Welcome back to A Better Love, I'm your host, Dr. Greg, today we're talking about anxious attachment styles and post-traumatic stress symptoms. If you have experienced trauma in your life you're going to want to listen to today's episode.

 First, let's answer the question: have I experienced trauma? if you grew up in a house where there was physical or psychological abuse If you experience sexual abuse or sexual assault if you've experienced War or intimate partner violence oh, it may be the case that you'll experience post-traumatic stress symptoms. briefly, these symptoms fall into several clusters including intrusions, avoidance, persistent alterations in cognition and mood, or hyperarousal. 

If you had any of these kinds of experiences in childhood, oh, there's a high likelihood that your attachment style was shaped in a way that may lead to more anxiety or avoidance in your interpersonal attachments. it may be the case that you had this type of attachment with your primary caregiver.  and lastly, it may be the case that your primary caregiver induced the trauma in the first place.

Let's pause for a moment so you can answer this question: have you experienced psychological trauma in your life? 

Now let's consider whether you describe your attachment style as anxious. Do you experience persistent fear of interpersonal rejection or abandonment? Do you have excessive concerns about and desire for proximity to close others? Do you experience significant distress when relationship partners aren't immediately available or unresponsive?

If any of these things describe your experience in your current relationship or maybe past relationships, what you can develop is the awareness of where your attention and focus is going before, during, and after conflict with your partner.

Is your mind scouring your partner's words for indications of threat? in this case the threat of losing the person? This will definitely have an impact on your experience of the relationship. It will discuss in a moment my general recommendation is it going to be for folks who tend to have a more anxious attachment style.

Perhaps you have less of an anxious attachment style and more of an avoidant attachment. Do you experience discomfort with close interpersonal relationships? Are you excessively self-reliant? When you feel things intensely do you move away from the emotion so as to deactivate it in a way as a way of regulating it?  folks with an avoidant attachment 10 to have challenges acknowledging negative emotional states in themselves,  they tend not to seek social support end of the attachment styles this group of people is likely to experience proportionately higher rates of depression. 

The connection between these two attachment Styles and post-traumatic stress is the following:  first, those who have these styles tend to report more post-traumatic stress symptoms than folks with secure attachment styles.  The general take-home here is that strong emotional connection to family and friends after trauma serves as a protective factor in later experiencing PTSD symptoms, in other words being diagnosed with PTSD  in the first place.

For listeners who may have experienced trauma in their childhoods,  post-traumatic stress often becomes much more complex and is stickier to work through.  and this gets me to my general recommendation here which is not going to surprise any of my listeners.

There's a significant benefit to those who have experienced physical emotional or sexual abuse neglect,  and from intimate partner violence to combat. It's important to integrate processes and make meaning of these experiences. and in relationships oh, it will be important for our partners to understand these difficult parts of our story. I've worked with many combat veterans to be able to share meaningfully with their

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