Fearful/Disorganized Attachment 101

This week, Alex continues her attachment style series and dives into fearful, or disorganized, attachment. She discusses why people with this attachment style can crave intimacy while simultaneously fearing it, how childhood instability can shape adult relationships, and why chaos can sometimes feel safer than healthy love. Enjoy!

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  And my DMs were so flooded, guys. Everything was ranging from like, "Sorry, what? Like, what even is an attachment style? Is that different from a love language?" And then all the way to like, "Alex, please explain in detail what the hell it means to have anxious verse avoidant attachment." So, to date, we have done an entire episode on anxious attachment. We then went to avoidant attachment, which has finally led us here today. We gather here today. What is that Nicole Kidman thing? That's us right now. It is officially time to tackle

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  fearful slash disorganized attachment. And I'm going to be honest, this is probably the hardest attachment style to tackle because it is really, really complicated. It's like, it's like a two-for-one situation, okay? And if you have fearful attachment, most people think you're either needy, AKA you could fall into the anxious category, or you're really cold, AKA avoidant, and so you fall into that category. But actually, you're both. If you have fearful attachment, you are high anxiety,

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  and you are also high avoidance. So you kind of got like a dual package situation going on when it comes to attachment styles. You basically crave intimacy desperately, but you are terrified of it because you believe it will eventually destroy you. So daddy gang, if you are feeling like you are stuck in this like non-stop agonizing loop in your relationships of, "Come here, I love you, oh my God, get the hell away from me, you're ruining my life," you probably just have fearful attachment. It's also called disorganized attachment, and it can be truly the most exhausting,

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  chaotic relationship dynamic. So, let's start with, how did you even get here, right? How does one have fearful attachment? In order to understand this, we have to go back to the childhood, guys. So, for comparison, people with secure attachment, their parents were a safe haven to them, right? When they cried, they got comfort. But for fearful attached people, your childhood home was essentially a minefield to you. And in psychology, they say that this

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  attachment comes from fright without solution. AKA, what that means is, the very people who were supposed to protect you and to keep you safe, your parents or your caregivers or whoever raised you, were also the source of your fear, your chaos, and your instability. And so, some people's houses may have kind of fit into this like Jekyll and Mr. Hyde parent situation. What that looks like is, one minute, let's say, your mom or your dad was so warm and loving and even smothering you with affection, right? And then the next minute, they were screaming, cold, or just completely absent. And you kind of never knew which version of your parent you were getting

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  when you walked through the front door. Some people also may relate more to the overwhelmed or the scary parent. Maybe there was addiction in the house, or really intense fighting. Maybe there was physical abuse. And so, essentially, to survive, you had to become hyper-aware of your surroundings at all times. And so you kind of learned to read these like really micro-expressions of your parents' faces, just to know if you were safe. Another environment to grow up in could have been the role reversal. So, this basically means you had to grow up way too fast. You had to essentially parent your parent. Now, some of these situations may

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  sound a little familiar to avoidance as well. If you guys watched the avoidant attachment style episode, some of these, you could be like, "Oh, I feel like that kind of was avoidance, too." And I think the easiest way to understand the difference between avoidant and fearful childhoods is to look at basically how the parents reacted to the child's distress, okay? So, someone who has primarily avoidant attachment, as a child, they learned that their emotions are basically useless. Whereas fearful attachment is when children learn that their emotions and

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  their caregivers are dangerous. So for fearful children, the defining element of a fearfully attached person's childhood is fear without resolution. So, when a child is scared, their biological instinct is to run to their caregiver for safety, right? You go to your mom, you go to your dad, you go to your grandmother, whoever raised you, right? But then what happens when the caregiver is the source of fear? So, imagine how complicated that is, right? The child's brain essentially is short-circuiting because they want to run towards the parent for safety,

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  but then they are like, "Oh, wait, no, I think I need to run away from the parent to survive." And so that literally leaves you nowhere to run as a child, because you're a child. You don't have money, you don't have any other circumstances, you can't choose where you live, you can't choose who your caregivers are, you're stuck. And so, you learn from a very young age that closeness equals danger. And so, someone with fearful attachment, their caregiver growing up might have been very erratic, may have been frightening, or maybe that parent was also like highly traumatized themselves from their childhood. But this can look like physical and emotional

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  abuse, right? It can, it can present as, you know, this parent may have severe addiction, they may have untreated mental illness, they may have highly volatile, like hot and cold parenting. And so, the implicit message this child receives at such a young age is, "I love you, but I might hurt you. I might scream at you, and I may disappear at any moment." And also emphasis on like, the "I love you" part is also questionable. Which then obviously has this child in constant survival mode, in their home, in the place that you're supposed to feel the safest. And so the child is forced into a state of just hyper vigilance at all times. They cannot

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  shut down their emotions, which again, an avoidant child, that's exactly what an avoidant child and then an adult does, right? An avoidant child, they just shut down their emotions. Fearfully attached, they can't shut down their emotions because the environment is too unpredictable and too dangerous to just ignore your emotions. So they must constantly scan, "I'm looking at my parents' face, I'm looking for signs of danger, I'm reading the room, I'm listening, my parents are in the kitchen, is the fight gonna begin? Oh my God, I hear what's hap-" like, you're just constantly in fight or flight and on guard. And so, fast forward to when you are an adult,

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  the result of this is that someone with fearful attachment, they crave love desperately because they never obviously got a stable version of it, but they view intimacy as a trap where they will inevitably get hurt, or controlled, or abandoned, right? And so, also to clarify, an avoidant child, again, like we talked about last episode, was taught to deal with things alone. A fearful child was taught that the people who love them are inherently unsafe. Like, the shutdown mechanisms

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  can maybe look similar from the outside, but internally, it's a complete different situation going on.

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  Okay. So the first one is you believe I am inherently defective and unlovable. Because your parents' love was conditional and chaotic and you internalized the belief that something is fundamentally wrong with you. There has to be something wrong with me. You think if my own parents couldn't love me consistently, why would a partner? Right? And then the second kind of core wound for your self-esteem is you believe people will always betray and abandon me because you don't trust anyone, right? Why would you? And if someone treats you well, you don't immediately think, oh, my gosh,

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  like, I really deserve this. Like, this is amazing. I'm turning things around. You think, what is their angle? Wait, wait a second. Like, what's, what's the trick? What's the get? When is the other shoe going to drop? This can't be real. And this can lead to this horrible cycle of self-sabotage. You think you're protecting yourself by pushing people away before they can reject you. But really, you're just proving your own bad thoughts right. And so you break your own heart to save someone else the trouble. And then you sit there crying, thinking, see, I knew I was unlovable. Of course, it didn't work out.

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  And so everything that I was reading in my research and, and talking to friends who've experienced this, like, it's exhausting and it can be really, really lonely. And it can make you honestly feel like completely crazy, right? And so let's talk about what it's like to date as a fearfully attached person, right? So we kind of just talked about the childhood and then you have these self-esteem things going on understandably because of what your caregivers put you through. So when you have fearful attachment, the best analogy I have seen explain this kind

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  of for your romantic life is that it feels like you are driving with one foot slammed on the gas and then the other is slamming on the brake. And you're just constantly go, you're like, wait, no, go, stop, go, stop. And you're constantly caught in this like painful tug of war between a desperate craving for intimacy. Let's go, let's go. And then this intense primal terror of it and being like, wait, stop, we're getting, oh, my God, no, we can't do this. We can't do this.

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  Again, understandably, very exhausting. And so the internal conflict, let's talk about how that kind of can play out and what does that look like for someone with fearful attachment? One example is the come here kind of tactic. And then the go away cycle. It's like, come here, go away. And a lot of fear fuls experience this. Basically, this is like the hallmark pattern of fearful attachment. You usually start dating someone and you're so excited, right? There's so much excitement, but the moment the relationship shifts from just like casual flirting to real emotional intimacy, a literal like switch flips in your brain.

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  And to like, go back to the driving the car analogy, it's basically like you start with the gas phase, right? You're like, here we go. You feel lonely. So you're craving connection and you're going to pursue someone passionately. You're like, oh, my gosh, I think I found this person. And then you enter the slamming the brakes phase, which is the moment the person you're seeing opens up or expresses any serious, you know, interest in commitment. Your subconscious registers that closeness as danger. And so you, obviously, you feel suffocated. You, you know, the hyper focus is too much. So then you start to hyper focus on their flaws or you experience, you know,

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  almost like immediate sudden loss of feelings. That's also, that can happen. And so what do you do? You press on the brakes so hard and you just pull away or you ghost them. But then you, after that, are also susceptible to what they basically refer to as this like panic phase, which is if someone matches your energy, if you do this to someone you're seeing,

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  and they walk away too, your fear of abandonment immediately is triggered. And you suddenly flip back to like high anxiety. You're like, wait, wait, I was abandoning you. Wait, why are you abandoning me now? And then you're chasing them and you're begging for reassurance and you're wanting them back. So if you were just like on a date and you're like, I, I need to, this is getting too serious. And I pull away and they're like, okay.

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  You're like, wait, wait, no, you're not going to fight for me. You're not going to, like, there's so much getting triggered in that moment. Another thing that is really prevalent when dating as a fearfully attached person is because your childhood environment was unpredictable, your nervous system kind of like grew accustomed to this baseline of stress and drama and trauma. And so fast forward to adulthood.

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  You essentially unconsciously equate that really high-stress emotional roller coaster with passion, right? And you can basically mistake chaos for chemistry. Another dynamic at play is that fearful avoidance kind of possess like this very incredible sensitive radar for shifts in their partner's mood or behavior. Because again, remember I mentioned we were talking about childhood. It's like, this was a survival skill learned in childhood. The, like, you may have gotten so good that you knew the sound of the creaks in the floorboard for which person. And you're like, oh, my God, this is about to happen.

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  Or you knew the sound in your mother's voice when it was gonna start, or the drinking, or your father, when it would become, like, whatever it was, like, and most people, if they were in that room with you, would be like, we, what, literally, what are you talking about? And you're like, oh, no, you didn't see that on his face? Like, the lip quiver, or the eye twit, like, whatever it is. You are so acutely aware of all of these little things. And so then, all of a sudden, you get into adulthood, right? And so in a relationship, you bring that into adulthood. This can manifest as just, you have this extreme hypervigilance. But unfortunately, a lot of it is now potentially misreading cues.

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  So, an example is like, I don't know, let's say your partner sounds they're a little tired on the phone. You call them, they're a little tired, maybe you guys are texting, they use a different emoji than normal, or maybe they need an evening to themselves because they're just like burnt out from work, whatever it is. Your brain instantly jumps to the worst-case scenario. Oh, my God, they're falling out of love with me. Or, oh, my God, they're about to dump me. It's over. And so you're constantly looking for evidence that the relationship is failing so you can protect yourself before it happens. And that is where the self-sabotage really begins, because your core belief, again, is that everyone eventually leaves or betrays you.

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  So you are often gonna destroy a good relationship from the inside out to try to regain that sense of control. When meanwhile, the emoji was just him being like, oh, this is like a cute new emoji that I've never noticed, let me send this. And it's like, you're misreading it sometimes, right? It's like, your subconscious logic is telling you, if I break up with them first, or if I cheat, or if I pick a massive fight and I make them leave me, at least I'm the one controlling the ending. They didn't get to reject the real me. They didn't get to hurt me. This isn't as dangerous if I'm in control.

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  If I force the hand, if I make the big move, then everything's good, right? And that, I think, is the most heartbreaking part of this attachment style. It's like, you're breaking your own heart because it feels safer to a fearful avoidant than trusting someone else with the power to break it. Again, understandably, you don't wanna re-experience what your caregivers put you through. Also, something that's interesting, and maybe is like a little bit of an unexpected outcome that fearfully attached experience often, is

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  while, yes, fearful avoidance, you know, fearfully attached people will run away from healthy, secure partners in those moments. And they can be more known to stay in toxic relationships for a long time. And that is because this extreme, intense, dangerous environment you grew up in childhood has affected your self-esteem. And again, you believe you are inherently defective. This is not your fault. This is, again, a product of your childhood. And I think on top of that, something that I was reading in my research is like,

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  the constant highs and lows of a toxic relationship do obviously match your internal blueprint of love, right? Again, not your fault. This is exactly what you were shown when you were younger. And so it makes it really, really difficult then to break that trauma bond, essentially, that you have with this toxic person. Which I do wanna talk a little bit more about for a second, because, first of all, no one should have to suffer an abusive or toxic relationship. That is a fact. But what is so hard in this situation is that when a fearfully attached person is in a toxic relationship,

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  they aren't just unhappy, but they are caught in this, like, addictive, agonizing, psychological loop. That I know, even if you don't have fearful attachment, that happens to people. And then there's another layer for these fearfully attached people, because their childhood taught them that love is chaotic, painful, and inconsistent. So a toxic relationship, it can actually feel like home to their nervous system, right? Like, it literally can trigger a chemical, and in this, like, emotional storm inside of this person's body, that is really incredibly difficult to escape, because nature versus nurture.

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  It's like, yes, we can all look back and be like, oh, I recognize, I didn't like this in my childhood, but I remember I said this in a different episode. It's like, sometimes we crave the familiar over what actually is good for us. Because familiar is, from day one, you came out of the womb, you're in this world, you're experiencing it, this is what you grew up around, this is the normal for you. So anything that goes against the grain, anything in life like that is always gonna be a little uncomfortable. So for fearfully attached people, going against the grain would be accepting love and experiencing healthiness. And a toxic relationship, they're like, oh, I got this. Because as we know, in a toxic relationship, the partner is usually hot and cold.

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  They shower you with affection, they're love bombing you, and then suddenly, they become cruel and withholding, right? But this is, again, so similar to what you experienced in childhood, that you actually kind of know immediately how to survive. You know how to placate with, like, you're like, oh, this environment? This is, this is home, this, I've got this. And so the result of when a toxic partner gaslights, or blames, or mistreats a fearfully attached person, the fearful avoidance core shame, it just instantly activates, because your self-esteem is already low.

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  So you don't think, wow, this person is treating me really terribly. You actually think, okay, if I were just better, if I was quieter, if I was more attractive, or more patient, they wouldn't treat me this way. And so you kind of internalize their bad behavior as proof of your defectiveness. And you feel this deep, suffocating sense of worthlessness. And the amount of empathy I wanna give to anyone listening right now

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  who can relate to anything I am saying is endless, because it's so much. This is understandably so painful, it's so complicated, and here's the catch, and why I think empathy is so important for anyone, if you have friends, or family members, or yourself, if you are a fearfully attached person. This is the catch if you are in a toxic situation. If you stay in this toxic relationship, you feel like

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  you are slowly losing your mind, and you're losing your dignity and your sense of self, right? But if you leave, your primal fear of abandonment immediately triggers, understandably, this panic that is so severe. And so because both options feel like, basically, they're gonna destroy you, you feel completely trapped, and you feel paralyzed by this, you're, you feel this terrifying helplessness, right? If either way, I'm losing. And it's such a mindfuck that a toxic relationship can feel safer to your subconscious than a healthy one, right?

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  In a healthy relationship, you're terrified that you will eventually ruin it, or that they will discover that you are unlovable, and they're gonna leave you. And that, though, is so unknown. Again, the unknown of that is so scary, because you've never experienced it. So that's almost more terrifying than a toxic relationship. Because in a toxic relationship, in your brain, you're like, but the worst has already happened. Because the relationship is already broken, you kinda don't have to worry in your head about losing a perfect thing. The chaos is miserable, yes, but it's predictable.

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  And that predictability, it does give you a false sense of control. And so I hope even just me describing that gives some clarity, again, to anyone experiencing it, or anyone that has anyone in their life that is going through this. Because I can imagine, as a friend, it's really, really hard when you're like, I literally don't know how to help this person. It's like, you are battling decades and decades and decades of this person's literal, internal nervous system, and their upbringing, working against. You just be like, but just go with the healthy guy, just be happy. Like, babe, that is, that's not even almost an option in their head,

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  because this, this feels like they're finally in control for the first time in their life. They understand what an abusive situation looks like, and finally, they could actually be in control of it. And so I also think it's really important to clarify that, like, breaking a trauma bond, breaking a trauma bond when you have a fearful, avoidant attachment style is one of the hardest things you will ever do in your life. Because your brain is literally wired to associate chaos with survival. So leaving feels like you are willingly just like stepping off a cliff without a parachute. And so to just get out, you can't just rely on like, ah, I feel ready.

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  Your friends can't help you make the jump and be like, alright, we're gonna pack all your stuff, like, we've got this, no.

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• 33:58Speaker 00

  Also to clarify, I obviously am not in any way clarified to then give advice on the next steps. And therapy truly for this is the most important gift that you could ever give yourself. As I've said in all of these attachment episodes, I also understand if therapy is not an option for some people listening. I don't want to like leave you hanging and you're like, okay, so I'm just in this forever. So I did some research, obviously do your own research. I talked with people who have experienced this. I will offer this obviously in this episode, but please know this is not even, this is not a full solve.

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  But from what I understand, it is really important to find a way to shift from feeling to observing. And what I mean by that is you have to stop trying to analyze whether they really love you or did they mean to hurt you? Intention does not change impact. And so you have to start keeping basically a private digital maybe journal. I would suggest digital, don't do handwritten because you can't lock that. This person could find it, they could read it and use it against you. Like literally get a locked digital journal and just start writing down facts. Write down exactly what happened that day.

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  No excuses, just write down the actual fact. Today, they ignored me for 10 hours, called me crazy. When I asked why, they showed up at my house and brought me dinner. And then we started eating dinner and then they stopped talking to me.

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  When your brain starts craving that high again, right? You just read the list of cold, hard facts. And, and as you keep building just facts, facts, facts, you, it hopefully can start to help you just bring you back to reality a little bit, right? Like, oh, this, this is the fact, this is exactly what happened for 10 hours, this happened. Now, obviously toxic relationships thrive in the dark. And because fearful avoidance carries so much shame, a lot of times they hide the truth from their friends and their family. And so my advice is I would really, really try to pick one or two safe, nonjudgmental people and just tell them the truth.

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  Tell them the truth, the absolute truth, right? I am in a trauma bond. I, I want to leave, but my brain is telling me I cannot. And I need you to just hold on to reality for me when I start wavering. And also I just need you to be supportive. I don't know how I'm gonna get out of it. I don't know when I'm gonna get out of it. I just need you to be supportive.

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  And then, you know, you cannot heal a trauma bond while still taking hits of the drug. And so low contact or just being friends to anyone watching, like, I can say this for a fact. That does not work. That does not work at all, even if you're not fearfully attached. It does not work if you got out of a toxic relationship and you're like, but we could still, we could still, you know, be somewhat friends. It's not gonna work. And so as a fearful avoidant, in order to actually break away from this, you have to literally block them on every single platform, on your phone, on social media, email, Venmo, like all of it.

• 37:29Speaker 00

  You can't seek closure. A toxic partner will use a closure conversation to just pull you right back in. You have to let your silence and your exit be your closure. And I would also say just trying to prepare when the day comes. Like when you first cut contact with this person, your nervous system, you need to just prepare yourself. It is probably going to go into absolute shock. Your brain is going to just scream that you made a mistake and that you will be alone forever.

• 38:01Speaker 00

  And from what I've researched, this is called the extinction burst, which I guess makes sense, AKA like the intense spike in behavior that happens right before an addiction finally breaks. It's like the pipe is bursting, right? So you almost have to expect the panic, expect it. So when it hits, you're not gonna run back to them. You're gonna be like, oh, everyone talks about this. The minute that you stop using or you stop in the relationship, you're like, this is going to be some of the most excruciating discomfort I've ever felt in my life to the point where it to me in the moment is feeling like I'm going to die. And you just have to sit in it.

• 38:46Speaker 00

  It really, it seems like time is the thing that is going to also really help wrap yourself in a heavy blanket. Okay, go take a cold shower. Call any of those reality anchors that you have as friends that are like, tell me the story again. Come over and read me my facts, read the facts of what he's done to me.

• 39:06Speaker 00

  Those people will be so key in the moment where you decide to leave. Because eventually, the wave will pass. Even though it doesn't feel like it will, I promise you, it will pass.

• 39:21Speaker 00

  And understandably, I think the hardest part of leaving for a fearful avoidant isn't actually losing the person that they were in the relationship with. It's losing the potential of who they could have been. You now have to mourn the dream of the relationship that you wanted and that you were telling yourself this could one day be. And you have to accept the reality of the relationship that you actually had.

• 39:56Speaker 00

  And that obviously will take, it could take a lot of time.

• 40:02Speaker 00

  I think what's hard is everyone is so judgmental until you are the one in it. Right? We always hear that like, oh, you don't get it until you're in it. But like, when you leave a trauma bond, you will feel an overwhelming sense of emptiness. That is a fact. And it is so important to understand that that emptiness is not a sign that you made a mistake. It is simply the absence of chaos, actually. Peace feels incredibly empty to a nervous system that is so used to war. Right? You're like, why is it quiet? Why is, wait, wait, where, where is the, when is the, what, what's happening?

• 40:47Speaker 00

  And if you are a fearful avoidant, this has been since your childhood. So you're gonna feel empty, you're gonna, you're gonna feel lonely almost. Decades of training, you basically have to unlearn. And that is going to be really hard, really, really hard.

• 41:04Speaker 00

  So I would say you have to give yourself time to just get used to the quiet and, and give yourself grace through this entire process. Because it's going to be really uncomfortable. And I know that's a lot, and I know it's very heavy. And changing a fearful avoidant attachment style, it's not about just flipping a switch, guys, or just forcing yourself to suddenly be a different person. None of these attachment styles are. And so you're like, oh, wait, I want to, I want it to reload. It's like, oh, this is, this is about to be a whole hardware shift right now, babe. Like, we gotta give it time.

• 41:49Speaker 00

  And, and it could, it could maybe fail and you have to restart it again, right? It's like, not to use that analogy, but like, it is kind of accurate where it's like, this thing could, it could overheat while it's trying to reboot, that you're like, oh, my God, it just crashed? Like, you have to literally look at it like that. This isn't just like a, oh, I think I'm gonna change it, like, no.

• 42:10Speaker 00

  And so in psychology, they call this earning secured attachment. Basically, your brain learned to be fearful, to survive your past. So I'm telling you, it can learn to be secure, to enjoy your future. It can, but you've got to be patient. Again, you didn't build this attachment style in a week. You're not going to heal it in a week. There will be days you accidentally slip into old habits. I think the most important thing that like, people are just so hard on themselves, understandably. You may want to run away from trying to solve this, or you're gonna panic, like, no, it's not failure, that's literally recovery.

• 42:56Speaker 00

  I think forgiving yourself when you mess up is the ultimate act of love that you can give yourself. Because you are about to go on a journey that is, it's almost harder to do this than to stay in this cycle, right? I also want to acknowledge that when you do start to unpack your attachment style, and you start to kind of become aware of what has caused you to be the way you are.

• 43:21Speaker 00

  This, I think this is important to say, guys, like, it is completely normal to feel a massive wave of anger or grief, or whatever it is you're feeling, right? Because even in, in doing this little series, it's like,

• 43:39Speaker 00

  I've realized that the more you become lucid of your childhood and what happened, and how it has affected you now as an adult,

• 43:49Speaker 00

  it can feel like betrayal. You look back at your broken relationships or your anxiety, the self sabotage you've put yourself through, maybe your career struggles. And you realize, when you get underneath it and you go back to your childhood and you look at your attachment style, you're like, oh, wait, I didn't, I didn't choose this. I was given a really fucked up hand by the people who were supposed to teach me how to navigate the world, who were supposed to love me, who were supposed to take care of me and keep me safe. Why couldn't they do that? How could they do this to me?

• 44:27Speaker 00

  And so grieving your childhood, that's going to be a lot emotionally and very heavy.

• 44:37Speaker 00

  But eventually, as we always talk about here on Call Her Daddy, eventually, and this is why I'm so happy we did this series. It's like, you will need to find a way to move from, why is this happening to me? To, okay, what do I do now?

• 45:00Speaker 00

  What am I gonna do? There's something so powerful in the moment that you decide to step out of victim mentality. And to clarify, I'm not saying you're downplaying the pain of what has happened to you and how messed up the circumstances were, absolutely not.

• 45:15Speaker 00

  I'm not saying you're even saying like, oh, that wasn't a big deal, or like, you should just get over it. No, but instead, what you're doing is you're making a huge statement when you decide to be like, okay, so what am I gonna do about it? You're basically reclaiming your independence. You're looking at the people who hurt you in your childhood and you're saying, you had the power to ruin my past and my childhood, but I refuse to let you control and dictate and influence and have power over my future. I'm gonna take it from here. I got this one.

• 45:52Speaker 00

  And so there is something really empowering about that.

• 45:59Speaker 00

  Terrifying. I mean, I feel like the next, I feel like the next episode inevitably has to be like, how to not resent your parents? That feels like, I'm like, okay, so we did all the, and guys, I was gonna write an entire episode on secure attachment, and then I was researching it and I was like, no one needs to hear this. It's actually just gonna piss all of us off. No one needs to, listen, the goal is to reach secure attachment, but I don't need to do an entire episode on, here's the gist. Securely attached people had extremely positive childhoods where their parents essentially, like, if they were crying, they held them.

• 46:43Speaker 00

  If they were struggling, they were there. It doesn't mean the parent was perfect, but it allowed the child to know that they lived in a safe world and that they were loved and their emotions mattered. And so that doesn't mean every moment this parent was a hero, but for the most part, this young child was constantly being met with energy that was filling them to understand, okay, I like this place, I'm a happy person, I trust people, I want to engage with people. Why wouldn't I trust you? They go in more with open arms. Now, that's not to say that as you progress in life, things can't happen to you that impact your attachment style.

• 47:25Speaker 00

  But do secure attachment style people sometimes experience jealousy in relationships? Absolutely. Do they sometimes, all of that is true, but at their core, who they are, they are operating on a complete system that is above, above baseline. They're ahead of the game. And I'm just like, I don't think we need to be sitting here and, listen, if you've got a secure attachment, you're doing great. Go look it up. If, if none of this related to you in this episode, the last episode, or the last episode on the Sunday sessions, and you're like, I just, I feel like I'm not any of these, babe, you're probably secure. So actually, we love you and everyone is jealous and thrive, bitch, okay?

• 48:22Speaker 00

  Call Her Daddy is brought to you by Airbnb. Okay, I am well into my third trimester now, so I haven't really been able to travel because I need to stay close to my doctor. But spending all this time at home has made me start thinking about all the places that I want to go once the baby is here. I have literally been sitting on my couch with the TV on, scrolling through Airbnb and planning trips. I am nowhere ready to take yet, but suddenly my vacation priorities, I will say, are completely different. Like, does the house have enough bedrooms? Is there a big kitchen? Does the furniture look baby safe? Or is every table covered in, you know, sharp corners? And obviously, we need an extra room for my mom,

• 49:05Speaker 00

  who has already made it very clear that she will not be leaving my side. She's like, I got you, I'm the babysitter, okay? And now that it is October, I'm picturing cooler weather, cozy sweaters. Oh my God, maybe a little cottage where we can escape for a little weekend. That's what I love about booking a home on Airbnb. Whether you're traveling with family, friends, or your partner, everyone has space to relax while still being together. Even if you're traveling for a concert or a game, you have one place where everyone can get together and convene after. Before the holiday season gets busy, treat yourself to one more fall getaway and check out Airbnb while you're planning it. Call Her Daddy is brought to you by Haagen Dazs.

• 49:48Speaker 00

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• 50:32Speaker 00

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• 50:50Speaker 00

  But what I was gonna say is I naturally almost feel like the next evolution of this conversation is the like, how to not resent your parents? Because what we're talking about, and I think sometimes when we have psychological conversations, I get it, sometimes people roll their eyes because everything goes back to childhood, right? And I think a lot of times, people don't want to hear that. And then to think that as an adult, and you're just like walking around the East Village, and you're like, no, no, no, like, it has nothing to do with how my parents treated me, or my upbringing, or any of that, you're like, it's a lie. And so I think what's hard is why a lot of people don't want to go back to childhood is because they know they're about to open the biggest possible wound there is.

• 51:32Speaker 00

  And they feel like, once they open those floodgates, it's never gonna stop. And keeping the door shut, sometimes understandably to people, feels safer. It feels like, I'm kind of containing my bubble right now, and I'm, like we've talked a lot about in these past episodes, like, I'm in control, finally. But are you in control? Because if, this is where it all gets so confusing. If you don't address your childhood wounds, the things that come up in your relationship that keep being an issue, you're like, I just don't get, why do I keep running? Why do I keep running? And we're all sitting there like, I know why you keep running. So what happened with your father when you were 10, Jacob? And it's like, no. And it's like, yes, literally.

• 52:16Speaker 00

  And, and there is so much power, and I'm not saying it's easy. I have had some of the most hard, like, therapy sessions are so hard and so uncomfortable, and you want to run and crawl out of your skin in moments, when you open childhood up. But then you kind of, then you do it. And I'm not saying it's a one and done, and/or it's a year, and then you're free. But once you then actually are like, no, no, no, I can open the door. I can actually look down the barrel of my childhood. And it's gonna be painful, but I'm gonna have control over that as well. That's, I think, when you start to operate and actually start to reach peak, probably entering secure attachment. Because you have a handle on what happened in your childhood, and how it's affecting your adult life.

• 52:59Speaker 00

  So you're not just constantly like, I just wonder, why do I always do this in friendships? Or why do I always do this here? Someone who is deeply immersed in growing and working on themselves is gonna be like, I know why. Because when I was young, my mother used to do this to me, and I'm constantly doing this, and I always catch myself. To know the root of the problem is to know how to actually change it. To constantly live up in the clouds, you're just, you have no stability, you have nothing to like, stand on. It'd be like, this is the why, and this is how I'm gonna change it. You're just constantly floating. And so if anything, you're gonna just waste a lot of time trying to be like, well, maybe it was him. It was the guy I was dating. It just wasn't right. No, it wasn't.

• 53:42Speaker 00

  You self sabotaged, and you completely ruined that relationship because of XYZ from your past. And then I guess I also just have to give grace of, yet again, I know it's not easy. And some people, some people aren't ready to get there, and everyone has to open those wounds at their own speed. So yeah, resenting our parents, that feels like the next step. Listen, I hope this was helpful. I know it was a lot. I suggest if you are someone where this episode was really hitting home, maybe go on a walk. I know sometimes you guys will watch the podcast at work, or maybe you're in an environment with roommates, or your partners there, like, maybe go get some fresh air, call someone

• 54:27Speaker 00

  who makes you happy, and just kind of give yourself a second, as cheesy as this sounds, because this is not something that is easy to talk about, let alone experience and live with and live through. So you need to do whatever you see fit to take care of yourself and put yourself first, so that you do feel safe and supported when you do open these wounds, right? I love you guys so much. This has been a really interesting series to explore. I feel like I've learned so much more. I feel more connected and empathetic to myself, and also to other people, and just what we all have to go through. I feel like you obviously don't look at people you interact with on a daily basis, and wonder like, hmm, I wonder what their attachment style is?

• 55:09Speaker 00

  Like, I wonder what their core wounds are from childhood, and how they've continued to show up for them in adulthood? Like, we're all just living our lives, and we forget that we all are still those little kids inside who have a lot of pain. And I think it's important to remember that. So if there is a series on topics that you want me to cover next, guys, I'm all ears. Because, because we're just, this is, this is like, we're just educating ourselves, okay? And I'm actually really enjoying this, like, being out of college and not, obviously, learning on a daily basis, I feel like this has been really invigorating and stimulating for me, because I didn't know a lot of the things that I have been studying.

• 55:52Speaker 00

  Every night, Matt is like, wait, so what are you doing again? And I'm like, I'm researching. He's like, the guests? And I'm like, no, no, no, Sunday sessions, we're in the thick of it, babe. And he's like, okay, and what are, he's like, watching me with my glasses on, like, deeply typing. He's seeing another side to me. I'm like, if you have anything, you have questions about Matt, I can write you an entire paper, don't worry. He's like, okay, I love you, goodbye. So I'm having fun, and I hope you guys enjoyed this too. All right, you know the drill, I will see you fuckers next Wednesday. Goodbye.

• 56:41Speaker 00

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