DOING LESS TO HEAL ANXIOUS ATTACHMENT WITH DR. JACOB AMBROSE
I would never say I’ve completely healed my anxious attachment, but in the last two years, I’ve moved closer to the secure end of the spectrum. Last month, I came across a video on Instagram from today’s guest, Dr. Jacob Ambrose, founder of Restore Psychology, that validated the progress I made and a recent epiphany I had about texting in relationships.
In his video from a podcast episode, he said, “Communicating less actually helps with anxious attachment because you have this assumption that I need to gain control through communicating well, and that robs you from ever getting any evidence that people will be there for you in the absence of your communication, in the absence of your control. So, the paradox is if you actually let go of control, you can send a one-word text to someone, and the next… you realize wait a minute, this is actually bringing them closer to me. When you’re healing anxious attachment, it really looks like how can you learn to communicate less so that you can get more evidence that people will be there for you in the absence of your work, and moreso present for you because you simply exist as a human. The bow that ties your relationship together—that's you as a human and as you exist.”
Now, of course we all need to communicate in relationships, but I was that person who was trying to gain control through communication. Because underneath that communication was an insatiable need to feel safe, wanted, and prioritized by the object of my affection. This all culminated in an epic crashout in the summer of 2022 with a guy I had been dating for nearly three months. After starting off strong and texting all the time, my nervous system couldn’t handle when the easy flow of our texts turned into an inconsistent trickle. Instead of sitting with the discomfort—or realizing that he wasn’t showing up in a way that worked for me and choosing to let go—I made it his problem. He couldn’t communicate, he couldn’t reassure me, he couldn’t soothe the uncomfortable feelings that I had such a hard time holding on my own.
As I've focused on learning how to self-regulate and self-soothe, I've witnessed my attachment symptoms greatly decrease. I found practices that made me feel safe within myself while learning to acknowledge and sitting with those uncomfortable feelings that popped up when I didn’t have control over another human being, regardless of how great a communicator I was or how I tried to voice my needs upfront. Sure, they can listen, but that doesn’t mean they can or want to give me what I want.
I learned to let go of control which I think only happens after you've put yourself through a certain amount of suffering (the limit will be different for everyone). It wasn’t about finding someone who wanted to text me and reassure me all the time, although I previously thought that would be the key to earning secure attachment. Texting all the time is not sustainable. What I needed was self-trust. I had to learn that I could be my own source of safety, comfort, and reassurance.
Now that I've established more safety within myself, I’m a lot less interested in nonstop communication with someone I'm romantically interested in. I think it breeds false intimacy and familiarity—especially when it’s not being backed up with real effort to connect in person. There is no direct correlation between how much someone texts you and their interest in you. We’ve all experienced a person who was great over text, texted all the time, only to disappear months later. What matters most is someone who wants to invest real time and energy in getting to know us.
So, I knew I wanted to dive deeper into some practical ways to heal anxious attachment with Dr. Jay who specializes in CBT, Note: this is an incredibly complex and nuanced topic, so there is no one-size-fits-all methodology here. In today’s conversation, we talk through some of my own experiences and observations of anxious attachment, how I’ve worked through my maladaptive patterns, how to reframe attachment, the importance of having a positive view of yourself, and why you might need to give up control and text less. This conversation has been edited and condensed, and if this topic hits home for you, I highly suggest listening to the podcast or youtube video.
Welcome, Dr. Jay! I would love for you to tell us, what were you like as a kid?
Dr. Jay: That's a wonderful question. I was not prepared for that. I loved connection. I had a deep desire for it wherever I went. I was a young black boy in southern Louisiana. I was always very different, always wanting to fit in, and yet, wanting to deeply understand what was so different about me and other people. I was in the self-care and self-help section at Barnes & Noble’s, trying to figure people out.
I would say my audience is pretty clear on what attachment is, but just to level set for anybody that might be new or finding out about attachment for the first time, can you take us through what attachment theory is?
Dr. Jay: When I talk about attachment, I want people to think about infants. Babies don't have ego defenses yet, so they're easy for a psychologist to observe. It goes all the way back to a phenomenal researcher, Mary Ainsworth. She developed the “strange situation” where infants would enter a room with a two-way mirror with their mother. They would have the mom leave the room, and they would observe how this infant would react to this departure of their secure base and then the return.
So if you're looking at that experiment, the anxiously attached kids — sometimes they had to stop the experiment because they were so dysregulated. If I don't have mom's face reassuring me that everything's okay, then I can't regulate internally.
The avoidant kids in the experiment seem to be the most okay. They were just crawling around, playing with blocks, but later studies showed that, based on heart rate data, these kids' hearts were racing just as much as anxious kids in the experiment. So with avoidant, the issue is that you minimize your internal experience so much that you lose touch of it. Some people think those with avoidant attachment just don't care intentionally. And yet, a lot of times, what happens is that they've trained themselves to turn their emotions off. They actually aren't aware of them, and they need to build that up again.
The third category, disorganized attachment, or some people call it fearfully attached. That's like if anxiously attached and avoidantly attached individuals had kids together, they come out in all sorts of different shapes and sizes. You have both strategies of the anxiously attached person and the avoidant. So it can be the most difficult to navigate because you have big emotions, and you also use the avoidant strategy of trying to minimize these gigantic emotions.
There’s earned attachment, and we can all earn secure attachment. That's having a positive view of yourself, other people, you’re willing to chase your dreams, be vulnerable. You have a strong sense of identity. It doesn't require excessive amounts of effort to feel like you fit in. You just sort of are, and your relationships can flourish in that way.
I want to focus on the tactics of how we heal from this. I think it can feel so hard because when I think back to the height of my anxious attachment, being aware of it and aware that I wanted to fix it, I kind of thought that I just had to muscle through it. Maybe I needed to date more, and then I would get more comfortable with the uncertainty, or I could tell myself, I need to just stop being anxious. I'm overthinking things. I do think there is a part of anxious attachment where our bodies are trying to warn us of a perceived threat, but then there's also the part where we actually have to learn to support ourselves through the uncertainty, right? I was not good at self-regulating.
Dr. Jay: You can try to muscle through it, but it can make you feel invalidated and tired. Going back to the strange situation, think about what that anxious kid feels like when mom leaves the room? How did they regulate before mom would get back? What did they do once mom got back? The symptoms that came up are more so dictated by the responses of the parents’ inconsistent parenting. So when it comes to healing attachment, the first thing to understand while looking at that anxious kid is realizing that they've used a very adaptive coping strategy to navigate a very difficult world.
So, if you don't approach it from that lens, then you're thinking, I'm this problem that needs to be fixed first, and then that worsens anxious attachment because look at all of these things that I'm doing wrong. Usually, to start healing anxious attachment, it looks more like lifting up the anxious child and asking, what is going on? What's happening? Use all of your anxious symptoms to let out what you experienced in childhood because there's a real wound there that needs to be processed.
Working with someone who's anxiously attached as a therapist, we want to create a validating environment that's very unfiltered. I work from a very attachment-focused lens and heal attachment through the vehicle of shadow work, cognitive behavioral therapy, and psychodynamic work. If you're someone who is anxiously attached and you find that you’re an incredible communicator, you rob yourself from experiencing relationships without communication being the glue that holds it all together. So as an exercise, I'll say, how about we try having you write out a text that you plan to send to someone, delete about three or four words in there, and then send the text and tolerate for the next few hours all the beliefs and fears that might come up about how this text might get misinterpreted.
We're tolerating the distance between the time mom left and the time that mom came back. We're tolerating the time that you sent the text without much information, and the time for that person to come back into your life. Now, I can hear the viewer saying, well, what if they don't come back? Of course, honestly, it's really important to practice this with a therapist. This is all educational information that I'm sharing. It's not a substitute for therapy. I'll also say that this can serve almost as a litmus test to see who's actually for you in relationships. The people who are always there for you will notice this behavior change, but then work with you to try to figure it out. The people who are actually aren't invested might pull away, or if they're avoidant, they might like it. That's just one example.
I think the communication thing is so fraught because so much of our communication happens over text. I reached out to you after I'd seen your video talking about texting less because you brought up how a lot of that is rooted in control. You think, if I send the right text or if I say the right thing, I can keep this going. I really started to see how I had this perfectionism issue, like if something didn't go right, then I'm like, oh my God, because I said it like this instead of this. And I know a function of anxious attachment is that we're very quick to blame ourselves. It was even the hypervigilance around someone's text message and trying to read between the lines—it's anxiety-inducing.
In my last relationship, there was significantly less texting. I think that helped correct things in my brain. I could see that we don't text every single day, but when I see him or when we talk on the phone, he’s still just as excited to see me. Nothing has changed. I don't know if everyone else feels this way, but for me, it always felt like, oh, their feelings for me could change at the drop of a hat.
Dr. Jay: Oh yes, 100% this is so true
It's so hard to relive that because it's so deep.
Dr. Jay: And I can even sense that as you talk about it, it brings up those emotions. It is that control, that squeezing of things. Every time you work towards control, it can rob you of the opportunity to see, which you talk about. You see now, right? Yeah. This freedom, this lack of effort that actually can breed more authentic connection. I'll always say, as a cognitive challenge, who's the bad character in the story when you were abandoned as a child? Was it you for not crawling the right way? Was it you for not putting the block a certain way? No, it was the inconsistency. It was people who abandoned you. So when you're in relationships, I'll say the first thing for you to work on is not your performance, it’s not about sending the right text. It’s how you navigated the situation. You can tell yourself after a communication experience, it wasn't my communication. Everything that I did might've been perfect, and the majority of what impacted the situation might've been outside of my control. You're taking the first step toward a secure attachment.
I remember back in the day when I hadn't heard from someone I liked, I would constantly reread messages. Do you find that with clients? I would have to reread them to reassure myself that, actually, things were okay. Like, this conversation went okay, it'll be fine. It's those little behaviors that you do to try to calm yourself down, but it's not a real self-soothing tactic in any sense.
Dr. Jay: Exactly. I can't tell you how many texts I've read in sessions with clients. What did this mean? What did that mean? Well, we'll start off digging into it, but for the most part, yes, that's a strategy to try to gain control. As you start to heal, you realize that while it does matter to interpret a text well, sometimes it's a lot less important than you think. It wasn't about this. It wasn't about the way you said that. What can be the gaps in your relationship or the negative emotions you experience when you reflect on what you might've done wrong? So, reviewing the text in and of itself, in fact, can be a behavior that decreases your success in relationships because relationships and chemistry are all about not being in a state of fight or flight when you're with that person.
When you're in a state of fight or flight, you're not magnetic. So, what happens when you're in your head thinking about your performance on a date? It wasn't about what you said during the date. It's about you reflecting on your performance during the date. That's where the issue happens.
I have considered that a lot, that when you are activated, it's not really your authentic self, and therefore you can't really attract the relationship that you're meant to have if you are stuck trying to be the cool girl or trying to be the cool guy, because that's not your authentic self.
Dr. Jay: That's my exact thought dialogue. You're not being your authentic self, and you're wondering, why am I only finding myself successful in relationships where I don't really feel much chemistry? Well, it's probably because that's where you're exerting the least amount of control.
I went through all of your videos, and I saw the one where you talked about chemistry. People online talk about “the spark.” Well, what if I didn't have the spark? Yeah, I remember those days of having crazy magnetic chemistry with men who are bad for me, that's a function of it. If I felt that way towards someone right now, that's a red flag.
Dr. Jay: A buzzword that a lot of people are using now is limerence, right? With anxious attachment, you can experience a whole lot of limerence, which is this hyperfocus on this other human being. So if you've been there and it feels like heaven to think about them. It feels like, oh my gosh, this is exactly what I wanted. Here's how you challenge that with anxious attachment. You realize that you may be putting this person on a pedestal. Ask yourself, well, if I actually had this person, what would this relationship look like? You slowly realize that if you truly knew them, that pedestal would quickly be removed. In fact, you might even find that you like them a lot less than you thought just a few months down the line. So, it's worth challenging that you're putting someone on a pedestal might not actually be that worthy.
It’s really hard, right? A lesson in trying to heal my anxious attachment was that sometimes you have to actually go against what feels right or what you think feels good. Again, that magnetic chemistry… yes, it's intoxicating, but it's a warning sign. You have to muster up all the courage inside of you to be like, no, I'm going to go this way instead.
Dr. Jay: I agree 100%. I'll also add, people can find themselves with people who aren't even toxic and still find that they're running into issues. This is where shadow work ties in. If you're working to heal anxious attachment, it's important that you acknowledge that there's anger in your shadow. It's about setting proactive boundaries and prioritizing your needs. That's in the shadow of anxious attachment. So, let's say you enter a relationship with someone who is actually secure. If you're anxiously attached, you're going to be looking at their facial expressions to dictate what you ought to do to win them over.
So what happens when you default to looking at their facial expressions over and over and over again to dictate what you should do? Well, when does Chrissy start to exist in a relationship? When do you actually get to set boundaries that inconvenience the other person? Because if you don't ever do that, three years are going to pass by, and the relationship's not going to look anything like Chrissy, but all about whoever you're with. So with anxious attachment, it's about proactive anger. That’s something worth challenging that might show up more in avoidant people that you might judge too harshly. I'm always asking, what do you judge most harshly in other people? Because we might need a little bit more of that in you, if that makes sense.
Absolutely. A big struggle for me throughout my dating history was that I didn't know what my needs were. I didn't even know I was allowed to have them. I just thought you like a guy and you find the one that's going to put up with you. So, first acknowledging I have needs, it's okay to have them, but then how to communicate them to someone is also a whole other stepping stone to this. It's hard because when you have anxious attachment, you are so focused on the needs of the other person, you don't think about yourself. It’s like, well, does this person really like me?
Dr. Jay: I thank you so much for your vulnerability here. I mean, that just plays a huge role in attachment. So, with anxious attachment, if you're looking towards what other people want of you, you're afraid of being the difficult child. You're afraid of crying too loud. You're afraid of doing all these things. If you're healing anxious attachment, I would ask, who are you when you're most difficult? Who are you afraid of being? My favorite moment in therapy is to get people to be comfortable enough to be that difficult version of themselves and to have problems. In the moment, I'll say, I just want to tell you, I'm so happy that you're here with me right now, that heals both anxious, avoidant, and fearful [attachment]. Because the belief is that you are not enough as you are.
Conflict for couples where someone has an anxious attachment can be really hard because the anxious person always feels like things are over. We got into a fight. Now, things are over, or this person doesn't care about me.
Dr. Jay: Then the behaviors that you do as a result of those thoughts actually make the relationship end.
We see avoidant attachment really get villainized on social media. I think there's this idea that they're aware of what they're doing and they're aware that they're hurting you, but they don't care, so they're doing it anyway. But it's the same way that we desire closeness— they desire space. It's literally just two sides of the same coin.
Dr. Jay: There are two separate languages being spoken. I want you to picture two spectrums. The first one is ranked from 0 to 10 in terms of emotional intensity, and then the second one is ranked from 0 to 10 in terms of emotional expression. From childhood, avoidantly attached individuals are minimizing their emotions. Their internal experience is a five, but they express a two. With anxious attachment, it's the opposite—it's magnification. My internal experience is a five, my expression is a seven. This is not what you're doing intentionally. In adulthood, the anxiously attached person begins to attune their emotions. So you're actually not lying about your five being a seven. You now have a new relationship with emotions that's pretty big. That's why anxious attachers can often have big emotions, and you have powerful abilities when it comes to your empathy. Avoidant attachers, sometimes they're saying, I'm actually not feeling sad about this. I'm not suppressing any sadness. I'm like, you're right. Since childhood, you've dulled your emotions so much that you don't even notice them anymore.
So, when you're navigating relationships with someone who's avoidant and you think they don't care, they might actually just have this dulled emotion. When you're with someone who's anxiously attached and you feel like they're making a big deal out of nothing, no, they're actually feeling dysregulated. If you both work in opposite directions and observe that you can slowly start speaking the same language again in relationship with each other.
Incredible way to put it. When I think about my anxious attachment, when it was most intense, the physical feelings that I felt, that's what feels so hard to sit with. Yes, there's this uncertainty, and it's the way the uncertainty is showing up physically in my body, this pit in my stomach, my racing heart, it felt like being on fire. If you don't get to reconnect or co-regulate with this person, you might explode.
Dr. Jay: Yes. Wow. That's a perfect description. You feel like you're on fire.
It's this sense of urgency. You're urgent about the dating process, you want to rush the relationship so you can get to that place where things are established, because you can't sit with the uncertainty. I remember that feeling again, of needing to see this person as much as possible, so hopefully they'll really like me, and then we can be in a relationship. Now I know, there's actually no rush at all.
Dr. Jay: Right? You can take your time. Things are slow and easy, and it's going to be hard to feel that at first. But you're right. You don't have to jump on things that feel like you might lose your grip. You need physical evidence. So, just another example, when it comes to healing anxious attachment, it's all about doing relationships with less evidence. A lot of avoidant people say, why don't you just trust my character…but there's a nugget of truth in there that's really good: trusting character does breed less questions. So with anxious attachment, how can you ask less questions when mom leaves the room? Just like in the strange situation.. They're like, mom's gone, but I know she usually comes back. So if you use that same skill in a relationship with secure people, that is usually going to foster a really healthy relationship. Now, this doesn't work with toxic people. They might hurt you. You want to be careful with that. So that's a huge disclaimer.
I think the biggest thing for me in healing my anxious attachment has been learning how to self-regulate, and I've talked about this a lot with my audience. I journal a lot, talking to my inner child, especially because there's that inner child in us who feels abandoned. So, reminding myself or even thinking about a younger version of myself and telling her, I'm not going anywhere, I've got you no matter what, even if this person does not want to be with you, it doesn't matter because I've got you. I'm always going to be here for you. I'll go on a walk and chant that to myself over and over and over.
In the beginning, it doesn't really feel like it's doing that much, but it gets to a point where you're like, oh, actually, I've shifted things for myself, and now I really do. You have to build that trust with yourself in the beginning. You don't trust that you actually can take care of yourself, so you have to literally build that brick by brick, no matter what, if anyone abandons me, I'm not abandoning myself.
Dr. Jay: With anxious attachment, you are trained since childhood to look externally for acceptance and regulation. You're looking towards the facial expressions, the Instagram comments, the likes, or whatever. If somebody leaves a negative comment, you're like, oh, this post was a bad one. Speaking as an influencer with anxious attachment, if you slowly start to build that relationship with yourself, no matter what is happening in the external world, I'm interpreting this reality as true, and this feels like I'm doing this with integrity. That is something that you want to keep building to be enough self-care, because that sends receipts to yourself saying that I am enough.
Here's another quick tidbit with anxious attachment: the more that you take care of yourself, and even more so take care of yourself sometimes at the expense of other people, you're not being a jerk, but more so, you're setting boundaries that prioritize yourself. The more that it sends a message to your psyche that your wants and needs are worth whatever you just did. Well, if you're constantly in relationships and putting yourself beneath others, you're like, let me just maintain a sense of control by putting myself beneath this other person, by complimenting them five times, that's going to send a message to your psyche that this person that you're talking to is far more important than you. So, if someone is more important than you and they're upset, then you're likely to be upset as well.
So the only way to work towards really healing anxious attachment is when you start to put yourself a little bit higher so that your wants and needs are more important in relationship, so you can start to build that.
Yeah, because self-abandonment just goes hand in hand with anxious attachment. It's like you are willing to do whatever. You're willing to sometimes forgo your own self-respect just to get this other person, but then for what?
Dr. Jay: Exactly. You've been hazed to the point where now you've sacrificed so much, and you feel like, well, now it's worth it because I need to be this new person. Healing anxious attachment looks like putting your wants and needs first, and you have to recalibrate. So you’re going to feel guilty at first. A huge practice, just like when you go to the gym, and it feels uncomfortable, you're doing it right. It's the same way with anxious attachment. I have a podcast, Two Dudes Talkin’ Therapy, with Dr. Vincent Barbieri. One line that he said that sticks with me so much is, let guilt be your guide. If you're working to heal anxious attachment, if you set a boundary, and you feel guilty. Now, if you're out there doing bad stuff or you're avoidantly attached—don’t do this. Speak with your therapist. That's my disclaimer. But let guilt be your guide. If you set a boundary and you feel guilty, that's a sign that you’ve done 20 pushups.
I feel like people who have anxious attachment often take long breaks from dating because it feels stressful. I remember writing about this in my newsletter in the early days, like, I'm fine being single because I have peace. When I'm dating, I'm stressed, and it brings up so much for me. So there were periods of time where I was taking long breaks from dating, even though I genuinely desire to be in a long-term, committed relationship. It really just felt like I couldn't handle the stress of this.
Can we heal anxious attachment alone, or do we need to be doing that in partnership? For a long time, I thought I needed to be on my own to heal this. Sure, I think there were aspects of healing alone that were really helpful. But I think where I experienced the most growth was actually in a relationship that felt like there was a safe enough container for me to explore a lot of the things we've talked about, texting less, inconveniencing someone, and going through that conflict and having that reinforcement over and over that, oh, even though things are not perfect or I'm not always showing up perfectly, things are still okay.
Dr. Jay: To go to the first part of what you talked about, dating is extremely difficult for people with anxious attachment. Some people with avoidant attachment have the cool flow at the beginning, and then it gets bad later. But with anxious attachment, dating can feel extremely traumatic. You know what it's like to be abandoned. So, when you're dating someone, you feel a deep responsibility to ensure that the person you're with doesn't feel abandoned. You also have this deep fear of being abandoned in a relationship, and especially if you experience this limerence in relationships where you hyper-focus on that person, and then you become more obsessed with them and the feelings that come up, and you're like, wow, should I even be here? So if anything goes wrong with dating with anxious attachment, you have this feeling that I'm either this monster that hurt this person because I rejected them, and now they're alone. Or I'm this person who's rejected and abandoned, and that just hurts so bad. So, healing anxious attachment in dating—one thing to notice is that the stakes are far lower than you think when you end a relationship in the early phases and say, I can't do this. They react negatively. You want to underestimate the pain that the other person is going through because you might be overestimating it.
To the second part of your question, can anxious attachment heal when you're alone? Is it better to heal alone? Some people will say it's more effective to work on yourself. Go to therapy, and make sure that you're figuring out all these tools and tips. I would say actually that's still engaging in a relationship with a therapist. Attachment often heals best with other people, and the research shows that if you're with someone with secure attachment, you can start to pick up on some of those strategies yourself. It's not required to be healing. You can learn skills on your own. But I recommend, as a therapist, that if you can find a good therapist with secure attachment, that therapist can help you earn secure attachment, which will naturally allow that to flow into your other relationships. So yes, work on yourself, spend that time alone so that you're not ending up in toxic relationships on repeat, being hurt, and yet it's really ideal if you can find spaces to just be in relationship with other good people that are pushing you, cheering you on to go forward in your secure attachment.
Do you often see people who struggle with anxious attachment in romantic relationships also struggle with it in platonic relationships? That's something that I don't experience as much. Although there’s been times where someone doesn't text back, and I'm like, oh my God, they're mad at me or whatever. Or I see a friend went out and did something and didn't invite me. So I'm like, oh, what's that about? But those instances for me are very few and far between.
Dr. Jay: That's a fantastic question because with anxious attachment, you might find that your symptoms are a lot less severe with certain people. The answer to that really is all the way back in the research, they talk about how with attachment styles, it's all about your view of yourself versus the world. With anxious attachment, it's a positive view of the world, a negative view of self. So, in order to heal that, you try to obtain what's on the other side of the looking glass. You want more control over the things that feel just out of reach, stimulation, pleasure, whatever it is. So if you feel extreme stimulation and pleasure when it comes to romantic relationships, then you're going to want to exert much more control. You're going to want to obtain that, and now your symptoms are going to be higher because this positive view of whatever's on the outside and a negative view of self. But if you don't feel that same pressure to control with closer friendships, now you start to identify with that group. Negative view of us, positive view of the group. The more desperate you are for something that you want with anxious attachment, the more the symptoms are going to show up.
That makes a lot of sense. Actually, back to our previous question, I was thinking something that's also been helpful for me in the healing process is when I am in a relationship with someone, I really try to ask myself, what would a person with secure attachment do in this scenario? Because if you really understand the tenets of secure attachments, they trust other people. They trust that people will show up for them when they say they're going to show up, and not try to predict when the shoe is going to drop.
D, Jay: Yep, I love that example. What would I do if I were secure? And another good relevant example of that might be what you would do if you were with someone that you had no chemistry with? That's a good question too, because now, if you ask an anxious attacher what they feel like when they're with someone, they feel no chemistry with it actually starts looking pretty secure.
When I first read Attached by Amir Levine, I basically pathologized my attachment style. If anyone was talking about dating, I'm like, oh, you have anxious attachment. I act this way because I have anxious attachment, and he has avoidant attachment. And I really thought it defined my entire dating experience. And as I had mentioned earlier, it's like I had all this awareness, but I was so confused when I continued to date with the awareness, but it wasn't getting better. I'm like, why isn't the anxiety letting up? I know what's happening, but it still doesn't feel any better. And it's because everything was happening up here (in my head), and I was very disconnected from all the feelings that were coming up in my body and how to address that. That's where things really flipped for me when I realized I actually have to focus on what is happening inside of my body.
That's kind of the overarching theme of most of my therapy work because I'm very self-aware. I like to live in my mind, as I said, I like all the knowledge, I read all the books. I want to know everything. And it's one thing to know everything, but how do you actually integrate it so you can also act from that place? And a lot of times it's like, yeah, you have to get in touch with what is happening in your body.
Dr. Jay: Yes, exactly. It's like sometimes the hardest part of the work is first identifying your cage. It's finding out that you're in a cage because the hardest time to escape a cage is if you don't even know you're in one. Once you identify the walls of the cage, it can feel more trapping, like I didn't realize I was in a cage, and now my symptoms feel worse to escape the cage. The keys, I would say one is that integration of the shadow. Two, it's identifying what I call cyclical maladaptive patterns.
For example, you're like, I'm stuck in this cage. I don't want to lose this person, so I'm going to communicate more. That's a cyclical, maladaptive pattern because the more you communicate, the more other people will take a step back in your relationships, and the less self-worth you feel, the more communication you have to do later. And the more identity of your relationship in and of itself is based on your ability to communicate, and not who you are.
So, escaping that maladaptive pattern through cognitive behavioral work looks like challenging the if-then statement that more communication equals more intimacy. So you turn the key just a little bit that way, and the doors loosen just a bit, and now you can exist in a space where you're communicating less. Then, dynamic work in relationships where you earn attachment. So it's all about finding ways to escape the cage. I think if you can build habitual techniques with your clients and they start to actually see the cage can loosen, while I'm still accepting myself.
Final question, Dr. J. What's bringing you joy right now?
Working with clients. Once you have that moment where a client notices their cage and then finds that they can unlock it, that is so joyful to me. And when a client is difficult or they perceive themselves as difficult, and I can say, I am enjoying who you are right now in this moment, and they’re taken aback. That's my favorite moment.
Dr. Jay’s Reading List
Owning Your Own Shadow by Robert A. Johnson
A great read for those hoping to better address their anxious attachment wounds through the vehicle of Jungian Shadow Work.
Not Nice by Dr. Aziz Gazipura
Great book for anxious attachers. Similar to many of my heroes (Dr. Gabor Maté) this author goes over the power of saying "NO" which is so important for anyone in the journey of healing attachment. It's written for those of us who’ve been trained to prioritize connection over authenticity.
Attached by Amir Levine and Rachel Heller
As you know, I'm sure from reading it yourself, this book breaks down anxious, avoidant, and secure styles in dating. This book I would say is important for mindful dating as someone with anxious attachment.
Scattered Minds by Dr. Gabor Maté
I found Dr. Gabor Maté's work later in my journey of healing attachment, and was pleasantly surprised at how seamlessly his theory and way of speech validated much of my approach. This book through and through is good for anyone hoping to better understand how trauma shapes the way we regulate (or dysregulate) our attention and emotions--very important when working through attachment.