Sex Talks With Emma-Louise Boynton - Are you anxiously attached? Psychotherapist, Jessica Baum tells us how to navigate different attachment styles

Episode Date: May 2, 2024

So we’ve all heard of attachment styles right?  Attachment theory tells us that the emotional attachments we form with our primary caregivers in infancy can influence our interpersonal relationships later in life. Whether we’re anxious, secure, avoidant or disorganised, our attachment style can have a pretty big impact on how we show up in our romantic relationships.  Since attachment styles have of late been getting a lot of airtime on social media and we wanted to understand more about the science behind the theory and delve a little deeper into the research underpinning the internet’s favourite relationship theory. To help us do just, Emma was joined in the podcast this week by psychotherapist and author of ‘Anxiously Attached: Becoming More Secure in Life and Love’, Jessica Baum.  You can take the attachment style quiz here; find out more about Jessica's work here and buy her brilliant book here. Book tickets to the next live recording of the Sex Talks podcast here. And subscribe to the Sex Talks Substack here.

Hello and welcome to the Sex Talks podcast with me, your host Emma Louise Boynton. Sex Talks exist to engender more honest, open and vulnerable discussions around typically taboo topics, like sex and relationships, gender inequality, and the role technology is playing and changing the way we date, love and fuck. Our relationship to sex tells us so much about. who we are and how we show up in the world, which is why I think it's a topic we ought to talk about with a little more nuance and a lot more curiosity. So each week, I'm joined by a new guest whose expertise in the topic I'd really like to mind, and do well just that. From writers, authors and therapists to actors, musicians and founders, we'll hear from a glorious array of humans

about the stuff that gets the heart of what it means to be human. If you want to join the conversation outside of the podcast, sign up to my newsletter via the link in the show notes, or come along to a live recording of the podcast at the London Edition Hotel. Okay, I hope you enjoy the show. When your boyfriend or your partner says something that hurts, by all means it hurts, but if your gut is on the floor, it's touching something deeper. Right, in today's episode, we are turning to a topic that is getting a lot of airtime on social media at the moment, slash all the time, and that is attachment styles. We've all had a lot of. We've all had a lot of attachment styles, right? Well, we'll go into this in a lot more depth in the episode,

but in case you need a quick refresh, attachment theory tells us that the emotional attachments we form with our primary caregivers in infancy can influence our interpersonal relationships later in life. Psychologists have identified four attachment styles. Secure, anxious, avoidant, and disorganized. Now, I feel the way that attachment styles are getting discussed in social media, It just feels often a little bit thin, and I found it pretty confusing. I found myself becoming a little bit cynical as to the validity of this theory, or rather how it's being talked about colloquially. And I wanted to understand more about the science behind the theory,

and also admittedly to try and make sense of my own attachment style, which recently I've realized is a lot less secure than I thought it was. I think I'm being pretty generous there. After reading her brilliant book, anxiously attached, I was keen to invite psychotherapist Jessica Borm onto the podcast to shed some expert light on attachment theory and provide us all with some practical insights on how we can have less anxious and more stable relationships, because surely that is what we all want from our romantic lives. Jessica, it is worth noting, is also the founder of the Relationship Institute of Palm Beach,

where she provides therapy, counseling and addiction therapy. I hope you find this episode as helpful and reassuring as I did. Enjoy the show. Jessica, hello, how are you? I'm so good. I'm so grateful to be here with you. Oh, well, I'm so, so glad to have you on the Sex Talks podcast. I've been really looking forward to this interview, so I absolutely loved your book, actually attached, which we are going to go into in some depth in this conversation. I really want to speak to you because I feel like, at the moment, we are hearing so much about attachment styles on social media. they're like ad lausium people with no like expertise of credentials are talking about attachment style kind of diagnosing people they've gone on dates with as you know a specific attachment

style using quite a lot of therapy speak in a very kind of colloquial way I think without oftentimes understanding what the terms they're using actually mean and attachment styles in particular just like keep them coming up in the work I'm doing at sex talks I found your book so informative in helping deepen my understanding of attachment styles and I'll have to kind of run counters of some of the more like memified notions of attachment styles I've picked up on social media. So I really wanted to have them the podcast today to bust some of the myths that I think are circulating around attachment styles and to give us a bit of like a deep dive into a topic that I think is so interesting when we think about how we can kind of best set ourselves up

to go into relationships in a kind of positive mindset. not to carry all our country from the past and project onto people in a way that we don't really, I guess, understand what I'm so doing at the time. Yeah, it's a very interesting topic, and I'm glad that you're talking about these things because I think having labels is a way to better understand yourself, but it's being weaponized and really misunderstood out there. So I think it's an important thing to kind of go over. 100%. We'll go into that little kind of the social media impact a little bit. But before we begin, can you just tell me a little bit more about the nature of your work?

as a psychotherapist. So I know you're a certified Imago therapist, as well as an addiction therapist, and I'm really eager to know how all these disciplines coalesce in the work that you do. Sure, yeah. I'm an amalgoth therapist, which means image, and it's a couples counseling dialogue that you go in, and it's three years of training and just couples counseling, and it really means that we attract people into our lives that have positive

and negative traits of our primary caregivers, and that they reflect an image to us, and that it's our work to get conscious in our relationships and to notice what's coming up in the relational space and do the deeper work with your partner. So it's really about building conscious relationships. And I think that life is about getting conscious. And if you grew up with any trauma,

and many of us have and you're not even aware of it, it's going to show up the patterns, the wounds will show up in your deepest bonds, not just romantic, but all of them. So I help people kind of unpack that and start to get to the root of their core wounds and hold where the wound was in the first place. And when you can hold and be with these wounds in a new way, you develop a capacity to be with more parts of yourself.

And you're really integrating a lot of your embedded patterns and traumas and developmental things that have happened to you into your body. You're moving them from your body up into your brain and you're integrating them. So that's a lot of the work that I do. And a lot of it is somatic. And a lot of it is just holding deep space and allowing the wisdom of your body to also lead you to where you need to go and again the same thing for couples when they come to me and when you say the wisdom of your body what do you mean by that so our body has inherent wisdom

in it and it will keep us keep the illusion of safety it will keep us in sympathetic activation it will keep us with protectors which could be substances it could be relationships it could be shopping all of these things protect us from the pain that we might be experienced underneath And so when we're in safe enough places, for safe enough environments and safe enough people, the wisdom of what needs to surface and kind of getting to the core where the pain is will eventually unfold for you. I mean, so everyone wants to heal, but truly your own unique healing path is something that comes up with you in the safety of others and it unfolds. It's not like I tell you how to heal. It's like I hold the space and we figure it out together.

And so your body will release memories and feelings. and suppress stuff the safer it feels and it kind of leads the way we follow the body. No, that makes so much sense. And as I was speaking now, I was reminded of a podcast I listened to a little while ago with the relationship expert with Mark Groves. I think he was talking on Kaggie Dunlop's podcast. And he said something that's always stuck with me. He said that relationships, our romantic relationships, shine a magnifying glass on the way

we interact with people in kind of in all contexts in our lives. So if we struggle to set boundaries in our romantic relationship, it's likely that we are struggling to set boundaries at work with our friends. If we are, like, you know, being quite defensive in our romantic relationship, again, those same patterns show up in all aspects of our lives. Does that resonate with what you see with the people that you work with in couples therapy and relationship therapy more broadly? No, not necessarily. I think if you struggle setting boundaries, you're going to you're going to struggle setting them everywhere if you were never taught. inner boundary systems and you were never taught to set healthy boundaries. Of course, it's going to show up in every relationship. But in terms of attaching and different

relationships, you might show up differently with different people because the way in which you show up is a combination of two people's energy and embedded patterns. So your best friend might be overbearing and a lot of energy and you might show up a little bit avoidant and might back up and your partner might be a little bit avoidant and you might show up a little bit more like you're chasing them. So really how we show up is a combination of two people's energies. I've also had it where people at work, their boss represents maybe a parent, you know, a critical parent.

So they show up differently with that person. So a little bit of what he's saying is true in that, like if you don't have the internal skills with your romantic partner, there's a good chance you're not going to have skills with everybody. But how you show up in each relationship can be completely different, on the combination of two people's patterns and energies and what that person represents for you. And I guess you're always, yeah, it's always that you're being responsive and reactive to the people around you. Now, let's turn into your book anxiously attached. I'd love to, I think,

probably begin just actually defining what attachment styles are. Because as I said, I think there's a kind of, there's a colloquialization that's happened on social media. We're talking about attachment styles all the time. I think sometimes out really understanding what they mean from a scientific perspective. So do you mind just defining attachment styles for us first and foremost? Sure. And maybe I'll just do it a little bit differently than you're seeing it out there. But your attachment style, aka your attachment pattern, these patterns are laid down in early, early formative years, and they have to do with the connection and the meeting of your needs with your primary caregiver. So if you were attuned and your primary caregiver was present

and there for you, enough of the time, you can develop what's called a secure attachment And these people, they can have attachment issues when they partner with someone on the spectrum. But they tend to live in the world where they have a lot of trust in getting their needs met. They tend to find other secure people. They have an easier time with abandonment and closeness. So those things don't seem to trigger them or awaken any of their earlier parts. And so a bulk of the population is secure. And then there are three insecure types.

There's anxious, avoidant, and fearful. And all of those are the way. way in which the baby or young person you adapted as a child to stay in connection or stay in safety when you were young. So if your parent was preoccupied, you might develop a more anxious attachment where you are monitoring them, their inconsistency, and you can actually regulate them and you don't get a lot of co-regulation on the other side. If your parent was more left shifted and not as emotionally attuned but met your needs physically, you might show up more like avoidant and give up on co-regulation and connection and kind of become an island

and become super independent. And then fearful babies struggle with both because maybe the parent was terrifying them. So you need your parent. You need to attach. But you're also scared. So you're stuck in this weird state. And you know, the truth is we embed every pattern inside of us. We're not just one style. We have a tendency to go towards one particular adaptive strategy based on what we use the most. But I've experienced all the patterns inside of me, depending on relationship dynamics that I have been in. So, you know, people are like, why am I anxious, but I also feel avoidant? Well, if you had one parent that was preoccupied, anxious, and one parent that was avoidant, you're going to embed both. So you might be primarily anxious with avoidant

protectors. There's so many different ways to look at this. And it's so much more layered than what we're currently seeing out there. And it's, um, it's hard to explain that. that. We're not just one category. And if you are anxious and you partner with someone who's really avoidant, you might meet some of your disorganized parts because you go into such a state of fear. So it's really important when you're starting to understand these things that the labels help us, but don't get stuck in your label because we move on a continuum with this stuff. And Jessica, you said there that these tactical styles, they embed in us and be brought out displayed depending on who we're around to our current partners. How does that early phase in our

life create such a long-lasting impact in terms of how we relate to people in the rest of our life? Why are those years so formative? I mean, those years, early years, if you're listening, and you don't even realize it, shape your paradigm. They shape the way in which you relate and learn about relating in the world to others. They shape your ability to feel trust in the world. feel trust in others, that they shape the ability to feel inherent sense of worth or shame. So those years, they set up the foundation, and they also set up a foundation in your nervous system around what feels safe, what doesn't feel safe, or what do I need to run towards or away from based on my earlier experiences. So we develop something called neuroception.

Our nervous systems constantly trying to protect us from our wounds and our fears. So we'll do a lot of behaviors and a lot of things as an adult to protect us from our original wound. And we're not even conscious of that until, you know, our relationships show up and we see that we're self-sacrificing or we lose ourselves or we're sabotaging. You know, I've seen a lot of people sabotage their relationship because the core wound of I'm not lovable shows up. So it's really interesting. And I think I can speak personally. Like I've had the same themes show up over and over and over again. And I know if you're listening, there's this theme of I'm not worthy or I'm.

I'm not lovable or I'm going to be left that's attached to some feeling. And it's like it doesn't matter what the external situation is. We always come back to that feeling and that feeling is actually your original wound. And it really needs to be traced back to the original origin and held a lot to heal or else we just kind of keep reexperiencing it. And we think that the other person is causing it when the truth is it's living inside of us and just getting reenacted begging to be healed. And I think that raises a really interesting point because when we started this conversation effect on how social media has really inculcated this kind of therapy speak. And I think one of the ramifications of that is that I think we've created quite a victimy culture around

dating relationships in that every meme I get served, every relationship influencer who I'm kind of served in my timeline, their diagnoses are often kind of very outward. So it's like, is your partner doing this to you? Are you? Are you? you essentially are you being positioned as a victim in this relationship dynamic? And obviously there is definitely, you know, we should all be hyper aware of where that may be the case. But I wonder sometimes whether it lets us off the hook as to what we're actually bringing to certain dynamics, what we're actually doing to precipitate a specific relationship dynamic with someone new. And I think actually can be quite damaging to enter that victim headspace and not

have space to explore your own issues and your own projection? Absolutely. For starters, I think the fact that so much press or excitement or talk around these topics is happening and our mainstream media is actually needed because I think what it's showing is that people are starting to educate themselves and they're really getting excited about the information. The only problem is this information is so deep and it's so much more than like what I just said. So for example, an anxious person often wants an avoided person to do the work. I think we've all been there. And the truth is an anxious person has a lot of work to do within themselves. And so, you know, I was avoiding my own abandonment and my own, my own issues by wanting

my partner to desperately do his work. And really at the end of the day, we're all just trying to hold a mirror up so we can look back inward and have the agency to do our own work. But what happens is we get weaponized these things, especially avoidance, they get a lot of slack on the internet when they're really actually also suffering inside. It doesn't appear like that they're suffering as much because they don't externalize as much, but many of them are. So I think it's really important to, I think it's important that we're going through this period of time where people are starting to understand the verbiage. And I think over time, I'm going to be working on it myself, we're going to give people a fuller and fuller understanding of just how complex your attachment.

patterns and embedded patterns and how holistic this is and how deep this is and how much more it is than just understanding the pure label and getting stuck in a box. And you've mentioned there both anxious attachment and avoidant attachment and how they, I guess, can kind of fire off one another. As a way of understanding those different attachment starts, I wonder if we could delve into your person's story a bit because what I really loved about your book is you bring a lot of yourself into it and you begin the book by saying, in my young adult years, I was a train wreck when it came to dating and then explain kind of how your own attachment style issues have been manifested in different relationships you've had.

I wonder if you can then tell me a little bit more about your personal experience navigating your attachment style and how that manifested in earlier relationships and then your first marriage. Yeah, I mean, the best way to answer that is that once you start to understand your attachment patterns, you start to understand your automatic nervous system. And I think for many years, I felt my nervous system, like I said, my gut fall through the floor. I'd feel a lot of sensation in my heart or, you know, complete devastation if you were ghosted or things didn't work out. And I think a lot of people can relate to that. But I didn't understand why I was having, like, such a visceral physical response in my body.

And it wasn't until I understood embedded trauma, developmental trauma, and how we store memory in our body. that I learned, okay, a lot of what's coming up for me is actually awakening earlier states. And I am not sure people really get that. So when we are really small, we embed memory in our body and that memory gets awakened in our romantic relationships or any really close relationship. So when your boyfriend or your partner says something that hurts, by all means it hurts. But if your gut is on the floor, it's touching something deeper as well, a deeper pattern, a deeper theme. So I was noticing I was having like extreme reactions in my love life and I just

was very curious and that's why I became an Amango therapist and I started to, I remember bringing my my ex-husband to therapy and I was floored by how much work I had to do. And so it wasn't just, it was obvious that he was breaking up with me and he was going through something and he'd have hives, a real somatic response to connection. And I was like, oh my God, this is insane. Look at what he's doing. And then in the process of doing my own work, I'm like, oh, I need to look at myself as well. And so it started this journey of really looking at myself. And I will say, I have not had the easiest romantic journey, but I would say to anyone who's listening who can relate to me and has had a hard time, that you can use any romantic experience when it's not in the quote

unquote positive as a flashlight in. And what I realized is that it gave me agency that even if my partner didn't want to heal with me. I could choose to find a therapist that was capable of kind of going to the root of these things with me. And I healed through a lot of dysfunction. And so I needed that dysfunction to bring up my work. And as it brought it up, I could see, okay, there's this little girl who's reaching out for her father. This isn't really about her partner right now. And I was able to make these really big connections in my inner world. And I kind of transcended a lot of that, but it was through kind of re-experiencing it and putting it into a new context. So that's been a lot of my personal work. And I would say the hardest relationships in my

life, I've experienced the most growth. And when we get out of the victim mindset, which is really hard when your partner's doing really awful things, but when we start to understand, okay, this is kicking up something much deeper in me. And I have agency here. And I can get someone to help me connect it to deeper things and hold those things and heal those things. And I won't pick what's familiar again because we pick people who are familiar. And I might pick a healthier partner. Moving forward, I surely will get in touch with parts of myself that have been dormant my whole life.

And so that's been part of my journey and part of this book. But it's also, you know, it's going to be part of my next book as well. Oh, exciting. Looking forward to the next book. You mentioned there, you've been on this. healing journey of your own which I guess is then kind of synonymous with it with the work that you're doing alongside it to helping other people do that same healing journey and he said there that you will that kind of will help you find a more secure relationship partner going forward but what other

differences have you noticed in terms of how you relate to people around you romantically and otherwise by virtue of doing this work you just described there so I think when you're healing I had to some really early wounding. When you do, you end up developing, like what I call anchors or just, I hate to use the word codependency because it's so misused, but you're not so focused on getting your needs met with someone who can't meet them because they're literally struggling themselves. And you start getting your needs met, your emotional needs held and met through people who actually are consistent and show up for you. And you start to feel supported by many relationships and you start develop deeper intimacy and you kind of shift from this place of

needing to get your needs met from someone who is incapable to actually facing your own vulnerability and getting your needs met with people who actually can show up and be present for you. So it's quite a shift in narrowing your focus to widening your lens to realizing so many different relationships can nurture you and hold you and they're not going to fix you. Right. And I think we live in a culture where we want to be fixed, so you might go to that ex-boyfriend or that ex-girlfriend and feel like, oh, that's going to soothe this inner distress. And it will temporarily, right? It's like a false illusion of safety. But the truth is when we start healing, we go to people who hold us in our suffering and that are there with us, but they don't take it away. And when we can

kind of re-experience that and be held, we move through it. We're not just medicating it. And everybody, you know, I say that with so much compassion. Like people have to medicate what they have to medicate. If we don't have the safety and we don't understand this stuff, we will keep medicating with some external thing to keep us out of despair until we have the right people around us. But I think once you kind of learn that, oh, you're expanding your capacity to be with yourself, you're able to have more and more healthy relationships of all kinds. You're feeling safer in the world. You're feeling connected to many people. You're building more community. all these things are healthier than dialing in on romantic love and having romantic love

be the solution to all of your pain, you know. So being really careful with that, if that's the fantasy you grew up with and kind of working on breaking that and moving towards really sustainable, nurturing, non-judgmental relationships that don't fix you that end up really just supporting you. And you just mentioned that you think that we, you feel hesitant about using the word codependency because you feel like it's being used. misused a lot of the time. How is it being misused? How are we misunderstanding what codependency is? Yeah, I mean, I think that's why I wrote my book. I, you know, I write about being hospitalized and I picked up facing codependency, which is a fabulous book. And I finally found, for the first time

in my life, I had some answers. But I think that we live in a society that when we think of codependent, we're thinking of the wrong things. So I felt shame around being needy. I felt shame around having my needs. The truth is we need each other. And the more that we can depend on dependable people and bring our needs to people who can actually meet them, the more we build a sense of security. But I learned that I had to be super independent and super successful and self-regulating, which is not even something my system could do because I didn't learn self-regulation. I didn't get enough co-regulation. So I was getting all these messages of being independent because I didn't want to be codependent that were so misleading in my life and really built walls of protection

up when the truth is healing those type of wounds is actually opening up to more and more people who actually have the capacity to be there for those parts of you and that having needs or being needy is absolutely okay and that those needs to be need to be met and it's picking people who actually can meet them and knowing who those are and having discernment around them and it changed the course of my life, but I would say the messaging around codependency has been so toxic that, you know, I swung the pendulum and I'm sure other people listening has swung the pendulum. And the real message needs is interdependency is where it's at. And that means that we actually really do need people. We need community and we need to be able to have our needs met. And there is nothing wrong with you

if you have a lot of needs. You're just picking people who are incapable and reliving your childhood trauma. So just understanding that, I think, takes some of the shame around the word away, which I definitely carried. And, you know, anxiously attached was really written for that demographic to really explain, like, codependency is just this, like, spin-off word. This is really what's going on with your adaptive strategies. And so it was really grateful for the books at the time. And then, you know, just our culture, what it does to us and makes us, you know, think that we have to be so independent. It just really hurt me. So that's why I wrote anxiously attached for a lot of those reasons

to kind of really help people understand, no, we need each other. You needing someone is okay. And actually, this is something we've talked about a lot at sex talks recently because I feel, I know I kind of bang this drum a lot at the moment because I think it's really front of mind. But I think for women particularly who grew up with third wave, fourth wave feminism and in the kind of boss bitch hustle culture, in which we've sought to be super independent,

earn our own money, be independent, be your own boss, don't need anyone. I think it really inculcated and a lot of ideas around you need to not need someone, you need to not be needy, you need to be totally self-sufficient, you need to have your own back. And I feel like in part that is helpful up to a point.

I think it's really important to unlearn a lot of the Disney narratives around waiting for someone to come and save you, as you said earlier. No one's going to come and save you. You've got to do that work yourself. but I think we've kind of maybe gone a little bit far. I personally have been a little bit far. I'm thinking, okay, I need to need no one.

And I'm so bad at asking for help, like really struggle to let people in. And even, like, romantic me feel like I need to be so okay. Like, I don't need you. I don't need anything from you. I'm this, like, island, you can come and hop on over and then you can go. And don't worry if you go, because I didn't need you in the first place. And I've really seen in kind of patterns my own behavior, how I've ended up, like, pushing people away and not letting people actually in that intimate space

because I'm so scared of them thinking I needy because to me that is the antithesis of the independent boss bitch power woman that I feel like I need to be at all times. And so I feel that in itself is its own form of unlearning. And that's why, as I said, I found your book really helpful because I do think it's that we've got to find some equilibrium.

You can be independent. You can be the boss bitch. You can run your own business, but you can also ask for help and need somebody. and let someone in to, you know, help you with your emotional needs and say, hey, I really, I need you for this. I want you for this. And that's actually quite a, like, beautiful thing to give to someone. For anyone, Jessica, who's listening and thinking, I don't really know what my attachment style is. I feel like I'm anxious half the time and I feel that I'm, I wouldn't

half the time. How can we identify our attachment style where we're currently at? I can give you an attachment style quiz that I made, but you can also take an attachment style quiz online. I'll just be mindful to not get too stuck into the label. Again, you might come up secure, but if your partner's really avoidant, you might see some anxious parts come up. The quiz will be in the show notes, everyone listening, so you can do it yourself after listening to this podcast.

Could you maybe outline a few of the key characteristics that might be most commonly seen for someone who's anxiously attached? Sure. Anxiously attached, the homework is probably inconsistency. So a feeling like the ball is going to drop. also like because you left your body to kind of sometimes regulate your parent, you can self-abandon a lot in your relationship and you might actually understand the needs of your partner before you even read your own needs. So like I could tell you what my dog needs most

of the time, you know, like you have this hypersensitivity to other people's needs and you'll meet them because that's how you stayed in connection. Avoidant people can seem sometimes selfish but they really, they're like on the other end of the spectrum. They struggle with understanding your needs, but they're very lonely and they can be very success driven and focused on themselves. And instead of focusing on you, they start focusing on taking care of themselves, which can seem selfish or working as a way to avoid intimacy. And then fearful people struggle with both.

They struggle when you're too close and they struggle when they're far away. And so they're a little bit more chaotic feeling when they're in relationship. and so there's just no safe place for them to land. That can be a little bit more challenging. And you said before that we mustn't get too hung up in our attachment style. So if we do the quiz and we find out, okay, I'm secure. I'm definitely not. But I'm anxious attachments attached, for example.

How? But we shouldn't get too hung up on that being overly deterministic as to how we're going to show up in all relationships. But I guess how much an influence does our attachment style, like the one that we typically kind of, show most often how much an impact does that have typically on the relationships that we perhaps look for like are there attachment styles that particularly attract one another yeah anxious and avoidant tend to attract each other like moth to a flame yep and i write about that a lot and

um they're mirroring our lost parts and there's a charge there and there's a very um strong desire to get close and reenact things. And it is a healable dynamic. And I really think that there's a lot of work to be done. And it's not like, I mean, there are things, the more you heal, the less allure you're going to be towards someone who might not be a good fit for you. The less you heal, the more your unconscious is looking to repeat familiar patterns. So at the end of the day, we're always trying to heal.

We're always trying to make the unconscious, conscious, or the semantic shape within us, or the pattern or the wound is going to get reenacted until we start holding it and healing it. So anxious people will pick people who leave them, avoidant people will pick people who maybe are too much for them and they'll reenact these dynamics over and over and over again until we hold the mirror up and we start to understand what's at the root of these wounds.

And when we're doing this reenactment, is that because we have this story in our head about who we are and how we show up in the world? And we're looking for, essentially, we're looking to prove it to ourselves. Even though it hurts, even though it doesn't serve us, we are just comfortable in the familiar. Yes, there's so much comfortable in the familiar.

It is so hard to break out of that. I had to break out of the familiar. And even when you're on a bad day, it's like that there's a very young part of me that wants to run back to the familiar, you know, instead of stepping into the unknown or the safe or the new. And so that's a transition in itself.

But once you start to see it, you have like these aha moments and what you used to be attracted to probably won't be attracted to anymore. I've, you know, I've worked with many people who maybe were attracted to more of the narcissistic type because they're charming and they're alluring and they meet all your needs and they come in and they emerge with you. And that's very enticing to anyone with neglect in their background or abandonment. And as they heal, they notice when those partners try to approach them, it feels suffocating it doesn't feel good anymore. They don't need it because they've healed it. And so you can tell when you're evolving. And if there's

nothing against anyone is just finding your next energetic match because we attract people who we have the tendency, not always to attract people who are at similar levels of developmental wounding as us. So if the wounding is early, we're likely to attract another person who has early wounding as well. So healing those earlier wounds and healing means feeling and healing is hard, but it means you are less likely to be a lord towards that type of person again and possibly can move on to someone who can actually meet your needs rather than recreate your original wound. And at the start of this conversation, you mentioned the tendency to self-sabotage. And that is something that I am queen of absolutely.

And I know I see friends around me the same thing who will, as you say, play out these more kind of damaging relationship patterns and then we'll meet someone really kind and nice who doesn't disappear for two months and then be like hey baby or and it just text back and it's just kind and nice and gentle and that in itself can feel I think the word triggering gets so overused but it can feel triggering so you kind of don't believe it you're like let me just hold up a second and this doesn't feel right. This feels like way too safe. You're too nice, whatever, and you just end up kind of pushing people away when they're

just showing up in kindness. How do we stop ourselves from being that kind of self-sabbitant? Like, where does that come from? Yeah, I mean, so there's a difference between like love bombing, which is not really someone showing up consistently and in stride and in kindness, but is showing up like intensely. But what you're talking about, I think if you're meeting. someone and they're consistent and they're showing up, they can be perceived as boring. And our system might not recognize that as familiar. And the truth is, people who are emotionally

available and show up like that can be terrifying to someone who isn't really emotionally available. So there might be a part of you that's not emotionally available if you're pushing away people who are emotionally available. And so that's something, you know, that was like something hard for me to look at and it's something to look at around like I'd rather be chased or I'd rather get the guy or the girl who's like impossible to get or the fantasy than you know this person that's just consistently in my life and is trying there's no charge there and so starting to look at you know what are what's really alluring you what is what's the charge to this person what's healthy love look like and it's different for everyone there's no like clear one path it's all but starting

to get really honest with yourself around, you know, that kind of stuff. And I've had experiences too where, you know, this is an experience not on my end, but on an avoidant end, is they're really scared of abandonment too. So they'll get really close and then they'll fear abandonment. And instead of speaking that out, they start backing up and running away because they think that the other person is ultimately going to abandon them anyway. So I might as well sabotage this and remain in control. So it's really hard to get conscious of these patterns. But if you're listening, maybe something inside of you inherently knows,

okay, this is my pattern or this is my wound. And I've had this on repeat a couple times. And there's sometimes a charge to the pattern or the wound and you can start to identify it. That really resonates at the moment. Because I feel like I've had quite a lot of pretty brutal rejections. Just like bad relationship dynamics. I mean, from married sex addict who turned out to live with this,

why to someone who was like, you are just too unattracted me to have sex with you. One guy I tried to sing with my flatmate, 12 hours after leaving my bed. I mean, stuff that just really kind of, it like hits you deep, especially when you'd built up, and these were all with people I'd built up, like, significant, like, had been speaking to for months, like, really had, like, gone, like, quite deep with. And I really noticed in that I'm now so hyper aware or hypervigilant towards that rejection that I find myself, just to your point, meet someone nice. and then immediately, like, I'm just, I need to end this now. Like, this is not, I need to just,

like, back off because I'm waiting for every message they send me, every time they turn to me, I'm waiting for it to be something horrible. And, like, I can, like, feel that kind of fight or flight. And I really have, like, fight against that because it feels so entrenched now in the way I see and interpret situations. And I'm confident the fact that that is in reaction to this series of unfortunate events, and it's not innate and it's not, but it's really hard to, in the moment, break those patterns because you do, I guess it is that flight or fight or flight response does become really activated in those moments from non-behavior because in those previous circumstances, you did need to fight or fly. So what I think I'm hearing you say is

that you have an anticipated somatic shape that I'm going to be left, hurt, criticized, and that has kind of become part of you. And I would say that that is still part of you. And until we hold your somatic shape around your anticipated feelings around what relationships will feel like, which probably started way before your last couple of experiences, but the disappointment or the lack of whatever, the semantic shape inside of you still exists. And so this anticipation, this is what relationships are going to feel like because this is what I've experienced, needs to be traced back to the original origin and really get to the root of it. And you need to be having other experiences with different relationships in your life that aren't doing that. Maybe they're

not romantic, but that are really showing up for you, really consistent, really love you, unconditionally let your nervous system let your body really start to experience this is love this is actually love this consistency this having my back this responding to me this friendship this parent or family member or sponsor or therapist they're teaching me that this is actually what love should feel like not what i've experienced in my infancy or my early years with a parent that might have been struggling themselves, not what I felt like in my romantic relationships. I need to re-experience what love is through my nervous system, through people who have the capacity to actually really be there for me and change my in anticipated somatic shape,

my unconscious kind of fear, change that through the experiences of new experiences with real equality relationships and people who can actually be there for me. Does that make sense? Completely. And so what I'm hearing from that, We don't, we can heal our attachment style alone. You don't need to be in a relationship to do that work. You don't need romantic relationship necessarily to heal. You need deep, intimate connection to heal. And I would say, actually, if you're not in a relationship and you're listening and you want to heal,

having deep intimate connection with a therapist, a coach, a friend, a sponsor, having it there first to re-experience what vulnerability and deep connection feels like in your system, then you might be able to call in someone who has a familiarity to what you're starting to experience. We cannot heal attachment wounds alone. Healing the wounds that were created in a relationship only get healed in relationship. But you need to find relationships that are available. And sometimes where we start is with people. I know for myself, I had to heal my attachment wounds with a therapist and with several other people in my life because my partner was incapable at the time for showing up for me in those ways.

But he brought the work up, but he couldn't co-heal with me at the time. So if you have a partner that's willing to do the work, going to an Amago therapist or an EFT therapist that's emotionally focused couples counselor, and doing the work and getting conscious together might be an amazing option. And I wish that for everyone. And sometimes we don't have that option. So we need to find other relationships to do the work in. And you absolutely need relationships to heal.

attachment ones. And the couples that you work with in couples therapy, what tends to be the kind of biggest barriers they face to healing their wounds individually but together? Yeah, a lot of it is, you know, sometimes when the coupleship gets deeper in, we have something called rupture. Like, so our wounds come up and we rupture and we don't know how to deeply repair because there's not enough safety in the relationship. So one person will seek closeness, like the anxious person, to try to get to safety, and the other person will run away to try to get to safety. These are just illusions of safety.

They're not really safety, but that's how they're trying to regulate their nervous system from and keep themselves from feeling abandonment or despair. So I, you know, help a lot of couples understand their nervous system and their nervous system responses and start to unpack that your partner shutting down on you or your partner acting this way is actually out of fear and let's look at what's really going on. And I address, I address this a lot in the book, but like if you start to understand your nervous system a little bit differently, you can start to communicate a little bit differently and you can start to understand that when my partner's shutting down on me over

and over and over again, they're not actually doing that by choice. That's their automatic nervous system. They're scared and they're activated and they're sending a fear signal to my nervous system and my nervous system is getting activated. And so we're both in these activated states. And in these activated states, we can't get back into connection. And so that's sometimes when we need a couple's therapist, a nervous system in the room to help us regulate, to slow everything down, to unpack what's really going on and to get back into connection. Because a lot of it is just a fear of disconnection, a fear of being engulfed, a fear of abandonment, activating our systems a lot.

And then our activated systems just kind of spiraling off of each other. And couples get stuck all the time. And I think having the information and really starting to understand the nervous system differently creates another level awareness that begins to help them resolve some of these deeper issues or dynamics. What do you think is the most damaging myth that is being perpetuated online now about attachment styles that might actually be affecting people's ability to address and deal with their specific attachment style? I think there's a lot going around about narcissism that's wrong. I think a lot of people are identifying avoidant as narcissism. And one is a personality disorder and one is an attachment type. And I think they can cross, but narcissism, narcissism can cross in any attachment type. So I think dismissive avoidance struggle by the way they operate in the world. And they're also incredibly lonely inside. And so I think dismissive avoidance struggle by the way they operate in the world. And they're also incredibly lonely inside. And so I think, think just developing compassion that if we're not we're built and wired for connection we all have

adaptive strategies most people don't have a choice or aren't conscious i mean it's our work to try to get conscious but some people they don't have the capacity to do the deeper work they literally don't it's so painful or they don't have the containers or they don't have the safety in the people and so have compassion for them and have healthy boundaries around them that's all you know and understand that they have a lot of deep wounding and you don't have to participate in any dynamic with them, but we also need to have a lot more compassion because most people don't choose their wounding. People don't wake up and choose to become narcissists. People don't wake up and choose to be avoided or anxious. This is how we adapted to survive. And so I just think having more

compassion in general for most of us are doing the best we can and reenacting so much. And hopefully in some of these experiences, if you're listening, if they've been painful, that it could lead to some kind of awakening or some time of self-evolving for you and that you can grow from the experience so that you don't have to re-experience it. And you just said there that there is oftentimes a misunderstanding of a narcissist versus a someone who's avoiding in their attachment style. And I feel like narcissism is something that's a term that gets thrown around a lot now, particularly on social media. And it's working people quite quick to call many people, or someone with who maybe just had a pretty bad experience with and dating context,

a narcissist, without really understanding what it means. Can you just outline for us what a narcissist actually is what it means? That is so made so early on. So it's like developmental issues from infancy. They really want to merge and they want fantasy bonds and things like that because they, like a mother and a child, they long for that period of when you're kind of in a bubble. They will make you feel like you are the center of the world and feed you all those chemicals. And most of them really believe it, right?

Like, that's our adaptive strategy to get into a place of oneness with another human being. And as the relationship evolves, you individuate. Just like you do when you're a baby with your mother, you individuate. As the narcissistic wound individuates, it can become very threatening. Everything can become very threatening for them. And it's very painful to feel separate from their partner and they can project a lot and have a lot of protective measures that literally can drive you crazy. But they're just trying to keep themselves safe from such an extremely painful wound.

I'm an empath, and I've been with someone who's had that type of wounding. and I know that they're experiencing a lot of pain and also it's a really painful thing to experience when you're on the outside of it. And it's all just pain. And if you understand that it's really early infant wounding and it takes a long time to heal that kind of wounding and a strong desire from someone who has that early wounding

to actually heal and they're very, all their defense mechanisms, they don't want to be vulnerable at all. They have so much shame. And like shame is running so much of their, that they're so well protected that they don't ever really want to get in touch with reality and the origin of their pain is so painful and it's so early on that it's very, very hard to hold and heal that. And it's very hard for them to understand that it's not what's happening in the here and now that this is early, early, early wounding.

So I have a lot of compassion for narcissism. Yet I think having strong boundaries and understanding it, I think once you've been through it, you kind of start to see it more. Even as a professional, like I was trained in it, but not until I experienced it. Did I'm like, oh my God, this is such a painful early wound? They're just surviving in the world. Jessica, we're running out of time now.

But just as a final question is a way of wrapping up. If anyone listening to this who's thinking, yeah, I really do need to do the work. I need to get on this healing journey, whatever my own personal healing journey looks like, because I'm repeating the same patterns. I am self-sabotaging in relationships. I'm finding it hard to connect, to let people in, but I just don't know where to begin.

It feels like a mammoth task. I'm scared. I don't know how to start. What advice would you give for someone who is in that position who just wants to get started? Congratulations, if you want to get started. You're not alone. There's thankfully so many resources. My book is one of them.

There's so many resources out there. I would say finding a therapist or a coach that is not only aware of attachment theory, but also aware of working with somatic. So working with your body and working with sensation in your body and has an understanding of the nervous system. So I'd say equally as important has attachment understanding, but also maybe a somatic therapist or one that works with the body and the nervous system, not just talk therapy.

So finding someone like that would be key. And you can also just start reading the literature and start noticing. Like my book has to start to notice what's coming up in your body and start bringing it to safe people. in your world, start to notice who is safe for you to be vulnerable with, who can you rely on a little bit more as you start to dig in and do some deeper work. I love that. And I really like that you highlighted earlier that it's not, we can't do this work alone.

We do need the relationships around us, but they don't have to be romantic. They can be our amazing friends. It can be platonic, familial. I think that's really important to highlight. So even if you don't have a romantic partner in your life right now, there is still, you know, it's looking at what the relationship. that are in front of you, what they can, how they can help you and how in turn you can help those around you as well. Jessica, thank you so much for your time today. I really, really

appreciate it. I've learned so much from you from your book and this conversation and I know everyone listening to it will have done too. So thank you. Thank you, Emma, for being such a gracious host and asking such wonderful questions and having me on here today. I really appreciate it. Thank you so much for listening to today's Sex Talks podcast with me, your host, Emma Louise Boynton. If you'd like to attend a live recording of the podcast, check out the Eventbrite link in the show notes, as we have lots of exciting live events coming up. You can also keep up to date with everything coming up at Sex Talks, plus get my sporadic musings, via the Sex Talk substack. I've also popped that link into the show notes, and over on Instagram, where I'm at

Emma Louise Boynton. And finally, if you enjoyed the show, please don't forget to rate, review and subscribe on whatever platform you're listening to this on. It helps others to find us. Have a glorious day.