Talking points: attachment, tactics, mindset
Let’s admit we all want a relationship that’s balanced and has minimal conflict and insecurity. I’ve talked about what anxious and avoidant couples do, but how do securely attached couples navigate? Here are five things to model.
(00:00:00) – Intro, and a quick recap on the main attachment styles
(00:07:30) – What do securely attached people in relationships do? Number one: healthy conflict and resolution building
(00:10:45) – Number two: they operate from a place of trust
(00:12:40) – Number three: they can self-regulate and work towards healthy de-escalation
(00:16:54) – Number four: they have a healthy balance of independence and togetherness
(00:19:45) – Number five: they create, maintain, and repair connection
(00:25:04) – If you’re not sure which one to start with, start here
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Transcript
What are the signs of a securely attached person in a relationship? How do you know if you are securely attached? How do you know if you are engaging in this behavior, and what do you actually need to do in order to create a securely attached relationship or to be more securely attached in your relationship? I’m going to go through the five main things. I’m going to have some action for you to take at the end of this video, so make sure you stay tuned to that. You can always skip ahead, but you’re going to actually need to tune into most of the content here in order to understand the action that you’re going to take at the end.
But before I begin, I want to just give a quick recap. What is an anxious, an avoidant, a disorganized, and a securely attached person? So, I’m going to give you my definition. I have tried to distill these down into the most simple definitions possible for you to hold. So you might want to write these down or just try and remember them if you have a good memory. So here we go. An anxious person.
An anxious person’s experience internally is as follows: I am not okay unless you’re okay. I’m not okay unless you’re okay. So I need to know, are you all right? Are you angry? Are you angry with me? Is it safe to engage with you? Another way of saying this is my nervous system depends on you. My nervous system is not okay. My body, my sense of safety, my sense of independence, my individuality is dependent on you, on you being all right.
If you’re all right, then I have a chance to be all right. This is why anxious people will over-text, over-communicate, constantly check in, those types of things. An avoided person is the inverse of this.
So an avoided person sounds something like, I’m only okay when I do it myself. Or I can’t rely on others to be okay, only I can do that. Or I don’t need you to be okay. And so that is a version of my nervous system rejects you. My nervous system doesn’t need you. There’s a rejection of co-regulation; there’s a rejection of real deep, lasting, and prolonged connection.
This is why a lot of truly avoidant people will sometimes even get with a secure person and that secure person will find themselves getting a bit anxious. You keep pulling away. Or we start to get into a deep relationship or deep intimacy, or we have great sex, and all of a sudden you pull away.
Or things will be going well for a couple of days, and then all of a sudden you pick a fight and you disappear for 72 hours, right? That is an avoidant behavior. My nervous system rejects you, and it can only withstand so much connection before I need space because I have learned to provide safety, security, individuality, independence in a very siloed way. The last one is disorganized attachment.
There’s different forms of disorganized, but I’ve just distilled this down to I need you to be okay in order for me to be okay, then I don’t, and then I’m afraid I can never be okay on my own. So it’s a bit of a combination of the other two. It sort of oscillates back and forth between the anxious.
Sometimes, I need to know that you’re okay in order for me to feel safe. Sometimes I’m going to reject you and don’t care about what you need or don’t need or the boundaries that you’re setting. I don’t care about those things in order for me to be all right. It’s a bit of both of them, and that’s because as a disorganized, my nervous system is on high alert, right? Your nervous system is on high alert as a disorganized and you struggle both to self-regulate and to trust that another person can help you co-regulate.
So what’s a secure? A secure person sounds something like this. I can regulate myself. I’m okay when you’re not okay and I allow you to help me be okay when I’m not okay from time to time.
So notice the secure does three things. I can regulate myself. I’m okay to help myself be okay. When things are stressful, when life is taxing, I know what to do in order to turn down the alarm system in my body. I know what to do to support myself without going off the rails and needing to drink or smoke weed or watch porn. I have good mechanisms to regulate myself and be all right in solitude, in crisis, in conflict, those types of things.
So I can regulate myself. I’m okay on my own. I’m also okay when you’re not okay. This is a big thing that anxious attached people struggle with. As soon as their partner is upset, they’re not all right. They get sucked in immediately.
So I’m okay with myself. I’m okay when you’re not okay. And when I’m not okay, I’m also okay with you supporting me in finding my way back to an okay place, right? So when I’m stressed out, when I’m pissed off at my whatever, at my boss, or when I’ve had a really stressful day because of some client situation in my business, I can have a conversation with you and you can be in a good place and help me get back to a good place. I also trust you to do that.
So those are the three signals of a secure person. I’m all right with me. I’m okay when you’re not all right, right? When you’re upset, I don’t need to personalize it. When you’re sad, when you’re angry, even if you might be angry with me, I don’t need to take that on in such a big way that I need to storm out of the room and close down and stonewall and shut down or become passive aggressive or judgmental. I can also allow you to contribute to me when I’m taxed, when I’m stressed, when I’m just done or overwhelmed, or whatever it is.
So those are the signs of a securely attached person. Now, what are the five things that securely attached people do?
Number one, and arguably the most important because it can be the most challenging, is you both engage in healthy conflict and confined resolutions. You both engage in healthy conflict and confined resolutions. Now the reason why this is so important to engage in healthy conflict and to find resolutions is that this is the number one sign of a healthy relationship. In my opinion, one of the number one signs is that the two of you can navigate through conflict. It’s one of the hardest things because it puts you into direct contact with your nervous system.
How do you as an individual operate and engage when you’re stressed, when you’re overwhelmed, when you feel personally attacked, when you feel like the other person is disappointed with you, when you maybe feel a little bit embarrassed or you’re angry, right, and you start to get frustrated. Your nervous system comes online, and you have to deal with that inside of yourself. And so really healthy couples will resolve conflict within 24 to 72 hours.
Now obviously most relationships have some things that don’t have resolution in the immediacy because they’re more foundational and they take longer periods of time to sort through and sort of chew on and deal with. But when that reoccurring conflict comes up, the two of you are able to find your way back to one another within 24 to 72 hours, ideally 24 to 48 hours. Most avoidance, most anxious people, this cycle will play out for days or weeks at a time, right, where a conflict will happen and one person stonewalls for five or six days or a week until that conflict is just sort of gone or avoided.
This is pretty key because conflict in many ways, conflict’s got a bad rap in our culture, but conflict is how you as an individual and you as a couple sort through the relational issues, discrepancies, you know, differences within maybe values or how you communicate or differences in desires. And so this is an integral part of any relationship. A really great relationship is not conflict free. I think that is a garbage narrative that is spewed out online and that is really detrimental to a lot of people individually and relationally.
What we want is the ability and the capacity to have healthy conflict and the majority of you that are watching this video have likely not seen good examples of that in your life. It’s probably one of the main reasons why you’re watching this video in the first place: because you grew up in an environment where conflict was hostile. It was avoided. One person engaged with it, and the other person shut down or got walked all over and that’s what you view. So you’ve repeated that pattern or you have gone in the complete opposite direction, right? There’s no conflict in my household, and now in my adult relationships, I create a lot of conflict for some reason.
So engaging in healthy conflict is the number one thing. Number two, the second thing that securely attached people do is they operate from the place of it is safe for me to trust you and it is safe for me to trust me. I can trust myself. I trust myself. I trust myself not to text bomb the crap out of you. I trust myself not to blow up and become so volatile in a conflict or an argument that I damage the trust in the relationship.
I trust myself to make good decisions that honor the sanctity of our relationship and I trust you to do all of those same things, right? It’s okay for me to tell you the truth. It’s okay for me to be honest, to express my desires, to express my wants and needs even when they’re hard, even when I’m not sure that you will approve of them or fully accept them, but I trust that it’s okay for me to voice those things. I can take what you’ve said and communicate it to me at face value. I don’t have to relentlessly question it. I don’t have to constantly be on high alert that you might be withholding something from me. That’s a securely attached person and dynamic.
I trust that it’s safe to trust you and I know that it’s safe to trust me. Again, not all the, not a hundred percent of the time, obviously there are some situations where people miss communicating something and it erodes the trust a little bit or they make a bad decision or there is a period of time where the relationship is sorting out for the first couple of years what the real rules of engagement are, what allows the relationship to function in a very healthy way. Those things will be tested over time, but as a general rule, secure people trust the other person and trust themselves in order to communicate what’s necessary.
The third thing that securely attached people do is I can regulate myself so I can calm myself. I can ground myself. I have tools and resources to navigate through my own emotional intensity when I get angry, when I get disappointed, when I’m upset with you as my partner, but I also allow you to contribute to helping to regulate me.
This is healthy de-escalation, healthy de-escalation. I trust myself to be able to regulate, but I also trust that we can co-regulate together. This is part of the conflict thing. For many people, as an example, for avoidance, co-regulation is a non-starter, doesn’t exist in most avoidance lives. The reason for that is because of the environment that an avoidant grew up in. It wasn’t safe for them to trust another person and so they had to do a lot of stuff on their own, or they were abused or abandoned or neglected or really hurt by someone.
They learned that it wasn’t okay to trust another person to help them be all right internally and they had to over-index self-reliance. I can’t trust anybody else to help guide me through this and so I literally have to do all this on my own. This is why, generally speaking, more men are avoidant than women.Now that’s not an absolute. There are many avoidant women that I’ve worked with and there’s many avoidant women I’ve seen in the comments section of my YouTube videos and my Instagram content, but generally speaking more men will be avoidant and more women will be anxious. Just as a general rule, it’s not an absolute.
But this is very important because each person in the relationship needs to know how to de-escalate their systems without checking out, without attacking the other person, without damaging or diminishing the relationship, without villainizing the other person as the entirety of the problem, without stonewalling and emotionally shutting down entirely and disconnecting from the other person emotionally. So you have to develop the tools and the skillset to be able to say, all right, that conversation was hard. That sucked.
I didn’t enjoy that. I disagreed with what you said, or things got heated. I took things personally, and to be able to have some self-accountability of the part that you played in the disconnection and that requires an internal de-escalation emotionally to be able to sift through your own anger, to be able to self-reflect and see your own contribution to the conflict or the problem, but not even just relationally, that you have the tools and the ability to regulate yourself when things outside of the relationship are causing you stress and duress, right? When finances are rough, when your parents are being a pain in your neck, when people at work are acting like complete clowns and it’s stressing the crap out of you because you can’t get your deadline met because you work with somebody that is perceivably incompetent.
Those types of things, you have to be able to trust yourself to be able to regulate, to de-escalate and then when you are maybe overwhelmed or taxed, that you can trust the other person to support you through that process, that you will open up, you’ll talk to them. You’ll talk about some of the things that are challenging in your life right now. You trust them to maybe have some good insight or feedback or that they just listen to you, right? And sometimes that means you communicate, hey, here’s what I really need.
When I’m dysregulated, and that might be too clinical of a word to use in your relationship, but you might want to say, you know, when I’m overwhelmed, when I’m really stressed out, when I’m really on edge, here’s specifically what I could use from you. What doesn’t help is telling me everything that I should do. Don’t try and solve my problem in the moment.
What I really could use from you is X, Y and Z. I would just love for you to listen to me, ask a couple questions, hear me out and sometimes tell me that that’s shitty. Sometimes tell me that that’s pretty hard, but that you have faith and trust that I will be able to figure it out. Like those, whatever it is for you, I don’t know what it is for you.
Maybe some of that resonated, maybe some of that didn’t. The fourth thing that securely attached people do is that they have a healthy balance of independence and togetherness. a healthy balance of independence and togetherness. Because at the core of the avoidant and anxious dance is anxious people will over rely on togetherness.
Remember, I need you to be okay in order for me to be okay. That’s dependence. I need you in order for me to be okay. And independence is the avoidant. I don’t need you. I don’t need you in my life. I don’t need you to be in order for me to be okay. I don’t need you in order for me to be happy. I don’t need you at all.
And that over indexing on independence doesn’t allow for relationship to fully blossom, doesn’t allow for trust, safety, security, deep intimacy, revealing, all of those things to really flourish in the relationship. So there’s a healthy balance of, I enjoy my own independence, going off with my friends, enjoying time with my buddies, whatever it is for you, right? Watching the football game, going racing, shooting guns, whatever your hobby is, going and doing photography, doing yoga. I enjoy solo time, solitude time, time with my own friends.
I have my own life outside of you in this relationship. But then I also contribute and actively curate the togetherness of our relationship. So I invest time and effort and energy into making sure that you and I spend time together.
And both people do that, right? So in an ideal relationship, secure, both people are secure and they are both contributing to the togetherness in the relationship. Finding hobbies, having shared interests, creating shared experiences and memories. I remember this great quote where somebody said, your job as a parent is to make memories for your children.
And I think that in some ways that is true for us as partners in a relationship, that of our job is to help curate these moments of connection and intimacy and love and experiences that you want to have with your person. I think about my relationship with my wife and that’s something that I’m always aiming for and that she’s always aiming for with me, is that we are looking for opportunities to create experiences for one another and that builds this togetherness. But we are also very independent people outside of that, with a very robust life outside of our relationship.
So finding that balance because with the avoidant, there’ll be a lack of togetherness. With the anxious, there will be an over-reliance on togetherness. And with the disorganized, it’ll be a back and forth, right? It’ll be like, I don’t need you, I need you 100% right now and it’ll kind of oscillate and it’ll be confusing for the other person.
So working on that balance of independent time, my own life and togetherness. And the last thing, very, very simple, I tried to break this one down to be very simple because I want it to be kind of tactical. I create, maintain and repair connection. I create, maintain and repair connection. So securely attached people do this constantly throughout the day. They create connection with their partner.
They maintain that connection with their partner when they’re together and they repair that connection with their partner when things have gone astray, right? Maybe you go on a business trip and you’re gone for a couple of days and things are really crazy busy and you come back and you haven’t really talked to your partner in a few days and they’ve been at home with the kids for a couple of days on their own. You can see that they’re stressed out and you make a concerted effort to create connection with them or maybe to repair the connection because they might be frustrated and having like a little bit of resentment of like, you got to go on the road and have a great dinner at this steakhouse and you come home and I’ve just been with the kids locked up in this house for a couple of days or whatever it is in your relational dynamic. So we all do things that break connection and this is part of the conflict.
We all do things that break connection and so one of the things that I found to be very helpful for people is to start to look at how do I individually break connection with my partner? What do I do? Do I stonewall? Do I shut down? Do they text me and I don’t text back? What complaints do they have about me that maybe are valid and true and can I repair those things, right? I remember when my wife and I were first dating, I was in Vancouver. She was in New York. She would go to bed before me and one of the things that she really appreciated was if I just sent her a text before I went to bed, right? Just like, good night.
I’ll talk to you in the morning. She would wake up before me, right? She’d wake up at six o’clock in the morning, New York time, which is like 3, 3.30 in the morning in Vancouver time and so we had this thing where I just text her before bed. She’d text me when she woke up and it was just this connection when we were apart.
It’s super simple, right? Just a super simple contact point and I would remember that when I didn’t text her at night, that was upsetting for her because we had this routine. We had this thing that was maintaining the connection between us when we were apart because when we were together, that wasn’t an issue, right? We didn’t need to do that. So it’s those types of things that you want to build and maintain into your relationship so you can think about how do I want to create connection with my partner? What can I do? Is there a certain look? Is there a certain energy? Is there a certain comment or gesture or a certain way that they like to be touched? Is there a certain gesture that I can do for them to take care of them that’s going to create connection or maintain it or repair it? Sometimes the easiest way to repair connection with any type of partner when it’s been broken is to say, hey, I realized that we had a pretty big disagreement and I think we both contributed to that and I would like to initiate a repair with you.
I’d like to repair with you. Are you open to that? And if you’re not, then let me know when you are. And that simple approach of I’d like to repair with you, let me know when you’re ready can be incredibly powerful for you taking the initiative.
And secure people will do this. They might not have a very scripted thing like I just said, but secure people will have a form of, you know what? That argument didn’t feel good or what happened there. That sucked. I was in the wrong. Let’s make this better, right? And it might be being goofy and playful. My wife does a very good job of this, right? When she’s been in the wrong, it’s usually this very playful, you know, sort of like a little silly engagement because I’m usually a little more like surly and like a bear when I’ve been upset.
And so that like playful silliness is almost this gesture that tells me like, oh, you’re wanting to repair right now. And sometimes I’ll even say to her, if I’m really like, are you trying to repair right now? Is that what you’re trying to do? And she’s like, yeah. Or she’ll come to me and say, you know, I’m sorry. I really want to make things right with you. Are you open to talking right now?
So those types of things, we have to start to bake into the everyday of our relationship because again, those are the things that you didn’t get. If you are an anxious, if you are an avoidant, if you are a disorganized, you didn’t get somebody that was consistently creating connection with you. Hey, do you want to spend time together? Hey, I’d love to talk to you right now. Hey, I’d love to play this board game or go on this hike. Or what are you working on? Tell me about your day at school. You didn’t get those things. Or what you got was a very overbearing, hypercritical type of creating connection. And then maybe some of you got no maintaining connection whatsoever.
Or what you got was a hyper invasive type of maintaining connection where the person was always there and in your business and, you know, trying to, you know, a parent trying to get into your private life and you’re like, get away from me. Or you had somebody that just didn’t repair at all. There was no repairing connection.
So these are the types of things that you have to start to build. Really secure people do these things exceptionally well. If you are not too sure where to start, start with this one. Really look at what can I do to create, maintain, and repair connection when it’s broken, when there’s disconnection that’s happened, or just how do I want to bring more aliveness into the connection with my partner? So the action. This is the action. If you are in a relationship, send this video to your partner or sit down and watch it with them.
The whole thing. See what resonated with them and choose just one action, whether it’s maintaining, creating, repairing connection, regulating the self, finding that balance between independence and togetherness, whatever, whichever pillar, whichever sign you wanted to really focus in on, choose one and commit to three to four weeks of taking action on that one thing. Hey, I want to commit to a month of repairing connection every single time there’s been some argument or some conflict that has disconnected us.
I really want to get present to what I do to create disconnection. As an avoidant, this is super important, and as an anxious, it’s super important. Also, really starting to look at how do I create connection with you? So pick one of the signs, focus in on it for a month, make a plan together and commit to checking in once a week.
How is it going? How are we doing on developing safety and trusting one another and trusting ourselves? How is this actually going? You have to open the lines of communication. So you might want to set, you know, 30 minutes on a Sunday night after the kids go to bed in order to have this dialogue, right? So pick one, take action on it, spend at least 30 days. Please try and give it 30 days to take action on this with your partner.
And as always, man it forward. Share this with somebody that you know will enjoy it, that could use it and need it. And do not forget to subscribe to whatever channel you are tuning in on.
Until next week, Connor Beaton signing off.
