Ep 196: The Roadmap from Insecure to Secure Attachment

What does it actually take to move from insecure to secure attachment? In this episode, I lay out the roadmap. Not the simplified version you often hear online — but the deeper process that rewires how you relate.

We look at the three layers that shape how you relate: mindset, emotions, and your nervous system. And why secure attachment isn’t something you think your way into — it’s something you practice into existence.

If you’ve been following the attachment series, this episode connects the dots and shows you how the transformation actually unfolds.

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Transcript

Roadmap From Insecure To Secure

SPEAKER_00 0:45

Let's look more closely at the roadmap at what's needed for someone to go from insecure in relation, whether that's anxious or disorganized or avoidant attachment style or a mix of both, or as you're sinking through the layer, you go from one to the other, to securely, meaning feeling more safe in the situations that has been flagged as unsafe by your system before. You've already heard me talk about this. I mean, all through the Uncover You podcast and through these past few episodes in the attachment series, where I'm pointing to you, okay, this is how insecure attachment shows up, and this is what it feels like on the other side, and kind of what do you need to go, what do you need to do to go from one to the other. But today I wanted to summarize and give you a bigger overview. And I think it's important for us to hear very honest roadmaps, like what's needed for this to happen. And I would say the first and absolutely most important thing is you can't think your way there. You're gonna need training ground, which you probably already have because of what's showing up around you and how your system is responding. But you're gonna need to set up like a dojo, which is a commitment to doing this with your emotions, with your mindset, and with your nervous system. You can't think your way through this. You need to like train this little mammal, it's part of it, this animal that has responded with fear, with protection, but also get to know your emotional world and get to know your unconscious and the parts of you inside of your psyche that is sitting and running patterns for a reason. So you're gonna be an explorer in your inner world. You're gonna become an alchemist, you're gonna become the dreamer that looks into what dream you've been dreaming and really questioning and challenging that, and you're gonna become the artist of your life because you're gonna create an experience that you want more of. So this isn't just reading books or thinking your way through it and figuring it out. You actually need to go in and do the practice, meaning moving your attention in there, inside of you, and turning towards a part and asking them questions and feel what they're feeling and relating to them differently. Going in and feeling a painful emotion without believing the story. You actually need to do the repetitions. You actually need to go to the gym and you actually, actually, actually need to move your attention down into your body. Why do you think I call my mentorship program the Embodied Relationship Academy? It is about inhabiting your body and start leading yourself from there. So now when we have established that, that bigger picture, you actually need to go in and be here with all of these layers. Let's look at each of the layers a little more individually. So when I talk about like the mindset, what is that? Well, it's the underlying beliefs that parts of you are holding, but it's also the narratives that they're speaking each and every day about where you are on your journey, about how healed you are, about how capable you are of having a relationship, about how silly you are for reacting that way. And most of all, like these parts don't need to go, but it's how you relate to them. Are you getting into the car with them? Are you believing that that's your voice or a true voice speaking? Or can you turn towards them and understand where they're coming from? So it's not about getting into more argument with them or conflict with them, because that will just make them feel even more misunderstood, right? But to also realize that, okay, there's some self-leadership needed here, because if we keep letting these parts set the inner landscape to tell these stories, to plant the seeds again and again in our inner soil about our worth, about what we're capable of, we're actually creating an unsafe environment inside, which will have our nervous system, which is a different layer, but very interconnected, right? You can't just separate all of these out as singular entities. They, yeah, they interact. But your nervous system is going to respond to that as a threat. Oh my God, I'm not there yet. Oh my God, I need to work harder. Oh my God, it's hopeless. I can just like give up because of that inner narrative. So, mindset for me is like, how do you choose to show up? What stories do you choose to believe? Are you investing your faith into lies? And you might be arguing, but but they feel very true because I also see it around me, and people, other people are treating me that way, so how can I know that they are not true? I know with all my certainty that they are not. And I'm so willing to prove that to you. Just come join me. Come join me in the Body Relationship Academy, and you'll see that they are not. What really tells lies apart from truth is that truth doesn't need to convince you. Truth is something more quiet and calm underneath. Lies are loud. They're like, we have to do this, or you have to believe me in this. They are the ones kind of screaming at the top of their lungs or being very insisting. When you sink through those layers, you'll arrive somewhere else. And there hasn't been one single client that I worked with over a decade that this hasn't been true. And there hasn't been one single of those stories inside of me where I've doubted, you know, I'm like, well, maybe this is true, and maybe I am not so worthy, or maybe I am ugly, or maybe I am this, you know, that hasn't been dismantled. And where I've arrived somewhere that that I can feel is truth. As I think you can hear, this goes deeper than just some mindset tips or that you can come across on social media. Think this way. Talk to yourself this way. No, it really goes deeper into the unconscious beliefs that's hold by parts of you. And we're not gonna try to override them because then we're just adding layers. We're gonna take them apart by understanding them and by showing compassion for them. So that is the mindset layer that you need to address and work on. Because if you keep planting those seeds into your inner soil again and again, you keep activating your nervous system, you keep reinforcing the same wound that you're trying to shift, that you want to shift. The second layer, the emotional layer. Such a misunderstood aspect of our beings, this emotional layer. And also in emotional teachings that I see out there, which goes a lot up into the head. Oh, label your emotion. Um, they they are showing you something. Listen to what they want to tell you. But that's all processing them through the mind and through cognition. What I'm guiding you into that your emotions are here to experience somatically, they are here to be felt. They're not speaking to you through words. That might come after, that might be a part of you that wants to say something and there's an emotion attached, but they are speaking to you through feeling. You can't listen without feeling. The way of hearing them is by feeling them. So if you're trying to speak a different language with them, like it hasn't landed, they haven't been processed through. So with the emotional layer, it's almost like two pieces here. One of them is all the accumulated emotions that you haven't allowed yourself to feel, that your protectors haven't felt safe enough to feel. And this makes so much sense because at one point you had an emotional experience and it felt overwhelming and it felt unsafe, and no one was there to show you how to move through it. So it makes sense that now your emotional experiences of certain emotions has been flagged as unsafe by your system, too. So as soon as they start to come up inside of you, you are having a reaction. You're having a survival response to feeling the sensation of this emotion. This needs to shift. Your emotions are not your enemy. Your emotions are safe to feel. And yes, even if you feel numbed out or are drowning in them, you can get there. Because it really isn't about learning something new. Oh my God, that's too hard to learn. No, what you need to do is unlearning some unhelpful ways that you've practiced in relating to your emotions. And when we undo that, arriving back into your body to let your emotions move through you is the most natural thing. It's protecting from them that takes a lot more effort. It's believing the stories that have been attached to them takes a lot more effort. It's a lot more draining. The emotions themselves, they are enlivening. They give you your power back and your sense of self back. You're not gonna find that by looking for your identity, your personality, who you are, figuring out your goals and your desires or your passions, your interests, your personalities. Like, no, you're dropping into a sense of you because you're feeling yourself. And so many of us have moved our whole attention up into our head, into the stories that we're saying, and into our logical thinking, our conscious mind, and we relate to the world and ourselves from there. And then we're wondering why do I not feel fulfilled? Why do I have a good life and still I don't feel like myself? Why am I not happy? It's because of this that our tension has been pulled up away from our body, our heart, our guts, our intuition, our felt sense in our body, our genitals, our sex, our desire, our passion, our deep sadness, our grief, our rage. And we're hanging out in the conscious mind. This needs to shift. We need to reclaim this, and it's easier than you think. It's repetition, it's moving your attention again and again down into your body. So, okay, one piece is the accumulated emotions that you haven't allowed yourself to feel that needs to be processed through, where you need to pull apart the story from the emotional experience and go in there and be with that five-year-old, that seven-year-old inside of you that didn't get to feel that emotion in a way that felt safe. And be that with that part and let them process it through. I call this embodied feeling. It's one of the cornerstones of my work and inside the embodied relationship academy. And I don't use just leave you with some advice of go feel your feelings. I actually show you step by step of how to feel in a way that heals. Because I needed that. I had no idea when therapists or online gurus told me to feel my feelings, like, yeah, I am. Why is it not working? Because we're feeling through the head, we're we're thinking about the emotion, we're not actually feeling them, or we're identified with a part that believes a bunch of things that's been attached to this emotion. This needs to change. And I show you how. But then there's the other piece of the emotional work, which is now that you don't have so much accumulated, feeling your emotions doesn't feel as overwhelming and heavy and like there's so much in there anymore. Because you've felt through things, you have less baggage in there. So now it's the work of just being there with what you're feeling and experiencing. Of being there with the experience of you each and every day. Feel what you're feeling without having it mean so much. It might not mean that you have to leave this relationship or that they don't love you, or that you're not respected, or something else. It might just be a feeling. Move through it and see what you feel like after. This is the emotional layer. The third layer, the nervous system. Now we're really getting into the animal body, to the to the mammal, what needs to be retrained. Because as you've heard me saying, there are many experiences inside of you that has been made unsafe. So your nervous system, your reptile brain, and your amygdala and your limbic brain has been responding and reacting to all this unsafety. And they've put you into survival states. Switch the gears from your prefrontal cortex into your amygdala, into your limbic system, okay? So this we need to work with. First inside of yourself, making emotions safe to feel again, making your inner world safe again. And now we can start playing in the relational arena. Okay, when someone needs a little more space, how is your nervous system reacting? When someone is coming really close and asking you to open up, how is your nervous system reacting? When they're putting their attention somewhere else, how is your nervous system reacting? This isn't your fault. This isn't something that makes you faulty or failing. This just points back to a moment in time where this experience felt unsafe for you. Can you see that it isn't a problem, a failure at all? It actually points back to the gold. It actually points back to where you can heal. We want this to happen. We want to see this because we want to follow the thread back down into the core, into the root. This is where we can address it. So now you can use your skills of turning towards yourself and meeting yourself in a new way, but also to retrain your nervous system to conquer these experiences as safe. And what's even more fascinating with all of this is that it's often pointing you to a place inside of yourself that's been shadowed. Someone pulling away, someone needing more space than you do, someone really standing up for themselves and not caring so much about what other people are thinking. It's probably showing you a skill, an aspect of yourself that didn't get so well developed, meaning it was shadowed. Maybe you went into people pleasing and hypervigilance instead. Maybe you went into kindness, compassion, empathy, and really grow that side of the human experience. This is what happens. Our shadows show up around us. And our shadows isn't just the bad aspects of ourselves. It's what hasn't been so developed. It's what's been put aside when you needed to adapt a survival mechanism to feel safe. So if people pleasing was your go-to, then maybe setting boundaries or putting yourself first isn't. So when that shows up in someone else, it's flagged as unsafe in your system. Ding-a-ding-a ding a ding-a-ding-ding-ding. This isn't something we could be doing. It's actually talking more about you and what's going on inside of you, what's safe inside of you, what you have capacity to do than it is about the other. And when you start seeing this, when you realize this, the whole game has changed, right? Now you can be in the dojo and you can choose to see what's showing up in the mirror of relationship as something that you want to practice, something you want to conquer, not to make the relationship work necessarily, if that isn't for you, but for you to play the long game of conquering this for you, for your relational skills, for your own self-esteem, for your own self-love, for your own wholeness. And then we can see if this is the relationship that you that lasts that you want to stay in, that you choose, or if that's another one down the line. And just to give another example of this, because it can feel pretty out there. Okay, if your pattern is to kind of attract people that come really close, that are feeling a lot, and that is projecting onto you everything that they're feeling. They might be blaming you, they might be, yeah, needing you a lot, needing your attention, wanting your attention. Yes, that will probably be pointing back to an experience you had in your emotional history growing up. Someone that was overbearing, someone that had strong reactions and kind of took over the whole room with that, so that you didn't get to be with you. So there was no space left for you. You didn't get to feel yourself. So either you responded to that by rejecting it, right? And like this isn't good. I can't have this around me to feel to feel safe. I need space from it. So I pull away. Or maybe you internalize that behavior too, right? But yeah, what we're talking about right now is when we reject what was painful for us in other people's behavior. But it doesn't mean that we are just rejecting it in others. It means we rejected it inside of ourselves too. So whenever strong emotions are coming up inside of you, you are rejecting that and shadowing that just like it would be someone treating you badly. Because it reminds you of that parent, of that caretaker, of that person, and how it felt to a part of you. So it's been shadow rejected inside of you. And now when it's showing up in someone else, when they are showing up around you and reflecting this back, yes, it could be about your mother, about your father, about a caretaker, but it's also about the shadowed aspect inside of you that you don't like looking into because your ego mind is like, don't look at that shadow. It needs to stay shamed in the basement. We want nothing to do with that. This is what real shadow work is about. It's not something gimmicky, uh, breath work, meeting your evil self. Like, no. It's about seeing how the psyche compartmentalizes things this way. How things are Being rejected into the shadow by the ego mind because the ego mind is busy trying to build a desirable sense of self that will function and be loved around others, that will make us feel safe. It just isn't really good at any of that, unfortunately. And we end up in a prison. So what we're doing is reclaiming all the aspects of ourselves. So looking into the mirrors of others is actually pointing us to what's been shadowed in ourselves, possibly for good reasons. No, we don't want to be violent or act out in a way that a parent did towards us. But when we've pushed that aside inside of us, we haven't actually met with it and integrated it. And it's actually way more dangerous to just keep it down there because it comes, it's gonna come up one way or the other. It's a pressure cooker in there. So the most safe people, which is what we're talking about, right? Safe in relationships, secure relating, are the ones that have met with their shadows. Yep. Here's the aspect of me that want to vomit this over everyone, that just feeling so much and drowning in it. Oh, here's the aspect of me that has a lot of rage and just want to tear everything apart, punch people's faces in and burn it all down. Okay. Uh that aspect of me. Let me turn towards it, let me understand it so that it doesn't have to scream so loudly inside of me. Maybe a way to summarize this is nervous system work is to meet with all of yourself so that you're not jumping at your own shadow, that you're not scared of your own shadow, because ultimately that is what makes you feel unsafe and insecure in relationships. And making your nervous system secure in relating is both meeting with that shadow and uncover the underlying wound, uh underlying wounds, heal them, meet the unmet needs, but also to conquer a new ground. It's like, oh, I get to be someone who can speak up and say what I want over here instead of people pleasing and always scanning them, which is ultimately making it about me. Oh, I'm someone that can take a step back or to decide or come closer to make all these new dance moves that I wasn't able to do before. I'm someone who can just speak about what's going on for me without needing to make the other person responsible for that or come up with a solution. I can also do it in two minutes, and I don't need two hours to do it. And I'm someone who can hold myself as I'm moving through painful emotions or overwhelming experiences. And I trust myself to do that. I don't need a parent to be here and do that because part of me is five. I'm showing up for that five-year-old. So this is the nervous system work, and we need the dojo for it, which brings me now into my last piece around this. We've kind of covered the big, okay, you need a dojo, you need to move your attention into your body. You can't think your way through this. And then we looked at the three layers that you need to address with your whole presence, with your felt sense, with your attention, and learn some skills that wasn't modeled to you and how to relate to yourself differently. And now the last piece that I want to mention: how for an insecure system to get to secure are three R's that I just come up with reflection, reminder, and repetition. So when I talk about reflection, this is something that I train my support coaches in, like the coaches that I train in the embodied self-mastery method. They have a whole module on becoming the clear mirror. When we're making it about us, we are projecting our experience onto others. Okay. You're hurting me, you're a bad person. Or even what we are not owning and what we're feeling inside, we are projecting onto them. Oh, you're angry, you're sad, you're this, you're that. And we're not taking responsibility for our own experience. Becoming way more of a clear mirror is doing everything I just talked about, of clearing out some accumulated stuff that's sitting in there and bringing your shadow into the light for wholeness. When you do that, you become a more clear mirror. You're believing less lies, you have less set opinions about what's going on because your life depends on it. Your safety depends on it. Like, no, there's more openness. So now you can actually meet others that way too. So, this is one of my most important roles inside of my mentorships when I'm coaching to be that clear mirror. I don't have an agenda for you. I don't have a belief system that I'm trying to hook you into, to comply with. Like, no, I'm reflecting back to you what I'm seeing and noticing that you're describing. I don't have an opinion about that. I don't judge that. We're just looking at it through the lens of what you want. If you want to get to secure a relating, okay, then I can reflect back to you the places that needs to be seen and felt and understood. This is needed. You need a different consciousness, reflecting a different reality back to you than probably most of your friends are doing. Or most of the relationship advice out on social media, and maybe even your therapist. If they're good, they're gonna do this well, okay? But there's not a lot of people and teachers and mentors out there who do this, who are clear, like elders in that sense, that they're setting aside their own agenda, their own belief system to guide you back home to your truth. This is needed. And if nothing else, like you need a different consciousness than yours. Because from inside of your looping patterns and your belief system, you won't be able to shift that belief system itself. It needs to be done kind of from outside. So you need someone pointing at you, pointing you from a different dream, from a different consciousness. And so that's the reflection part. You need a clear mirror where you can see your shit, someone who's willing to hold that up for you with a lot of compassion and who understands where you need to go. And then you need the reminder again and again and again, like, oh, I'm identified right now. Oh, yes, I'm inside of this part that believes A, B, and C, that I'm unworthy, that I can't be in relationship, that I'm too broken. Ah, okay, I remember now my job is to turn towards that. And we need this reminder again and again and again, because you have repeated this pattern every day for your whole life of your attention going into this part of you and living from within it. So moving your attention out of that and turning towards this is what we call dreaming practice. Like, what dream are you dreaming? And you need the reminder of that again and again. You need the reminder of instead of reacting inside of a pattern, to step out and relate to it differently. And then you need the repetition. You're forming new neural pathways. So going in, ask the inner leader, and again and again, meeting yourself in this way, like this is what will change the pattern. Your parts, your protector parts that's been in charge of keeping you safe and of relating, and we need to get out of this now or else, and let's burn down this whole thing, or let's move closer to them and make them know that we love them and what fantastic people we are. So maybe then they will love us if we do more. Let's do more. Like those parts, they have been in charge because they were put in the role of protectors, but they were very young when they were put in that role. So you showing up for them with a different sense of leadership and turning towards them and not believing their stories and but still understanding them, that will create a whole new sense of inner leadership. That will create a whole new sense of secure relating inside of you. To all these kids inside of you, it doesn't feel safe for them that they are in charge. It doesn't. So when you start to practicing your leadership roles inside, that environment changes and you start to feel more secure inside. Again, now that can spill out, can spill over into your external relationships. So reflection from a different consciousness, a mentor, a coach, whatever it is, something around you, a retreat, a yeah, a different consciousness that's reflecting a different reality, a different possibility back to you. Reflecting what you can't see. The repetition and the reminder. This is what forms new neural pathway. This is what forms secure relating. And this is, of course, why I've set up because I saw this. I'm not making this up because I have programs that is built this way. No, it's the other way around. I built my containers, the Embodied Relationship Academy, because I saw that this is what works. So in era, we have the practice dojo where you go in and you repeat and you get to practice with others. And I'm there reminding you all the time. And we're coaching and we're trying new things, and I'm directing your attention again and again back into your body when you want to run up into your mind and try to figure it out again. And I'm reflecting that back to you. This is what's happening now. This is what makes changes over time. And if that sounds like a lot, it really doesn't have to be. It's more about you committing to something. Like, okay, I want to learn singing. Okay, I'm showing up for this choir once a week, and I'm practicing little singing exercises and tongue stretches, and it just takes like 10 minutes, most days. And just setting that intention and that commitment, it does a lot. I think where most people get stuck is because they get overwhelmed with all the different options. And they're trying to combine different methods on their own, and now they have three different places where they're looking. And now, oh my God, I should be doing this, and I haven't done this today, and then they loop back into the self-judgment. Oh, see, it's not working. Um, I'm procrastinating, I'm not doing it. So, like committing to a container or a mentor or coach where you're like, yes, this is where I'm at. I'm just showing up here. And even stepping into that is sending that signal, is setting that intention, right? I hope this has been helpful, not just this episode, but the whole series on moving from insecure to secure attachment. We started in episode 192 with the five signs that I see are common in people with insecure attachment, and not on the surface level, but what's going on underneath. And then we looked specifically on the avoidant pattern and on the anxious strategy, and brought in a lot of compassion and nuance to what is happening and to see that it really is one sense of like the aspect of relating with distance or space or or people coming closer, the intimacy, the connection that has been flagged as unsafe to the system. And the strategy now is to get to safety again. So when we can understand this, we can work with it, right? And then in the previous episode, we talked about what it feels like for the system to get more secure. What are the signs that we're getting more secure? How does that feel like in our body? And then today, talking more about what it takes to make that journey and how incredible it is to make that journey, to have the way I see it today, like the privilege of having felt all of it, what it feels to be in an insecure attachment. I feel so honored and privileged that I have gotten to experience high anxiety, panic attacks, freeze response, disorganized attachment pattern, and everything that's been layered in there. Like I feel so privileged to having had that experience because it also helps me when I'm working with clients, for sure. I understand what's going on and how challenging it feels, and how it feels like it's never going to be different or better. And what a privilege to get to take that journey, which not a lot of people do fully commit to in that way, out of love for themselves, out of love for these parts, and like, oh, I want you to be able to experience secure relating and what it feels like to feel fully myself with others, where I don't have to hide or walk on eggshells or be hyper-vigilant, but I get to show up as me and find out that relating can be something very different than my young nervous system and emotional body got to experience. No, I want to reclaim that. I want to reclaim love. I want to reclaim partner love in a way that feels good. Yes, let's do my half of that. Let's make my inner world safe, secure so that I'm open to that safe, secure relationship. And then what a joy and privilege to get to experience more quiet, calm, security on the other side. It's like, uh, yeah, I'm so fucking loved. I am loved. What do I want to go create from here? What are the relationships that I choose to step in into from here? That's a whole different game again. Next week, you'll get to listen to a phenomenal conversation with Emerson. Emerson stepped into, you know, one of my free trainings about six months ago. She first jumped into alchemy, try that out, continued into the Embodied Relationship Academy, and she also came to one of my in-person retreats, the one in Mexico, now back in January. So she's really had an experience of having worked on herself for 20 years and feeling completely hopeless and had tried everything to just in a month feeling very different from doing this work, and then starting having experiences in dating three, four months in that she was like pinching her arm. Could this be? Is this happening? Do I feel this different already? And then coming to Teotihuacan in Mexico, which is a magical experience in itself, and where she's now like, I'm coming back every year, because that was something I couldn't even have imagined was possible for me to experience. So I can't wait to have you hear from someone who thought she was doomed and that it was always gonna feel this insecure and high anxiety, and then having a very different experience. Tune in next week for Emerson's journey.