Insecure: Unpacking Attachment Styles The Refined Collective Podcast

Relationship coach and expert Amanda Blair Hopkins is on the podcast this week for the second time ever! She is a previous guest on episode 36: How to Pursue Wholeness Before Pursuing a Relationship. She is a relationship coach for Lacy Phillips’s To Be Magnetic (who is a TRC Podcast guest as well: episode 46: How to be 100% in Your Worth.
 
It’s in the first few years of our lives that we learn how to relate and attach to the people we love. We learn patterns and behaviors that become so familiar to us they can be hard to identify. There are multiple different “attachment” styles in relationships. Do you know which one you are? Amanda unpacks what the four main attachment styles, and we both share personal stories as examples of our own. 
 
We also compromise in real time about the matching tattoo we’re going to get!
 
 
What Are Attachment Styles?
John Bowlby, author of Attachment and Loss, found the way you attach to your parents/caregivers in childhood is the way you attach to your romantic partners later in life. Essentially, your attachment style is built on what you learned love is. Changing your attachment style is possible, but it takes hard work and consistency. “Realizing what your attachment style is offers you a lot of freedom. It gives you a way to remember that at your core you are whole. You are love. You are divine. That idea that you could be broken is false.” Don’t let your type become an excuse not to grow.   
Breaking Down The 4 Attachment Styles
Anxious (Insecure) When you were a baby through 14 years old, it was the way your parents attuned to you. They weren’t always meeting your needs, so you learned that love is unstable and untrustworthy.  If you’re anxious, work through this exercise here. Avoidant (Insecure) The parent wasn’t getting their own needs met, so they didn’t meet their kid’s needs. The kid shuts down to their needs so they shut down their emotions to avoid rejection. They keep love at arm’s length to avoid being engulfed by it. Ex: They’ll say they’re very independent because they learned early on to shut down their needs. In relationships, they’ll have walls up, fail to be vulnerable, and they may come on super strong in the beginning and then as soon as it gets real, they pull away. Anxious/Avoidant (Insecure) A combination of Anxious and Avoidant. Secure Parents were attuned to the child, so their needs were met and there was a trust there. Then, in adulthood, they trust that people mean what they say and that they will do right by them.  
The Healing Journey
“It is progress, not perfect. You have to look for the progress because that is what will help you along this path.” We talk about how sometimes you have to really run into the fire to learn your lesson, instead of going through a bunch of minor lessons that never really stick. Running into the fire could be an important part of your healing process.   
6 Practical Ways To Become Secure
Read Attachedand do more research on attachment theory. Take inventory of your last five relationships: what happened, how you felt, what you feel you did, what you feel they did. Notice any patterns and moments when your attachment style activated in those relationships. Walk through this process with a coach (Amanda takes one on one clients!) If you’re anxious, start speaking up, communicating your needs, understanding your boundaries, and holding your boundaries. If you’re avoidant, get out there, get seen, be vulnerable with friends or online. Support all of this work with the energetic work Amanda teaches with To Be Magnetic.  
Feeling Stuck?
Work with someone along the process—we were never meant to go through life alone. We all need guidance.  “If you have hit a wall, get someone to help you climb over it or see that there’s no wall there, or climb underneath it or walk over it. That help will get you so much further, because you