Ep 192: 5 Signs Of Insecure Attachment (And How To Use Them To Heal)

Want tangible ways to move from an insecure to a secure attachment? Follow along in my new series! In this first episode, I lay out five signs of insecure attachment and show how each one points toward your power when met with presence.

Along the way, I offer a compassionate reframe that builds self-esteem rather than diagnoses it away. We practice separating sensations from narratives, listening to protective parts without letting them run the show, and aligning your inner will so choices feel coherent. This is the groundwork for secure attachment: not a theory, but a felt sense of safety that makes love, play, and honesty possible.

If you’re ready to turn insight into embodied change, press play and join this series. Share what lands, send your questions, and help shape the next episodes. Subscribe, leave a review, and pass this along to someone who’s ready to feel safe in love.

Mentioned episodes:
EP 164: A different look at anxious and avoidant attachment
EP 186: From self-fixing to self-cultivation - a mindset revolution

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Transcript

Return From Mexico & Renewal

SPEAKER_00 0:45

A warm welcome back to the Uncover You podcast. I've had the most incredible month in Mexico, and I'm now back in Sweden. The Power Journey to Teotihuacan this year. It was my tenth year, and it was the strongest, most powerful one ever. I feel like we're starting a new chapter of Power Journey to Teo, and no one in the group was left untouched by that experience. Everyone broke open, cracked open in one way or another. And yeah, I can't wait to go back, and I can't wait for as many of you as possible to be able to experience the magic that happens there. This place is truly built for healing and activation of your full power. It's both. That's why I love it, obviously. And then I've had some delicious, wonderful time in Mexico, enjoying, resting, recharging, and have so much new energy, have so much inspiration of what to come, things that I'm bringing into ERA, the Embodied Relationship Academy, things that I'm bringing into events and things that we're planning to do this spring. So, yes, I can't, I can't wait for you to be part of all of that. And I just want to let you know that I'm so grateful that you're here. I've gotten a lot of messages recently just letting me know how much this work resonates with people from members inside of Alchemy that's saying, like, oh my God, I can't believe how big an impact this is having already after two or three weeks of relating to myself this way when I've been struggling with it for a decade or my whole life, or been trying to work on it for two years now. But this is the piece. So I just want to say how grateful I am that you've found your way here and that your like your willingness to try this out because it really is a different way of relating to yourself, which then makes relating to others in a new way, in a secure way, in a safe way, in a fun, loving way possible. And you might say, well, it's it's them, they I'm relating fine with them, but they are not relating with me. But there's a reason you are in that situation. There's a reason you're staying in it, there's a reason that you feel so hurt by it or frustrated with it. And that is the half that you can work on, which will then unlock a very different relationship situation for you. So, with all of this said and with this strong, powerful energy and love that I'm feeling in my heart right now, I'm inviting you into a series on insecure and secure attachment. And if you've been listening to this podcast for a while, you know that I have a little bit of a different look at insecure attachment. I don't really like using those labels as a way of um diagnosing ourselves. I don't really enjoy saying, oh, calling it avoidant or anxious attachment, because I don't find that it's very helpful for us, that it doesn't really build our self-esteem. It doesn't really bring us out of that insecure attachment or that unsafe experience by labeling ourselves that way. But I do find it helpful to understand it if we use it in a good way, in a way that actually builds our self-esteem rather than the other way around, rather than a label that we can hide behind. So I want to talk about this in the series. I'm gonna have conversations with people that are experiencing themselves with an anxious pattern, with an avoidant pattern, so that you get to know what's going on inside of them, so that you get to learn from their systems and their reactions and learn about yourself, to look into the mirror of their experiences. And we're going to talk about the real gold. Okay, this is the experience I'm having, but how do I get to the experience that I want to have? Meaning, okay, if I'm now I feel unsafe in certain relationship situations, how do I get to feeling safe? How do I get to feeling secure in relationships? So in this first episode, I want to make it very clear what I see again and again in clients and what I saw in myself, what I discovered. I did some really thorough research on myself when like the more awareness I grew with doing the embodied self-mastery work, I became so much more curious about what was going on inside of me, right? So I would sit down and like, what's this reaction? What's going on here? What's this response? Where is it coming from? So that is part of what I want to share with you. And then, you know, so many years of working with thousands and thousands of people and getting a look into their, you know, getting a peek into their psyche, into their inner world, and seeing some commonalities, seeing some common threads. So I want to talk about five signs or five flags, signals that I see again and again in people that have an insecure attachment. So, first of all, what do I mean when I say insecure attachment? So, attachment theory is a psychological theory that I've been covering before in other episodes. So I will link to those episodes in the description of this episode so that you can go check that out. So I won't go over all of that again. But the way that I describe this theory with my own words and with my own understanding of the work that we do inside of the embodied self-mastery community is certain situations in relating has been flagged as safe, as uh sorry, as unsafe in your system, right? It might be that someone removes their attention from you and that feels like you're gonna die, and you go into a survival response and a protection mechanism to not have to feel that uncomfortable emotion. For others, it might be when people come too close or when people look at you with a certain, you know, look on their face, facial expression. For some, it might be when things get boring or too secure, too safe, too mundane. Like that doesn't feel safe to me. For some, it might be when they don't get to prove themselves and work hard, when other people want to give to them, and like receiving feels really unsafe. So it really is about the relating dance and that certain steps in that relating dance when someone moves away, when someone comes too close, when it's moving too fast, when it's moving too slow, that has been flagged as unsafe in our system. I really find that we need less complex theories around this and more simple, direct ways of describing what is really happening. And I find that this way of talking about it right now is what I find the most powerful way. Certain situations in relating have been flagged as unsafe. Your system goes into survival response and protection mechanisms. And it makes sense that it has. If you look back at your history, and you don't even have to know everything that happened or didn't happen, the needs that were met. But some of us are really good at that part, right? We can really map, oh, this is what happened, this is what I never felt seen in, loved for growing up. And for some of us that have had like abusive um situations growing up, it becomes really clear, right? When someone's angry, it feels like there's no room for me. It feels like I need to make them happy again so that I can be safe. But when we start to break it apart, like break it down to the core components, we can really see that it is about survival. I need to be loved and cared for, and as a baby, that's crucial, or else I'll be, you know, I'll die. If no one is caring for me, loving me, and therefore feeding me, I won't survive. So it's this humbling experience that we aren't just a logical mind, we are also this animal body, we're also nature that functions certain ways for survival. And since we are also conscious aware beings, or at least have the capacity, the ability for conscious aware existence, then we can yeah, we have the ability to reflect over these things, to observe them, to see what's going on, and to relate to them differently than we have. So I'm saying this because I find it helpful to really look at what's going on. What does an insecure attachment mean? Well, it means that you feel unsafe in certain relating situations. Your system feels unsafe, even though your logical mind might know, like, hey, I'm actually not unsafe anymore. But somewhere inside of you, there's a two-year-old, a six-year-old, a nine-year-old that truly do feel unsafe. And the way out of that isn't to keep dismissing or using your like your grown-up brain to override that, it's to go in and meet with that experience. And it's so important to hear that in the beginning, we we look at these as wounds and things we need to fix about ourselves, things we need to heal, like something is broken and off. But the more I work with people, the more I see that this is the beautiful journey that we take to uncover aspects of ourselves. It's not just a wound that needs mending, something that needs fixing. It's our power in there. So when we access, it's like we re recover this part of ourselves that has this ability to love, right? Or that has this playful power that we've been projecting onto others or looking for in others, and we realize it's alive inside of me. So it's not just about healing wounds or meeting unmet needs, which is an important part. But as you learn how to do that, it will give you so much more than just, you know, a healed wound. It will give you the love that you've been longing for back because these parts are sitting on that capacity. They're holding that in their hearts, and as long as they felt unmet, wounded, is like that can't come out. That can't come out to play. But as you go in and meet with them and really dare to see them as their full potential, as I do as a coach, and as I train others to be coaches, I train them in this, you need to see people as clear mirrors, you need to see their full potential. They think they are broken, too controlling, not capable of XYC. But you need to see beyond that. That's what they're projecting onto themselves to be. That's that fog that they put in in like in place. But when you learn to meet with yourself, like we practice inside of alchemy, right? You will start to have a different experience instead of projecting onto these parts that are broken or controlling or judgmental or victim-y or princess-y, you're like, wow, there's more to them. So I think that's a very important piece to say, and something that often gets lost in the whole conversation about anxious, avoid, and attachment. Where we're just like, oh, I'm done with dating avoidant people. I my self-worth right now is so much bigger. Like we just put things in these polarized ideas without understanding what's really going on at the depth of human psycho, human consciousness. And I think that's for me, that's part of my life mission, to understand it with a felt sense, not just with intellect and theories, but really to connect with it, to dare to see what's there. So with all of this said, I want to give you some clear signs that tells you that either you or another person does have insecure attachment, meaning feels unsafe in certain relating situations. And I think when we put it that way again, it kind of takes away the blame. Oh my God, you have avoidant attachment. You're such a bad person, kind of thing. Oh, you feel unsafe in certain relating situations. Ah, you know, we can have a different compassion for that. It doesn't mean that we should put up with any behavior that we don't want, okay, but it gives us a more true and better understanding of what's really going on. So the five signs that I see again and again in people with insecure attachment, either all of them or some of these are number one. Like I said, when you go into survival response, what will happen is that you will have a full body reaction that will feel absolutely true. This is what I talk about as automated automated reactions, automated reactions or um survival responses. It's when you go into freeze or flight or fight or fawn people policing, fixing the situation so that you'll get to safety again. And what has happened, as I talk extensively about in this podcast, is that you've switched from your prefrontal cortex and executive thinking into your amygdala because something has been flagged as unsafe. This is not good. So you'll start responding with your whole body, with your system. Things will feel absolutely true. They are terrible people, they are trying to hurt me, they are coming at me, they are trying to smother me, they are pressuring me. Can't breathe. And these might be thoughts in your mind, but it might also just be impulses in your body. So you're being pulled into an automated pattern response reaction. And it's taking over your nervous system, it's switching you into your amygdala, and things just feel absolutely true from here. I need to get out of here or else. Which makes sense. It's a survival response, right? Something in your system has flagged this as a threat. So we've switched all like away all the nuance, no time for nuance, no time for reflecting or feeling into things. We just need to get to safety. And this is, of course, why the first pillar in alchemy is recognizing your survival response. Because the more you become aware of this experience, like, ah, then you start to understand and realize that okay, making anything feel better from here won't come from, you know, trying to have that conversation or fight it out. Like, oh, I'm in a survival response. So making my system know that it's safe again is what will break an old pattern and actually give room for other options. But this is the first sign. You're pulled into an automated survival response. And, you know, at this point you might say, like, that's not what's happening. I just get angry. They're really bad, okay. But you need to get to know your body. You need to start to learn how to recognize when is my body in a survival response? What thoughts am I thinking? How is my heart behaving? How's my breathing? What happens in my muscles, in my emotions, in my nervous system? And it's not until then you can actually say when you're in a survival response or not. And it doesn't take away from that you might want to speak up or ask for something else, or step away from this interaction, step away from the relationship in a whole. That's still totally valid. So I'm not taking away that from you. It's just that from the survival response, you won't be able to do it in a way that truly feels good to you, that feels authentic and in a way that you feel proud of. I mean, obviously, if the situation is threatening, yeah, get the hell out of there. If it really is. But if it just that they remove their attention away from you and you're responding like you're gonna die, then we want to work on that. We want to make you feel safer in whatever relating situation so that you can have more choice. Resolve it, have a conversation in a different way, step away instead of staying, clinging, doubting yourself. We want to give you full freedom to do the relating dance. So this is sign number one, and I'll I'll tell you much more about how to work with these, how they are actually um the gold. When you start to seeing them and pulling them apart this way, that's when you can start to work with what's underneath. So in this whole series, we will follow these threads, these five signs, and you'll see them come up again and again for people. And I'll show you how to work with them. So that's our sign number one. So, sign number two, we often get pulled into a conflict between two options. People often come to me in alchemy, for example, or wanting to work with me, and they're like, I don't know what to do. I either need to step away from this relationship because it's eating away at my self-worth. I'm not getting met in the way that I want to, or I need to give up myself. And they are usually not saying this out loud. But those are kind of the options that they get put in front. It feels like it's only bad options. Either I have to step away from this relationship to conserve my self-worth and to prove like my value because they're not treating me in that way. But then a part of me is losing something, right? There is a conflict there for a reason. Another part knows that it's gonna lose the connection. So that feels just shitty. And we might also be like, but what if it's just me reacting? But then the other option then becomes okay, so I stay for the connection, for the sake of the connection, but it feels Like I'm giving up, like I'm letting I'm letting another part of myself down because I'm not standing for what I want. So can you hear what's happening? The mind is only giving two options. And none of them are good. None of them are really giving us what we want. It's either I have to give up my own worth and value to keep the connection, or I'll have to give up the connection to keep my worth and value. Seems like a pretty shitty deal. And this is often what comes with that sense of insecure attachment. That relationship hasn't really felt all that good. It's eating away at something else of us. We keep getting pulled into a wound. We keep feeling threatened. We feel keep feeling smothered, or like we can't regulate back and feel ourselves and know what we want. We keep losing ourselves. So this is a very common sign for an insecure attachment. I either have to give up myself to keep the connection, or I have to give up the connection to keep myself. And what your system hasn't learned yet is that you can have both. It just doesn't know how yet. It hasn't seen that modeled, it hasn't felt that modeled inside of the system. Those neural pathways haven't combined or fired yet. And that's all there is. But your mind at this point will put you in this conflict or in this seemingly like dilemma. It's either or. You can't have both because that is the experience you've had early on with an emotional imprint in relating. That's our sign number two. Sign number three. We either project or dismiss the experience that we're having. So let's talk about the first one first, like projecting. What does that mean? Well, it means that when I'm feeling all this pain coming up and this wound being touched, because you turned your attention away from me and you got busy at work or you walked out without acknowledging how I was feeling or whatever it is. Attention is being removed. And now that brings up a wound inside of me. But I don't know yet how to be with that painful experience inside of me because that was flagged as unsafe inside of me to have that. That felt overwhelming the first time I have it. So that's the imprint in my system. This is overwhelming. We can't deal with it. So what we've learned to do is projecting it out onto others and say, you're the bad person. You're doing something really terrible. You're not considerate, you're not compassionate, you don't care about me. And we start to say all those things that that little child felt at one point inside of us. But what we don't recognize is that it's also made up of lies. The feeling is true, but the stories might not be. That they are removing their attention in their world might not mean at all that they don't care about you. Or that someone is, you know, coming at you and wanting to have a conversation and wanting to get into know you and get close to you. It doesn't mean that they want to control you or smother you. It just doesn't mean that. But in your system, it does. That's what it signals. So we need to get really good at holding nuance, holding complexity, holding that both is true in a sense. Ah, this experience that I'm having is creating this story that I'm projecting onto them. They are trying to control me. They don't care about me. Not necessarily true. It feels that way in your system. That is true. So can you see that it's not either or, it's both and you know so this is projecting. When we can't really hold that painful emotional experience inside of ourselves and being with it, we start telling others what they're doing and how bad they are for doing it, like what it means. And we do that with ourselves as well. We project onto other aspects of ourselves how bad they are or what it means. We give meaning to things. The other option here that I mentioned, we dismiss it. So that's when we kind of have often become aware. Oh, this is just me reacting, it's not true. So I start to dismiss the experience inside of me instead. I start saying, you know, that's just me overreacting, that's just coming from a wound, that's an experience I had growing up. It's not happening. But what happens here is that we dismiss the experience inside of you. So it doesn't get understood and heard. And you kind of keep talking to it like um dismissing adult. Oh, just grow up, get out of it, stop crying. That's not a big deal. And it doesn't resolve it. So again, it's the nuance, it's the complexity of hey, I know that might not be true, but something inside of me is feeling this way. This is something that we do deeply inside of alchemy, right? Of learning to be with both. And in my feel to heal, like private podcast training that I do, where I take you through this these steps of not believing the story, but being with the felt experience. This really unlocks something. And the tricky part here is that we actually need to go in and do it. I have many people that, you know, they start alchemy, and after a few weeks, they're like, Yeah, I know the pillars. I've done the pillars. I'm like, how often do you do the pillars? It's not about going through the videos once. It's almost like you sign up for, I don't know, some exercise program or, you know, learning to ride the bike, and you watch the first video, and um you got up on the bike and tried to paddle once, and then you're like, Yeah, I, you know, I know how to ride the bike, but it's not working. You need to do it again and again and again until it works. You have to get it into your body. You have to do that exercise, that movement again and again and again until you've built the muscle. So it's not enough just listening to this and like, ah, I get it. I understand it now. You actually have to put it in your mouth, chew it, digest it, like, and then repeat again and again and again. I know how to swim theoretically. Like, you won't know, you won't be able to swim, you won't be swimming from knowing how to swim. I think I've used enough analogies for that right now. Okay, so that's sign number three. We either get good at projecting onto others or we dismiss what's going on inside of us. Another very clear sign of the insecure attachment. And in a coming episode, I will of course talk about how it feels in a secure attachment because you know, lucky me, I've had uh the honor to have experienced both. And often many of us get to experience both in certain relationships or in certain situations. Oh, in this situation, I feel quite secure. But in this situation, when they do this or not show up that way, that's what puts me in that sense of unsafety. But for some of us that have had the honor to move from one experience to the other, where it used to feel so unsafe with certain situations in relationship, and then working through it, moving through it, transcending it so that it now feels safe. It's like night and day. It's it's almost even hard to describe the difference. But that's why I want to have this conversation, right? And do this series. So that's my long way of telling you. We will talk about what it feels like to be in secure attachment, to feel safe in these situations. So I will bring up these signs again in the coming episodes and talk about what they feel like on the other side. Okay. So sign number four, and maybe this is the biggest one, and we tend to not recognize that it has to do with insecure attachment as well. It's the doubting of ourselves. It's the sense that there's a right answer and it's somewhere outside of me. Someone needs to tell me what the right answer is. Is it this or is it that? Is it staying or leaving? And this in itself is the sign of insecure attachment because if you start really following the threads down into the rabbit hole of your psyche, and if you start really exploring it in your body, you'll start to notice that that is a sense of like lack of trust inside, that it's not okay or safe, or that you haven't even learned to put attention inside of you and feel what feels good, what feels okay. But you've learned to kind of abdicate that to someone else, which makes sense. That is how we start out. Mom, dad, and give me food when I'm hungry. It's up to you to know that. I can't tell you, I can make noise, I can make facial expressions, I can scream. But you're the ones who's kind of in charge of my bedtime, of my meal times, of when I need a bath. Like you are in charge of me in that sense. So if there hasn't been a good coaching from our caregivers growing up, there might not have been a transition going from I'm dependent on others to tell me what to do, into I can trust myself. And that trusting in myself comes more from a feeling than figuring out the right logical, rational answer. What? There is no right answer. No, you're here to create this beautiful work of art that is your life, and no one can tell you what that is for you because no one has lived your life. No one has walked the exact path that you're walking. And you get to express life through you in the way that feels good for you, in the way that you want. Okay, there are no rules about how to live this life. I mean, we can talk about certain guidelines because we're all here together, you know, about not hurting each other and not like not cause harm or violence, but ultimately there are no rules. So this piece of that you get to feel into what feels good for you, and that parts of you start to trust that, like that's enough. That is enough. I get to feel what I want to do in the situation, and this is the tricky part, and that more and more of your will gets aligned with that. Because in the beginning, it will feel like a big conflict, and this is the sign of fragmentation inside of you, right? You have one part pulling in one direction, one part pulling in another direction. And this happens because these different parts have different strategies to get to safety. They're like, we need to talk about this, we need to speak up about this, we need to leave. And another part is like, no, no, no, no, we need to keep the peace. And this is what Jung would have called fragmentation, where parts are pulling in different directions. But when you really start to look at it, they are working, they're coming with the same intention. And when you can step in with awareness, with a loving inner leadership, that fragmentation will start to become a wholeness. And it's a wonderful, lovely feeling to have that inside of you. And I can tell, I can tell you because I know what is what it feels like to be on the other side, to feel very, very fragmented. And I know it now too, right? It shows up in certain situations for me. But now it's almost like a curiosity and excitement. Oh my God, here's a piece where that I'm fragmented about. Oh, what an opportunity to sit with all these parts. I know there's gonna come growth and more freedom and more love from that, from moving through it, because I have the tools, because I trust myself now to move through it. So it makes sense if doubting yourself is also coming from this fragmentation that you have all these different voices inside of you. But that doesn't mean that you're lost cause. It just means that you get to take this wonderful, amazing journey from fragmentation to wholeness. And if you listen to Young, like that's what he looked at as our life's purpose. Like the dream of the planets and the collective consciousness and how we're brought up, like will do that to us. And we get to go on this hero's journey to become whole, to align a divided will so that more and more of us, the parts of us, are working towards the same purpose, mission, but also with a similar strategy instead of pulling in all these different directions. So this sense of doubting ourselves, it really keeps eating away at our self-esteem, at our confidence, our sense of selves, like I can't make this decision. I have to talk to someone about it, or I feel this way, but I can't trust it. Because there is there is something right about this doubting, too, right? It's a part of ourselves sense that I might be overreacting, right? This might not be the full truth, but it leaves us in relation with ourselves in a sense of mistrust. So now we're coming back to that. Like, how do we relate to ourselves? How can we meet with all of this without dismissing it, but also not necessarily believing it? That's the key, that's the way out. So instead of looking for the right answers, ah, it's outside, it's out there somewhere. Someone needs to tell me what I should be doing in this situation. Yeah, that is the sign of an insecure attachment. And the fifth sign, which also eats away at our self-esteem a lot, is that we tend to give a lot of meaning to all these things that are playing out in our relationship. That someone leaves us, that's, you know, the wrong person is attracted to us, you know, whatever it is. We tend to give it a meaning about us. Sometimes we give the meaning about the other person, but it's always in and uh like reflects back to us. Oh, they are really bad. They're treating me really poorly. They're bad people, they don't care about me. And somehow that reflects back to me. That means I haven't done enough work. It means I'm not there yet. It means I'm not healed yet. So we tend to make our relationship situation, what it looks like now, mean something bad about us. And this is, of course, if you look at, if if you were to look at what you're saying in your mind, consciously or unconsciously, it can be a few layers down, but would you say that to a child that you cared about? Oh, you're not healed yet. That's why they don't love you. That's why you keep having this experience again and again. That's why no one can meet you. You're not healed yet, and therefore this is happening to you. Would you say that to a child that you cared about, that you loved, and whose job it was like it was your job to grow their self-esteem? No. And this is like the sign of how you've learned to relate to yourself that has in itself become unsafe, which is often an internalization of how we were met on the outside, how people related to our emotions, our behavior, what we were saying or doing, or and we saw it in them playing out in the relationship between our caregivers. And we felt it in the emotional connection, even without words, we were picking up on it. So it's internalized, and that's the beautiful thing because now you can do something about it. You can't do much about other people's behavior, but you can do something about the internalization about that and how that's alive inside of you. Well, now you have the power to shift that, and it will take you on this beautiful, amazing journey, right? So there they are. Five signs that I see again and again of an insecure attachment, aka, that certain situations in relationship, or maybe even relationship in itself, or maybe even being around other people has been flagged as unsafe in your system, in your system. So, like I mentioned, in the coming episodes, you will hear these come up as I have conversations with people with, you know, typically anxious or avoidant attachment styles. And I want you to listen for them. Have a little bingo card or something, write these down. And you're like, ah, that's a sign of that. Oh, that's another sign of that. Oh, they just said that. That points back to that sign. Okay. So that you can start to recognize them. Use others as your own mirror, right? Because that means you're growing your awareness about this pattern. You can see it inside of yourself. And then after we've had these conversations with people, so this becomes even more clear for you, we will look at like what it feels like, how these signs shifts as you move into secure attachment. And then how do you get to secure attachment? What is needed in terms of healing and growth? And like I mentioned, I have a couple of other episodes where I go deep into my view on anxious and avoidant attachment. What is it exactly that's been flagged as unsafe for you to have these experiences? Experiences. So check out the links in the description and you can go listen to those episodes while you wait for our next episode in the series to come out. I can't wait to take you on this journey. I hope this has been helpful so far. Please feel free to share with me if you're in the embodied self mastery community. Put a comment on this episode, comment on Spotify, or send me a DM on Instagram. I would love to hear how this episode landed for you and if you have questions, because that way I can answer them in future episodes.