Mark Groves
Appearances
Healing + Human Potential
How Attachment Styles Hold the Key to Emotional Freedom and Relationship Growth | EP 67
Your attachment system is a radar that is looking for safety and security in your relationships. Not just romantic, every relationship in your life. It's asking the question, am I safe? And am I safe to be me? It's really about not your relationship to the other person, but more about the space between you and the other person.
Healing + Human Potential
How Attachment Styles Hold the Key to Emotional Freedom and Relationship Growth | EP 67
Yeah, and for the anxious person to be able to say, like, together as a couple working through something like that is, you know, like, what would you need to hear from me as I take this space? Do you need me to check in on you in a couple hours? And I'll be the one who comes back and you make the rule no longer than 24 hours.
Healing + Human Potential
How Attachment Styles Hold the Key to Emotional Freedom and Relationship Growth | EP 67
And hopefully you just bring that time down until eventually both people, as you were saying, they heal their stories. Like when they take space, they leave. Or when they have needs, I get overwhelmed and it becomes all about them. I think it's actually ethically a deep responsibility for any interventionalist to actually do somatic work.
Healing + Human Potential
How Attachment Styles Hold the Key to Emotional Freedom and Relationship Growth | EP 67
And if your survival strategy, which is, that's why I think like at the core of why we do that or why we're good at something, that's great that it's a developed thing. At least we took a wound and turned it into something we could turn into a living and it feels natural for us. But at some point we have to unhook from the need to be needed.
Healing + Human Potential
How Attachment Styles Hold the Key to Emotional Freedom and Relationship Growth | EP 67
And I think a lot of interventionists get stuck in that, is that still unconsciously they need their client to need them and they're being paid for it. So we have to actually do the deeper somatic work that you're talking about so that our nervous system liberates their nervous system. So there's not unconscious hooks. There's like deep unconscious contracts that we're,
Healing + Human Potential
How Attachment Styles Hold the Key to Emotional Freedom and Relationship Growth | EP 67
you know, in a way, unconsciously sabotaging the success of the people we work with.
Healing + Human Potential
How Attachment Styles Hold the Key to Emotional Freedom and Relationship Growth | EP 67
You had a hook back into their wound. You know, it just becomes the same model. And, you know, as I agree with you and it's like all really good, like every mentor I've had, every
Healing + Human Potential
How Attachment Styles Hold the Key to Emotional Freedom and Relationship Growth | EP 67
every healer i've worked with everything i always can sense like are they here to actually liberate me and and i might not have known that initially but that's now how i sense it's like are they do they need me to validate them do they need any of that no that's right do you walk away feeling better about yourself or better about them that's a good indicator right like i need you to think of me as great or do i feel great in your presence
Healing + Human Potential
How Attachment Styles Hold the Key to Emotional Freedom and Relationship Growth | EP 67
Yeah, and you know, I think a lot of the time, too, when we're disorganized, especially, there's a deep desire for a relationship, but then we just don't know why. Like, I had no idea when I was in that phase of my life after that deep betrayal. One, I went from being so pro-relationship, so in love with love, and
Healing + Human Potential
How Attachment Styles Hold the Key to Emotional Freedom and Relationship Growth | EP 67
All of a sudden I was like, well, I'm just going to deal with one night stands and short term relationships. Like I can control the depth of intimacy. When you look at the conversation that happens about avoidance online and disorganized is it tends to not be optimistic.
Healing + Human Potential
How Attachment Styles Hold the Key to Emotional Freedom and Relationship Growth | EP 67
It's not like it's almost like most of the content is created for anxiously attached people, probably because anxiously attached people are the ones going out and looking for it.
Healing + Human Potential
How Attachment Styles Hold the Key to Emotional Freedom and Relationship Growth | EP 67
Right? Like, let me understand my man on a deeper level so I can make sure he doesn't, you know, or let me understand my woman. But for disorganized, I think one, the recognition that it exists because you don't trust connection. and that's true of all of them, but I think it's especially true for disorganized is that the nervous system doesn't trust connection. And so it like wants it.
Healing + Human Potential
How Attachment Styles Hold the Key to Emotional Freedom and Relationship Growth | EP 67
So there's this reaching out. And if you think about it, this is often modeled from where the people you got love from is also a was sometimes a place of danger or a lack of safety. So there's a confusion. So you can feel this like desire to go forward, but then this, ah, like this pullback.
Healing + Human Potential
How Attachment Styles Hold the Key to Emotional Freedom and Relationship Growth | EP 67
So again, coming back to the awareness, knowing that you can change it is of course a powerful thing, which we spoke about before, but somatic practices, like somatic practices, somatic practices, which of course they're in the right place with you.
Healing + Human Potential
How Attachment Styles Hold the Key to Emotional Freedom and Relationship Growth | EP 67
You know, breadcrumbing. I think it's a, they have now all these cool terms.
Healing + Human Potential
How Attachment Styles Hold the Key to Emotional Freedom and Relationship Growth | EP 67
Did our generation not have cool terms? Like breadcrumbing, there's like zombieing where they disappear and then they come back from the dead.
Healing + Human Potential
How Attachment Styles Hold the Key to Emotional Freedom and Relationship Growth | EP 67
I think attachment is such a simple framework for sort of understanding the ways that human systems move together. And so when people start to learn about them, they're like, oh my gosh, that makes so much sense. Now I make sense. The work is, I mean, was really more popularized by Sue Johnson, who... recently passed away. So God bless her and the work that she did.
Healing + Human Potential
How Attachment Styles Hold the Key to Emotional Freedom and Relationship Growth | EP 67
They're gone.
Healing + Human Potential
How Attachment Styles Hold the Key to Emotional Freedom and Relationship Growth | EP 67
Breadcrumbing is really interesting. I would argue that breadcrumbing likely exists more from an avoidantly attached perspective or disorganized, but that it is like... I'm just gonna give you enough. I would say that it's people who are not ready for a relationship. So it's a pretty good orange slash red flag.
Healing + Human Potential
How Attachment Styles Hold the Key to Emotional Freedom and Relationship Growth | EP 67
You know, whenever anyone says, like, believe their actions, not their words, I'm like, no, no, no, no. If their words and actions don't match, that's the orange flag. Because, you know, you'll have someone who says, I don't want a relationship, but treats you like a boyfriend or girlfriend. That doesn't mean they actually want you to be their boyfriend or girlfriend.
Healing + Human Potential
How Attachment Styles Hold the Key to Emotional Freedom and Relationship Growth | EP 67
And that's where I think we can get lost in that. The breadcrumbing is like, I'm just gonna give you enough to keep you close, but I'm never going to be fully emotionally available to you. I'm never gonna be relationally fully available to you. For people who are on the other side of it, it's usually because they actually, through likely their childhood, just got enough from a parent.
Healing + Human Potential
How Attachment Styles Hold the Key to Emotional Freedom and Relationship Growth | EP 67
And could be that their needs were met with wants, which is pretty common. So like if I need a connection from my father, but he bought me gifts, And so we actually learn to meet our needs for connection with meeting wants. And you see this a lot relationally where people are dating and things are not going well and all of a sudden they go on a lavish vacation.
Healing + Human Potential
How Attachment Styles Hold the Key to Emotional Freedom and Relationship Growth | EP 67
And then things are getting back to the, you know, the truth is coming out again and then they get engaged. And then the truth comes out again and then they get married. And then the truth comes out again and they have a baby. And then they do that again till eventually
Healing + Human Potential
How Attachment Styles Hold the Key to Emotional Freedom and Relationship Growth | EP 67
Ideally the person who keeps getting because that's you know, some form of breadcrumbing It's like I'm never going to be fully aligned with you and I think for people who are really felt inconsistency from a parent, that becomes just a familiar model. Like, it's like activating the wound. Will I ever be enough for you to fully choose me?
Healing + Human Potential
How Attachment Styles Hold the Key to Emotional Freedom and Relationship Growth | EP 67
Instead of really like the healing of that is, will I ever be enough for me to fully choose me? And then breadcrumbing becomes this like, are you really trying to pull that shit on me? You're gonna breadcrumb me? Like, hell no. Thank you for showing me who you are. I have zero time for it and zero tolerance for inconsistency, because I am the model of my own consistency.
Healing + Human Potential
How Attachment Styles Hold the Key to Emotional Freedom and Relationship Growth | EP 67
Yeah, you know, the root of what brings us to work like the work we're talking about, personal work, personal growth, books, somatic therapy, all of it, usually comes from this experience, right? We go, oh, I'm like frustrated dating, or I'm not sure if I should stay or go, or I just going through a breakup and I feel like I've lost everything.
Healing + Human Potential
How Attachment Styles Hold the Key to Emotional Freedom and Relationship Growth | EP 67
But it's looking at the original studies looked at a mom interacting with a kid in a room. And what would happen is mom would leave the room and mom would come back. and they'd see how the baby would respond to mom. So first one, mom leaves the room, mom comes back and baby reunites with mom and then doesn't leave mom's side. So that's anxious attachment.
Healing + Human Potential
How Attachment Styles Hold the Key to Emotional Freedom and Relationship Growth | EP 67
So the doorway is usually the perspective that something's wrong with me and I need to fix it. But what has to change in that process is that it's not that there's something wrong with me that needs to be fixed. Because if I'm fixing something, that infers brokenness. And so at some point, your growth has to come from a place of expansion, not repair.
Healing + Human Potential
How Attachment Styles Hold the Key to Emotional Freedom and Relationship Growth | EP 67
And what I mean by that is that the child sees that the failure of the environment is about the failure of the child. So like the child has two options. My dad was inconsistent because I wasn't enough for him to be consistent or my dad is just not good. To think of your father or your mother or both as being flawed is too confronting.
Healing + Human Potential
How Attachment Styles Hold the Key to Emotional Freedom and Relationship Growth | EP 67
So what happens is the child creates a narrative that they themselves are. So just knowing that, that like, oh, wow, do I see, as you said earlier, like, do I see their behavior as evidence of my lack of worth or my dysfunction? Or do I see it as their behavior? And so we start to decouple our self-worth from our relational outcomes.
Healing + Human Potential
How Attachment Styles Hold the Key to Emotional Freedom and Relationship Growth | EP 67
This is like really where the birth of my work came from was that I went through a breakup and I was like, why do I feel more connected to my heart than I ever have? And yet I appear like a failure to the people around me. Like to a lot of the people I loved most, they were like, oh, you're just afraid of commitment. You're just this, you're just that.
Healing + Human Potential
How Attachment Styles Hold the Key to Emotional Freedom and Relationship Growth | EP 67
And I was like, wait, I've never made a decision more connected to my heart, like more brave for me to go against what I was taught. And now I'm actually like facing shame. And so that was like, I was, I had to do a deeper inquiry into it because I was so confused. And you start to see like, oh yeah, the behaviors that were taught about relationship are
Healing + Human Potential
How Attachment Styles Hold the Key to Emotional Freedom and Relationship Growth | EP 67
a lot of the things we do relationally are just things we're taught. They're not even necessarily things we want to do, which is actually a bit of the mind F in that. So knowing that your worth is really sourced from your choices. So whenever I work with someone, One of the first things we do is just like explore where their frustrations are in their life.
Healing + Human Potential
How Attachment Styles Hold the Key to Emotional Freedom and Relationship Growth | EP 67
so anxiously attach people when there's too much space that creates fear and for avoidantly attach people when there's not enough space that creates fear we like bring people into our experience who trigger us in the exact way that requires us to heal and resolve the things from our childhood And we call it chemistry.
Healing + Human Potential
How Attachment Styles Hold the Key to Emotional Freedom and Relationship Growth | EP 67
And frustrations don't have to be romantic. What I look at is where does tension exist in anything you're in relationship with? So you're in relationship with everything that's not you. So substances, people, TV, right? All of it. And where does friction exist in those relationships? And it goes, okay, well, what do you value? Like, who do you want to be? What do you want for your life?
Healing + Human Potential
How Attachment Styles Hold the Key to Emotional Freedom and Relationship Growth | EP 67
And a simple way for people to do that, which I would say anxious attached people have a harder time identifying their needs and their values because they spent their whole lives orienting around other people. Right. So, and you know, what I'll often hear initially is I can't believe I don't know what I want or who I am or what I need. And I'm like, beautiful adventure.
Healing + Human Potential
How Attachment Styles Hold the Key to Emotional Freedom and Relationship Growth | EP 67
Like what a beautiful adventure. It's not, again, evidence of a deficit. It's evidence of a possibility. So by looking at people you admire, you can identify values that you hope to hold. And then you look at the things you have friction with because the friction and the pain or the frustration is coming from you violating some form of value. You just haven't labeled it yet.
Healing + Human Potential
How Attachment Styles Hold the Key to Emotional Freedom and Relationship Growth | EP 67
And so when you draw out or just write out three to five core values, which I would say like there's some pretty universal ones, you know, like I want health and vitality in all my relationships, both mental, physical, emotional. I want trust and truth and integrity and, you know, among many others. And
Healing + Human Potential
How Attachment Styles Hold the Key to Emotional Freedom and Relationship Growth | EP 67
So like underlying fear, I'm afraid that if you leave, you might not come back. Second one, mom leaves, mom comes back, baby reunites with mom, hey, what's up, goes back to playing, secure attachment. Last one, mom leaves, mom comes back, baby's like, ah, I didn't even really notice you were gone.
Healing + Human Potential
How Attachment Styles Hold the Key to Emotional Freedom and Relationship Growth | EP 67
When you actually go through the list of things that are frustrating you, you can write out in which of my values is this in violation of, how, and what would need to change in, is it even possible for that relationship to get into integrity? To me, I'm like, that's actually, if you wanna love your life, that's the process. Go get all those things into alignment and you're free.
Healing + Human Potential
How Attachment Styles Hold the Key to Emotional Freedom and Relationship Growth | EP 67
Like, it's actually that simple. Except what's scary is the large conversations that often have to happen to shift yourself back into integrity if you've ever even been there.
Healing + Human Potential
How Attachment Styles Hold the Key to Emotional Freedom and Relationship Growth | EP 67
Which, you know, when you've built a life being someone different than who you are, then to actually create a life based on who you truly are, it requires the systems that you've been part of to orient around a new version of you. And as you know very well, almost every single human system will push back on the thing that's trying to change the system.
Healing + Human Potential
How Attachment Styles Hold the Key to Emotional Freedom and Relationship Growth | EP 67
So if you have a family that never confronted mom's alcoholism and all of a sudden you're like, hey, did anyone notice this shit that's going on over here? Like we can't have Thanksgiving dinner without mom slurring words and saying rude things. All of a sudden the system goes, whoa, whoa, whoa. And so I always,
Healing + Human Potential
How Attachment Styles Hold the Key to Emotional Freedom and Relationship Growth | EP 67
you know, joke that the black sheep of the family eventually becomes the goat, which is not actually possible from an animal-based perspective, but from a metaphorical archetypal perspective it is, is that the black sheep disrupts the family system and then becomes a beacon of health for the system to orient around a different way of being.
Healing + Human Potential
How Attachment Styles Hold the Key to Emotional Freedom and Relationship Growth | EP 67
like no big deal but what happens physiologically for that child is it's acting the same way as the anxious attached child so heart rate etc are up and and that's avoidant attachment so i always frame to people that and the third type of attachment well i guess we would go forth is disorganized so you might like pivot between anxious and avoidance and we might know that one as an adult when you're dating and you're pursuing somebody and then
Healing + Human Potential
How Attachment Styles Hold the Key to Emotional Freedom and Relationship Growth | EP 67
And thank God you don't need other people to do the work for you to heal. And going right to when someone's like, I need to have a conversation with my mom. That's the first thing I need to do. I'm like, maybe don't start with mom. Start with that I can't do dinner on Friday with a friend. Start with a small boundary. Because at the core of even
Healing + Human Potential
How Attachment Styles Hold the Key to Emotional Freedom and Relationship Growth | EP 67
know getting into regulation again from a nervous system perspective if you've spent your life hyper vigilant or even avoidant you know it's like disorganized like any of these different states because avoidance is flight too you know so for people to understand that if you've spent your life like that and all of a sudden you start doing yoga and hanging out with relaxed people
Healing + Human Potential
How Attachment Styles Hold the Key to Emotional Freedom and Relationship Growth | EP 67
And you're like, man, and you maybe go on dates and someone texts you when they say they're going to. And you're like, what? This is kind of weird. This is boring. Yeah, exactly. When you get regulated, you'll see that reliability is the hottest shit ever. But what happens to the system is that as it reorganizes, so if I've never laid a boundary, the first time I lay a boundary is a Hail Mary.
Healing + Human Potential
How Attachment Styles Hold the Key to Emotional Freedom and Relationship Growth | EP 67
It's like, because boundaries feed self-worth and boundaries also come from self-worth. But if the first time we've ever laid a boundary, there's an absence of the worst. So the first one is like, I think I got this. And then that's why you need people around you are like, you got this, like we're holding strong.
Healing + Human Potential
How Attachment Styles Hold the Key to Emotional Freedom and Relationship Growth | EP 67
And the old way of thinking is if they don't like my boundary, then the boundary wasn't good. No. You have to like your boundary. No one else has to like your boundary. And them not liking it doesn't mean the boundary is not awesome. It could be the best boundary in the world.
Healing + Human Potential
How Attachment Styles Hold the Key to Emotional Freedom and Relationship Growth | EP 67
And I say for people who don't have boundaries that often the first things you actually need are walls because that actually delineates a self. When we've been so enmeshed in other people's experiences, we actually need to separate ourselves to discover who we are. And so actually taking space from family of origin
Healing + Human Potential
How Attachment Styles Hold the Key to Emotional Freedom and Relationship Growth | EP 67
like parents, people who really trigger us is actually necessary in order to be like, oh, like I don't have to be in relationship with all these, they're almost like tentacles or hooks. Yeah.
Healing + Human Potential
How Attachment Styles Hold the Key to Emotional Freedom and Relationship Growth | EP 67
Yeah, and it might not even be possible.
Healing + Human Potential
How Attachment Styles Hold the Key to Emotional Freedom and Relationship Growth | EP 67
Yeah, boundaries have to have consequences. Otherwise, they're just suggestions. You know, like, And people who are boundary bulldozers, they know you're suggesting. They're going to test you. You know, it's Harriet Lerner who talks about, like, they do a change-back move. So as soon as you, like, do something, they try to get you to change back by doing something else.
Healing + Human Potential
How Attachment Styles Hold the Key to Emotional Freedom and Relationship Growth | EP 67
And so, you know, at the core of regulation is really, like, trust, is that do I trust that when I need to have my own back, that I have access to the resources, to my voice, to be able to say this doesn't work or this does work. And if we don't have access to our no, then our yes is really filled with small print.
Healing + Human Potential
How Attachment Styles Hold the Key to Emotional Freedom and Relationship Growth | EP 67
So when someone says I have anxiety, anxiety is perceived to be a future-oriented experience, I always look to like, where are you not fully self-expressed? Where do you not have access to all your emotions? And, you know, just making it like more simple that there's core emotions and then there's just like different branches of those core emotions. Like, which emotions do I not have access to?
Healing + Human Potential
How Attachment Styles Hold the Key to Emotional Freedom and Relationship Growth | EP 67
You're like, I like you, I like you, I like you. And then they're like, I like you. And you're like, ah, I'm not really sure. Might need a little bit of space. Yeah, so I always frame it as like your attachment system is a radar that is looking for safety and security in your relationships, not just romantic, every relationship in your life. And it's essentially just assessing that constantly.
Healing + Human Potential
How Attachment Styles Hold the Key to Emotional Freedom and Relationship Growth | EP 67
Because if you don't have access to expression, then you can't steer your life. If you can't steer your life, your life is going to go kind of rudderlessly in the direction that other people decide for you, likely the expectations of society, culture, family, all that kind of stuff.
Healing + Human Potential
How Attachment Styles Hold the Key to Emotional Freedom and Relationship Growth | EP 67
I'd say the first one is, do I feel safe with this person? And I think it needs to be coupled with, am I also excited about pursuing this connection?
Healing + Human Potential
How Attachment Styles Hold the Key to Emotional Freedom and Relationship Growth | EP 67
A lot of the times someone will say, what's wrong with me? I'm meeting new, reliable people and I don't want to date them or I'm like not finding a connection. And... You had mentioned this earlier. It's like no matter what emotion you're experiencing or no matter what feeling you're experiencing, it's always the doorway into something. So it's like never shame the feeling that's coming forward.
Healing + Human Potential
How Attachment Styles Hold the Key to Emotional Freedom and Relationship Growth | EP 67
Like if someone's hesitant about getting married, you have to follow the hesitation to get to the thing that's rooted in there. It doesn't mean you're not getting married. It just means you're gonna uncover something that might need to be brought forward. Maybe there's a behavior in the other person that is actually in violation of a deep deal breaker that you haven't identified. Who knows?
Healing + Human Potential
How Attachment Styles Hold the Key to Emotional Freedom and Relationship Growth | EP 67
But if we shame the thing we're feeling, then, you know, much like we were saying, like, if we identify as being boundaryless, then it's a lot harder to change. But if it's a collection of behaviors and survival strategies that got us exactly where we are, newsflash, they were perfect then. They did exactly what they were meant to do.
Healing + Human Potential
How Attachment Styles Hold the Key to Emotional Freedom and Relationship Growth | EP 67
So, what I'll often say to people when they're like, oh, I'm like, what's wrong with me that I can't, first I like narcissists, now I can't even like a nice guy. It's being able to see that often there might be actually truth to your somatic response, which is that kindness isn't always clean. that sometimes kindness is contrived. Sometimes it's manipulative. It's the more fawning response.
Healing + Human Potential
How Attachment Styles Hold the Key to Emotional Freedom and Relationship Growth | EP 67
And that's why they say like, nice guys finish last, because really the kindness is coming from a place of manipulation. So being able to say no to something, like it's better for you to say no to something that's a yes, than yes to something that's a no.
Healing + Human Potential
How Attachment Styles Hold the Key to Emotional Freedom and Relationship Growth | EP 67
So accessing no, and when you say no to something that's a yes, you discover more about the value of the things in your life that you don't have because you don't have it, right? But if you say yes to something that's a no, you put yourself in circumstances that you actually shouldn't be.
Healing + Human Potential
How Attachment Styles Hold the Key to Emotional Freedom and Relationship Growth | EP 67
It's asking the question, am I safe and am I safe to be me? And I always say to people, it's a lot simpler to understand that it's really about not your relationship to the other person, but more about the space between you and the other person. So anxiously attached people, when there's too much space, that creates fear.
Healing + Human Potential
How Attachment Styles Hold the Key to Emotional Freedom and Relationship Growth | EP 67
Yeah, such a good question, and I think we all can find ourselves in that, like, how do I know if this is actually... I would definitely look at someone's relationship... Patterns.
Healing + Human Potential
How Attachment Styles Hold the Key to Emotional Freedom and Relationship Growth | EP 67
Yeah. So if they have this sort of like, I want the excitement, the chemistry, the thing, but their history is like unreliable, liars, betrayers, cheaters, you know... Is this true for this person?
Healing + Human Potential
How Attachment Styles Hold the Key to Emotional Freedom and Relationship Growth | EP 67
Well, what happens is the nervous system is still like we're confusing chemistry with unreliability and unpredictability. And so there's an excitation that occurs, almost like we might say in the thrill of the chase, but I would say it's in the thrill of the desire to change and the desire to finally resolve that that person will change and I will be the person that they change for.
Healing + Human Potential
How Attachment Styles Hold the Key to Emotional Freedom and Relationship Growth | EP 67
I'll finally be enough. I'd say there's probably a father wound in there. And so what happens is that I think of this as like we've eroticized our pain. So we've actually taken what we do with the unreliability as we then experience arousal, and then the arousal treats the unreliability. So it actually numbs it. So it becomes like an erotic addiction.
Healing + Human Potential
How Attachment Styles Hold the Key to Emotional Freedom and Relationship Growth | EP 67
Um, and so then we can't, we're not fully in our bodies. We're not able to fully feel. And this is where we can, you know, obviously things like pornography can do that. Masturbation can do that. We can use these tools when we're dysregulated as a way of regulating.
Healing + Human Potential
How Attachment Styles Hold the Key to Emotional Freedom and Relationship Growth | EP 67
Which I wouldn't recommend porn for regulation, but... But what I'm saying is that when we actually look at someone who's reliable then coming into our life, and we're used to unreliability and this other different way of being, It is us who have to actually learn how to regulate and enter discernment. So there's a saying that the opposite of trauma is choice.
Healing + Human Potential
How Attachment Styles Hold the Key to Emotional Freedom and Relationship Growth | EP 67
And this is why small choices like advice like, hey, you know, make your bed every day. It's not about making your bed every day. It's about when you say you're gonna do something, you do it. And so now you have evidence that you do that. When you say you're gonna go for a walk, you do it. And we might go, well, no one else knows that I said that to myself and I didn't go. Yeah, but you know.
Healing + Human Potential
How Attachment Styles Hold the Key to Emotional Freedom and Relationship Growth | EP 67
That's actually the key piece is that you know that. Telling other people can help hold you accountable to your self-expression because of things like belonging as being a way of behavior modification. But really what has to start to happen is you start to see evidence that when you have a choice, you make it.
Healing + Human Potential
How Attachment Styles Hold the Key to Emotional Freedom and Relationship Growth | EP 67
And so when you get, if you have a history of dating unreliable people, you just have to go to a, I don't date any unreliability. Like I have to have a zero tolerance for that. And then I'm going to start to look for where am I unreliable in my own life.
Healing + Human Potential
How Attachment Styles Hold the Key to Emotional Freedom and Relationship Growth | EP 67
If you don't have access to it yourself, then you still won't have a standard. So when someone comes into your life who treats you as if you're not worthy, if you believe you're not worthy, that will match. Now what's interesting is whenever you tolerate someone who's ambivalent about you or inconsistent, et cetera, You have to, this is not optional.
Healing + Human Potential
How Attachment Styles Hold the Key to Emotional Freedom and Relationship Growth | EP 67
And for avoidantly attached people, when there's not enough space, that creates fear. And really, these are just two different ways that people adapted to unreliable relationships or inconsistent parents.
Healing + Human Potential
How Attachment Styles Hold the Key to Emotional Freedom and Relationship Growth | EP 67
You have to become somebody who believes they're worthy of being ambivalent about.
Healing + Human Potential
How Attachment Styles Hold the Key to Emotional Freedom and Relationship Growth | EP 67
Everything we choose to keep in our life, we have to match with an internal narrative.
Healing + Human Potential
How Attachment Styles Hold the Key to Emotional Freedom and Relationship Growth | EP 67
Yeah. Be interesting. Like if they had to finish the sentences, when people get close to me, they, when people are reliable, what happens? Like, is there a narrative that they get let down? And then what happens when they get let down? Are they left alone? Like, there's going to be a story of how it all plays out anyways. And how it leads to pain. Right.
Healing + Human Potential
How Attachment Styles Hold the Key to Emotional Freedom and Relationship Growth | EP 67
I really love there's a line from Harville Hendricks and Helen Hunt where they say that we usually say our relationship isn't giving me what I need instead of what does my relationship need from me to feel the way I wanted to. And I think what that, you know, as you've mentioned too, is like that level of responsibility of like, I'm going to take this on for me.
Healing + Human Potential
How Attachment Styles Hold the Key to Emotional Freedom and Relationship Growth | EP 67
And the interesting, and I know this is deeply part of your work, is looking at the overlay of the nervous system to that, which is that for anxiously attached people, they have a hard time self-regulating, and for avoidantly attached people, they have a hard time co-regulating. So all of this just overlays, and when I look at it, I just think it's such a simple
Healing + Human Potential
How Attachment Styles Hold the Key to Emotional Freedom and Relationship Growth | EP 67
If we're feeling disconnected, you know, I think a lot of the math that, I think it's like the Gottmans, yeah, it was the Gottmans, who talk about the five to one ratio that when they looked at, so they took newlyweds, they put them in this apartment overlooking Lake Washington and they recorded their conversations. And then they followed up six years later to see if they were married or not.
Healing + Human Potential
How Attachment Styles Hold the Key to Emotional Freedom and Relationship Growth | EP 67
And what they saw was that couples who had above a five to one positive interaction to every negative
Healing + Human Potential
How Attachment Styles Hold the Key to Emotional Freedom and Relationship Growth | EP 67
were still together and anything below that they got divorced they were more likely to get divorced and seven eight to one was like kind of the optimal if it was too high it wasn't authentic and so what happened is is that they would actually um what they saw was that if you just change the math like if you just engage in more positive interactions then what will happen is the baseline sort of deposits that you've made in the relationship will um
Healing + Human Potential
How Attachment Styles Hold the Key to Emotional Freedom and Relationship Growth | EP 67
will shift, just the energy of the relationship will change. If you're parents, then what often happens with parents, which I can now say this now that I'm a parent, before I had great parenting advice because I wasn't a parent, but now I can say that often what happens when a couple goes from two to three to four to five or whatever is that the couple fails to prioritize each other.
Healing + Human Potential
How Attachment Styles Hold the Key to Emotional Freedom and Relationship Growth | EP 67
The couple should always be first. And I know that can be a real challenge, you know, depending on the dynamics, especially I think for like mother-child dynamics, that can be really hard. Of course, it's biologically meant to be. But the couple must maintain a priority. And if we've forgotten that, if we've forgotten about each other, couples grow apart all the time.
Healing + Human Potential
How Attachment Styles Hold the Key to Emotional Freedom and Relationship Growth | EP 67
It's just like, how do we come back together? Date nights, adventure. Not just regular date nights. Don't just put on fucking Netflix and get some popcorn. No deep intimacy and connection. Go do an adventure.
Healing + Human Potential
How Attachment Styles Hold the Key to Emotional Freedom and Relationship Growth | EP 67
And switch who's responsible for planning the adventure. You know, my wife and I, we wrote a book called Liberated Love. And in it, we talk about how like, When you actually recognize that your partner can leave you in any moment, then you see that your partner is choosing to be with you in that moment. I always think to myself often that my wife could choose anybody.
Healing + Human Potential
How Attachment Styles Hold the Key to Emotional Freedom and Relationship Growth | EP 67
She could be with lots of guys, but she chooses to be with me. So how do I continue to be someone that is worthy of that choice? And because I consider it an honor and I consider it very sacred. And I think we can often forget that because life gets busy and we're not taught to think that way. You know, we're like, oh, I got married. I guess you can't go anywhere now.
Healing + Human Potential
How Attachment Styles Hold the Key to Emotional Freedom and Relationship Growth | EP 67
And the divorce act is like, actually they can. Yeah. So I think when we make agreements like marriage, what happens is, is we think that It's a contract that you now don't have a choice anymore. we actually have to constantly be like, this is a choice. And I think that really liberates things. What do you think?
Healing + Human Potential
How Attachment Styles Hold the Key to Emotional Freedom and Relationship Growth | EP 67
way to understand your behavior patterns, and also that you can change it. I think that's actually a big hope message for everybody. quite determined when you're young, but you can change it as an adult.
Healing + Human Potential
How Attachment Styles Hold the Key to Emotional Freedom and Relationship Growth | EP 67
And both people have to be in. You know, both people have to be desiring to make the changes and to grow. I mean, I think... You know, Stan Takenu talks about how one of the greatest reasons that people get divorced is they fail to make clear agreements at the beginning. But like, who here, like, I'm 46. I got married two years ago. I had a very different level of awareness.
Healing + Human Potential
How Attachment Styles Hold the Key to Emotional Freedom and Relationship Growth | EP 67
If I was 22 getting married, agreements? What are you talking about? What vows did I hear that are good? It's like, we actually have to, and so as you said, we could do it at any time in a relationship, but we have to create clear agreements about who do we want to be? How do we honor one another? And as you said, which is so beautiful, it was like,
Healing + Human Potential
How Attachment Styles Hold the Key to Emotional Freedom and Relationship Growth | EP 67
Relationship with you, relationship with other, relationship with children. And the most thriving relationships prioritize the individuals and then the togetherness. Like they say, how do you become all of you through the material that this relationship brings forward? How do, it's David Data who says there's three stages of relationship. The first one is I need you. to complete me.
Healing + Human Potential
How Attachment Styles Hold the Key to Emotional Freedom and Relationship Growth | EP 67
The second one is I don't need you. And the third one is through you, I find God. And I think of that as like, God could be self-actualization. It could be whatever you want to call it. But when we use relationship as a vehicle for total transformation, I'm actually not sure there's a more potent vehicle. I think entrepreneurship is actually pretty close.
Healing + Human Potential
How Attachment Styles Hold the Key to Emotional Freedom and Relationship Growth | EP 67
Yeah, I always think of that word too. I would have used the term unintegrated or uninitiated maybe, all really meaning the same thing. I was listening to a talk from a researcher the other day that said testosterone as a hormone actually amplifies whatever the culture celebrates.
Healing + Human Potential
How Attachment Styles Hold the Key to Emotional Freedom and Relationship Growth | EP 67
which is really fascinating that like in the research, if the culture was more about generosity and kindness, the more testosterone a male had, female too, but males in this conversation, it actually amplified those behaviors.
Healing + Human Potential
How Attachment Styles Hold the Key to Emotional Freedom and Relationship Growth | EP 67
So whatever the culture desires from its men, which is really fascinating when you think about it, because I think evolutionarily, you hear women say, oh, I want a great emotionally aware, loving, kind, gentle, blah, blah, blah, but then they might not choose that. And so I think we have to always remember, much like the work with the nervous system, that we are evolutionarily programmed.
Healing + Human Potential
How Attachment Styles Hold the Key to Emotional Freedom and Relationship Growth | EP 67
We're biological beings before we're soul-based beings, and then we become soul-based beings who can think about our biological pulls. You know, it's like when we have chemistry with someone, it doesn't mean you have to pursue it. So I think of that as like taking charge of your charge, that you're finally in charge of where you direct your energy. And...
Healing + Human Potential
How Attachment Styles Hold the Key to Emotional Freedom and Relationship Growth | EP 67
What happens is when we, you know, getting back to your friend, kind of, is like when we stop directing ourselves towards what isn't working, we start to create space for what can work, which maybe never has had the opportunity to do that. We don't trust that unknown space. Relationally, what I see happening is like there's a deep desire for a man to be in integrity, right?
Healing + Human Potential
How Attachment Styles Hold the Key to Emotional Freedom and Relationship Growth | EP 67
And a man to stand for what matters to him. And as David Data talks about, it's like the woman in your life wants to be the most important person, not the most important thing. And if you give up on your purpose or your passion or your principles for your partner, she will not trust you and she will not be attracted to you. And I remember when I learned that, I was like, okay.
Healing + Human Potential
How Attachment Styles Hold the Key to Emotional Freedom and Relationship Growth | EP 67
I for sure more identified as like the nice guy, I'm gonna be different than other guys, like that kind of bullshit. And I say that because it's like, if my partner would test me, I was such a doormat.
Healing + Human Potential
How Attachment Styles Hold the Key to Emotional Freedom and Relationship Growth | EP 67
Like when I think of the betrayals I experienced when I was in my late teens, I look back and I'm like, oh my God, I ended up in the exact circumstances that someone ends up with when they don't have access to boundaries and their voice.
Healing + Human Potential
How Attachment Styles Hold the Key to Emotional Freedom and Relationship Growth | EP 67
I was afraid that if I self-expressed and said that wasn't okay, because I grew up in the 90s and the 80s, so the story was that men are bad, they're toxic, they're evil, they're rapists, they're murderers. I used to think that that dialogue was going down, but I'd actually say that it's way higher than even my childhood.
Healing + Human Potential
How Attachment Styles Hold the Key to Emotional Freedom and Relationship Growth | EP 67
So if a woman or a man or both are not there to speak the nuance to boys and girls, but especially boys, that those are some men. but they're not all men. Just like women who have toxic traits, those are some women. They're not all women. How do we actually stand in our values and really step into our integrity? I think for me as a man, that's been the most liberating thing.
Healing + Human Potential
How Attachment Styles Hold the Key to Emotional Freedom and Relationship Growth | EP 67
And I think as a father, I activated a whole new level when I thought, okay, who do I tell my son I am? And does that match who I am? And that being a whole new level of integrity that's necessary, which was there, but not with the same potency. Yeah.
Healing + Human Potential
How Attachment Styles Hold the Key to Emotional Freedom and Relationship Growth | EP 67
I think we're really craving that the masculine has access to things. Like, I was talking to a friend yesterday about this, that there's something primal about moving weights and hiking and hunting that activates a part of you. Like, I would love to see a bunch of men go hunting with like bows or guns, it doesn't really matter, and check their testosterone before and after.
Healing + Human Potential
How Attachment Styles Hold the Key to Emotional Freedom and Relationship Growth | EP 67
Because for sure it would go up, just from this like, I'm out here, I'm gonna go get some elk for my woman and bring it back for my family, you know, put some blood under my eyes or, you know. But there's, I think we are all craving this like, we demonized roles that were innately part of our evolution. And it doesn't mean that there can't be other roles.
Healing + Human Potential
How Attachment Styles Hold the Key to Emotional Freedom and Relationship Growth | EP 67
But what I'm saying is that we demonize them. So we made them wrong. Just like if you're a woman, it's like you got to be a boss, babe. And now if you want to be like a stay-at-home mom, that's shamed. So it's like, how do you win? And it's like, you're not trying to win. Who gives a shit about winning? What do you want to do? What's authentic to you? Exactly.
Healing + Human Potential
How Attachment Styles Hold the Key to Emotional Freedom and Relationship Growth | EP 67
Yeah, the sacredness at which we approach all of it is what's imperative. You know, and I think one of the things that I always experience from my wife is that she sees things I don't see within myself. And so I actually see her as this sacred vessel that allows me to grow in ways that I couldn't do without her.
Healing + Human Potential
How Attachment Styles Hold the Key to Emotional Freedom and Relationship Growth | EP 67
And also after we had a son, I was just like, I had reverence that women were a portal. But when I actually experienced her being a portal, I was like, holy shit, you just built a human. And then he came out of you. And witnessing her as a mother, all of these things just, I was like, man, it's just so profound to think about just how sacred of a being a woman is. Men, great, I feel sacred.
Healing + Human Potential
How Attachment Styles Hold the Key to Emotional Freedom and Relationship Growth | EP 67
You are earth, you are life. That's freaking crazy.
Healing + Human Potential
How Attachment Styles Hold the Key to Emotional Freedom and Relationship Growth | EP 67
Whenever you tolerate someone who's ambivalent about you or inconsistent, etc., you have to become somebody who believes they're worthy of being ambivalent about. Everything we choose to keep in our life, we have to match with an internal narrative.
Healing + Human Potential
How Attachment Styles Hold the Key to Emotional Freedom and Relationship Growth | EP 67
Oh man. Uh, you can find me at markgroves.com and I have a community called the create the love community where I know all my courses and all that stuff are in there. And then I also have a podcast, the Mark Groves podcast, which I look forward to having you on. And, um, yeah, that's, you can find me all there. I took a hiatus from Instagram.
Healing + Human Potential
How Attachment Styles Hold the Key to Emotional Freedom and Relationship Growth | EP 67
But I think create the love will be coming back in January. I have a lot of thoughts on the nervous system and social media and being a business, etc. That I've been like putting together that. Yeah, I want to teach because I've just had so many profound awarenesses for myself.
Healing + Human Potential
How Attachment Styles Hold the Key to Emotional Freedom and Relationship Growth | EP 67
Well, thanks for having me on. I really appreciate it.
Healing + Human Potential
How Attachment Styles Hold the Key to Emotional Freedom and Relationship Growth | EP 67
Yeah. You know, the, the hope for the anxious person is that they won't over pursue, you know, like so much part of the way that they learned how to navigate relationships as little ones is this, like, if you're okay, I'm okay. Like if, if I know that you're here, then I'm good. So really they're, They're an outwardly focus. They're focused on everybody else.
Healing + Human Potential
How Attachment Styles Hold the Key to Emotional Freedom and Relationship Growth | EP 67
And as adults, we might know this as like hypervigilance. We might have a hyperattunement. I would say that people go into coaching and therapeutic spaces. We're likely more anxiously attached.
Healing + Human Potential
How Attachment Styles Hold the Key to Emotional Freedom and Relationship Growth | EP 67
Right. Yeah, and even I kind of see it as, like, you're monetizing your survival strategy. You're, like, getting paid for the thing you were naturally developed, really, for survival, you know, developed this really incredible skill to be able to be hypervigilant, notice facial expressions, and predict behavior.
Healing + Human Potential
How Attachment Styles Hold the Key to Emotional Freedom and Relationship Growth | EP 67
And in a way, we're sort of, like, psychically entering the space of other people to try to be predictive, to minimize the risk of being abandoned or rejected. The hope is, of course, that we can learn how to not just act upon our feelings. But this can be really hard. This is where practices like somatic therapy, breath work, meditation, they all extend the pause. You know that quote?
Healing + Human Potential
How Attachment Styles Hold the Key to Emotional Freedom and Relationship Growth | EP 67
I think it's from Viktor Frankl. That's like the space between stimulus responses, a choice. And if you manage to change that choice, you could change your life. I think like the, he said it more eloquently, but the space gets extended through practices of mindfulness, through the ability to, oh, I'm activated because I have a higher predisposition to anxious attachment.
Healing + Human Potential
How Attachment Styles Hold the Key to Emotional Freedom and Relationship Growth | EP 67
Especially if I'm my wife's more prone to avoidance, of course the the joke of the universe, but it's like I Know that previously when I was like 19 or 20, I would just send the text I would just do the thing I would never think about it But now as an adult I can like sense when that's coming up for me Bring that forward because we have a lot of safety in our relationship so
Healing + Human Potential
How Attachment Styles Hold the Key to Emotional Freedom and Relationship Growth | EP 67
noticing what is your predisposition in terms of your attachment style, and then being able to have strategies or practices that allow you to observe what's coming up for you first. And a good therapist, a good coach, a good friend, a good hug can really help with regulating our systems so we don't over text the person we're interested in.
Healing + Human Potential
How Attachment Styles Hold the Key to Emotional Freedom and Relationship Growth | EP 67
Because of course, what happens is the fear engages in a behavior that just recreates the story.
Healing + Human Potential
How Attachment Styles Hold the Key to Emotional Freedom and Relationship Growth | EP 67
Yeah. And then, you know, for the avoidant attachment, it's really about like, can I stay a little longer in spaces and connection? Can I actually be in relationship to another person and not feel like I'm going to lose myself? You know, because you think about it, it's like a lot of the time what the real underlying fear there, and I've been avoidant.
Healing + Human Potential
How Attachment Styles Hold the Key to Emotional Freedom and Relationship Growth | EP 67
I got really avoidant in my life after I went through a giant betrayal. I got cheated on. And then I didn't know what I was doing for like five years. I would date and be in relationship. And as soon as someone would tell me, I really like you, my stomach would get sick. I would want to withdraw. And they were like on paper, incredible people. They were incredible people, but I just couldn't.
Healing + Human Potential
How Attachment Styles Hold the Key to Emotional Freedom and Relationship Growth | EP 67
And I was like terror. I always think like in hindsight, I was terrified of women. I was terrified of like a woman who was like, I like you, I choose you. I'm like,
Healing + Human Potential
How Attachment Styles Hold the Key to Emotional Freedom and Relationship Growth | EP 67
Yeah.
Healing + Human Potential
How Attachment Styles Hold the Key to Emotional Freedom and Relationship Growth | EP 67
The most thriving relationships prioritize the individuals and then the togetherness. When you actually recognize that your partner can leave you in any moment, she chooses to be with me. So how do I continue to be someone that is worthy of that choice?
Healing + Human Potential
How Attachment Styles Hold the Key to Emotional Freedom and Relationship Growth | EP 67
Yeah, I mean, a model of a, that's why I think like a good coach or therapist is so powerful for that because they'll generally be able to model that. But yeah, being able to sit with people that you care about and be able to actually, I mean, eye gazing is really powerful for that with no conversation. But also I think being able to bring forward the fears in relationship is,
Healing + Human Potential
How Attachment Styles Hold the Key to Emotional Freedom and Relationship Growth | EP 67
You know, because when I was more avoidant, it was that I did not know... The underlying story that lived in my mind was that when I loved people, they were going to leave me or betray me.
Healing + Human Potential
How Attachment Styles Hold the Key to Emotional Freedom and Relationship Growth | EP 67
And I think that's such a simple practice, no matter your attachment style, is to just finish the sentence, when I love people, they... Because what that ultimately will point to, or when I love people, I, because that could be like, I abandon myself, I forget about my needs. It really points to the upper limit that is living unconsciously in the way that we relate.
Healing + Human Potential
How Attachment Styles Hold the Key to Emotional Freedom and Relationship Growth | EP 67
And like you were saying, the way that someone relates to you is generally not personal. Their avoidance is not personal, it's a strategy. They don't know how to deal with your overwhelming feelings, so the best thing they can do is just peace out and get away.
Healing + Human Potential
How Attachment Styles Hold the Key to Emotional Freedom and Relationship Growth | EP 67
And I joked about my wife and I, that being the joke of the universe, is that we like bring people into our experience who trigger us in the exact way that requires us to heal and resolve the things from our childhood. And we call it chemistry. And in a way it is, you know, it's like the perfect recipe.
Healing + Human Potential
How Attachment Styles Hold the Key to Emotional Freedom and Relationship Growth | EP 67
for someone who's an avoidant, you know, being able to say to the person that they're in relationship with, you know, I really feel the need to leave right now. Like that's the sense I have. And maybe initially that's actually what's required is like, I need a couple hours, but I'm going to, they have to be the one who comes back, the person who asks for space.
Healing + Human Potential
How Attachment Styles Hold the Key to Emotional Freedom and Relationship Growth | EP 67
Because it's always the anxious person is like, so are you ready to talk? You know? And sometimes I always joke that like the avoidant's like, I'll bring this back up. And then like 10 years later they're like, oh yeah, remember that thing?