Decoding Attachment Styles

I talk about the push and pull in relationships. The anxious spiraling. The person who needs to talk about everything right now and the person who would rather have the conversation sometime in 2037.

I've lived some of these relationships myself. I used to be anxiously attached, and understanding my own attachment was part of how I learned to become more secure.

But somewhere along the way, I became just as fascinated by the other side.

Why do people do what they do?

I've been asking that question for as long as I can remember.

As a kid, I used to get into trouble for asking “why?” Apparently repeatedly asking adults for the reasoning behind their decisions wasn't considered charming.

But I genuinely wanted to understand. Why was this expected of me? Why did people behave the way they did? Why could two people experience exactly the same situation and walk away with completely different versions of what happened?

Decades later, I'm still asking those questions.

I've studied psychology and attachment, read the textbooks and research, observed thousands of conversations about relationships, worked with people struggling with these patterns, and lived plenty of them myself.

And one of the ways I came to understand attachment was to imagine that we were each handed a survival script.

There are four broad scripts: anxious, dismissive-avoidant, fearful-avoidant and secure.

The script influences what feels safe to us. What feels threatening. How much closeness we want. What we do when we're afraid. How we communicate, fight, pull away, pursue, ask for reassurance, protect our independence, set boundaries and love other people.

It doesn't explain everything about a person, and attachment isn't destiny.

But once you start recognizing these patterns, they're very difficult to unsee.

That's what this podcast is about.

I'm sharing what I've learned from psychology, research, observation, my work, and my own life - not so we can put everyone into four neat little boxes, but so we can understand each other better.

And then do something useful with that understanding.

Sometimes that means communicating differently. Sometimes it means setting a boundary. Sometimes it means working on yourself. Sometimes it means understanding why someone behaves the way they do without continuing to accept the behavior. And sometimes it means letting go of the outcome altogether.

So if you're fascinated by attachment, or you're simply trying to understand why your partner, ex, parent, sibling, friend, or even you keep doing something that makes absolutely no sense to you...

welcome.

This is exactly what we're going to talk about.