Dating & Relationships

Talking points: attachment, mindset, psychology

Diving into the deep end for 2025, team. The disorganized attachment style is complex, hard to manage, and my heart goes out to anyone who struggles with this. But over the years of training and study, and working with clients with disorganized attachment, I’ve found some things that help. Here’s your primer, team.

(00:00:00) – Why disorganized attachment is so challenging, what makes it different, and the biggest origin points

(00:09:26) – Digging deeper: how does disorganized attachment get formed?

(00:19:47) – Signs of disorganized attachment as an adult

(00:32:05) – How do you heal this?

(00:43:16) – On the importance of working with your nervous system, and one final piece of advice

Transcript

All right, everybody, welcome back to the ManTalks Show, Connor Beaton here. Today we’re going to be talking about disorganized attachment. This is going to be a full and robust guide to disorganized attachment.

I’m going to define it for you. I’m going to tell you about how it gets formed, what actually creates that disorganized attachment, how it shows up in your life or in your partner’s life or in somebody’s life that you know, and then what do you do? How do you actually begin to work with and move through your disorganized attachment style? Now, admittedly, this is a challenging attachment style for a number of reasons. Just as in the title, as in the name of it, it’s disorganized.

The person really struggles to stay connected to any type of intimacy and relationship. There’s a desire and a fear of intimacy. There is a desire for closeness, but a fear of abandonment.

So the way I like to break it down is, “I don’t know how to be in relationship.” That’s the sort of moniker or narrative going on inside of an individual with disorganized attachment. You could also put on the sort of title of, I deeply crave intimacy and relationship, but I’m also afraid of it, and I don’t know how to make it happen.

So for the disorganized person, there is one real big component that is different from almost every other attachment style, whether it’s avoidant, fearful avoidant, anxious, et cetera, which is that there is a kind of hypervigilance towards any small relational changes. Any changes within their partner, any change within the relationship itself can send that disorganized person into a bit of a spiral, a panic about the relationship being changed or that being a threat. Because for the disorganized person, it’s almost always the case that their disorganized attachment style was created because of painful inconsistencies in their childhood.

I’ll just give you a quick example and then we’ll dive in a little bit deeper. But imagine that you’re a kid and you bring a book or a toy to your parent and they smile at you, right? You’re two, you’re three years old, they smile at you and they take the book from you and they start reading the book. And then you get off their lap and you walk away and you go grab another book and you bring back the book to your parent and they smack the book out of your hand and they yell at you and you start crying and you’re forced to go away and leave them.

That’s very much the case for a lot of disorganized attached people. In their childhood, they were surrounded by inconsistencies. One moment a caregiver would be loving and kind and connected and the next moment they’d be abusive and yelling or cold and shut down and there would kind of be this unpredictable cycle that would play out at home where the child never really got any type of grounding or foundation of what to expect in relationship.

And this is a very, very important part. I mean, if you look at attachment just in general, what you’ll see is that on average people need 35% to 40% of the time when we’re a kid, when you’re a kid, you need 35% to 40% of the time for a parent or a caregiver to understand that there’s a need and to be able to meet and fulfill that need without punishment, without breaking relationship, without disconnecting from you, yelling at you, making you wrong. You need to begin to realize that there can be a consistent pattern of I can bring you what I need and what I want.

I can try and connect with you and you’ll meet those needs. You’ll connect back with me. You’ll engage in relationship with me.

For a disorganized person, that didn’t happen. That consistency, even a 25% of the time consistency of being able to see, oh, there’s a pattern here. When I bring mom this book, mom’s happy.

When I ask dad to play with me, dad engages with me, right? There’s not a consistent response to that child and their needs. Think about disorganized attachment as a form of attachment style that’s really characterized by a lack of an internal system or structure that is designed for managing relationship and emotional needs. The actual internal systems of being able to regulate emotional needs, being able to know that other people care about your emotional needs, and being able to trust relationships, feel safe in relationships, those internal systems never really got fully developed within a disorganized attached person.

Now, this doesn’t mean that they’re defective. It doesn’t mean that you’re broken. It doesn’t mean that there’s something fundamentally wrong with you.

It simply means that the circumstances that you grew up in were not conducive for you to develop that, really to sort of like pour the concrete and the foundation of your internal home with regards to relationships and your emotional needs. Now, the good thing is that you can learn these things, all right? I’ve started to look at a lot of the conversation that’s out there around disorganized, and I’ve seen your comments. I mean, the comments that I get from you guys on YouTube are phenomenal.

I really, really love how much you guys engage with this content around attachment. And what breaks my heart quite a bit is that I see a lot of people that are either hating on avoidance and disorganized people or disorganized people that genuinely feel hopeless. And so if you are a disorganized attached person, please know that you are not hopeless.

You’re not fundamentally broken. And I’m going to walk you through a very deep understanding of what created this, how it up in your life, and what you can actually do to go about building an internal system and structure to be able to engage in relationships and trust intimacy and feel safe and bring your emotional needs forward and meet your own emotional needs. Because that’s one of the other hallmarks of the disorganized person is that they don’t know how to meet their own needs or have others meet their needs.

So last piece about the disorganized attached person, and then we’ll get into the real formation of it. The disorganized attachment can really be identified as a mix of fear and confusion. Confusion is a big, big, big player when it comes to the disorganized person.

They’re very confused. They’re confused about how to create intimacy. They’re confused about how to get their needs met.

They’re confused about whether or not they should stay or go. Now, a lot of people experience that. So just know that if you are thinking about, I don’t know if I should stay or go in a relationship, that doesn’t mean that you’re disorganized attached.

But for the disorganized attached person, this is a pattern. It’s like they just deeply have this sense of, I don’t know if I’m in the right relationship. I don’t know if I should stay in this relationship.

I don’t know if I’m good enough to be in this relationship. Sometimes disorganized attached people are confused about why the other person would even choose to be with them. So confusion is a really, really big, big part of this.

Remember, disorganized attachment, the hallmark of it is unpredictability. I’m going to drive this home a couple times because I haven’t heard enough people talk about this. Because in the wounding is the remedy, right? In the wounding is the remedy.

If unpredictability was the kind of hallmark of what created this interrupted attachment style, this attachment style where you struggle to maintain relationship, then predictability, as boring as it may sound initially, predictability is really going to be a huge, huge part of the reconciliation, the healing, the rewiring of your system, which we’re going to go into. The last piece to this, the last piece I want to add on to this is that your primary caretakers, it’s very, very likely that if you are a disorganized attached person, one or both of your primary caretakers or whoever your primary caretakers were, they were a source of comfort and fear and deep confusion. And this led to a kind of internal conflict and unrest where you don’t ever really know whether it’s safe to approach somebody that you love.

You don’t ever really know unequivocally whether the other person wants to be with you, wants to know how you’re feeling, wants to know what you want. And so there’s a kind of mistrust that happens that it’s not okay for me to be in relationships or relationships just aren’t okay for me. So how does disorganized attachment get formed? Well, I’ve laid out a couple of things already, but I’m going to go a little bit deeper into this.

So it’s usually a response from childhood and a response to your primary caregivers. And there’s a few things that can cause this. So the first one is certain types of abuse and neglect.

Depending on how that abuse looked and how that neglect looked, for example, maybe you had a parent that was very loving and kind sometimes, but just wouldn’t show up to your sporting events or your music recitals or whatever it was. And this was like sort of sporadic. Sometimes they’d be nice at home.

Sometimes they’d be loud and violent. Sometimes they’d show up to your school events and sometimes they wouldn’t. And there would be no rhyme or reason.

There was sort of like no predicting what they were going to do. And you’re kind of on the edge all the time of like, are they going to show up? Are they going to yell at me? Like, I just really have no idea and I can’t figure it out. The next one obviously is trauma.

Trauma can play a big role. And again, here we’re talking about acute trauma, the capital T trauma of physical abuse, direct emotional abuse, sexual abuse, et cetera. Those types of abuse specifically coming from a primary caregiver or somebody adjacent to the primary caregiver that the primary caregiver likely should have protected you from or known about or et cetera, some version of that.

So trauma will and definitely can create a disorganized attachment. Because again, trauma can create fear for some people, really deep-rooted fear. And for others, it can create deep-rooted confusion.

And again, for the disorganized attached person, you can kind of think of it as like the cloud over top of them and the relationship. And they’re constantly sort of wondering and thinking and not really too sure. And they can never really settle in and exhale into a relationship and know that they’re okay.

They’re safe. They’re wanted there. And that’s clear.

The next piece is inconsistency and unpredictability from primary caregivers. So you had a mom that was sometimes emotionally okay, other times bursting out into tears, other times yelling and screaming, other times throwing things, other times not talking to you for hours on end. And there was this kind of emotional whirlwind where you just like, you never knew what was going to happen.

You’re like, I just do not know what to expect. There’s no rhyme or reason. There’s no ability to predict how she’s going to be feeling.

Or you had a father who was there and present and then not there or loud and abusive or jovial and happy and kind of cycled through these sort of like really intense emotions, maybe really close and connected to you and then very distant and far away. And so again, this unpredictability and this inconsistency, when you’re a kid, your nervous system and your brain are actually wiring. And they’re wiring for many things.

But one of the biggest things that your nervous system and your brain are actually wiring for when you’re a kid is relationship. Your nervous system is literally, your body is literally wiring for, how should I feel when I’m in relationship with people? What should I come to expect? And the brain is doing the same thing. Remember, your brain is a pattern recognition machine.

And so in part, the brain, when you’re a kid and you’re growing up in an environment that’s really inconsistent and there’s really unpredictable behaviors and emotions and situations and circumstances that happen, your brain wires to not be able to recognize consistent patterns of safety, security, attachment, connection. So this is one of the big, big parts where your caretaker as a parent or whomever may have cycled or alternated through these behaviors of loving, kind, harmful, abusive, present, disconnected, available, unavailable, and just generally left you as a kid feeling deeply, deeply confused about where you stood. And the last piece I want to say on this unpredictability and inconsistency is that because of the way that our brains form and our nervous systems form, and because of the way that the psyche forms when you’re a child, specifically in certain developmental stages that you go through, you are going to be a kind of a little bundle of ego.

And so all the things that happen out in your external environment with mom and dad and caregivers and family, they kind of get internalized as, what am I doing to cause this? What am I doing to cause mom or dad’s erratic, inconsistent behavior? How come I can’t get them to respond in a way that is consistent and loving and kind and grounded and calm and et cetera? So it’s very common that when you dig down, when I’ve worked with people that have disorganized attachment styles, when you start to dig down into it, there is at the sort of core, the foundation, a belief that that inconsistency was somehow their doing. Like I did something wrong or there was something wrong with me fundamentally that caused this behavior in my environment. I was the reason why dad was never consistent.

And again, this doesn’t logically make sense. As an adult, we’re like, of course, I mean, he was just a mess or she was just a drunk or whatever it was. But internally, as a child, in your body, in your nervous system, in the unconscious, in the pre-verbal states, before you even had language to explain or try and rationalize what the hell was going on in your household, your body and your brain were coding things as, I am contributing to what’s happening to me.

I am doing something that’s causing this. And your little brain and your little body would have been working tirelessly, just extensively to try and figure out what am I doing that’s causing this inconsistency because I can’t figure it out. And so it can be really, really deeply frustrating.

This is one of the things that I really have a tremendous amount of empathy for people that have disorganized attachment because the more that I’ve learned about their stories, the more that I hear about childhoods and relationships in their adult years where they have worked tirelessly to try and figure out and get clarity on what have I done to cause this situation? Like, what’s my part in this? And there’s really, and we’ll get to this in the healing part of it, there’s really oftentimes a mislabeled or misplaced level of responsibility on them for relational issues, specifically in their childhood. They might be causing and contributing to them for sure in their adult relationships, but specifically in their childhood, there’s a misplaced level of responsibility of like, mom was a disaster and I really made it my fault. The last piece, the last two pieces about what forms disorganized attachment is emotionally unavailable parents.

So you might have had a caregiver that is just really, they’re emotionally overwhelmed. They’re struggling with their own trauma, their own PTSD. This is very common when I’ve had people that grew up with military parents or parents that were doctors or first responders.

It’s a big one. First responders have a lot of trauma, a lot of PTSD from what they have seen, being on the scene of car accidents and gun violence and stabbings, et cetera. And so they can really take a lot of that stuff home with them.

And so that can create an environment where that person is emotionally distant. And again, internally, it can be very confusing for the child, for you as a child to know, how do I get my needs met? How do I get some type of connection from a parent who doesn’t seem to be willing or wanting or able to connect with me consistently? And again, as a child, you would have and you will have internalized that as your fault, as something that was wrong with you. Not necessarily something that you were doing wrong.

This is the big difference. Children do not have the capacity to separate personhood from behavior. So they don’t think like, oh, I did something wrong.

They think I am wrong. Something’s wrong with me that’s causing this because they don’t understand that who I am is different from what I do, even though there’s many adults of us that don’t understand that either. But for kids, that’s a very real experience.

It’s just like, mom yells at me, something’s wrong with me, you know? And so they internalize everything. A couple of examples, a child whose parent comforts them in one moment is sort of like loving and nurturing and kind, but then lashes out, is unpredictable, yelling, maybe hitting them, slapping them, spanking them in the next moment may develop disorganized attachment. So this sort of response of, I don’t know what I’m going to get.

Am I going to get hostility? Am I going to get loving, nurturing? Like, what am I going to get from my parent? Having and growing up with a diagnosed or undiagnosed bipolar parent can replicate this. And you can grow up in an environment where they’re cycling through. And so if you have a parent who was sort of manically happy in some moments and then terribly depressed the next day and then kind of okay the day after that.

And they were going through this cycle and you never really knew it was happening. That can certainly cause disorganized attachment. Kids witnessing domestic violence, so you may not have even experienced the abuse on you, but witnessing the abuse, witnessing this sort of erratic, hostile behavior between your parents, that can also lead to disorganized attachment.

So all of these types of things, I’m just trying to give you the landscape. So I’m going to truck through signs of the disorganized attachment. This is also important because it’s going to help you understand what it is that you actually need to work on in order to develop a more secure attachment style.

So if you are disorganized, then you definitely want to stay in on this part. If you don’t think that you’re a disorganized attached person, you could skip ahead to the healings just so if you want to know how to work with your partner. But this part can be very helpful, especially if you are in a relationship with somebody to be like, okay, I’m not crazy.

Like this is this disorganized attachment showing up in our relational dynamic. So people with disorganized attachment styles, they often exhibit a mix of behaviors that for you, if you’re not disorganized, can be very confusing. You kind of feel their confusion.

You feel this disorganized, cumbersome, confused, unsure behavior because it comes out into the relationship. And there’s sort of an inconsistent pattern where they’ll be connected to you. Sometimes they’ll be super avoidant.

Other times they might act like irrational and anxious. Other times, and they kind of oscillate through and you’re like, can we just find solid ground here? Can we land the plane? And it kind of always feels like you’re going through some type of turbulence when you’re in relationship with a disorganized person. What are some of the signs? Number one is fear of intimacy coupled with a very deep fear of abandonment.

So this is where the disorganized person has a kind of conundrum, right? I’m afraid of intimacy. I want it. I’m afraid of it because it’s been inconsistent or it’s been dangerous or it’s been unhealthy or abusive or traumatic, but I’m also afraid of being abandoned.

And so that’s where the disorganized person is constantly sort of dancing between these two sides. I don’t want you to leave me, but I also don’t want to get close enough to you to actually feel the depth of love and connection and relaxation and ease that could come from consistent, connected intimacy. So the person may desire the close relationship, but simultaneously fear being hurt.

As soon as you start to get close and you feel like things are going well, they pick a fight and blow things up. Or you feel like things are going well and all of a sudden they’re anxious and they’re like text bombing the crap out of you. And you’re like, what’s going on? You were just pulling away and didn’t want to be with me three days ago.

Like what’s happening? So they oscillate between clinging to you, clinging to someone, or if you’re the disorganized person, you oscillate from clinging to your partner to pushing them away. And you kind of create this push-pull dynamic. And it’s kind of like this yo-yo effect where you as the disorganized person, you’re like, come closer, come closer, come closer.

And then there reaches this certain point where it feels like, holy crap, they’re so close. And your whole body goes into an alarm. An alarm goes off, right? It’s like, this feels dangerous.

This feels like a threat. This feels foreign for a lot of disorganized people. The consistent, loving, safe attachment is what feels foreign.

And all of the questioning starts to happen. Is this normal? Do I want this? Usually when stability starts to enter into the relationship, that’s when the disorganized person has all of the alarm bells go off internally. They start to question whether they’re safe or not.

And they start to question the relationship itself because stability, ease, connection, closeness, intimacy, all of that is foreign. It’s unknown. And so when it starts to happen, all of the alarm systems start to go off.

And maybe they pull away. They become sort of disengaged and disconnected. Or they start to become anxious.

There’s a deep difficulty trusting other people. So you might notice that if you’re a disorganized person, there’s this constant projection onto your partner of like, I don’t know if I can trust them to take care of themselves, to take care of me, to meet my needs. I don’t know if I can trust them to stay faithful.

And there’s this kind of pervasive thought or pervasive sense of mistrust that the other person is somehow out to get you, going to betray you, going to hurt you. And there’s a suspicion of that other person or the relationship. Now, I want to say something on this because part of what happens for a lot of you disorganized people is that you do attract people who are not trustworthy.

And that is part of the pattern. And usually these people who are not trustworthy, sometimes you have great wild sexual connection with them, but the relationship itself is toxic, unhealthy. You know, really wild and inconsistent.

And it’s just this big push-pull dance and they’re close and it’s intense and they’re gone and it’s not, and it’s a bit of a mess. So your sort of radar for relationship, depending on where you are and how intense your disorganized attachment might be, it’s common that disorganized people sometimes will attract other disorganized people, okay, which is a bit of a storm. It’s a bit chaotic.

You probably, if you’ve experienced this, you know exactly what I’m talking about because that relationship will stick out in your mind like a sore thumb because it’ll just have been this like nuclear bomb that happened in your life. But you can attract disorganized people or you will attract people who legitimately do not want intimacy, do not want closeness, do not want connection and relationship. And so you attract these people that you can’t actually trust and push away the people that you can trust.

Now, this is super important for the healing process. We’re going to touch on it more later. But the basic part that I want to emphasize here is that your relationship radar, for lack of a better word, is a bit skewed.

And it’s skewed towards people who are going to reinforce your current attachment style. Now, that is a problem inherently, okay? It’s a bit of a pickle and a conundrum. So what I want you to start to look towards are the people that would normally feel a bit too safe, almost a bit boring.

I use the word boring. The people that you’re like, oh, yeah, like that would be easy or that relationship, you know, it’s like, oh, that was just going to bore me or I’m not really too sure if that would be exciting for me. Those are generally speaking, and honestly, those are the types of relationships that you want to go and try to have because your nervous system needs to get a sense of stability, of predictability before you can really have a clear sense of being able to choose who you really want to be with.

So you need to have a relationship or some relationships with people that are stable, that are very grounded, that are, you know, again, like I said, I’m just going to keep using the word, that are, to your perspective, probably kind of boring and overly safe and kind of like vanilla. That is going to be a healing experience for you. So moving on, a couple more things that hallmark the disorganized attachment style, unpredictable behavior in relationships.

So again, very common, no fault of your own, that disorganized people become disorganized in the relationship, right? They become the unpredictable person. So they experienced a lot of inconsistency and unpredictability growing up, and how they show up in relationships is the exact same behavior. There’s a lot of reactions to emotional situations that can be erratic.

You can oscillate from being super intense to wanting a lot of closeness to rejecting it to emotional withdrawal. And you might find yourself struggling to maintain any type of consistent patterns of communication, affection, intimacy, right? You might show affection one day, and then the next day when your partner texts you or calls you, you just like flat out ignore them for the next like two days. And all of a sudden they’re like, what happened? So there’s this kind of erratic behavior that can start to show up.

There’s a deep fear of rejection and criticism. This is seen as a huge threat for the disorganized person. And there’s a heightened sensitivity because rejection and criticism of any kind, right? No, I don’t want to go on that date with you, or no, I don’t want to watch that movie, or no, I don’t want to eat at that restaurant.

That is encoded, encrypted internally as a threat. That might mean I’m going to get hurt if I’m disorganized. That might mean that this person is going to leave me.

They’re going to abandon me. They’re going to blame me for something. And so any type of rejection or criticism is seen as a threat internally.

Emotional dysregulation is another big hallmark of the disorganized attached person. So you likely have a big challenge processing, managing, sometimes even understanding the emotions that are happening inside of you. And they just kind of take over. It’s like a weather system moves in and mood swings, outbursts, all of these types of things begin to unfold.

You might be somebody that experiences intense anxiety or despair whenever there’s any kind of relational stress. Okay, depending on the origin of your disorganized attachment style, you will either go to intense anxiety or you can go to intense despair. Like I’m never going to be loved.

Relationships are terrible. They never work. You know, this sort of like Eeyore effect can really set in.

And that can happen at the drop of a hat with any type of relational conflict or stress. It doesn’t even have to be big. It can just be like a reoccurring small thing. And it can send you into this type of despair. Two more things that are really, really important. The next one is low self-worth.

Very common for disorganized people to have low self-worth. Again, the primary cause of this is that the lack of consistent connection and relationship and intimacy growing up, of love, receiving love growing up, became internalized as there’s something wrong with me that I’m not getting the love and affection that I want or there’s something wrong with me that I keep getting this very negative, abusive, whatever it was. So very common that there’s a lot of low self-worth.

And then the big last piece is hypervigilance. This is a big one, team. Disorganized people have a lot of hypervigilance towards any incongruencies, any incongruencies in the relationship, any behavioral changes in their partner, any behavioral changes, any changes within the relationship, the temperature of the relationship, like when things are hotter or colder, they’re closer, they’re more connected, they’re less connected.

A disorganized person will be extremely hypervigilantly tuned in to all of that because when they were growing up, they had to learn to just be in a constant state of externalized awareness, externalized awareness. What is happening outside of me? And they had to do that in order to try and provide any type of safety and stability and internal sense of just being okay. And so there’s a lot of externalization of how are you doing, what’s happening in our relationship.

They might even be very hypervigilant about what’s happening in their environment, things within the apartment or your house, being moved or in the wrong place can cause a lot of dysregulation, can cause them to move into a space of like, is there something wrong with us? Are you leaving me? It can cause this sort of descent into that despair or that anxiousness. So hypervigilance, a big, big, big hallmark of it. Okay, let’s get deep into how do you heal? How do you heal disorganized attachment? The first thing I’m gonna say is work with somebody that specializes in this.

If you are a disorganized person, if you have a disorganized attachment style, this can be very challenging. I’m not saying that working with avoidant and anxious can’t be challenging, but working with disorganized is genuinely, it is a very challenging thing. So if you know that you are that person, if you’ve come this far and you’re like, yes, I’ve checked literally all of these boxes and I 100% am a disorganized person and you’ve gone through and you’ve sort of done the test and you’re like, yes, I’m a disorganized person, definitely work with somebody that has a few skillsets to support you.

Number one is that they know how to work with attachment specifically, okay? That they are specifically trained in attachment. My good friend and mentor, Dewey Freeman, he’s been working with attachment for 40 plus years. That’s what I am trained in and it is a beautiful modality.

It’s very, very important to work with somebody that understands attachment and somatic therapy, some type of somatic processing. Because again, a lot of the hypervigilance, a lot of the confusion that you experience, a lot of the yo-yo push-pull stuff that happens, it is what’s called pre-verbal. It’s not a rational process that’s unfolding.

It is something that is ingrained into your nervous system and your body and it’s something that is in your unconscious and it’s something that is somatically baked in that you need to begin to work with. So very, very important that you begin to work with somebody that knows how to help you get into the body, develop safety in the body, be able to work with your body in a way that is effective, okay? Super, super important. The next thing is rediscover safety with the self first and with the other second.

So very important, a lot of disorganized attached people, they lack a felt sense of safety in their body. So there’s this constant state of like, am I okay, am I all right? And they maybe feel okay if things are fine in their relationship or fine in their external environment, but the minute that any of that changes, they lose any kind of internal sense of safety. So beginning to develop systems where you can regulate yourself, breath work, meditation, maybe getting into like Qigong or Tai Chi, some forms of yoga can be very helpful for you to actually get into your physical body and begin to work on what does safety actually feel like for me? Because as I said, a lot of the things that contributed to your disorganized attachment style are less memories in your mind and more memories of the body, okay? And this is something that I’ve just started to talk about more and more.

It’s this notion that your body has memories, right? Memories of the body are usually the things that are getting in the way in the relationship, right? Your partner does something or they say something in a specific way, in a certain tone, or they text you something, and it’s usually, it’s not your mind that triggers things first, it’s your nervous system in your body that activates some memory of like, oh crap, am I safe? Am I okay? Are they pulling away? They’re getting too close. This doesn’t feel safe. And so in many ways, you have to be able to develop that safety within your body and your nervous system so that your alarm system isn’t constantly going off and that your alarm system in your body isn’t going off at the inappropriate or incorrect times.

So being able to develop safety within yourself, there’s a number of things you might look at. Again, you will want to do guided with a psychedelic therapist, but you could do certain forms of psychedelics. MDMA have been shown to be very, very helpful, and psilocybin has been shown to be very, very helpful.

Things like EMDR have also been shown to be helpful when it comes to things like disorganized attachment. But the main piece I wanna reinforce is that as you work towards developing safety internally and with your partner, it’s very important that you have a third-party person, that you have a therapist, a psychologist, a coach that specializes in this. And again, I’m not trying to pitch myself here.

There’s tens of thousands of people that specialize in this. Go and find somebody so that you have someone that can help you move towards consistent, safe, trustworthy connection. That is the aim.

And unfortunately, as a disorganized person, your body doesn’t know what that feels like. And so you need a third party outside of you to act as a kind of tuning fork for your nervous system, for your brain to be able to trust relationship, okay? And somebody that’s good to see through your BS. So begin to rediscover safety with the self.

Again, breath work, yoga, qigong, working out, all these types of things can be very, very helpful for you to develop that sense of safety. The next one is really important when it comes to the relationship. You have to start to map your yo-yo push-pull pattern, okay? You have to start to map your push-pull pattern.

When do you push away, why, and what’s happening inside of your body? So that’s a question that I want you to write down. If you’re a disorganized person, do some homework out of this video. When do I push away, how, and why? What’s actually happening in my relationship? Am I pushing away because that person feels too close? Am I pushing away, oh yeah, and what’s happening in my body, right? Am I pushing away when somebody brings something up that they don’t like, when they express disappointment, when they start to really love on me and try and meet my needs? Like, when is it that you start to push away your partner? What’s happening in the relationship? And what does it somatically or physically feel like in your body? Does it feel constrictive? Does it feel like this big wall goes up? Like, what actually starts to transpire? And then when do you move into the pull pattern, the pull cycle of trying to get that person closer and closer and closer and closer and closer? Again, what’s happening in the relationship when you move into that pull cycle? What’s happening physically and somatically in your body? What does it feel like when you’re in that pull cycle and pull space? All of this is going to be super, super important so that you can identify where you are because what happens for a lot of disorganized people is they oscillate between these two extremes, right? They oscillate, I mean, imagine in the political spectrum oscillating between like the far left and the far right.

And I know it’s kind of like a funny, ridiculous analogy, but for disorganized people, that is often what happens is that you are oscillating between get further away from me and I need you to come closer to me. Get further away from me, I’m not okay. I need you to come closer to me because I’m not okay.

And there’s not a lot of middle ground. And so as you can start to contextualize, oh, I’m in that pull cycle again. Oh, I’m in that push cycle again.

You can begin to regulate and there’s a very clear pathway that you can begin to walk, right? If you’re pushing somebody away, call out the pattern. If you’re with a partner that you trust or that you’re starting to develop that trust with, just label it, identify it. Hey, you know what? I noticed I’ve started to push you away.

Not because you’re doing anything, not because it’s your fault, not because of anything, but I felt like things were getting too close and I started to push you away. My bad, I apologize. I’d like to spend some time with you tonight or whatever it is, right? Like maybe you ask for a little bit of space.

Maybe you genuinely want some time. This is a process of you really beginning to notice that cycle of push-pull, this yo-yo and back and forth, and beginning to tune more deeply into what is it that I actually need in order to be secure and safe and trusting in this relationship. And again, you might not know initially, but the first step is getting very clear on what the cycle is and being able to communicate that cycle to your partner, right? You have to out yourself, you have to out your cycle.

So out your cycle to your therapist, your psychologist, your coach, whoever it is that you’re working with, and then ideally out yourself to your partner when you get this awareness, because this will do two things. One, it will help you begin to get a sense of, I know where I am, I know what’s happening inside of me, and you’ll have a better understanding of why the relationship keeps oscillating. And then secondly, it’s gonna help your partner begin to trust you a little bit more because you will be identifying what’s happening with you.

And that will actually allow the relationship to find some consistency, to find some stability that it has likely been missing. The next piece is very important, which is begin to reparent your younger self. Now, this is a concept that is in many different modalities.

I started doing it in psychology for a long time, reparenting the self. I don’t think Jung called it reparenting the self, but working with the inner child is a big part of it. In IFS or internal family systems, that’s a big part of it.

So beginning to give that younger self what they needed that they didn’t get from your caregivers, right? So if you needed consistent validation or recognition from your parents, begin a ritual, a daily ritual and process of recognizing yourself as often as possible to reinforce, to start to give yourself this thing, this skill, this behavior, this recognition that you didn’t get growing up. That’s just a very basic part of it. But creating safety will be reparenting that younger self, doing some inner child work with somebody.

I’m not gonna outline that right here and now, but doing that inner child work can be very, very helpful because part of what happens, part of that memory in the body is that younger self. And that younger self comes online, takes over cognitively and emotionally and physically, and says, oh crap, I’m not safe. I need to protect myself.

And I need to protect myself by pushing this person away or by trying desperately to get them to come closer to me. And so it’s that younger self that needs a more mature adult-oriented version of you to step in and say, we’re okay, we can ground right now, we don’t need to chase after them, we don’t need to push them away, or here’s where we are in the cycle. So being able to reparent is going to be a very, very, very important piece of the equation.

The last piece that is very important outside of everything that I’ve talked about is being able to work with your nervous system. Being able to work with your nervous system. Your little nervous system when you were a kid didn’t have any type of consistency.

And that inconsistency is disorienting for your nervous system. And so it can never really tell when it’s safe. And so you need to work with somebody who’s skilled to be able to help you develop a very deep sense of safety within yourself.

Now there’s ways that you can begin to do this on your own. Some of them are more extreme, some of them are rituals that you need to have on a daily basis, but I strongly recommend that you have some type of a daily grounding practice to get you into your nervous system. To start to connect to how does the energy in my body actually feel right now? And when you start this practice, you might feel like it’s just a giant question mark.

Where you’re like, I have no idea. I have no idea how I feel, or I just feel like crap constantly, or I feel confused constantly, or whatever it is. But you just begin a ritual.

And it might be a meditation, it might be that you commit to daily breath work, right? You do Wim Hof, or some breath work style, and you just commit to it for 45 days, or 60 days. And you start this practice of forcing yourself to get back into your body, and to try and reestablish a baseline of safety and security so that you know what to return to when you feel that oscillation into pushing the other person away, or trying desperately to get them to move closer to you. Because again, that cycle for the disorganized, they move into that cycle when they become aware, when you become aware of I don’t feel safe relationally, or I don’t feel safe with myself.

And it’s either in one of those two moments where you push or pull the person away, just depending on what’s happening in the relationship. And so the more that you can work with your own nervous system and your own body, for your own body to be a safe place for you to live, the more that you are going to be able to show up in a consistent way in your relationship. Because the real, and this is how I’m gonna wrap up this episode, the real sort of tragedy or hardship of the disorganized is that it doesn’t just cause a disorganized attachment for you with others, is that it creates that disorganized connection with yourself.

And so the real hardship for the disorganized person is I don’t know how to be safe with me. I don’t know how to be consistent with me. I feel inconsistent and out of control in myself.

And that’s the real challenge. And so at the base of this, being able to slowly and incrementally commit to practices and rituals that are going to embed safety into your body, that are gonna embed consistency into your mind and your habits and your nervous system, the more that you are going to start to lower your baseline from a frenetic, frantic, disoriented, confused place to a more grounded, consistent state of being. And the last thing that I’ll say is that for disorganized people, when they start to have more grounding and regularity, it can feel so foreign that it’s almost like this unbearable thing.

I’ve noticed this in working with a number of disorganized people, where the more they find consistency and grounding, the more intense the confusion, the more intense the urge to self-destruct, push people away, et cetera, becomes. And so please know that if you are a disorganized person and you start to do this work, what you’re going to notice, and I promise you this will happen. I’m sorry to say, I promise you this will happen.

As you start to move closer and closer to having safety, security, trust within yourself and within your relationship, the more, for a period of time, not forever, the more that the intensity of confusion, wanting to push people away, wanting to pull them closer, you might find yourself becoming way more needy or way more avoidant because for disorganized, how do I say this part? For disorganized people, the way out is usually through avoidance or anxiety and then back to secure. You don’t generally go straight from disorganized to secure. Usually what happens for disorganized people is they move through one of those pathways.

They become more anxious, more anxious, more anxious, and then they move back to secure or they become more avoidant and then really have to lean in to relationship and security and safety. And so just know that if you feel like you’re doing this work and you’re becoming more anxious or more avoidant, it’s probably that you’re on the right path. Keep going.

Now, that doesn’t mean that I’m advocating for you to be an anxious, attached person or avoidant, attached person. It simply means that that is the direction that’s moving you towards safety. It means that you’re picking a side.

It means that you’re finding a path. And for disorganized people, that is part of the problem to begin with. They don’t know which energy to inhabit.

They can’t find safety. They can’t find avoidance. They can’t find anxiousness.

And there’s kind of this oscillation between all of them. So as you do this work and you start to ground and you start to find more safety and more security, you are going to notice that the urge to pull away, disconnect, sell everything and move to Bali, the urge to become more anxious and needy and clingy in your relationship, those things are probably going to heighten. Know that that’s going to happen.

Know that that’s okay. Be honest about it with the people that you’re working with, with your therapist or psychologist. Be honest with your partner about it.

Just be as transparent as possible and you’ll move through that phase much, much faster.

Talking points: attachment, genetics, psychology

Attachment as a framework for working on and healing your relationships is powerful stuff. But it’s also complex. I wanted to nerd out a bit this week with all of you over this fascinating study on attachment, genetics, and environment—with a PSA at the end.

Dig in and let me know what you think!

You can find the abstract of the study and request a full PDF here: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/385437792_Genetic_and_environmental_contributions_to_adult_attachment_styles_Evidence_from_the_Minnesota_Twin_Registry

(00:00:00) – Intro

(00:04:28) – Why it’s interesting and a potential game changer, and why heritability doesn’t mean it’s game over