Episode Description
Ever wonder why you chose the spouse that you did? Or why you and your spouse seem to be locked in the same dance – pushing each other’s buttons and arguing over the same things you’ve argued about 1000 times before?
In this podcast episode, Bev Mitelman, a certified attachment practitioner and founder of Securely Loved, discusses the profound impact our attachment style has on all of our future relationships.
Bev explains how our early relationships with our primary caregivers create lifelong patterns for how we give and receive love—and why understanding these patterns is key to building better connections. Relying on the work of Dr. Gabor Maté, Bev explores and explains our attachment styles, core wounds, and the pivotal choice each of us makes between maintaining an insecure attachment style that we may have picked up during our childhood and consciously growing into a secure attachment style that will help us create the healthy relationships we crave.
If you feel like it’s “Groundhog Day” in your intimate relationships, and you long to create a more secure and well-balanced bond, this podcast episode is for you.
Show Notes
About Bev
Prior to becoming a Certified Attachment Practitioner and founding Securely Loved, Bev was an Executive Leader, University Lecturer and published author, having obtained her Masters' Degree in 2006. She has dedicated her entire career (25+ years) working with adults in the realm of personal growth and professional development.
Bev specializes in attachment theory, as it relates to dating and relationships, LGBT+ communities, sexuality, childhood trauma, complex family dynamics, narcissistic abuse, and respectful parenting. She believes that radical honesty is the way to authentically connect with people, in a world where more and more of us are feeling isolated and disconnected.
Connect with Bev
You can connect with Bev on LinkedIn at Securely Loved and on Facebook at Securely Loved. You can follow Bev on Instagram at Securely_loved and on YouTube @SecurelyLoved. To find out more about Bev’s work visit her website at Securely Loved and book a 20 minute consult here.
Key Takeaways From This Episode with Bev
- Attachment theory explores how early childhood relationships with primary caregivers shape emotional bonding patterns that persist into adulthood.
- Approximately 50% of people develop a secure attachment style, characterized by emotional regulation, self-trust, and healthy relationship-building skills.
- Insecure attachment styles include anxious-preoccupied, dismissive-avoidant, and fearful-avoidant, each stemming from different childhood experiences of emotional safety.
- The core wound shared by insecure attachment styles is a fundamental feeling of being emotionally unsafe, learned through childhood interactions with caregivers.
- Anxious-preoccupied individuals tend to be people-pleasers who seek constant validation and often choose emotionally unavailable partners.
- Dismissive-avoidant individuals value independence, struggle with emotional expression, and tend to avoid conflict by retreating or stonewalling.
- Fearful-avoidant (or disorganized) attachment is the rarest style, typically emerging from abusive environments, characterized by simultaneously craving and fearing intimacy.
- Attachment styles are learned behaviors, which means they can be recognized, understood, and potentially unlearned or transformed.
- Emotional attunement from caregivers is crucial - consistently meeting a child's emotional needs helps develop a secure attachment style.
- Imperfect parenting doesn't permanently damage a child; what matters most is overall consistency, the ability to apologize, and attempting to meet emotional needs.
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Transcript
Why Do We Love the Way We Do? A Deep Dive into Attachment Styles (Part 1)
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
attachment, security, attunement, patterns
SPEAKERS
Karen Covy, Bev Mitelman
Karen Covy Host
00:10
Hello and welcome to Off the Fence, a podcast where we deconstruct difficult decision-making so we can discover what keeps us stuck and, more importantly, how we can get unstuck and start making even tough decisions with confidence. I'm your host, Karen Covy, a former divorce lawyer, mediator and arbitrator, turned coach, author and entrepreneur. And now, without further ado, let's get on with the show.
Today's podcast episode is a very special one. In this episode, I'm going to be speaking with Bev Middleman and we're going to have a two-part episode. So today we're going to start with part one and dive deeply into a topic that fascinates both of us and hopefully you will find interesting and helpful in your own life, and then we will also do part two. So if you're listening to today's episode, make sure and then we will also do part two.
01:10
And now, Bev Mitelman is a certified attachment practitioner. She's the founder of Securely Loved, a collective of relationship and attachment trauma practitioners. Bev specializes in attachment theory as it relates to dating and relationships, LGBTQ+ communities, sexuality, childhood trauma, complex family dynamics, narcissistic abuse and respectful parenting. Prior to becoming a certified attachment practitioner, Bev was an executive leader, university lecturer and published author. She obtained her master's degree in education in 2006. Bev has dedicated her entire career to working with adults in the realm of personal growth and professional development. Bev, welcome to the show.
Bev Mitelman Guest
01:54
Thank you so much. I'm so honored and pleased to be here with you and your audience.
Karen Covy Host
01:58
I am thrilled to have you because I have been wanting to dive into attachment theory for a very long time and it's so fortuitous that our paths crossed, so I'm excited. But before we get into attachment theory what it is and why people should care about it let's start about. I'd like to start with you. How did you get into the work that you do? Why attachment theory? Why this?
Bev Mitelman Guest
02:27
It's such a great question Thank you for asking. I think you'll find that a lot of practitioners in this space gripped over attachment theory while they were on their own journey of healing. So I really believe in personal growth. I've dedicated my career to it and I've worked in, you know, various areas of personal growth. But years ago, when I fell across attachment theory, that's where things started to change for me. So the impact of what I learned in terms of actually starting to understand my own thought patterns and my emotional patterns and why I communicated the way I did and why I did certain things like my behavior it gave me such an incredible insight and I realized just how important this is, not only for my own healing, but I realized more people need to know about this. So I had, you know, on my own journey of healing.
03:25
I had a pretty, I would say, difficult childhood. It was challenging and, you know, I had sought out the help of various different practitioners and I had tried various different types of therapy, because I knew that I didn't feel well in my skin, like I could tell that I was, you know, very jumpy. I was hypervigilant. I never felt relaxed, I never felt calm. I always had this really strong instinct to pull away and run away and almost hide, and so you know, for me that was my baseline, and when I started speaking to people I was like you mean, this isn't and inner child. And I did EMDR, which is a form of trauma-based therapy eye movement, rapid desensitization. That was helpful for me. I did that in conjunction with the work that I was doing on my subconscious mind in regards to attachment theory, and the combination of the two is what changed my life, and so it became my focus and I thought, you know, if it could have that level of impact for me, then I know I can help others.
Karen Covy Host
05:00
That makes so much sense. So since this was so helpful for you, let's dive right in and talk about what is attachment theory.
Bev Mitelman Guest
05:11
Yeah, so attachment is really the emotional bond that we create with others and it goes back to our earliest years. So when we come into this world, tiny little babies we're like a blank slate, right, and then we hopefully are being cared for in a healthy way by the child, will identify usually a primary caregiver, right. So it could be the mother, father, it could be an aunt, it could be a grandmother, but the child will identify someone as their primary caregiver and the relationship that they have with that individual in those earliest years, from birth until about five years old, is when we are most suggestible. Those are the most formative years. They're that important to us. We actually create a set of patterns in our mind for how we give and receive love, depending on the type of love and care that we received and what was modeled for us. So if we take the example of someone who came out of a secure home, so we talk about an attachment theory secure attachment and insecure attachment. Those are the two broad categories. There are subcategories to insecure attachment, but we'll get there in a moment. So if we just talk about secure attachment, what we're talking about is generally a baby or very young child whose not only their physical needs were met, but their emotional needs were met most of the time, predictably consistently.
07:04
Now I want to be very clear, because you know I'm sure a lot of your audience are parents. I'm a mother as well. None of us do this perfectly all the time. I have certainly made plenty of mistakes. I would love to have a bunch of redos right, but what the child is looking for is a level of consistency, predictability in your behavior vis-a-vis them and their emotional needs.
07:32
So, for example, when a child cries, they can consistently predict that their needs will get met. The mother, for example, will come and hold them. Either they'll change a diaper, or maybe the child just needs some consoling, or maybe the child wants to be played with, or the child will learn. You know different emotions from the mother, so there's a level of attunement there. That's what this is about. It's attunement and what that does for the child is it creates a template in their minds that, okay, I can emote when I feel like I need something. So if I'm sad, if I'm mad, if I'm, I can emote that authentically and my caregiver will respond to me in a healthy, predictable way. So that creates this beautiful form of safety for the child. The child is safe.
Karen Covy Host
08:33
Let me interrupt for a second here. So, primary caregiver, but every human on the planet has two parents. You know there were two people involved in making this child. So, assuming that a child is in a household where there's a mother and a father, one of them is a primary caretaker, or could be grandparent, like you said, anybody. What's the role of the other person Like? Do the other people around the child in the family? Do they affect the child's attachment style too, or is it just pretty much the primary caregiver?
Bev Mitelman Guest
09:10
No, it's such a beautiful question. In fact, no one's ever asked me that question. The entire environment matters. You're absolutely right, and so you know. It's rare that we see that two people are split equally divide with the caretaking of the child, Like there generally is one parent that will spend more face-to-face time with the child, right? So I don't want to say that if the other parent is working to put food on the table, that they're not caring for the child. They are, but from a child's perspective, they're really identifying the primary caregiver as the person that spends the most time with them.
Karen Covy Host
09:56
Okay, so let's say, the child has a really good primary caregiver, then you know who meets the child's needs. And I love that you said most of the time, because nobody is perfect. And I can hear like every you know parent going oh my God, I screwed up my kid for life. I mean, that's, that's our biggest fear. Right, it is so, you know, if that. But if the child is raised in a, in a household where the primary caregiver is usually most of the time responsive and relates to the child well, then that child develops a secure attachment theory. Is that what I'm hearing A secure attachment?
Bev Mitelman Guest
10:36
Absolutely. And so what comes out of secure attachment are a couple of things. One, the child learns very early on that they can authentically be themselves. So they learn how to identify their emotions. They learn that it's safe to actually communicate their emotions when they're sad, when they're angry, when they're frustrated, when they're tired, whatnot, and they learn that someone will respond to them in a healthy way. All of this as an environment breeds a child who develops the critical life skill of emotional regulation. When they come into adulthood they understand for the most part their emotions. They can identify very often, they can put words to what they're feeling. They understand physically what sensations are coming about when I'm angry, sad, frustrated, tired, right, they're able to communicate it. And they also have a level of trust that other people will interact with them in a healthy way, because their caregiver did up and, by the way, percentage wise in North, in North America, we generally say about half the population has a secure attachment.
Karen Covy Host
12:12
That's what I would have thought. That's cool.
Bev Mitelman Guest
12:14
That's what I always hear. Now, I mean, the statistics vary. I've seen some studies that like 40% of the population secure. Some say 60%, so I land at 50%, okay, which is fair. So at this point, what we're talking about is that these children grow into adults that do very well in the world. They do very well in terms of having a good, healthy sense of self-worth, self-esteem. They trust themselves right Because they learned how to emotionally regulate when they were younger. They have a good sense of trusting other people. They do very well in terms of building relationships with other people, whether it be friendships. They generally have solid relationships with family members, romantic partners. They're generally do very well in long term relationships. So these are the people who are not emotionally volatile okay, they're generally, you know the go-to.
13:30
I'm sure you have a couple of people like this in your world that are like solid as a rock. They know what small things to let roll off their back, right, and if you say something that upsets them, they know that. Okay, you know what? This is not about me. Bev's probably having a bad day and they'll say you know what, Bev, I didn't really like what you said to me, please don't say it again. Done, okay. So it sounds like these people generally they're not the they don't have it again Done Okay.
Karen Covy Host
14:03
So it sounds like these people generally they're not the, they don't have a lot of problems with codependency. They can speak their truth, they're, you know. They're not afraid to say what they're feeling and say, hey, you hurt my feelings or I didn't like that behavior or whatever it was that would bother them. It sounds like these are the people who are going to have, for the most part, healthy relationships, right?
Bev Mitelman Guest
14:29
100% and you know these are the folks too. They carry around the lightest burden of core wounds and we're going to talk a little bit about core wounds as we get further into our discussion. But we all carry a set of poor wounds from our childhood. This is, you know, micro traumas. We all have wounding.
14:52
Some of the wounds hit very, very deep and some are a lot lighter, right, so someone who comes out of a secure home where you know the parents or parents were very loving and attuned, they might have difficult childhood memories of going to school and maybe they were bullied or maybe they were called names, right, and this is very wounding to the child, but not on the same level as being neglected by a parent. There are levels in terms of how a child will identify safety because that child could come home from school back into a safe environment, Right, Right, so it's not to say that people who are mostly secure don't have wounding. They do, but it's usually more context, specific, like certain events that happened to them right in childhood and, again, it's not generally as triggering.
Karen Covy Host
15:58
Okay, so that's the 50% of the world who is secure. What about the 50% whose attachment style is perhaps not so secure?
Bev Mitelman Guest
16:09
We call that insecure attachment Now. So this is a bigger ball of wax, right? So what we see is a lot of interesting behavior and patterns that come out of folks who did not have a secure attachment, so insecure attachment.
16:28
Now, insecure attachment can come about from a number of different scenarios. So you know a child, for example, who felt abandoned or perceived abandonment from their caregiver, or they were emotionally neglected, or one of the parents or both of the parents were emotionally unavailable, or, for example, the parent was dealing with a level of addiction or alcoholism and there was a level of unpredictability there. Maybe there was a parent who was incarcerated, maybe there was a parent who died. There are so many scenarios. Maybe there was a high conflict, divorce that created a level of chaos in the home. Maybe there was violence, there was abuse.
17:19
I could go on and on and on about the different types of households whereby children don't grow up feeling safe. And what I mean by safe is emotional safety. Because what's so interesting is, when I speak to people who have insecure attachment and this is the work I do is I work with them as adults to build towards secure attachment, because you can unlearn these patterns, right. But a lot of them will say to me I had a great childhood, you know, I had a home, I had, you know, three meals a day, and so they're equating their physical needs, having being met in the same boat, as their emotional needs and it's not actually the same thing.
Karen Covy Host
18:07
That's fascinating because, you know, I too, have worked with a lot of people over the course of the years, and you know a fair number of people. I mean, no, let's put it this way, there are very few people that have had the picture perfect childhood right and believe that. But a lot of people say, you know, there's that group of people who say, yeah, no, my childhood was awesome, it was wonderful, I, you know, life was grand. And then there's the category of people who say, no, it wasn't, but I would have. It's surprising to me that someone can think of their childhood as no, my childhood was great, or it was fine, or I was happy, or you know whatever, but still have experienced childhood trauma at a level that would affect their attachment style 100%.
Bev Mitelman Guest
18:54
So often what I see is these folks are actually repressing their emotions which is a which is a very, very common strategy for people who have insecure attachment for one subsets.
Karen Covy Host
19:11
Okay, let's talk about those subsets because I know there's a couple of them. What are they?
Bev Mitelman Guest
19:17
Yeah, so. So, um, attachment is on a spectrum, right. So I'll just mention that very few people fall like squarely insecure or squarely here. It's a spectrum, right. So if we put secure in somewhere in the middle, you know we have it stretching out to either ends of the polarity. So on one end of the polarity again we're in insecure attachment is the individuals who are anxious, preoccupied. Okay, we're going to put a pin in that and come back to that in a moment. On the other side of the spectrum we have the individuals who are dismissive, avoidant. Okay.
20:00
So we have, we have anxiously attached, avoidantly attached, and then somewhere in the middle, exhibiting traits of both the anxious and the avoidant, we have what's called the fearful avoidant, which used to be called the disorganized attacher. Well, that's another name that you would see in the literature. Fearful, avoidant and disorganized attachment are actually the same thing. So what's interesting about all three of these subsets is they have one core wounds that they share. That is common for all three.
Karen Covy Host
Okay, what's that?
Bev Mitelman Guest
It's not going to surprise you at all, Karen.
The core wound is I am unsafe
20:47
That makes sense.
Bev Mitelman Guest
21:12
Doesn't it?
Karen Covy Host
But especially if you're talking about unsafe in the way that you have defined it, it's not unsafe like I'm out on the streets by myself at night, right, although it could be, hopefully not Could be but that it's unsafe in that I cried and no one cared.
Bev Mitelman Guest
That's right.
21:13
That's exactly right. We're talking about emotional safety, right? So a child will learn very, very early on. A child will always choose attachment over authenticity. Dr Gabor Mate talks a lot about this. He's one of my favorites, he's brilliant. So a child sometimes has to make a decision over attachments versus authenticity, and authenticity means that I'm going to be true to myself.
21:43
So if a child is feeling angry in the moment and they want to be authentic and say I'm feeling angry, like, let's say, this is a four-year-old child, right, I'm angry and they stomp their foot Well, the way the caregiver actually responds to that leaves the child with a choice, an unfortunate choice. So if the caregiver turns around and they said you're angry, Okay, I get angry too sometimes. Tell me why you're angry. See how validating that is. See how you're angry. I still love you. I'm going to listen to why you're angry. I might not agree with you. I'm not going to give you everything you want, but I'm not going to invalidate you for being angry, okay?
22:38
Versus the scenario where a child says I'm angry and the parent says put a smile on your face or I'll give you something to be angry about. Oof, the child learns very quickly in that moment. It's not safe for me to show my true feelings. If I'm angry, I can't let anyone know, because my caregiver is not going to love me. So I'm going to choose attachment over authenticity. So at that point in time, every time I feel angry, I'm not going to let anyone know, I'm just going to repress it. I'm going to pretend like I'm happy and I'm going to put a smile on my face regardless of what I'm actually feeling. And this is the first part of self abandonment, when we start moving away from being our authentic self.
Karen Covy Host
23:34
Let me jump in for a minute and just kind of take to tie this with something that we've already talked about, which is does the caretaker have to be a? I mean, they're not perfect, but let's say you say something like that to your kid because you know the caretaker is stressed, the caretaker is, you know, under time pressure or there's something else going on in their life. They're just not so patient one day but 90% of the time they're validating and patient and all the things. But that 10% or maybe only 1%, they just lose it. Have you screwed your child for life?
Bev Mitelman Guest
24:14
No, not at all. And actually it's a beautiful learning moment, right. So, like again, I want to reiterate, I was a mother. I had those moments right when, like you have two kids running around and the dog is barking and the doorbell's going and the phone's ringing and you're cooking dinner, and like you just want to jump out the window, like your patience is really thin, right, and so if your child goes, let me, I want a cookie you go. No, right now you could be more patient in that moment, right.
24:45
But what I think it's important to do is, as adults, we are teaching emotional regulation. We are teaching our children that, if we have moments where we're less regulated than others which is normal, but what can I do about it after? So, in the events where I was snappy with my kids, I would go to them an hour or two, maybe three hours later, like maybe before bedtime things have calmed down and I would say to them look, I know I was a bit snappy, I'm sorry, I got overwhelmed. I really wish I would have been kinder to you in that moment. I'm sorry, wow, like. And the child realizes okay, like I can make a mistake and then ask for forgiveness, because my mommy just made a mistake and made me feel bad, but she asked for forgiveness. So it's a perfect life lesson, because we really do all make mistakes.
Karen Covy Host
25:50
Okay, all right, so I interrupted you. You were talking about the insecure attachment styles.
Bev Mitelman Guest
25:57
Okay, so we'll go back to that. So we now have our three categories. So some people will say there are four attachment styles secure, anxious, preoccupied, dismissive, avoidant, fearful avoidant which is true, right, secure. But the last three fall in the insecure category. So that's what we're going to talk about now. So when we talk about, they have one core common wound I am unsafe. Now, all the other core wounds that they carry differ a little bit depending on what they experience. So if we start with the anxious, preoccupied, this person is very what we say anxiously attached.
26:39
This is an individual who would have experienced some form of abandonment or perceived abandonment. Maybe, for example, the mother had to work and the child was dropped off at grandma's house every day, so the child perceived that as abandonment. Maybe there were too many kids in the household, right, and they couldn't get the attention they needed. Maybe the mother was unpredictable. Maybe she was dealing with a form of mental illness or something and her behavior was erratic. Maybe she was emotionally available one day and the next day not so available, and so it's that when something isn't predictable, this starts to cause an issue. Maybe there was alcoholism, right. There's a lot of scenarios there.
27:30
What this individual learns is what they do is they're the ones who tend to be the people pleasers. They grow up into people who become people pleasers. They learn very early on that, in order to get the love and attention from their caregiver, that they would either have to try to care for them, they would have to please them. So their focus is always on the external needs of others, not their own. So they're really the ones that learn self-abandonment really early on, right. And so there's a really, really interesting set of emotional patterns, thought patterns that come out of this, again, depending on the context and level of what the child experienced, right. But they are generally the ones who need in adulthood, who need a lot of attention. They seek approval from others. They are unable to self-soothe. So this is a skill, part of emotional regulation that they didn't learn. They need a lot of validation.
28:48
These folks tend to work. You'll see this often. Often they tend to work around a lot of people. They like to be around a lot of people, like, for example, they might be in a profession where they're a teacher, right, they felt somehow ignored in childhood. Right, they were always chasing after someone's attention, right, trying to get someone to pay attention to them and most often, if we're going to talk about romantic relationships, they end up selecting partners who are emotionally unavailable. They're used to chasing after that level of approval. So you know, sometimes these folks will appear very clingy, very needy. They'll be the romantic partners that will call you know, every hour, every two hours. You know, are we okay? You didn't say anything this morning. You felt different last night, are you sure? Is there something we should talk about? That need for constant approval is because they have such a deep wound of abandonment. They're looking for reassurance over and over and over. I need to be reassured that you're not going to leave, right that?
Karen Covy Host
30:10
Assured that you're not going to leave, right, that makes sense. Yeah, and what about the other two?
Bev Mitelman Guest
30:18
insecure attachment styles. Let's talk about that. Sure, so the avoidance, the dismissive avoidance, they're on the other side of things. They generally came out of a home where they felt emotionally neglected, right? So let's think about a home where, for example, the parents were very stoic or they were part of you know, a high demand religion Very stoic, right, interesting, right. So there was no emotional attunement. These kids would not have been hugged. There were no. I love you's If they were sad, you know. It's like they learned to be on their own and figure it out yes and so go on, suck it up and figure it out, yeah.
31:05
And so these children generally spend a lot of time alone Dealing with their own emotions. And just to survive, they just represses, they just push all this stuff down. So as adults, it's really no surprise that they value their independence. You know, they're overly self-reliant, they're hyper independent. Anything that threatens their freedom feels like a great threat. They are not good with conflict, so they seek to have a level of harmony in any relationship. That sometimes is unrealistic, because they didn't even learn to have basic conversations where there were disagreements. Disagreements aren't bad, they're just different viewpoints. But to them it's like oh no, there's a conflict coming on. I'm, I'm uncomfortable, I'm going to retreat, okay. Whatever you say, dear, I'm going to my man cave, okay.
32:04
So, there's a retreat there. Right, I'm just going to stop the conflict because I don't have the emotional capacity to deal with it. I don't even know how to start.
Karen Covy Host
32:15
Okay, and so those people? It sounds like they avoid feeling
Bev Mitelman Guest
32:20
Yeah, they avoid feeling. They avoid their own feelings and they avoid yours as well. That's how they keep themselves safe. Okay, right, so we have one side where they are incapable the anxious, preoccupieds of self-soothing. They rely on the connection and the closeness to other people to be able to self soothe, and I'm sure you have a couple of friends in your circle who are like this If something bad happens in their day, they will call you and speak to you about it for an hour, and then call another six friends and talk about the same thing for an hour, and then you'll get a call from the third friend and oh, you've already heard, they spent their whole day talking about this Because they need to talk about it and vent and go over it and go over it.
33:12
That's how they try to actually settle or regulate their nervous system. It's a survival technique. They're just trying to find balance, right, but that's where the neediness comes in. Whereas an avoidant will be very guarded, an avoidant will stonewall If you have a disagreement. They may not answer you for three days. They take space away from other people in order to regulate their nervous system, because they cannot regulate in the presence of someone else. They didn't learn this. They were left alone when they were a child Right.
Karen Covy Host
33:56
What falls in the middle between those two still within the insecure attachment bucket.
Bev Mitelman Guest
34:02
Yes, you asked a great question. So this is the fearful avoidance. Now, the fearful avoidance is the rarest kind of attachment style. It's estimated to be about 7% to 10% of the population. It's the most complex.
34:18
Generally, the fearful avoidant comes out of a home where there was abuse. Now we can talk about. You know, it can be any form of abuse physical, psychological, emotional. For sure it could be sexual, it could be all of the above.
34:38
In this scenario we're talking about a young child, for example, who has a natural love for their caregiver, right? The child, of course, naturally loves the person that they're dependent on for survival, right? So if they're upset about something, they're going to naturally gravitate towards that person for comfort, but at the same time, that person is the one harming them, and so this creates a disorganized pattern in their minds of how to give and receive love, and so that's why sometimes it's called disorganized attachment. So for this child they grow into an adult who is often, in a romantic sense, called the hot and the cold partner. So the partner that says come towards me, I want a hug.
35:35
Okay, I was just kidding. Too close, we're going to take three days apart. We're a little bit too close, no, no, come back towards me, let's spend a week together, and then I need two weeks away from you. They crave that closeness and that love and they're terrified of intimacy. It feels really unsafe, right? Because whenever they got too close to their source of love and childhood they were harmed, and that pattern follows us Now. When I'm talking about patterns, these patterns are deep in our subconscious mind. They're not in our conscious awareness, so someone might, you know, fight me on this and go. I'm not afraid of intimacy and I'm like, okay, you might not realize that you are, but your behavior would indicate that.
Karen Covy Host
36:32
You know I want to jump on that point cause you're talking about behavior and you've said a couple you know many times so far that this is. You know, the child learns how to attach based on what their caregiver did. So what I'm hearing is it is a learned behavior, which to me means if you learned it, you can unlearn it. Or am I missing something?
Bev Mitelman Guest
37:02
No, you're not missing anything at all. You're. So, on the money, it's learned behavior. You said it perfectly, Karen, and yes, what we learn we can unlearn. So this is to be absolutely clear. Everyone has an attachment style. It is not a mental illness, it is not a personality disorder. It's nothing to be diagnosed with. It's a set of patterns that you learned early on for how to interact with others.
Karen Covy Host
37:35
That makes so much sense and I want to dive so much deeper into this. So I want to talk about how the different attachment styles relate to each other, who might be attracted to who, how you handle things If you've identified an attachment style that you or your spouse has that isn't working, and how you can identify your attachment style. So so many more topics to get into, but at this point I think we're going to call it a wrap on part one and for all of those out there who are listening or who are watching, if you want, if you like this conversation, if you want to see the continuation of it, make sure to check out part two and, like the episode, subscribe everywhere you're listening and we'll be back with part two shortly. Thank you.
