Sex, The Ick & Attachment Styles (Part 1)

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Mama Maya acknowledges the traditional owners of land and waters that this podcast is recorded on.

Oh, this could be a whole episode. Let's see. Let's talk about sex. A lot of people use sex to try to build attachment, and that's actually not a great way to use sex. We want to think about can I develop a secure attachment first, and then sex is a way to deepen a healthy secure attachment.

From Mom Maya, this is no filter and I'm Maya Friedman.

Well, we'll be here for three hours now. I'm just kidding. So I experienced childhood trauma. I lost my mom at a young age. I was six years old, and I then went through my dad actually being in some really difficult relationships. There was a lot of chaos in my family system growing up. So that was the beginning. And then, of course when I began to date, I was in my teens early twenties. I was very attracted to the

Which was what took me through that guy.

Yes, he was the quintessential unpredictable, not stable, doesn't do what he says he's going to do. I'm walking on eggshells, trying to prove my worthiness. Maybe I'm changing things about myself, thinking, oh, if I'm different in this way, then I can get him to want me. I experienced all kinds of terrible things that you do in toxic relationships, cheating, lying, people who were married, people who had whole different lives. I

Do you mean within your relationship? Yes, So there was domestic violence with this guy who was a narcissist.

Yes, domestic violence, I mean just the most traumatic type of experience you can have where you are scared for your life essentially. And I went through that and I just thought, I don't even recognize myself. Who am I and I just had this fork in the road moment where I knew I can keep going down this path, I can keep repeating these same relationship dynamics. I don't know if I'm going to be alive it was that toxic or I can decide to heal. I can decide to try to figure out how do you have a

Can I ask about your fiancee? Was he different to every guy you'd die did before?

That's a great question. As I was doing my healing work, I had started to attract a healthier type of partner, So I was starting to date emotionally available people. But I will say there's something about my fiance. I think he's probably one of the most emotionally available, thoughtful, emotionally intelligent men that I've ever met, and I from the very beginning I felt emotionally safe with him.

There's so much talk about attachment theory and attachment styles at the moment, and there are four different attachment styles. What are they?

Yes, so we have anxious attachment, avoidant attachment, or organized aka fearful avoidant, and secure attachment style. And I always like people to know that this is not a way to label yourself. It's not a way to judge yourself. When we understand our attachment style, it's a way to have acceptance and compassion so that we can heal.

I quite like labeling myself. I find it useful because to me it just opens up into some insights and to some maybe some tools. And instead of saying, oh, I just like bad guys or I just you know, choose this type of relationship. I like the idea that there's a reason for it. It's not just you know, something that comes out of the blue and that you have no control over or that's just really random attachment theory is grounded in this idea that our attachment styles

Absolutely, yes, that it begins Some people would say even before birth, but that you were attachedment style is forming throughout all of your various relational experiences. Early attachment theory research would say, Okay, it's your relationship with your caregivers, that's it. But we now know that your early romantic relationships, your friendships, all of your relational experiences play a role in forming your unique attachment style.

So it's not just your parents or the people who raised you.

Right.

Interesting, So when you say there's four secure, anxious, avoidant, and disorganized, can we just go through and you can explain to me some of the characteristics of each of those styles. And let's start with secure.

Okay, I love secure. Secure is where we all want to be.

I was going to say, I like a leaderboard, Morgan, and I like to understand what is the best one to be so that I can strive for it. Who's on the top of the leader board? Secure?

Yeah, So with secure attachment, you are emotionally safe, you have interdependence with your partner. So you know, I can depend on me and I can depend on you. I'm able to self soothe, and I can also ask you to help regulate my emotions. I have both available to me.

Interdependence as opposed to codependence.

Yes, as opposed to codependence and hyper independence.

Codependence means that you can't live without the other person, right.

Right, That's where we see a lot of folks with anxious attachment are susceptible to codependence. You're too needy, Yes, you are prioritizing not being abandoned over your own needs.

Is this just about romantic relationships or it's about all your relationships with friends, with family?

It can be about all all your relationships, all of your relationships. Absolutely, Okay, yeah.

So whatever style you have, it usually applies to how you interrel with everybody in your life. Is that right?

Absolutely? I will say this though, It's very common for people to have secure attachment with their friends and even their family, and not in their romantic relationships. So it's normal that you would have different attachment styles based on the type of relationship.

It is so anxious attachment, let's talk about that, and let's keep to romantic relationships because I think for the purposes of this conversation, let's try and understand out patterns in romantic relationships. What's anxious attachment.

Anxious attachment at the core is where you are devaluing yourself and you are overvaluing the other person, so you are disconnected from self and you are very aware of the other person's needs. And with anxious attachment, I like to tell people it's like your reassurance bucket has holes in it. So what I mean by that is we

Not landing avoidant attachment.

This is where you're actually overvaluing yourself and you might find yourself devaluing others and there's a lot of unconscious distancing that's happening where you're pulling away, and this can look like not responding to text messages, avoiding conflict. Even those people who are very sarcastic, and they might be putting you down in kind of a sarcastic way. That can be an avoidant attachment strategy as a way to

The fourth attachment style is interesting disorganized. What does that mean?

Disorganized attachment is the combination of anxious and avoidant happening at the same time.

Oh, how does that manifest?

So this is that push pull dynamic. Never leave me, now, get away from me.

That sounds familiar in a moment. Now that we know what the four attachment styles are, what do we do with that information? And how do we figure out which one we are? We'll be right back. Can you be a combination of more than one attachment style? Or do we tend to fall mostly in one of those four buckets?

Most people will have a style that they find themselves being in the majority of the time. I think it's important to ask yourself that of Okay, where am I most of the time. The important thing to realize about disorganized attachment is once again that anxious and avoidant are happening simultaneously. So it's not that you just have both anxious and avoidant strategies, is that they're actually happening at the same time.

That must feel very confusing and uncomfortable.

It's very chaotic. It's about five to seven percent of the population highly correlated with childhood trauma, oftentimes misdiagnosed as borderline personality disorder. I think people with disorganized attachment they often feel a lot of pain in their relationships.

Is your attachment style fixed for life or can you change?

I'm so glad you asked yes, you can always become securely attached. Really yes, The old research said no, which was actually what motivated me to write a book because I was very annoyed about that. We have tons of data now that you can rewire your brain and change your nervous system and learn how to embody secure attachment.

So no matter how tumultuous or even traumatic your childhood was, no matter what the patterns were that was set early on in your life, you can change that.

Absolutely. I'm living proof of that.

I want to ask a little bit about your story, if that's okay. Losing your mum at six. I can't imagine how that felt. I genuinely can't imagine how that felt. Looking back now as the woman you are to that little girl, how did it play out for her? Because I mean, abandoned doesn't even begin to cover how you must have felt.

I've done a lot of deep work, and I really wasn't able to talk about losing my mom until my mid thirties. It's just one of those things. I really had to process a lot before I could even talk about it, and so I've thought a lot about it. And one of the things I've done is I realized I had a lot of abandonment beliefs that I was abandoned by her. Even though this was it was an accident, it was a totally random thing. I had internalized that there was something wrong with me and that I was

I like, I'm a combo of science and woo woo.

The same same. So I do a lot of breath work and I've had some breathwork experiences where i feel that I've connected with my mom's energy. And one of the messages that she had and I'm going to get emotional talking about this, but the message that she had for me was I never left you. I've always been there.

Yeah. That's incredibly beautiful and important because the feeling of abandonment can exist whether someone actually abandoned you or not. Like she didn't abandon you, clearly, it's not like she left you. It's not like she wanted to be apart from you. It was an accident, it was random, it was out of her control. She never would have chosen that. But the fact that you felt abandoned isn't any less real just because she didn't want it right right exactly.

Yeah, and my dad. You know, I've worked a lot on my relationship with him. He didn't really have a great childhood, he didn't have models for emotional availability. My dad really threw himself into work, so he was working NonStop. And I think what I learned during that time of

You must have been terrified that your dad was going to die?

Yeah, I think I was. I also have aunts. I have amazing aunts, my mom's sisters, and I know there was some of that in my relationship with them as well.

Being very fearful, I guess, and not trusting that people would stick around.

Yes, we had dogs. We had three dogs, and there was a lot of chaos. As I said, in my family were moving around a lot, and these were dogs that my mom had picked out. They'd been part of our family, and when we moved at one point my dad gave away the dogs, one of the only constants in my life. And not only did he give them away, he had us go to the families and give the dogs to the families. And as you can imagine, that was incredibly painful for me.

Do you have siblings. I have a twin sister, okay, which brings me to my next question. Can you have children who grow up in the same facts, so the same nurture, but have different attachment styles.

Absolutely, my sister and I are a wonderful case study of this. Yes, you can have similar experiences in childhood and develop completely different attachment styles based on how you're coping with the attachment wounds.

Speak more about that.

So, if you have a child where the parent is emotionally unavailable, maybe one of the children learns, okay, I need to be hyper independent. So they're developing the avoidant attachment style where they're disconnected and they want to achieve and be independent, whereas the other child may develop anxious attachment. I need reassurance. I'm asking for a lot. I come across as needy, and it's same experience, two different ways of responding and coping.

Did your twin and you share an attachment style?

I would say she was definitely way more of attached then me.

I would have thought that it's funny with twins because you would always be there for each other, right, So I would have assumed that twins have a secure attachment style, I guess, because there's always someone there that you can rely on. But one of my closest friends is a twin and she has an anxious attachment style as well.

And one thing to really think about is when we're developing, whether it's early on with our parents or in our teens, whenever, if we don't have that secure figure, that person that is showing up, that's validating our emotions, that's really making us feel seen and heard and validated. If we don't have that, then we're not learning how to do that for ourselves, and we're not learning how to do that

Okay, So then why if we have abandonment issues would we find avoidant partners? How does that whole attraction thing work depending on our attachment style? More with doctor Morgan Andison after this short break. People who don't kind of understand how this works. And I suppose logically you would think, well, if you'd have had issues around abandonment, surely you would look for a partner who was very present, who was

I was so glad you were asking me about this. Yes, it's because it feels from it's our emotional home. And I would add that there's this thing called repetition compulsion. Have you heard that term? No?

Okay, but I think I can relate to it already, even without having heard it before.

With repetition compulsion, we're repeating our same relational dynamics unconsciously. It's not as if you're intentionally saying, oh, let me find this emotionally unavailable person again. You're repeating it unconsciously. But there's the unconscious wish that this time you would have a different result, And your brain goes, if I can get this person to love me this time, it's going to make up for everything I experienced in the past.

I bet it never happens.

No, And it ends the same way insanity is, you know, doing the same thing over and over again, expecting a different result. So we have these re woundings and then we're just absolutely devastated each time.

So each time you were rejected in a romantic relationship or abandoned, even if it was emotionally abandoned, it harked back to that original abandonment. Yes, and so it amplified it. Do we then overreact to something that seems quite small but that triggers all of those memories of being abandoned in the past.

Yes. I always know my clients who have insecure styles, because you know, we can talk about a breakup can really feel like dying because of how painful it is, And you're going, man, my friends still seem to have this difficult of a time when they're experiencing breakups. What's wrong with me? And I can tell you it's because of your unresolved trauma from the past and repetition compulsion.

How do you resolve that trauma like you can't unloose your mother? How is that not an absolute permanent scar in your psyche?

That's such a good question. One of the things I find is that when we become aware of this and we know that it's happening, and when we go back to the original wounding and we process it from our healthy adult, securely attached selves, that we're able to release a lot of that unfinished business. And then in our present day we're no longer attracted to those same types of people, We're no longer seeking to recreate the wounds.

So you can go back and go I know it felt like she left because I was unlovable, but actually it was just a random accident and that's not what she wanted, and I wasn't unlovable, And so even by taking that adult perspective and overlaying it on that childhood experience, you can heal it. Is that how you heal it?

Yes, And of course there's always loss and grief, and it's not to say that we don't experience grief. I think it's really important anybody listening who's lost a parent,

What happened to you and your sister obviously was one of the most extreme forms of trauma, but you don't have to have experienced something that life changing or that extreme to still have experienced trauma or abandonment in your childhood. Right, it might be a grandparent dying, it might be pet dying, it might be your parents getting divorced. Is that right?

Absolutely. I think sometimes we get into this place of, well, my trauma wasn't as bad as this person, or it really wasn't that bad, and we almost invalidate ourselves, but realizing that anytime there's a rupture or a wounding in the secure attachment in your life, that that does have an impact on you.

I was one of those people who went to therapy when I was much younger, feeling a little bit sheepish about going to therapy even though I was going for I think I went for the first time because I had an eating disorder. But I was like, yeah, no, my childhood was fine, Like my parents are still married, No one died, you know, there wasn't any particular trauma. But then when we sort of unpacked things, and it's

Absolutely? Absolutely? And then I get really curious about the belief systems. Right, what are your beliefs about relationships and beliefs about man?

Right?

And it sounds like if I was you, I might develop the belief that man will always leave me.

Yeah. Well, I mostly through my early twenties and late teens, just chose guys who were permanently stoned.

That's a form of emotional and availability.

That's interesting, Yeah, it is. And then I got you know, the definitive relationship of my life was an emotionally abusive one with a narcissist and a drug addict, And so that was the ultimate that's when I hit my rock bottom, and the partner that I chose after that was a very deliberate It's almost like you have to things have to get so bad that you have to go right, Well, I'm not doing that again.

Yes, and hopefully not everyone has to go through that, But it sounds like you and I did, yeah, of just really getting to that place of I cannot do this again. But I think what you pointed out about

Interesting. Yeah, the other thing I had to learn in therapy was to depend on people and to ask for help because I internalized this idea that I think was probably quite common of gen X kids, that that was the generation where our parents were the opposite of helicopters. It was very much about free range, like they just got on with their lives and they didn't parent as a verb. They were parents, but they didn't parent and It's not that we were neglected in a malevolent way.

Yes, absolutely, Actually, it's fascinating when you look at the research, avoid an attachment style is the fastest growing attachment style, and I do think that there was a lot of that cultural and influence of hyper independence being sort of the goal of how we're supposed to be. Yeah, Unfortunately, social media and just the age that we're in of I call it pseudo connection for that term, we're not really deeply connecting like we used to do. It's really

Are there patterns for different ages like the gen z's, millennials and X's have generally similar attachment styles or is it very individual?

That's a great question. I think the research I looked at I can really speak to gen Z and that's where they were seeing a lot of an increase in avoidant attachment style.

That's really interesting because parenting now has become so much about helicoptering. You know, Glenn Doyle talks about the memo that every generation of parents gets given at the hospital about you know, gen X's parents were like, you know, here's a kid, go off, have your life, you know, make sure you feed in water them and love them. But the memo that we got as parents is do not let this baby ever have a negative experience or a negative emotion. You must clear every obstacle in their path.

So that can lead to both avoidant attachment or anxious attachment, And I think we don't always associate it with avoidant attachment, but think about it this way. If you have that feeling of wow, this person is intrusive, right, being sort of almost taken over, then that that teaches you that intimacy does not feel good. So avoidant attachment can be sort of a rebellion to helicopter parenting of Okay, I'm going to go be an island because intimacy does not feel seen.

Are you learning so much? I am learning so much. So much is making sense to me about my past, about my present, and not just my romantic relationships, but friendships and other relationships as well. And I guess I never really understood the difference between interdependency and codependency the way she explained it so clearly. That was actually amazing, particularly for those of us who were consider ourselves really independent. Repetition compulsion is another really useful term that I had