Hi Reader
How are you? I hope you've had a restful weekend.
In today's newsletter, I want to talk about anxious attachment and conflict, and how you can make small shifts in the way you approach conflict to experience it in a much healthier and less stressful way.
When talking about why anxiously attached folks struggle so much with conflict, it's important to set the scene and establish upfront that for anxiously attached people, the relationship comes first.
What does that mean? Well, basically that the state of the relationship is the utmost priority: keeping things stable, making sure that everything feels okay between you and your partner, making sure that your partner is happy, protecting against any possible rupture or sign of disconnection… the list goes on.
This often manifests as people-pleasing, approval-seeking, and shapeshifting - basically, trying to be as needless and low maintenance as possible in order to make ourselves easier to love (yikes).
In the vast majority of cases, these behaviours stem from a lurking fear that something bad is going to happen and that if the relationship isn’t okay, you won’t be okay.
So what happens when we have an anxiously attached person not being very proactive about voicing their needs, while simultaneously having unrealistically high expectations of their partner and the relationship? Those unmet needs begin to pile up, creating a mounting hurt and pressure under the surface of the “don’t-rock-the-boat” facade.
The inner tension between Team “I can't cause a fuss because this person will leave me” and Team “all of my unvoiced needs are going unmet” becomes increasingly acute. And from that state of stress springs the story that your partner doesn’t care, that they don’t love you, that you’re the one doing all the work, that you’re always giving and caring and supporting and they never reciprocate.
Eventually, this inner storm will reach boiling point — a moment where it all comes to a head. Often this will be in response to something really disproportionate, but because you’ve been brewing in emotional hurt and tension behind the scenes, it takes on a whole new magnitude. For example, your partner might be 10 minutes late for dinner and you erupt into a huge outburst about how they don’t respect you, how they don’t care about you, how selfish they are, how you can’t do this anymore, and so on. (Spoiler alert: this tends not to play well with most partners).
Obviously, this isn't a very nice dynamic. If you’ve experienced it, you’ll know how very out of control it feels. Even in the moment — a part of you knows it’s not a very good strategy, and yet you feel so desperate and so scared that you don’t have any other tools at your disposal.
To that end, I've released a new podcast episode entitled 3 Tips for Anxiously Attached People to Experience Healthier Conflict - which you can listen to on Apple podcasts here or Spotify here. In the episode, I share some really straightforward and easy-to-implement shifts that you can put into practice right away, which will transform your conflict and interrupt those painful cycles of rupture and disconnection.
As always, I'd love to hear from you if this resonates - feel free to hit reply and let me know. Have a great rest of your week.
Sending love
Steph
📣📣 PS. My signature program, Healing Anxious Attachment is coming BACK! Early bird registration opens in a couple of weeks' time, and there are already 750+ folks on the waitlist! To save your spot and access exclusive early bird discounted pricing & bonuses, click below to be instantly added to the waitlist 👇🏼
