Breaking The Anxious Attachment Cycle with Dr. Sam

And partly

because there's been a lot of

other really big ticket items that I've had to reconcile with prior to this anxious attachment.

has been the root of my heartache.

And only in the last two or three years has it been something that I have been ready to truly face.

Where does anxious attachment come from? What does that even mean? I mean, literally, it means you are anxiously attached to whatever it is.

Typically a person could be a friend, could be a romantic partner.

And the way that it presents is you're all in, you're all into the point where you give yourself away.

You will go to the ends of the earth for this person.

You will stick your claws into them.

You will shower them with gifts.

You will obsess over their whereabouts, their wellbeing, why they haven't written to you and why they have.

And when they do not reach out, do not respond, or even worse, when they end the relationship with you, you will utterly come undone.

You will not be okay unless, and that's really the danger of this pattern.

And I will never forget being in this friendship a couple years back, you know, the best friend, the friend that was going to have to be my friend forever and ever until the day I died or else, right? Or else I wasn't going to be okay.

When that friendship happened, hit enough speed bumps that the car really broke down.

It was as if I was zapped into a state of consciousness on that particular day.

It was as if decades and decades of living in this attachment style was brought into my conscious awareness and I could see it for what it was.

And I always say pain is a circuit breaker.

It's a beautiful thing because It makes the unconscious conscious.

And until the unconscious becomes conscious, we will just live out our lives and call what is happening to us, our destiny.

When this pattern came into my conscious awareness, the through line that occurred to me was if I love you hard enough, Maybe you won't leave me.

Essentially, I was trying to love at a level that required so much self-abandonment because I felt like if I didn't, you would leave.

And, you know, the irony of anxious attachment is that you end up overgiving and overloving to a person who hasn't earned the right to receive it.

And they do leave you.