Joe Hudson

They're present and showing up for the relationship, but you don't really have a sense of kind of how they're thinking or what they're feeling and or they...

move away, right?

They leave a relationship before intimacy deepens, or they hyper-focus on flaws in someone else to, you know, be the reason why this relationship won't work, to prevent closeness entirely, where if we want to say like the opposite, so to speak, the anxious, right, will be the person who's pursuing, hyper-vigilant, sensing any shift in tone, worried if you're upset with me or not, and trying to pursue to maintain that connection because they are

In contrast to the avoidant who never had the connection, right, an anxious attachment had parts of it in certain moments.

So that's what we then become vigilant to, right?

Any indication that the connection that might be available might leave.

So disorganized, to kind of wrap that one in there, that would be when the parent, right, this person who we need safety and security from, when they are the source of our abuse or our neglect.

So then we have kind of mixed messaging, right?

The person that I'm quite literally wired to connect to is also the person that's abusing me or that's like neglectful of me.

So that then is a bit of a, we could think about as a combination in a sense of the avoidant versus the

anxious attachment where it's kind of like we desperately want closeness, but we're desperately afraid of it at the same time.

And honestly, I think secure attachment is few and far between.

I think there are fewer adults than you would see in those other attachment styles that are securely attached, again, because few of us in our lineages, right, had

parents, grandparents that had these tools and skills themselves.

But again, I want to be clear, secure attachment can be created through new, safe, secure relationships.

And of course, through us changing and learning how to be safe and securely attached ourselves.

I think all change happens with the awareness that we continue to speak of, right?

Learning how to be present to ourselves and our lives, learning to understand what habits we are carrying into our relationships in particular, maybe what beliefs or identities are driving those habits, right?

For a lot of us, we become the caretaker in an adult relationship because, again, there was...

safety in worrying about or appeasing other people in childhood.