regulate around what you're stressed out over or what you're struggling with, you can actually work more holistically towards your goals while receiving the comfort that you need on route. And I'm not

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going to say that this is an easy thing to achieve because the avoidance's worst fear generally is showing other people what they're struggling with. There is this deeply ingrained belief that if you let anybody in, well, you are on route

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to solving some problem before you have it all figured out. Nothing good is going to come of that other than people are either going to judge and reject you or other people are going to try to help you. And then acting appreciative of

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other people's help is going to become another item on your to-do list when it would just be way easier for you to shut everyone out for a while and attend to the problem on your own.

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But your route towards secure attachment is learning to value the role of emotional comfort simultaneous to your attempts to protect yourself and change your situation. Which might mean learning to source competent support and help. And that's a whole skill in and of

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itself. But something I've had to learn the hard way as someone who grew up with a lot of that avoidant patterning is that when I am stressed out and I am desperately trying to solve all of my problems before anybody becomes aware

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that I have them, I am generally gunning myself towards burnout. And a more sustainable way of existing is admitting to other people that I have problems, even the ones I feel deep shame about.

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And finding a way to be relaxed in my experience of letting someone know that.

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So not indicating to them, I need you to solve it, but just allowing myself to be seen by other people in my problems so that it no longer feels like a forced choice between having a problem that needs solving and having relationships

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in my life. Both of those things can coexist, especially when the relationships in your life are with secure people who know that they don't need to solve your problems or they don't need you to solve your own problems for them to feel okay. They can

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just witness you inside of them and care about you and support you as you move towards their solutions. So again, this is not about doing away with our strategy of self-p protection. It's about continuing on with it while

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balancing it out with care and support both from ourselves and other people. And the last attachment style that we're going to talk about today is of course the fearful avoidant attachment style.

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So what often happens with the early development of someone who has a fearful style is that like the avoidant attacher, they learn that their desire for care and intimacy and closeness is somewhat shameful and shouldn't really be expressed.

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But like the anxious attacher, there are times when their feelings spike into that distress range. And this could be for many reasons. One, it could be that they have an abusive parent. And this is very often the only explanation that you

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hear for fearful attachment. However, it is not true that overt abuse is the only way a fearful attachment style can form.

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This could also be a product of having something like a mentally ill parent who sometimes gave very bizarre responses to the child that they didn't know how to make sense of. And the only way to really navigate that was to stay very

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attuned to the feelings of distress that were coming up in their body that indicated their parent was behaving bizarrely or unusually and using those distress signals as important pieces of information. But regardless of how it developed, and again, I just want to

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drive home that you do not need to have experienced abuse to have a fearful avoidant attachment style, you are going to have some version of both that avoidant patterning that encourages you to kind of mistrust what your nervous

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system is telling you and focus on how you think you ought to be feeling, paired with a more conscious experience of your own distress than the traditional dismissive avoidant has. So, what happens as a fearful avoidant grows up is that they learn it's important to

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keep my strong feelings in my awareness because there's information that I need from them, but I have to find a way to internally manage my experience of those feelings. It's not something that other people are going to be able to

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competently help me with most of the time. And so what might happen if you find yourself in that 3 to six distress range as a fearful avoidant is you might find that you're suddenly feeling really disoriented because again your nervous

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system exists in a perpetual state of being braced to try to figure out whether you ought to be responding to a situation by dismissing what you're feeling and kind of gunning towards your goals and your plans or whether you

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really need to pay attention to your feelings in this case. And there's going to be a lot of self-shaming that comes online for anytime you feel as though you've made the wrong call. So, anytime you express your feelings when you feel

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like you should have held them in or anytime you hold your feelings in when you feel like you should have paid attention to them and dealt with them and in that middle range of distress, what's going to be happening as an adult

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is that you're going to find yourself feeling consciously disoriented and indecisive. So, I find that fearful avoidance, more so than any other attachment orientation by a long shot, tends to deal with intense indecisiveness because their system is constantly

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flip-flopping between paying attention to my feelings and my desires is what's most important. And then a state of, "Oh my god, it's so stupid to pay attention to my feelings and desires. I need to be shoving those down and trying to align

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myself with what I think I should be doing." And there is a constant back and forth between those things that is most conscious and in your awareness when you are in that mid distress region because what you are unconsciously going to be

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trying to work out is should I be attending to my feelings right now or dismissing and distancing myself from them. So you might find yourself kind of bouncing between extremes like I should tell this person everything I'm thinking

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and feeling versus I'm just being dramatic. I should keep that to myself and just act normal. I'm going to make everything weird if I share what I'm feeling. Or you might find yourself getting really preoccupied with making the right choice about something while

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actually just being totally frozen in the face of making any decision at all. You might feel an intense desire for comfort while also shaming yourself heavily for having that desire. And you might generally just feel like you're starting to sabotage things that you

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care about without really knowing why. So flaking on plans, not being able to meet the demands of your work or your relationships or whatever it is. But what this is just going to feel like is total disorientation in the nervous

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system. And when we're feeling this way, when we're in that moderate distress range as a fearful avoidant, before we've hit the point of either total burnout, like the avoidant when they're in that 9 to 10 range, or total

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desperation and need, like the anxious attacher in their distress range, what we need to do is learn to be present with our feelings and witness them in a non-judgmental, non-shaming way for long enough to be able to adequately discern

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if this is a situation where we need to listen to the signals that our body is telling us and attend to our distress or if this is a situation where maybe what we're feeling is a trauma response and

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we can only actually work through it by getting trauma support. So, I'll give you an example of both of those things.

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A situation where you might need to be listening more to the wisdom of what your body is telling you is a situation where, let's say, you are feeling really uncomfortable in a romantic relationship, but you're telling yourself, well, I shouldn't feel

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uncomfortable, right? My partner is a good person, there's nothing wrong with them. Air go. If I'm not perfectly happy in this relationship, it must mean that there's just something wrong with me, and I need to just keep those feelings

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to myself. The secure response pattern here is taking your own distress seriously and going, you know what, all of these things can be true. This person can be a nice person and I can be uncomfortable with some element of how we relate to

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each other or there can still be certain boundaries that I need to set in this relationship. So in these situations, just like the avoidant attachers, you need to stop referencing how you think you should be feeling and trying to get

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your nervous system to conform to that and instead let your nervous system lead and take your feelings as simple, uncomplicated data points. So your feelings are not right or wrong or good or bad. They're just data points. You

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think your partner is a good person and you're unhappy. Healing from fearful avoidance is in fact about learning to challenge your nervous system's automatic categorization of everything that you're feeling, which the cognitive mind has learned to do really well over

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the course of your life. And instead of responding to the cognitive categories that you've put everything in and that you've analyzed really heavily, learning to just be present with what is actually happening inside of your experience and allowing that to lead the way. However,

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there are also going to be times where what you're experiencing is a trauma response. And what you might need to learn to do in that situation is gently retrain your nervous system to recognize that it is now safe inside of a context

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it was once not safe inside of. So, an example of this, let's say you have one work email that you have just been delaying opening forever and you know it's really important and someone's waiting on your response and yet you

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just cannot seem to open it. You will do anything to avoid it. And you might be telling yourself some version of this is just because I'm a worthless no good person. I can't get anything done. No one ever should have hired me. Why can't

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I just do this simple thing? All of those berating self-shaming thoughts, right? when what might actually be happening is you might be in a freeze response. So you might already be outside of your window of tolerance without recognizing

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it. And in those situations, what needs to happen is you need to recognize what old pattern is emerging in your system right now. So maybe you know there's something in that email that you're going to need to ask for help with. And

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maybe your system has this old response stored inside of it that asking for help leads to punishment. And so your whole system might be in a freeze response.

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And when we learn to be present with that and notice what's happening, we can ask ourselves questions like, is it true that in this situation it's likely that I would get punished for asking for help? And very often we find that we're

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in very different situations now than we were in the past when we developed that trauma response, but we haven't learned to update for context. So, our brains have not learned to recognize signals that indicate that we are safe in our

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current environment and no longer need to be responding from that trauma program that did probably do a great job of keeping us safe at a younger age. So, on kind of both sides of the fence here, you might sometimes be inhibiting when

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you need to be acting, and other times you might be acting too quickly from a trauma response when in fact it's now safe for your system to relax and to choose to do something different. And so where this all starts, the kind of key

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at the bottom of all of this is that for the fearful avoidant, you need to be able to recognize when you find yourself in those states of feeling kind of disoriented and indecisive or like you can't stop self-sabotaging as your

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system ricochets back and forth between trying to source comfort and then shaming the self for needing comfort and trying to get the self to repress the need for comfort so you can simply get yourself into a better situation before

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anybody realizes that you're in trouble. You need to learn to be able to recognize that feeling of disorientation as a sign that it's time to pause and be really present with what is happening for you both internally and what's

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happening inside of the conditions of your life so that you can start to slowly reconstruct an understanding of what you are reacting to in what way. So how your inner world of feelings and thoughts is connected to your outer

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world of people, places, and things. Only once we get clearer on how our inner and outer world are influencing each other that we'll even really be at the beginning of knowing ourselves well enough to make strategic choices about

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where our boundaries need to be and what direction we want to go in as well as what type of comfort and support we're going to need in order to move in the direction that we've decided is best for

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us. So for the fearful avoidant, learning to be present with and non-judgmentally witnessing of what's happening inside of the system relative to what's happening inside of one's life is the beginning point of all of the rest of that healing work.

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And it's very likely that you're going to need some help in this process. So something like a trauma-informed therapist can be wonderful for helping us make these new connections. I really recommend Gestalt practices for fearful avoidance. It's essentially this

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therapeutic modality that's focused on staying really present with your present- moment experiences and not jumping into the head and making a whole bunch of analytic connections. You already have that part on lockdown. What you probably need some help with is the

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presence piece. So modalities that help you do that are probably going to go a long way towards developing that more secure relationship with your nervous system where you're able to both make wise and self-protective choices for your life as well as seek the right

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forms of comfort and support for yourself. All right, I'm going to leave this video at that for today. But as always, any questions or anything coming up for you guys as you've gone through this video, please leave in the comment section

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below. I love you guys. I hope you're taking care of yourselves and each other. And I will see you back here again really soon.

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[Music]

Topics: attachment styles nervous system regulation anxious attachment avoidant attachment fearful avoidant secure attachment co-regulation self-regulation distress tolerance trauma healing

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