Hello and good morning.
Welcome back.
Today we are doing day two.
This is one of the more eye-opening days.
I would love to just take a second to appreciate the fact that you are still here.
You came back,
You pressed play again.
That's not nothing.
That is actually the whole thing.
Consistency is the work and you are already doing it by showing up for yourself.
So today we are going to talk about something that I think is going to shift the way you see yourself.
It might not happen overnight or right away,
But you will have more clarity about who you are and where these patterns come from.
Today we are talking about anxious attachment,
Where it actually comes from,
Why your nervous system does what it does,
And This is the part I really want you to stay with.
Why it was never,
Not for a single second,
Ever,
Ever,
Ever your fault.
Let me introduce you to something called parts work.
It comes from a model called internal family systems developed by Dr.
Richard Schwartz.
If you've ever done therapy,
You might have heard of it.
And it is one of the most clinically supported frameworks for understanding why we do what we do in relationships,
Even when we know better.
Here's the core idea.
So you are not one singular self,
You are made up of parts,
Different aspects of you that each have their own role,
Their own history,
Their own way of trying to keep you,
The individual,
Safe.
And at the center of all of those parts is something called the self.
Calm,
Clear,
Compassionate.
That is the real you.
The one that exists before the anxiety,
Before the spiral,
Before the patterns took over.
Now,
When we experience something painful early in life,
A part of us holds that pain.
We call this the inner child.
The exile,
The part that carries the wound.
And because that wound is so tender and so heavy,
Other parts step in to protect that wound.
I know,
Kind of sad.
These are the protectors.
They are the ones running the reactive behaviors.
The breaking up before you get broken up with,
The chasing,
The people pleasing,
The perfectionism,
The reassurance seeking that never quite fills the cup all the way.
You know what I'm talking about.
Well,
Your protectors are not trying to hurt you.
They are trying to protect that younger part of you that got hurt a long time ago.
They learned their strategies early and they have been loyal to you ever since.
The problem is,
Though,
They are still holding old maps in new territory and those old maps keep leading you somewhere you do not want to go.
Now,
Let me tell you about the science underneath all of this,
Because I want you to understand that what is happening in your body is not weakness.
It's basically neuroscience.
Attachment styles form in early childhood based on how consistently and safely your emotional needs were met by your caregivers.
When love was warm but unpredictable,
Present sometimes and absent other times,
Your nervous system learned something very specific.
It learned that love is uncertain,
That connection could disappear without warning.
And so it developed a strategy.
Stay alert,
Monitor constantly,
Do whatever it takes to keep the connection from breaking.
That is anxious attachment.
It is your nervous system doing exactly what it was trained to do.
It is not a personality type.
It is not who you are.
It is a learned response to an early environment.
And here is the most important thing about learned responses.
They can be unlearned.
That is literally what the 21 days are all about.
I want to share something personal with you here because I think it matters.
My father left before I could speak,
Before I had words,
Before I had any way of making sense of what was happening.
He was the first person who did not choose me.
And my nervous system,
That tiny little nervous system of a baby,
Who could not even talk yet,
Registered that as the very first lesson about love.
Love will leave.
And I carried that lesson into every relationship I ever had without even knowing it.
I chose people who mirrored that familiar feeling,
Not consciously of course,
Not because I wanted to be hurt,
But because my nervous system recognized the feeling of not quite being chosen and called it home.
The younger version of me,
My inner child,
That part that Parts work talks about,
Was still running the show well into my adult life.
That part of me just wanted to feel chosen.
Love.
Even considered,
Held even.
The abandonment wound was so loud,
So present,
So wired into my nervous system that I fed the story without even questioning it.
Of course they will leave.
Of course I have to earn this.
Of course I have to make myself small enough,
Good enough,
Easy enough to keep.
It made complete sense given where I came from.
It made total sense.
But sense is not the same as truth and a story that made sense when you were five years old does not have to be the story you live at 25 or 35 or 45.
We get to choose.
We get to rewrite our story.
Now I want to talk about something that might feel a little tender,
The abandonment wound.
Research on early abandonment and attachment shows that when a primary attachment figure is not present during critical development stages,
The nervous system registers that as threat to survival.
Not metaphorically speaking,
Literally.
For a child,
Connection is survival.
So the absence of that connection,
Whether physical or emotional,
Wires the brain to be on high alert for signs of loss in every relationship that follows.
This is why you might notice that you are not just anxious in romantic relationships,
You might be anxious about friendships pulling away,
About people going quiet,
About not being responded to quickly enough.
Because the wound is not about the specific person in front of you,
The wound is older than them.
It was there long before they even arrived.
And here is what I need you to really hear.
The fact that your nervous system learned to be hypervigilant about connection.
Does not mean you are broken.
It means you were a child who needed safety and had to figure out how to create it in an environment that did not always provide it.
You were doing the best possible thing with what you had.
Your protectors showed up and they worked hard.
They kept you going.
They deserve to be thanked for that.
Okay so moving on to the somatic practice.
I want you to close your eyes if you are somewhere safe to do that.
Take a slow breath in.
And I want you to bring to mind a younger version of yourself.
Maybe five years old,
Maybe eight,
Maybe 12.
Just let them appear.
Notice what they look like.
So close your eyes,
Notice what they look like.
Notice where they are.
What they are feeling.
Now I want you to place one hand on your heart and say,
Either out loud or you can say it silently,
I see you.
I know you worked so hard to keep me safe.
The way you learn to chase,
To shrink.
To seek reassurance.
That was very clever.
That was survival.
You did what you had to do.
And I am so grateful for that.
And I want you to know that you do not have to work so hard anymore.
I am here now.
I am the adult.
And I am going to take care of us from here on out.
I want you to take a deep breath in,
Let whatever comes up,
Come up.
Emotion is not weakness here.
It is only information.
It is only your nervous system beginning to feel safe enough to let something move through it.
Okay,
And your journal prompt today is think about the relationship where you spiral the most and ask yourself honestly,
What are you afraid of losing?
Is it the person or is it the feeling they give you?
The feeling of being chosen,
Of mattering,
Of not being left.
And then ask,
Where did you first learn that that feeling was something you had to earn?
I hope that helped.
Anxious attachment is not a life sentence,
You guys.
It is not a personality type you were born with.
It is a survival strategy you developed in response to real experiences.
Your protectors were doing their job.
Your inner child was doing their job.
And now you are here on day two doing something different.
You are not too much,
You are not broken,
You can,
And you are someone who learned that love was uncertain.
And you adapted beautifully,
Cleverly,
In the only way you knew how.
Now we learn a new way.
I will see you on day three with so much love,
Haley.
