anxious, avoidant, & afraid attachments from a childhood of repeatedly predicting threat

[00:00:00]Kids who grow up walking on eggshells more often than not essentially have a disorganized type of attachment system.

[00:00:11]I'm a licensed clinical psychologist.

[00:00:13]Let's talk about what this looks like when your disorganized attachment is really propped up by chronic hyper vigilance. Remember that when we're talking about attachment, we're talking about the quality and quantity and types of engagement with a child around their the parents responsiveness to the child's physical, mental, and emotional needs. So for example, parents who are more anxious often are over involved, overly fearful, often let their anxieties and parental emotions spill over too much and too often in front of the child. Parents who are more avoidant often are more emotionally often neglectful. So they're they're not going to be engaging with emotions. They're going to find their child's emotions overwhelming.

[00:01:03]Not so much the ones that make the child easy and pleasing and compliant and independent, but emotions that are like needy and angry and tearful. So these parents are going to sort of like push away push the child away in some manner when that happens. It could just be through their tone of voice. It could be physically, but a child experiences that as really this this dismissal or removing as a form of rejection. And of course, those with a more secure attached system. Ideally, these are not perfect parents, but more often than not, there's a safety in the emotional needs and responsiveness and a a general consistency. Once again, not perfect.

[00:01:44]When we're talking about disorganized attachment, I think that when I first came across it, I I perceived it as only these kids who were like extremely physically abused, right? And so these are just children walking around in a constant state of dissociation and just complete disorganization which can definitely be the case. But what I didn't realize was that I wasn't just anxious or avoidant. I really had this disorganized presentation because the heart of this attachment pattern is that the source of attachment, the parent, the caregiver can be a source of growth and security.

[00:02:26]and I would call it intermittent forms of what feels like safety but is ultimately not. And they can also be the source of fear. So what does this look like? This means that the parent might be supportive, helpful, loving, funny, kind, charming, but also explosive, angry, rageful, intermittently upset, easily activated, easily emotionally triggered. They might do all those things wonderfully, but then when they get upset with you, give you, you know, the stink eye or the silent treatment, shut you out. And essentially, whether it's, you know, the extreme of their behavior or the more, you know, covert behaviors, you know, when your parent is displeased with you and when they're angry and upset. And when this happens again and again and again, you become fearful. And so you might get a good experience with them, but you never know when you won't. And so your brain learns to predict threat because to be afraid of a parent is threatening. It is dangerous. Feeling just rejected, let alone physically or mentally harmed. All of it feels bad for kids. Now, historically, we've thought of this as a parent teaching a child's, you know, nervous system to live in fight or flight. Well, it turns out that that's not exactly the case when it comes to science and and the brain. It turns out that this idea of having a reptilian brain, an emotional brain, and a thinking brain is actually not how the brain works. And this myth has stuck around so long it's still in many Harvard textbooks and esteemed academic papers for many not even all neuroscientists are expressing this reality that the brain is actually a prediction machine. The brain makes predictions through taking in sensory data of your body and the environment and the context and the language you speak and everything it's encountered before. And it especially takes into account previous trauma. It weighs that experience heavily going, "Oh, I know what this is." to make more threats. The whole point of prediction is for the brain to uh maintain resources. What do I mean? I mean that imagine if every time you came across something, it was like the first time. How many things would have to happen from taking in the sensory data to your brain processing it? Your brain would be stuck all day just trying to remember how to make coffee, right? So your brain learns these sort of predictions and the more predictions it makes the more likely it is going to make predictions of threat in threatbased environments. So what I'm saying is when you grow up predicting threat a lot no surprise you keep doing that as an adult and that is where we can become truly chronically hypervigilant. Well, hypervigilance is going to thrive at environments where we never know what to expect, right? Where we're sort of like, what version of the good mommy, bad mommy, daddy, parent am I getting today?

[00:05:29]And we often tend to blame ourselves when they treat us this way when they are unsafe. So, you have this repeated threat prediction happening brain. Uh, go check out I'll link in the section down below Lisa Barrett Thelman's work on the brain. is so fascinating and it I had to scrap the first part of my book on the brain because I was repeating the same things that I had thought were true. This is why we're talking about now the body does not keep the score. It doesn't mean your body doesn't suffer from repeated chronic stress and toxic stress and trauma. But your body's not [snorts] holding trauma in the same way.

[00:06:05]Your brain is making predictions and being hypervigilant and getting stuck in threat prediction. Okay? And then once again the more you look for something the more you find it. So that is what creates so much hypervigilance for us and it sculpts and shapes our brains to where we are the kind of people who enter a room and we are hovering over ourselves reading verbal and non-verbal signs. What does that mean? That tone of voice and why did she say it like that and do they not like me? What's happening? And we're thinking about it and then we're responding in kind. So we'll talk more about this but the bottom line is that we are always doing that. We cannot turn it off because it was a primary survival technique in our childhood. So people who have disorganized attachment are going to have a lot of underlying often fear about relationships. Fear of rejection, fear of abandonment, fear of you wanting too much from them. This is how we get the both avoidant you want too much from me and anxious qualities.

[00:07:08]are you going to leave me? Are you mad at me? These dynamics. And so I thought I would just share some of my favorite sort of ways of thinking about organized attachment through this lens, not through the extremely harmful lens which matters, but how these qualities play out. So when you get into the literature on disorganized/fearful attachment, it can be kind of confusing if you're not in the psych world. So the first section is that we can have a disorganized internal world. What does that mean?

[00:07:42]Five things it talks about. Number one, disregulated psycho physiological states. This is the idea of that hypervigilance living in our body. What we would have previously called the reptilian response, right?

[00:07:57]The survival response. This is often disregulated because our childhood experiences were disregulated with our disregulated caregivers. Remember your caregiver is the keeper of your nervous system. They are the tender. They are the teacher. So when they are disregulated, you are disregulated. But you have no choice in it, right? Because you're the child. So the way this plays out is in our body this like constantly feeling whether it's you know guarded, overly aware, hypervigilant, anxious, down, unsafe, frozen, all of those dynamics. Number two, affect disregulation.

[00:08:38]Too much or too little. What does that mean? That means that the way that you express your emotions and your moods and feelings and your affect essentially kind of like how you're doing in a given moment from a emotional mental state and physiological state. It often can swing between there's so many feelings happening or disregulated and overwhelmed or you've shut down to conserve resources to protect yourself.

[00:09:05]There's too much vulnerability for example that you feel like you're being asked to express. The bottom line is that there's this dysregulation and it it can really feel like there's that you are feeling and or expressing or you are too much or too little. The next one is lapses in self-observation or monitoring. Now, this is where I would say when it comes to the more eggshell childhoods, it's the opposite. The lapses are actually not lapses. They're overfocused dynamics on monitoring and self-observation. So, what am I doing?

[00:09:37]What are you doing? What does it all mean? all funneled through the lens of threat prediction, discontinuous self states and a effect states. So once again, things are not going in the way that they should go, right? We're we're thinking about how a person naturally moves through threat or fear or relationships. And in this case, there's just there's the massive variation going back to that intermittent reinforcement. Reminder, intermittent reinforcement is like the slot machines in Vegas. You never know when you're going to win or lose, but you stick around. You keep, you know, doing the the slot machines because sometimes you win, sometimes you lose.

[00:10:17]And it turns out that is one of the most addictive what we call schedules of behavioral reinforcement. Meaning that you stay in the game, right? You, you know, you're going to win, you're going to lose, but when you win, it feels so good. On the next round, you just might win again, then you lose. But that never knowing what to expect is very toxic and addictive in many ways for children. Not in many ways and always. And then cognitive distortions, confusion and drive dominated thinking. And so confusion is at the heart of these kind of childhoods. It is at the heart of disorganized attachment whether it's emotional, physical, or mental and how your body is functioning. your thoughts, your feelings, all of that, and what you need or don't need, and how that drives and affects the way that you engage in relationships, the way you express yourself, whether or not you express yourself. The next is called disorganized behavior. And historically, this is talking about impaired self- agency and impaired goal-directed behavior. And that goes back to what I was saying about kids who have like these extreme forms of harm is like they don't know how to, you know, act in their own best interest or for themselves or they shut down or they can't establish what they want or need as goals. I would argue that when you have the more hypervigilant eggshell kind of childhood that they're still impaired, but in some cases it can be an overfunctioning an overfunctioning of self- agency like I have to save myself to get out of this environment. I have to find ways to protect myself because I've learned to be so hypervigilant and aware of threat.

[00:11:54]I'm I'm doing that at all times.

[00:11:56]Sometimes it's it's a very valuable skill, it can really help. Other times, not so much. Inhibition of exploration and play. We know that people with a lot of attachment wounds actually as opposed to those with secure attachment who are more likely to go out and explore the world. When we have a more wounded attachment pattern, we're less likely to, especially if we have more anxious and potentially in or disorganized because that is a more fearful-based one. in the more avoidant attachment where we're like overly self-reliant. I think that this can actually fuel our exploration, but we're doing it as a way to survive what we didn't get and as a way to sort of overfunction, this sort of pseudo autonomy, to numb our needs deep down inside and to just take try to take care of ourselves, but often skipping over the wounds that we've never the needs we never got met. And then lastly, disorganized attachment behavior. So, activation of contradictory attachment styles. Essentially, you're avoidant, you're anxious, you can behave securely, like it's all over the map. Controlling behaviors. As I've said in so many videos, we know that children of borderline parents are often more bossy and controlling in play with peers because they're trying to get some level of control because they have none in other environments, especially with their caretakers at home. submissive or excessive caretaking behaviors. This is that compulsive caretaking, trying to always get your needs met by being the pleaser, the helpful one. It could be fawning, or it could be submitting, right? If I'm just good and compliant and easy, you'll be safe. There won't be threat. Stable instability in relationships. This is really a common one of disorganized attachment. It's often called a storminess. It's like things are good, but they're always not going to be good eventually.

[00:13:47]essentially. Does that make sense? It's like you can count on the fact that it's never going to be completely stable. And you see this a lot in people with BPD um in the parents in their relationships, right? It's just it's like there's always some drama going on. Defensive aggression and helplessness. Now, this would also be I would say in the extreme cases uh a shutting down, you know, I'm not able to self- advocate.

[00:14:12]Truly being and feeling helpless because you are there's no one coming to save you. I think in the more hypervigilant state it looks like this posture of just trying to manage ourselves once again through overfunctioning to respond to our helplessness. So we often don't know how to ask for help and we will I'll do it myself kind of dynamic and because I only I can provide safety because I can't trust anyone else to do it. And I think that's kind of how it can play out. And that can be really harmful for us when we don't know how to ask for help or when we're defiantly defensively aggressive about ourselves, our lives, our needs, almost to the point of pushing people away. And then an inability to elicit desired responses.

[00:14:55]What does that mean? That means that that connection between what we feel like we want and deserve and need. It's almost like even though we're maybe masquerading as independent and and we are to a certain extent, really feeling like we're allowed to have needs and to express them and to be safe in doing that feels really almost impossible. And so that fear that when the when when one person determines your entire temperature of your home of the mood or multiple people you have learned again and again and again to outsource that safety and so it's always externalized to other people to the environment and this is why lastly so many of us I believe alongside potentially things like autism and ADHD love to be alone.

[00:15:43]It is the only time, especially if you grew up in an eggshell household, where no one's gonna ruin your vibe, right?

[00:15:50]You're good. You're on you you are in control of your own It's peaceful.

[00:15:54]You don't have to read anyone's body language or ruminate or determine what their physical or mental or verbal or non-verbal behaviors and communications mean. The problem is it can be really good for helping us settle and hobbies and self-care. And I don't mean like like self-care like any petty Manny Petty. I mean just like taking care of our ourselves.

[00:16:17]But it can push us into extreme forms of isolation because at the core people are the source of the greatest stress in our lives. And that's not our fault, right?

[00:16:28]But if we want to work on relationships, we have to work on learning how to manage that. And that is what my book is about. We'll talk more about it, but essentially it's learning how to understand that you are predicting threats always. You then make meaning out of them and then you respond in a certain way and that pattern is going to be often very much shaped by what you did in childhood. The problem is you're no longer in childhood. So next time you're, you know, doing something, just notice when you feel like someone mad at me or what did that just mean that how quickly you went to a threat at the core, what you told yourself the situation was. Were they mad at me? Why?

[00:17:06]Like what's the story? And then what did you do? If you have this experience, please share it down below. I'll talk more about this pattern again and again and again in my book and otherwise in this next several several months as I just keep sharing more things I learned in my research and in my storytelling.

[00:17:23]and I hope you will join me. So if you are someone with this pattern, you know, my guess is you have really strong anxious and avoidant patterns and you also have this sort of sense of a fear-based approach, not like I'm scared of you, but like I'm always coming from a place inside of fear, which is really threat prediction.

[00:17:45]That's it. Thanks for being here. Have a great day and don't forget to follow me.

[00:17:48]I just posted a new uh Substack yesterday on Father's Day talking about bad dads and father wounds and some links on the body does not keep the score just some more stuff around that autism and trauma. So I will see you then. Have a good day.