Mark Groves
speaker
137 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard Dec 2024
Mark Groves’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Your attachment system is a radar that is looking for safety and security in your relationships. Not just romantic, every relationship in your life. It's asking the question, am I safe? And am I safe to be me? It's really about not your relationship to the other person, but more about the space between you and the other person.
so anxiously attach people when there's too much space that creates fear and for avoidantly attach people when there's not enough space that creates fear we like bring people into our experience who trigger us in the exact way that requires us to heal and resolve the things from our childhood And we call it chemistry.
Whenever you tolerate someone who's ambivalent about you or inconsistent, etc., you have to become somebody who believes they're worthy of being ambivalent about. Everything we choose to keep in our life, we have to match with an internal narrative.
The most thriving relationships prioritize the individuals and then the togetherness. When you actually recognize that your partner can leave you in any moment, she chooses to be with me. So how do I continue to be someone that is worthy of that choice?
I think attachment is such a simple framework for sort of understanding the ways that human systems move together. And so when people start to learn about them, they're like, oh my gosh, that makes so much sense. Now I make sense. The work is, I mean, was really more popularized by Sue Johnson, who... recently passed away. So God bless her and the work that she did.
But it's looking at the original studies looked at a mom interacting with a kid in a room. And what would happen is mom would leave the room and mom would come back. and they'd see how the baby would respond to mom. So first one, mom leaves the room, mom comes back and baby reunites with mom and then doesn't leave mom's side. So that's anxious attachment.
So like underlying fear, I'm afraid that if you leave, you might not come back. Second one, mom leaves, mom comes back, baby reunites with mom, hey, what's up, goes back to playing, secure attachment. Last one, mom leaves, mom comes back, baby's like, ah, I didn't even really notice you were gone.
like no big deal but what happens physiologically for that child is it's acting the same way as the anxious attached child so heart rate etc are up and and that's avoidant attachment so i always frame to people that and the third type of attachment well i guess we would go forth is disorganized so you might like pivot between anxious and avoidance and we might know that one as an adult when you're dating and you're pursuing somebody and then
You're like, I like you, I like you, I like you. And then they're like, I like you. And you're like, ah, I'm not really sure. Might need a little bit of space. Yeah, so I always frame it as like your attachment system is a radar that is looking for safety and security in your relationships, not just romantic, every relationship in your life. And it's essentially just assessing that constantly.
It's asking the question, am I safe and am I safe to be me? And I always say to people, it's a lot simpler to understand that it's really about not your relationship to the other person, but more about the space between you and the other person. So anxiously attached people, when there's too much space, that creates fear.
And for avoidantly attached people, when there's not enough space, that creates fear. And really, these are just two different ways that people adapted to unreliable relationships or inconsistent parents.
And the interesting, and I know this is deeply part of your work, is looking at the overlay of the nervous system to that, which is that for anxiously attached people, they have a hard time self-regulating, and for avoidantly attached people, they have a hard time co-regulating. So all of this just overlays, and when I look at it, I just think it's such a simple
way to understand your behavior patterns, and also that you can change it. I think that's actually a big hope message for everybody. quite determined when you're young, but you can change it as an adult.
Yeah. You know, the, the hope for the anxious person is that they won't over pursue, you know, like so much part of the way that they learned how to navigate relationships as little ones is this, like, if you're okay, I'm okay. Like if, if I know that you're here, then I'm good. So really they're, They're an outwardly focus. They're focused on everybody else.
And as adults, we might know this as like hypervigilance. We might have a hyperattunement. I would say that people go into coaching and therapeutic spaces. We're likely more anxiously attached.
Right. Yeah, and even I kind of see it as, like, you're monetizing your survival strategy. You're, like, getting paid for the thing you were naturally developed, really, for survival, you know, developed this really incredible skill to be able to be hypervigilant, notice facial expressions, and predict behavior.
And in a way, we're sort of, like, psychically entering the space of other people to try to be predictive, to minimize the risk of being abandoned or rejected. The hope is, of course, that we can learn how to not just act upon our feelings. But this can be really hard. This is where practices like somatic therapy, breath work, meditation, they all extend the pause. You know that quote?
I think it's from Viktor Frankl. That's like the space between stimulus responses, a choice. And if you manage to change that choice, you could change your life. I think like the, he said it more eloquently, but the space gets extended through practices of mindfulness, through the ability to, oh, I'm activated because I have a higher predisposition to anxious attachment.
Especially if I'm my wife's more prone to avoidance, of course the the joke of the universe, but it's like I Know that previously when I was like 19 or 20, I would just send the text I would just do the thing I would never think about it But now as an adult I can like sense when that's coming up for me Bring that forward because we have a lot of safety in our relationship so
noticing what is your predisposition in terms of your attachment style, and then being able to have strategies or practices that allow you to observe what's coming up for you first. And a good therapist, a good coach, a good friend, a good hug can really help with regulating our systems so we don't over text the person we're interested in.
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