Marni speaks with the author of Anxiously Attached: Becoming More Secure in Life and Love, Jessica Baum. Jessica is the founder of the Relationship Institute of Palm Beach, a practice that provides couples therapy, family counseling, and addiction therapy. She has worked with thousands of clients for over a decade. She helps clients make a meaningful connection with themselves so they can better understand how they relate to people in relationships.

 

Key takeaways from this episode:

 

• Understanding an Anxious Attachment style

• What it means to do “the work”

• Being compassionate toward other people

• Why your body is holding on to past trauma

• Cultivating a great, deep love

 

How the Anxious Attachment Style Relates to Your Love Life [2:17]

 

Attachment styles are embedded patterns that get developed early in life. They get embedded in our nervous system. We repeat hurts from childhood in our adult relationships because it is the way we learned to adapt, connect, and survive. For anxious people, it comes with a lot of self-sacrifices.

 

Twenty-five percent of the population has an anxious attachment style. Secure people can feel anxiety in their relationships but people with an anxious attachment system tend to be hyperfocused on the external. They normally have a deep-seated abandonment wound. The way they survive is to make plans and keep things close. They may seem controlling but they are just trying to create calmness in their world.

 

People with an anxious attachment style are externally focused because they have trouble getting their own needs met.

 

Is It Intuition or a Past Trauma? [10:35]

 

When we are young and our hippocampus is not fully formed, we have implicit memory. When we are little we store sensations in our body. When sensations feel big, we know it is an old feeling that is resurfacing. Jessica reminds us that big sensations can be painful and cause us to lash out.

 

Awareness, compassion, and the right support can help us change behavior.

 

What are you doing to distract yourself from having real relationships?

 

Anxiously Attached: The Book [19:22]

 

A lot of couples go to Jessica when they are activated without understanding on a conscious level why they are acting the way they are. In her book, Anxiously Attached: Becoming More Secure in Life and Love, Jessica breaks down what is happening to the nervous system of both people in the relationship and describes what they can do to gain a better understanding of what is happening, and what the other person is feeling.

 

Jessica says that when we form adult relationships we internalize them and they become part of how we build our secure sense of self. It is through these experiences we learn how to self-regulate.

 

You can’t fake safety but you can cultivate it.

 

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