Life Check Yourself Episode 322 – With Jessica Baum: How to Identify Your Attachment Style to Finally Have the Big Love You’ve Dreamed Of
When you meet a man you like, do you communicate openly, trust he has good intentions and show up flexible?
Or are you sensitive, get suspicious and sometimes act out?
Are you the ‘cool girl’, super-independent and aren’t someone who needs a man to be happy?
Do you get attached easily and worry about being rejected… and do relationships tend to give you anxiety?
These are examples of the 4 different attachment styles. Understanding your attachment style can be the missing piece to having the epic love you’ve always wanted!
Marni speaks with the author of Anxiously Attached: Becoming More Secure in Life and Love, Jessica Baum. Jessica is the founder of the Relationship Institute of Palm Beach, a practice that provides couples therapy, family counseling, and addiction therapy. She has worked with thousands of clients for over a decade. She helps clients make a meaningful connection with themselves so they can better understand how they relate to people in relationships.
Key Takeaways from this Episode:
- Understanding an Anxious Attachment style
- What it means to do “the work”
- Being compassionate toward other people
- Why your body is holding on to past trauma
- Cultivating a great, deep love
How the Anxious Attachment Style Relates to Your Love Life [2:17]
Attachment styles are embedded patterns that get developed early in life. They get embedded in our nervous system. We repeat hurts from childhood in our adult relationships because it is the way we learned to adapt, connect, and survive. For anxious people, it comes with a lot of self-sacrifices.
Twenty-five percent of the population has an anxious attachment style. Secure people can feel anxiety in their relationships but people with an anxious attachment system tend to be hyperfocused on the external. They normally have a deep-seated abandonment wound.
People with an anxious attachment style are externally focused because they have trouble getting their own needs met.
Is It Intuition or a Past Trauma? [10:35]
When sensations feel big, we know it is an old feeling that is resurfacing. Jessica reminds us that big sensations can be painful and cause us to lash out.
Awareness, compassion, and the right support can help us change behavior.
What are you doing to distract yourself from having real relationships?
Anxiously Attached: The Book [19:22]
A lot of couples go to Jessica when they are activated without understanding on a conscious level why they are acting the way they are. In her book, Anxiously Attached: Becoming More Secure in Life and Love, Jessica breaks down what is happening to the nervous system of both people in the relationship and describes what they can do to gain a better understanding of what is happening, and what the other person is feeling.
Jessica says that when we form adult relationships we internalize them and they become part of how we build our secure sense of self. It is through these experiences we learn how to self-regulate.
You can’t fake safety but you can cultivate it.
