[0:00]Hey guys, I'm Heidi Prieb. Welcome back to my channel or welcome if this is your first time here. Today on this channel, we are talking about a topic that I have been wanting to touch on forever. But it kind of feels like such a big can of worms that I haven't been sure if I even want to open it in the first place. And that topic is healing the dynamics of an anxious avoidant attachment relationship. So most often, where you see this showing up is romantic partnerships. People with anxious attachment styles tend to gravitate towards those with avoidant attachment styles. And because these relationships are made up of two people who are largely psychologically one-sided, and we'll talk about what that means in a minute. What tends to happen is that a lot of conflict comes up, and it can feel really difficult to resolve. So, where a lot of anxious avoidant couples end up is in this place where they're both trying to change the relationship dynamic through convincing their partner to try to change themselves or their attachment issues. And in this video, what we're going to go over is one, why that approach is absolutely not going to work. And two, why a lot of the more conventional approaches that I see people taking towards healing avoidant anxious dynamics also tend to not work, at least beyond a kind of surface level. So, let's say you have an anxious avoidant couple, they both think the other one is the problem, but they want to work on their relationship, and so they decide to let's say go to couples counseling. The approach that I often see used when it comes to healing anxious avoidant dynamics is actually an approach that pushes each person further into their own wounding. So you might have an avoidant partner being encouraged to hold more space for the anxious partner's emotions. And you might have the anxious partner being encouraged to give the avoidant more space to do their own thing and lick their own wounds. And well this might kind of work on a surface level, it might get you a relationship where you're not triggering each other as actively. That's not the same thing as healing the relational dynamic. To heal the relational dynamic on a deep level, what needs to happen is both parties need to do significant shadow work. So before we get into what that looks like interpersonally, I'm going to talk about what the shadow looks like for each of the people in this scenario, as well as how that shadow can actually get in the way of doing the deep healing work that would be required to actually fix the relational dynamic on a deep level. So really quickly, if you don't know what I'm talking about when I say terms like the shadow or shadow work, I do have a video explaining that terminology that I will link in the description of this video. as well as a video series that goes over the biggest blind spot, which kind of covers the shadow of each attachment style specifically. So you can check those out and then come back here when you're kind of up to date on the terminology. But for those who are familiar with what I mean when I say the term shadow, let's talk about what is in the shadow for the different ends of the attachment spectrum. So, quick recap, our psychological shadows are comprised of the behaviors, the impulses, the needs, the feelings, the thoughts, that we learn to systematically suppress at a very early age because they were non-adaptive in the caregiving environment that we grew up in. So we learn to maximize what gets us care, protection and safety in the world, and to minimize what is going to threaten our safety, whether that's literal safety or interpersonal safety. And anxious and avoidant attachment styles tend to have directly opposite things in their shadows. So those who lean more avoidant, learned early on, if I show my true needs and my true vulnerabilities and my true pain, I will be relatively consistently met with disgust or rejection. So their strategy for staying in connection becomes self-reliance and making sure that they're monitoring their own emotional experience and not putting their needs too heavily on other people. What goes in the shadow is their vulnerability and need. So those are the things that they start repressing even from their own conscious awareness. So it's not that they're walking around with all of these needs and vulnerabilities at the surface that they're consciously deciding not to express. Most of the time they aren't even consciously aware of having those needs. And then on the flip side, you have the anxious strategy. So those who air more anxious on the attachment spectrum, learned and internalized from a young age, if I don't make my needs very loudly and consistently known, I will be abandoned. So the connection strategy that gets developed for those who have anxious patterning is to keep their emotional needs right at the surface of their own conscious awareness, and make them known to other people anytime they start to feel as though distance is developing between themselves and someone else. So this is a proximity seeking strategy. It's oriented around keeping capable others close to them so that they can get help having their needs fulfilled. And what goes in the shadow when you develop this type of strategy is your own self-reliance. Because if you feel like solving your own problems will cause you to get abandoned and be alone in life, your mind is going to start naturally repressing information about how to solve your problems and become independent. Now, here's where we get into trouble. A secure relationship is a relationship in which self-reliance and vulnerability and proximity seeking are held in balance. And in a relationship where both people are secure, both people have a good balance of each skill. So they're able to be open and vulnerable and to seek out proximity to their partner when that's what's needed for the connection. But they're also very capable of solving their own problems, taking space and behaving independently, when that's what's healthy for themselves and the partnership. In a relationship where you have one person who leans more anxious, and another who leans more avoidant, both is going to start over-functioning in their area of comfort. So the anxious party is probably going to be providing most if not all of the proximity seeking behaviors in the relationship. And the avoidant partner is likely going to be providing most if not all of the emotional self-containment behaviors in the relationship. So both people are psychologically one-sided at least when it comes to their emotional development. They can only really do half of the secure thing, and the other person represents their own shadow. So for the avoidant person, dating an anxious person who has all of that need and vulnerability right on the surface, represents the parts of themselves that they naturally learn to repress very early on.
[6:44]And same goes in the opposite direction. For the anxious party, the avoidant other represents the traits of stoicism and calm and emotional containment that they learn to repress in themselves early on. So it's like you have two people who are living literally with their own shadow. And this dynamic is chronically reaffirming each of their respective worldviews. So the avoidant has that worldview of I'm okay, I can take care of myself, I can meet my own needs, I'm psychologically regulated. But you are not okay. So there's this belief that others are incompetent, unable to take care of themselves, unable to meet their needs, and will always be looking for something or needing something from the avoidant. And on the other side of things, you have the anxious worldview of I'm not okay, you're okay. So it's this idea of I can't take care of myself. I am not capable of navigating the world without a protective well-regulated other, but you're okay. So other people are intelligent and well-regulated and capable of consistently providing me with the protection that I need. And of course, both of these things are happening unconsciously. We're not going around actively having these thoughts, but they probably are showing up relatively consistently in our partner choices. And we're going to talk a lot more about why that's important and what those worldviews mean when they start to shift as this video goes on. So, it might feel really easy to go, well, why not just let each person play to their strengths? And in some relationships, I want to be clear, this actually works. So it's really difficult to paint avoidant and anxious attachment with broad strokes. Because you can have someone who's just a little bit reserved on the avoidant side of the attachment spectrum. Or you can have someone who is severely avoidantly attached, and those things are going to look very different. Same with the anxious side of things. You can have someone who's just a little bit clingy when they get into a relationship, or you can have someone who is very severely anxiously attached. And again, those two things are going to look very different. So in a situation where you're dealing with just a little bit of avoidance or anxiety on either side of the spectrum, you might actually never need to do the work. It might just be that if you're a little bit needy, you find someone who's a little bit reserved or vice versa, and you actually have a reasonably stable life together. But if you find yourself further down that attachment spectrum, you're likely to have these dynamics where humongous wounds are present in both parties, and each one starts to look at the other as the sole cause of the problems in the relationship. The reason why this ironically works so well is because both people are right when they're pointing at the other and saying you're the problem. It's almost poetic. Because both people are psychologically one-sided, and so they're truly able to see the flaws in the other, but each one is unable to see the flaws in their own behavior. So again, I have that video on blind spots that you can check out below that gives a little bit more information on what this process looks like. But the trap that most people get stuck in when they want to heal their anxious avoidant relationship is the trap of believing that their partner needs to change in order for the relationship to get better. And maybe they pay some kind of lip service to the idea that, oh, we both need to change and get better. But because the partner's flaws are so much more apparent than your own if you're in one of these dynamics, you're probably going to have this idea that your partner needs to change like 80% and you need to change like 25%. And in the rest of this video, we are going to talk about how that logic is absolutely flawed because not only do you both need to do shadow work in order to change this dynamic, But your partner changing is likely to be highly triggering for you in ways you do not expect if you are not also doing that change work in equal magnitude. And this is something I see getting discussed almost nowhere. So, we're going to go into discussing it right now. When we think about getting our partner to change, whether that means we are anxious and we're wanting our partner to become more emotionally available, or whether we are avoidant and we're wanting our partner to become more emotionally regulated and independent. We tend to imagine that our partner is going to retain all of the qualities we already like about them, but just take away the things we don't like and add in some traits that we want them to have. In reality, this is not at all how attachment healing works. When you're in a partnership or a family system of any sort, when one person changes, everybody else has to make compensatory changes in order for the system to remain in equilibrium. So the first thing I rarely see talked about, but that I believe has to be at the core of our awareness, if we want to heal avoidant anxious relational dynamics, is the fact that your partner ceasing to over function in the way that they have been over functioning in your relationship. So again, that example of the anxious person providing all or most of the proximity seeking behaviors, or the avoidant party providing all or most of the emotional regulation skills. If either one stops over-functioning in that area, the other one is going to be forced to step up and start doing something that they have never learned to do before, which is going to mean confronting your own shadow, and that might be deeply uncomfortable for you. So you might have an avoidant person going, I want my partner to become more independent and to stop looking to me to solve all of their emotional issues. Okay, if they do that, and they truly become more independent and more self-regulated, it means that you are probably going to have to be responsible for much more of the proximity seeking behaviors in your relationship. So instead of waiting for them to come to you and to provide the warmth and attention and structure for how your emotional lives will function as a couple, you're going to have to learn to approach them in equal measure. And this guarantees that at some point, you're going to need to feel vulnerable and put your pride down and explain to them that you feel either neglected, vulnerable, in need of something, or any other host of emotions you're not used to having to express. Because if you're used to being smothered, you don't have those needs. All you need to do when your anxious partner is over functioning in the proximity seeking category is do what you're already comfortable with, which is pulling back and asking for space. Asking for connection if your partner becomes someone who has a thriving active social life outside of the relationship, and who stops needing you to regulate them as much. At some point or another will become very vulnerable, which might cause you to feel disgusted with yourself. Because again, that vulnerability, that need for closeness and intimacy, that need for co-regulation has always been in you, but you've shoved it into your shadow. So if your partner stops over-functioning in that way, you are going to now need to start pulling things out of your shadow and integrating them in order to keep the relationship functional. And the same is true in the opposite direction. So if you have an anxious attachment style and you really want your partner to be more emotionally available, what that means is not just that your partner is going to start sharing their emotions with you in a self-contained way. It also means that your partner is going to start being genuinely vulnerable, which might feel like neediness to you, and you might feel disgusted by that. Because if your partner is showing their vulnerabilities and their neediness, and keep in mind that because this is likely a new skill for them as someone with an avoidant attachment style, it's actually going to be a very clumsy and undignified expression of vulnerability most of the time. That forces you to be in your own adult self and to serve as that secure base for your disregulated partner. And the problem here is that if you have an I'm not okay, you're okay worldview, and that's what you are secretly the most comfortable with, is feeling like you're not okay, but someone else is capable and taking care of you. It is going to feel very threatening to temporarily have that reversed. When in reality, secure relationships function like this all of the time. So partners trade off acting as the secure base for one another. And each one is comfortable letting the other one be a little bit disregulated and stepping into the adult role and then letting those role shift. So both partners know how to be in their own self-responsibility as well as in their own vulnerability. But again, if you are anxious and you have this negative view of yourself that you are so pathetic and incompetent, the only thing worse than being you, as far as your unconscious mind is concerned, is being someone who needs you. If you're down here, that must make them way, way down there. And so it's highly likely that you're going to get a little bit triggered if your partner truly does start becoming vulnerable with you. And I have to say, as someone who has been healing from the more avoidant side of the spectrum, this is absolutely happened to me. More than once in intimate relationships, where I've been kind of sloppily learning my needs and how to express them and my vulnerabilities, and I've been met with contempt and disgust by more anxious leaning intimates. And ideally, that's something that you can work through, right? The anxious partner can and if they want the relationship to work, has to learn to work through feelings of disgust that arise when their partner starts needing them the same way that they need their partner. Because secure relationships do involve healthy forms of dependency. But this is the first thing that we need to be aware of if we want to start healing anxious avoidant dynamics. If our partner starts to truly heal, it's going to force us to reach into our shadow and start developing the traits that we were once putting entirely on our partner to provide in the relational dynamic. So the avoidant partner is going to need to learn to do those proximity seeking behaviors, vulnerable emotional expression and dependency in appropriate ways. And this is risky, not just for you and your own self-image, but it's risky for the relationship. Because again, your partner might feel disgusted by those behaviors and not want to be with you anymore. That is a very real threat that I am absolutely not going to sugarcoat for us. Anytime we start showing up differently in any sort of relational system, the entire system is going to have to learn to adjust, or try to push you back into your regular role through subtle forms of shaming or whatever it is. So that's something to be aware of. Once again, am I willing to embody the traits that my partner usually holds within this dynamic and withstand potential rejection in the face of me doing so? Same is true in the opposite direction. If you are anxiously attached, are you willing to develop your independence and autonomy and self-regulate, even in the face of subtle pushback or subtle shaming from the other party in the relationship? Again, it's risky because it might lead to forms of rejection that your partner is not even aware they're doing. And this is absolutely true for both parties in this dynamic. So again, am I willing to proactively work to embody my shadow traits so that I'm not subconsciously triggering my partner to over embody them? And am I willing to face the fact that I might get rejected in the process and have to deal with a lot of shame, which is often what comes up when we're doing that shadow work. Question number four to ask yourself in this process, and this is one that might arise once you've already done a significant amount of healing work on both ends of the spectrum. Am I willing to take a sober look at this relationship and be realistic about the ways in which we are and are not compatible? So a lot of the time, when anxious and avoidant individuals get together, the main thing they have in common is their shared worldview of who is okay and who is not. So the anxious party goes, I'm not okay, but you're okay. And the avoidant party goes, that's right, I'm okay, and you're not okay. And so they have this very compatible way of experiencing relational dynamics. But if they both heal themselves into secure people who are able to function independently, now what happens is you have to look at the relationship and go, okay, do we like each other? Now that the main purpose of being together is not us projecting our deep psychological wounds onto each other, do we like hanging out? Do we enjoy what we talk about when we're sitting around talking? Do we want the same lifestyle? Do we have aligned goals? Do we share a sense of humor? All of these things that are the first thing secure couples tend to look at are probably only going to be things that are brought into your screaming awareness once you've started to do enough healing work. Because before that point, your attachment issues are probably going to be the main source of conflict in your relationship. You're not even going to get down to those compatibility issues. And something I also rarely see being brought up but that I think is fairly prevalent, is that attachment wounding very often causes us to seek out partners who we're not that compatible with. Because there's no risk of true intimacy on either side if both people kind of know in an intuitive way, this person just isn't really going to get me even if we were both fully healed and okay. Because we're just not that similar. We just perceive the world in drastically different ways. And that serves both parties in being able to perpetually feel misunderstood and keep blaming their partner for all of the problems in the relationship. So I look at mutual shadow work or healing work in relationships as a process of kind of sobering up after being really drunk in a relationship, potentially for many years. It's like waking up the next morning and actually looking at the person in bed next to you and going, is this a person who I want to keep seeing? And the answer might be no, and that's okay, too. It doesn't mean that your relationship didn't matter or was a waste. If anything, a relationship that brought you into mutual healing and growth and left you both more secure than where you started, is a fantastically successful relationship. But it doesn't mean you're going to want to stay together once the healing has happened. And I think that's something that it's actually really important to acknowledge and to be aware of as you're going into that healing process. At the end of it, we might have less anger towards each other because we're no longer projecting everything onto each other, but we might also have less attraction towards each other. Because maybe we just learned that the secure versions of ourselves don't have that much in common. And again, that is totally and completely okay. It's just something you're going to want to ask yourself about and be aware of going into it.
[23:42]And fifth and final question we're going to talk about today when it comes to getting down to what actually makes an avoidant anxious dynamic heal, is the question, am I willing to focus at least five times harder on my own change and growth than on my partner's? Again, it is so much clearer to us to see what our partners are doing wrong than it is to see what we're doing wrong. So for every one thing we see our partner's doing wrong, we might have to acknowledge it's now time to dig five times as deeply inside of ourselves to unearth the one thing that we're doing wrong that we're struggling to see. It is going to feel like our partners are most of the problem if our own negative contributions to the relationship dynamic are in our blind spots. Now what I'm not saying here is that if you're in some sort of emotionally abusive dynamic, the solution is to work five times harder on yourself. In that case, healing work and shadow work is actually going to make you much better equipped to leave the relationship with a low risk of returning to it. Okay? So that work is still important. The work of making yourself more self-sufficient and independent, or interdependent on healthy support networks, is still going to be the skill that's going to help you out of your current situation. And the kind of asterisk that I want to put on this point is that it doesn't count as real growth work if what you are doing is just becoming more and more one-sided. So I've kind of seen this trap that both sides of the spectrum can fall into. Where let's say the avoidantly attached partner starts learning different lingo for communication skills. And then they use that lingo to just become more rigid and more demanding about the exact logical sequence that everything has to follow in the relationship. Like, okay, now that I know about non-violent communication, every time you're not using non-violent communication, I don't have to listen or take you seriously. Right? That's not healing work. That's just one more way of being rigid and one-sided and dismissive of emotions that are not expressed perfectly. And on the flip side, I've seen anxious people get really into let's say attachment healing work, and what they're doing is just getting more and more and more fixated on their partner's behavior and how they can use attachment theory to manipulate their partner. And this is also not healing. Again, you're just further repressing the shadow and doubling down on what you already know and calling it healing. That's not going to get you anywhere. In order to heal an anxious avoidant relationship, or in order to heal your own attachment wounding, whether you're in a relationship or not, the only way to really do it, to really get down to the core of it, is to confront the wounding that originally created the attachment patterning you have been in for the majority of your life. You need to do that work of uncovering and becoming aware of your own blind spots, deeply grieving the pain of what caused you to develop that sort of one-sidedness. And then be willing to bring into your conscious awareness and start working with that which you have systematically suppressed throughout the majority of your life. That is the only way deep healing work actually happens, and that is the only way deep healing work actually happens inside of a relationship. You cannot deeply and sustainably heal something by just using little tricks to make your woundings more compatible. Again, maybe that works if you're only a little bit wounded and it doesn't cost that much to make those tiny concessions for the rest of your life. But if you are deeply wounded, that is not going to cut it. You have to do the work of becoming more psychologically balanced. figuring out what's in your shadow, bringing it into your conscious awareness, and being willing to integrate it and become a version of yourself that doesn't need another person to hold and represent that shadow for you. That's the only way deep healing work actually happens and that is the only way deep healing work actually happens inside of a relationship.
[28:39]So, on that note, I will leave a ton of videos in the description of this one that can get you kind of started on that path if it's something you want to take on. As always, I'm very curious about where you're all finding yourself in this process. As well as what's coming up for you as we talk about this. Let me know in the comments what you're thinking, feeling, experiencing, wanting to work on in this department. I love you guys, I hope you're taking care of yourselves and each other, and I will see you back here again really soon.
