How To Feel More Secure In Your Relationship(s)⚡️

Hey folks! 👋

Here’s your weekly dose of Pillow Talk - your 5(ish) minute read on how to have a healthy, confident and pleasurable life. Today’s read? Attachment styles and intimate needs.

Intimate Needs Across Attachment Styles

Your attachment style shapes how you relate and connect with others. Each style has different intimate needs. In some cases, these needs can conflict across styles, e.g. anxious vs. avoidant. Knowing yours, and how it relates to others, can help you have healthier and more communicative relationships.

Anxious Styles 

Anxious style may feel like their partners are not as close to them as they’d like them to be. Their challenge is to meet their intimate need of closeness whilst not “pushing” our partners away. Here are tips to help make an anxious style feel more secure: 

• Validate and Communicate: have consistent communication and provide validation that they are wanted.

• Reassure During Times of Separation: During periods of physical or emotional separation, provide extra reassurance and facetime.

• Provide Frequent Affection and Responsiveness: Express affection frequently and be readily accessible and responsive to their concerns.

• Be Clear on Commitment: Avoid ambiguity or uncertainty about the relationship status or its trajectory.

• Resolve Conflict Immediately: Don’t delay or leave things unresolved. This makes them more anxious and worsens conflict.

Avoidant Styles

Avoidant styles may feel like they’re not being given enough space and that their partners are trying to get too close. Their challenge is to meet their intimate needs of independence whilst not overly “pulling” away from others. Here are some tips to help them feel more secure:

• Give Space and Encourage Independence: They value autonomy and may feel trapped if they perceive their partners as being too intrusive or demanding.

• Take It Slow with Emotional Connection: Let emotional closeness develop gradually so they don’t feel skittish.

• Establish Clear Boundaries: Use boundaries to give them a sense of security, autonomy and predictability.

• Avoid Over-Dependency: Don’t push for excessive reassurance and respect their capability to handle things on their own.

• Recognise our Efforts to Connect: Closeness is still important to them, it just looks different.

Disorganised Styles 

Disorganised styles are less commong and typically come from childhood trauma. They oscillate between “pushing” and “pulling”, displaying mixed signals. Their challenge is to minimise these swings, whilst also providing more predictability for their partners. Here are some tips to make them feel more secure:

• Create Clarity and Predictability: Provide clear, consistent and predictable behaviour to help them feel less anxious and more open.

• Reassure in a Way That’s Judgment-Free: Provide a judgment-free space for them to be vulnerable without fear of criticism or rejection.

• Establish Trust: Give them both space and connection when they need it so they can re-learn how to depend on others.

• Understand It’s Not About You: Be patient with them as they heal their internal conflict of desiring intimacy whilst also fearing it.

• Help Self-Regulate: When they swing, remind them that they’re safe and that they are not defined by their past.

Secure 

Secure styles find it easy to build and maintain relationships. Their challenge is to maintain a healthy balance between the “push” and “pulls”. Here are tips to stay secure:

• Mirror Actions and Words: Be comfortable discussing and contracting boundaries and reliable in upholding them.

• Be Emotionally Available: Know and express individual needs, hold space for vulnerability and share emotional experiences.

• Have Uncomfortable Conversations: Discuss issues, feelings, and needs without fear of judgment or criticism.

• Mutual Growth and Support: Set and achieve goals together whilst also supporting each other to set and achieve goals individually.

• Enjoy Togetherness and Separateness: Normalise spending time and doing activities both together and apart.

1 Thing to Try This Week

Take this attachment style quiz to identify your style. Once you know your style, pay attention to how it shows up in periods of stress or tension. Don’t judge it, just observe it and learn how it does and/or doesn’t serve you. See if you can identify the styles of friends, family, colleagues, etc.

2 Questions to Ponder

1. Growing up, how did my caregiver(s) respond when I was upset? What did they do/not do? As an adult today, how might I have treated my childhood self similarly vs. differently?

2. Looking back on my other relationships, how have I seen my attachment style play out in terms of my intimate need? What about in relation to the needs of others?

Happy rest of week y’all, as always - feel free to pass along the newsletter to any folks you think would be interested!

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