Anxious Attachment Solution: Taking Back Her Brain with Love Life Coach Amber Lynn

Developing a secure base also comes with understanding that we CAN cope within ourselves, we can support and comfort ourselves, we do not have to seek it outside of ourselves. After we practice comforting ourselves it gets easier, but often you will find yourself running that negative narrative sound track that is comparing you to everyone one under the sun, and thats when you have to stop and remind your brain that we are doing things differently now. Develop Secure Self Love does not mean that you love yourself in every second of every day. It means that more often than not you are showing love, care and support to yourself. It means that more often than not you are stopping the negative narrative that is your current sound track. It means learning to love all of you, even the parts of you that have been the hardest for you to accept. It takes practicing, it takes journaling, it takes reminding yourself that you are inherently worthy. You are loveable just as you are, it means that no one can change your lovability. You are inherently worthy. You are inherently worthy of love. So we have to rebuild the relationship with ourselves so that we can become that safe person for ourselves, we can develop that safe haven within ourselves, and develop that mental idea of proximity to ourselves (this is visualizing people we are close to and who we see as a secure person) . Having a secure base inside ourselves means no matter what we will have our own back.This also looks likeAccepting that sometimes our thoughts are going to activate our primal panicLearning to feel all of our feelings, with curiosity and not self shameLearning to love ourselves through our primal panic so that we can feel our emotions and ask ourselves hard questions like, “could there be more to this than what my brain is telling me?” “ How can I see this a different way?” Asking ourselves hard questions that challenge our inner belief, our inner narrative about how loveable we are It means Loving ourselves in spite of whatever we think needs to be fixed about us, and learning that we are exactly as we should be, and loving ourselves through all of our emotions.It looks like owning our attachment style- our responses, validating them while learning how to PAUSE feel our emotions, and choose on purpose how we want to react, how we want to response, and how we will love ourselves through the feelings so that our brain learns to trust us, to develop that secure base. Journal prompts:What thoughts do you currently have about yourself? What thoughts do you have about self love?How do you show yourself Compassion? Do a thought download… you may have surface self love, surface self compassion, but deep down, what are your core beliefs about you and love, about you and relationships? How do you feel when you are alone? How do you feel making plans for yourself?Get it all out… write it all down… it is only when we know our current thoughts and beliefs about yourself that we can begin to change it.

When we are living in emotional childhood we are not owning our attachment wiring, we are not stepping into awareness of how our primal panic affects our reactions, or we don’t acknowledge how our selective feedback, selective memory and selective interpretation may be influencing how we are currently perceiving our partners words/actions. So what does this mean? This means we have to learn how to develop Emotional Adulthood. We have to develop skills and strategies for when our primal panic is activated.What is emotional adulthood?Emotional adulthood is when we take responsibility for our thoughts, our feelings, or actions and we practice being aware of our attachment system triggers and our response to it. It's when we take responsibility for developing our new belief systems. It takes back our power. Learning how to love ourselves, be there for ourselves and not make someone else’s actions or reactions to us mean anything about us as a person or our worth. Emotional adulthood is when we are able to learn to hit the pause button, set away with communication: I need a minute, I can feel my body and brain want to react a certain way but I want to choose how I show up so I am going to walk away for a minute. Emotional adulthood is learning to think, act and feel on purpose and allow others to do the same. We no longer take ownership of how someone else feels. We no longer think we can earn love through actions. We no longer lose ourselves inside of a relationship because we need to “prove” that we are all in by being overly committed to someone else and loosing our commitment to ourselves. Emotional Adulthood is learning to develop a relationship with yourself that looks like learning to feel all of our emotions. It is learned to allow them, even when it is the last thing we want to do, trust me sitting through anxiety is one of the hardest emotions for me to sit with, I have learned that this may be my life’s work, to learn to sit with my emotion of anxiety, but I am going to continue to work on it and I hope you do to.It’s learning to develop new core beliefs that serve you in developing healthy relationships.Developing Core Beliefs takes practicing new neutral thoughts on purpose. So if you have the belief you are not loveable. Even practicing to some people I am loveable, will slowly allow you to change it to I am loveable. If you have the core belief, They will always leave and you change it to “Some people will stay” it will slowly allow you to change it to “the person for me will stay”. I will never find someone who can love me. Practice “ There are some people who could love me”, to “there are an infinite number of people who could love me”Remember practicing self love and self compassion when your primal panic is triggered: looks like, you showing up for yourself, you acknowledging your brain patterns, feeling your emotions, and then choosing how you will respond or react. It does not look like judging yourself, comparing yourself to securely attached people, or calling yourself negative names like “too much, too needy, or crazy” .When we are walking around with these yucky core beliefs that don’t feel good, we do not show up confidently, we do not show up with feelings that will emulate that we love, trust and care about ourselves and as a result we do not attract those that will love, trust and care about us. So if you want to feel confident, if you want to feel secure, if you want to learn that you will choose a better partner for yourself, one that you DO ACTUALLY deserve, then it starts with practicing new thoughts, new thoughts consistently practiced become new thought beliefs, new thought beliefs eventually become core beliefs. This takes LOVE and PATIENCE and CONSISTENCY.

So now that we know this is what we experience when we have the Thought “they are rejecting me” or the thought “ they are going to leave me” or “they don’t love me anymore” ect, all of which create the feeling of instant panic and anxiety, creating the actions of: texting, non stop, calling, ruminating on negative self perceived thoughts, and then we create the evidence that they are rejecting us, while we are actually rejecting ourselves, and abandoning ourselves, and not showing ourselves what we need in this moment. So we have to practice pausing when these thoughts and emotions arise, and learning to become aware of them. Once we are aware of them we can start creating a new relationship with our attachment style.We need to validate our brain, of course it is reacting this way, this is what it is used to- I say Hey Brain I see you, I hear you are scared or anxious about these circumstances but I am here for you no matter what. Brain there is a possibility that you are not a reliable source of truth at this moment. So I am going to practice the thought “My primal panic has been triggered and I am going to take a moment to do a thought download and see what is really going on here” The important component to remember is that we developed certain habits to help protect ourselves so when looking at ourselves and understanding what we are experiencing, we should always have compassion for our experiences, our reactions as they were developed to protect us, even the intensity we feel , is our brain's way of saying “Hey I need help here” “if you’re not here for me I might die”. So we have to be there for ourselves during these moments. To become more aware and get to know yourself, or develop a more secure system, you have to have your own back. You have to show your brain that you are there for it, that you understand what it is going through, and you love yourself no matter what. Having self compassion when your brain cycles through these patterns allows you to still feel your emotions which is an important part of letting your brain know that nothing has gone wrong, resisting the cycle will not stop the cycle, it will only prolong the anxious emotions, and create more mental drama. So practicing thoughts like “these are the moments when my brain feels like I am being rejected so I am going to remind it that I love it and that nothing has gone wrong.” “ These are the moments when I feel unloveable so I am going to tell my brain that I am open to the possibility that I am loveable and my brain is not showing me accurate memories, and nothing has gone wrong,”This will allow you to feel the anxiety, accept it, then process the thoughts you are thinking and decide if you want to keep those thoughts, if they are not serving you then you can change them. Some Guiding questions are: What do we make it mean when someone wants to do something without us? Why do we think it is a problem to develop our own hobbies? Why do we think it is a problem to spend time alone to develop our own passions? Why do we feel rejected when a partner wants to spend time away from us, what are we making it mean?Why are you so committed to the belief that you are unloveable?Why are you so committed to the belief that you have to hustle for your love?

So if you are a person who identifies with these attributes of dismissing attachment style, what can you do to develop a more secure attachment?If you are a person who recognizes these traits in yourself and you want to experience the closeness of a relationship you first have to start recognizing when you are avoiding, resisting, or actioning over your emotions. You have to notice when your emotions go offline. Then you have to relearn how to actually feel your feelings. Start by learning what the vibrations feel like in your body. Then label it. Practice this over and over again… You have to teach your brain that emotions are not harmful and they will not kill you. Your brain has worked your entire life to learn how to “detach” turn off your emotions. So this will take time and practice.Learn to validate your feelings, once you learn that you do indeed have feelings, all range of feelings, and that you do feel them. Then it is time to validate them, how do you validate your feelings, you learn to feel them and then sit with them and allow them. Allowing your feelings is how you validate them. This practice also teaches your mind that you can feel feelings without needing to detach or deactivate your attachment system.Learn to recognize when you are distancing yourself from someone, when you are starting to distance yourself from a partner, your brain is so wired to not be let down later, and you have a deep fear of being rejected, that you have learned the best thing to do is distant and move on, go do you.So if you are dating someone and you try or make attempts to be there for them and they back away it confuses you as to why they are detaching instead of softening to your attempts to be there for them but this is their pattern in their head to help them quote survive and they become more distant appearing to be emotional distant and disengaged. He fears being rejected, unable to act on need for closeness, Neither autonomous or able to feel closeness.So if you are a person who is dating a person with dismissive attachment, what can you do?You need to make sure that you are working on developing your own secure attachment qualities, that you are taking the time to develop an inner secure base within yourself, and that you are doing the deep work on you, because you are going to need your inner belief to be grounded, your inner value and worth to be rooted in self confidence, so that when your partner starts to distances themselves from you, you are able to have enough self awareness and relationship awareness to know, their actions do not mean anything about you. Them distancing themselves away from you, them being unable to appear bothered by a problem ( you know show emotion) in a tense situation does not mean they do not care, it just means that you are dating a person with dismissing attachment and they have learned that they way to survive is to not feel emotions to deactivate. It just means that they have deactivated their nervous response system. It doesn’t mean anything about your worth, or even how they feel about you.So you have to learn how to manage your own mind, recognize your own attachment response tendencies, and own ONLY your thoughts and emotions, and your actions.You have a choice too, once you recognize the qualities and traits of someone you are dating, you are allowed to choose that these qualities and traits do not work for you, without any brain drama, you get to decide what you want in a relationship. With this being said you are also allowed to accept someone for exactly who they are, love them and choose to not be with them. With that being said you are also allowed to give someone the permission to be the human they are, their nervous response system and all, and choose to develop a more secure attachment within yourself and still date this person.

Taking back her brain from Insecure Attachment Part 2Hey there and thank you for joining me today for Taking back her brain from Insecure Attachment. This podcast was inspired by the book Insecure in Love by Lesile Becker-Phelps. If you don’t have it you should definitely get it. I recommend reading Insecure in Love and doing the exercises if you want to have a deeper understanding of your own attachment style, as some people have attributes of more than one attachment style. On last week's podcast I introduced words to know about Insecure attachment, how it affects our brain and what these behaviors look like. Today I am going to be talking about what Preoccupied Attachment Style is and what it looks like.Well if you are like me and the other 40% of the population who experiences insecure attachment here are the three different types: Preoccupied Attachment, Dismissing Attachment, and Fearful attachmentPreoccupied Attachment- This attachment style is when you find yourself desperate for love, those of us with preoccupied attachment look for our worthiness outside of us, and we are only worthy when we are being loved or in a relationship. We look to our partners to show us or reassure us that we are worthy of love. We may have surface self love, but we have inner beliefs that we are not worthy of love, and that once someone really knows us they will leave. Unfortunately these inner beliefs mess up our reality, as our brain looks for evidence that these subconscious beliefs are true. These underlying beliefs mess with our interpretation of a partner's affection or attention.One of the challenging aspects of Preoccupied Attachment is that we are so desperate for love and affection but once we receive it we don’t know what to do with it because it doesn’t fit our self concept- or our self- perception: that no one could ever truly love us. Once someone truly loves us, they will leave. (this is what our brain is constantly scanning for, evidence to prove this belief true)I am going to pause here and share strategies if you notice that this is you:Our first step in developing a less preoccupied attachment style is to discover all these beliefs we have around us and around our lovability. Then we work to develop a new self concept around our worthiness and our lovability, however we can't do this until we practice noticing what thoughts our brain is offering to us, and what evidence we are constantly looking for:Are you constantly looking for evidence that your partner is losing interest? That your partner is rejecting you? That your partner is going to leave? That your partner doesn’t really love you ? Write down all of your thoughts about you and your ability to find love or be loved.Journal Topics:What if I told you right now that you are inherently worthy. You can not action your way to being loved. Self Love and Love from others is all an inner belief, and is created by our own thoughts that we have about ourselves and we have about our partners. So what thoughts do you want to believe about you, your lovability, and worthiness? How are you worthy of love? How can you start to develop a self love concept?

Do you have anxious/insecure attachment style? Than this podcast is for you!

On today's podcast I am going to be talking about my favorite topic… Feelings…This week I want to talk about how important it is to feel our feelings, but not only our feelings but urges. Learning to allow urges. What is an urge? a strong desire or IMPULSE to do something…I learned that in order for our brain to 1) increase pleasure, 2) decrease pain 3) conserve energy it provides us with - thought errors- these are thoughts or narratives that are not actually true BUT serves the primitive brains purpose to increase pleasure, decrease pain, or conserve energyWhen our brain provides us with that thought error- we don’t even hesitate we just respond on autopilot. We don’t question that story, we don’t doubt it, we just instinctively indulge in that urge, or desire. That desire/ action increases false pleasure and we get a hit of dopamine.We call it false pleasure because most of the time an urge is our brain's way of “getting out of feeling uncomfortable, or doing something that gives us instant pleasure but isn’t what our future self really would want. “When it comes to urges our brain creates “false desire” - a desire we weren’t even thinking about but because it's there we do it, it's a false desire from our primitive brain that it goes against our intentional deeper desire for the results we actually want.An urge- a false desire - is- doing something that “feels” good in the moment but doesn’t match the results we want in the long term.Another sneaky thing about an urge is that most often we are unaware of what we are doing, because our brain has trained us to “react to the want” without thinking, without questioning. Sometimes we don’t even realize why we are doing what we are doing.An urge is an emotion followed by an immediate reaction that has not always been thought through.

Welcome to Taking Back Her Brain with LoveOn todays podcast we talk about our thoughts, how they become our beliefs, and why its so important to be aware of our thoughts as they create our feelings and drive our actions, our thoughts create the results we have in our life.Podcast Script

Well if our thoughts create our feelings: what kind of feelings do these thoughts create ? If our feelings drive the actions that we take, what actions do you take when you feel inadequate, not enough, hopeless or defeated?I can bet that the actions you take from the feelings of inadequacy, defeat and hopelessness are way different than the actions you would take from a feeling of sufficiency, abundance and hope.The most powerful and influential tool we have are our thoughts and our thought beliefs. So what if there was enough? What if there was more than one person in the world who could love you? What if you could make more money? What if wanting to make more money wasn’t selfish ? What if you had exactly the right amount of time and energy and the only thing holding you back were your thoughts?

Taking back our brain from our expectations of others and what we make it mean.