Everything that you've studied about attachment styles and everything you've learned about yourself and the person that you got broken up with, or if you've broken up with them, you still want your dismissive avoidant back. Why is that the case? I've got some interesting comments here in my comments section. I want to share that with you guys right after this.
Thank you guys for sticking around. Now this is an interesting discussion I have for you guys today. I see a lot of people end up in this situation, where they get really hung up on someone that they were dating, or if they are with someone that's a dismissive, and the person has the activator, or like I like to say, the turtle has gone back into the shell. I'm going to read this comment, because there was a lot of interaction here. I think it's really a good indication of just what people are feeling throughout this breakup, throughout this learning about attachment styles and trying to heal themselves. This person says something that was kind of rude, it was a couple years ago, but the comments section set them straight. Here on my channel, I advocate for different sides of the fence, the avoidants and the anxious attachers, so I try to be that mediator person in the middle, because it's what I've done all my life. It's what I did working with at-risk youth. I advocated for them a lot, when they just needed a voice, someone to speak up for them when they felt like they had no voice.
So what the comment says is:
“I have no idea why an anxious attacher would try so hard to get a dismissive avoidant back. I understand why they would, due to dysfunctional attachment but logically, it's crazy…”
Okay first off, it's putting the dukes up and you're ready for a fight, saying something like that.
All right I'm gonna pause right there. All right, ‘play games, and pathetic, and ridiculous’. Well I’m an anxious attacher too. So I'm kind of offended there, because he acts as if this was something that I had some type of control over. Now let's not forget, if you think about what we experienced as kids, we had no control over, right, we really didn't. So it set the tempo for how we're going to show up in our adult relationships. This isn't some type of choice that people who have insecure attachment are showing up with or presenting. This is something that is subconscious, because the subconscious mind is so much more powerful than our conscious mind, right. We don't have a say-so in what our automatic response is, it’s like ANTS. A lot of therapists use the acronym ANTS: A-automatic, N-negative, T-thoughts-S. The automatic triggers that show up. We don't have a choice, it's out of our control. So “pathetic and ridiculous”, it's almost like getting mad at someone who's disabled. Say you're on a hike and they're in a wheelchair, and you say ‘hey get up and walk’. It doesn't work that way. You'd have a lot more empathy for them, because you can physically see what their issue is. Now I’m not saying that having an insecure attachment is a disability, but it is something that we have no control over. Especially when we haven't been given the tools to overcome this and to strengthen ourselves, and become a more secure attacher.
So he said [continues reading the comment]
“Find a securely attached partner after taking time to get your anxious attachment style over to a more secure attachment style. Above all, love yourself.”
I get it. I honestly get where he's coming from here, especially being a coach. I've been doing this for years now. It's really hard, when you're coaching, it's really hard to slow yourself down and meet a person where they're at. That's where my background and working with people who were at-risk youth, and people who were struggling with drug and alcohol addiction, I didn't judge them and met them where they were at. This [referring to the comment] is always going to get some type of blowback, right.
So in this section, one person said:
Right, exactly what I was just saying. It's not that easy. There’s another one I saw here that I agreed with actually, I hearted this one.
“This is the most judgmental and unhelpful comment, everyone deserves empathy.”
Right, and it goes on and on. People are talking more about that in the comment section, but it's not something that you control.
So why is it that you want this person back right? That's the original question, why is it that you want this person back in your life? It has a lot to do with the addicted brain, because I think being an anxious attacher essentially is being codependent, and codependency is then addicted to the neurological chemicals that that person releases for you. The oxytocin, the adrenaline, the dopamine. Everything that comes around is associated with that person. This is why whenever I have sessions with people, even after the session, they feel so much better because they got to talk about that person at least. They got to say the person's name, they got to get it all out there in the open. It gave them this secondary hit of dopamine, because they're still able to be associated with that person in some way, shape or form. This is why it's hard for a lot of people to get over, to cut off the friends and the family of someone that they just got broken up with. Especially if you're an anxious person or an anxious attacher, and just preoccupied. It's something that you really have no control over.
So whenever you are about to poke poke at someone, and make a little bit of a dig, you have to understand this isn't something that they're willingly choosing to do. If you think about someone who's in realistic relationships where they're getting abused, or someone who essentially needs to go to some type of battered women's shelter, or something like that, they're not choosing that. As anxious attaching people, we're not choosing to be insecure, we're not choosing to be clingy or needy. This is just the way that we've learned how to get our needs met. If you think about the book “Attached”, one example that they gave is once the caveman left the cave, you have a few different types of people: the people that are gonna grasp onto him and grasp his leg and say ‘hey never leave, I don't want you to go’, or you have people that's going to say ‘all right, see you later’. We, as anxious attachers, tend to be the more grasping of the leg. We feel that abandonment coming, because out there in the world, anything can happen, even after a breakup. We don't know if we're going to ever meet anyone else, after this person. We don't know if this person's going to meet someone else and never come back to us. The number one concern most people said is that they’ll never see this person again or they'll never come back, or this person will leave me. That's the biggest concern, is they'll leave me and they'll never come back. I have to brace them for option two, because one, the worst has already been done, they've left, and two is, you have to change yourself so that if they do come back or heal yourself so that they do come back, they won't leave you again. Essentially, once you have that pause and that reset in the relationship (that's why you see the off and on relationships happen), you have that pause and that reset where the person may give you a second opportunity or a third opportunity or sometimes fourth, fifth, sixth. If you haven't changed the way that you're showing up, they're just going to leave again, or you're just going to push them away again.
So, if you want my help personally, reach out to me on my website, www.fruitfulseedz.com. I hope you found this valuable. Please like, comment and share, and always remember, when you go be love, you'll never have to find it. Namaste.