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Repair attempts are much more successful when there is a pre-existing relationship culture of understanding each other, expressing gratitude and regularly doing nice things for each other, which supports the relationship in being better able to withstand the inevitable storms.
Being seen, understood, appreciated and loved by another who is turning towards you with their presence and warmth is invaluable in its potential to offer the corrective attachment experiences that so many of us need.
Knowing how to stand securely on your own two feet and how to be your own safe haven and secure base is fundamental to building your internal secure attachment.
Secure attachment with yourself means being aware of your feelings and desires, as well as being able to tend to your own needs and knowing how to advocate for them in relationships. In the absence of this, your relationships can be built upon a false premise, or, at the very least, will struggle to be sustainable.
According to Daniel Siegel, we can make sense of our attachment history by creating a coherent narrative of our past experiences.72 We do this by putting together the story of what we went through as a child and examining how our attachment history impacts our present sense of self and our relationships today.
But as adults, our positive sense of self cannot be solely contingent on the expressed delight of those around us. We need to cultivate expressed delight for ourselves in order to maintain a positive sense of worth and healthy appreciation for who and how we are that is sustainable and resilient.
I am talking about the importance of positive self-talk and being kind and loving to yourself in ways that you would probably treat a friend, but so frequently forget when it comes to your relationship with yourself. When we have experienced trauma and attachment ruptures, we can forget what it means to be kind to ourselves.
Even a small shift in the way you talk to yourself has significant physical and mental health benefits and can influence your ability to regulate your feelings, thoughts, and behavior under stress.
Positive self-talk is not about placating yourself, trying to falsely boost your ego or being self-delusional. It is about having an inner dialogue that is forgiving, understanding, flexible and holds a larger, often more realistic, perspective than the negative, defea...
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Attunement is at the heart of secure attachment. In its absence, attachment security ceases to be possible. When there are early childhood attachment ruptures, requisite developments in a person’s ability to tune into themself and regulate their inner states can become hindered.
When our childhood needs are not met from the outside and our attachment figures are unable to help us learn how to identify and label our inner experiences in order to make sense of them and soothe ourselves, as adults we can then struggle with knowing how to feel our own feelings, identify our own needs, and calm down our own body, mind and heart in the way a nurturing caretaker would have.
When we are able to tune in and tend to our needs from the inside first, we may still seek outward support, comfort and guidance from our partners, but our fundamental well-being and sense of being OK are not dependent on it.
When applied to the self, attunement is our ability to turn inward in order to become receptive and aware of our interior world. Self-attunement is the inner inquiry into what you are feeling, needing, thinking and experiencing.
People with more attachment anxiety tend to seek outward regulation from others—they want to be taken care of, try to overprocess with partners, look for someone fix or take away what they’re going through, or can even seek someone else to just tell them what to do.
Types of regulation, adapted from Stan Tatkin’s “The Four Regulation (Self-Care) Strategies” from We Do: Saying Yes to a Relationship of Depth, True Connection, and Enduring Love.
With self-compassion we can learn how to re-parent ourselves in ways we may have never received.
There can be a healing effect of being with discomfort, of contacting pain or pleasure without collapsing or disconnecting, that can allow people to access their own inner safe haven and secure base.
Surround yourself with people who truly mean well, are more securely attached and who want to be a support for you in your healing process.
There are natural rhythms to our cycles of sleeping, eating, resting and having sex that suffer when ignored.
The loss of the impact of such culturally approved rites of passage means that the millennia-old practice of having a ritual-based matrix in place to assist us with adjusting to life events (and the accompanying change of consciousness required to accommodate those events) is often no longer available to us.
When focusing on establishing a more secure relationship with yourself, one of the most influential routines we can implement is what I refer to as self-alignment practices.
When we actively engage in practices that bring these parts of us to the forefront, we are rewiring ourselves to resonate more easily with a self that is more peaceful, joyful, loving and accepting.
If we live in alignment with our most secure, loving and happy self and practice living through the lens of the qualities about us that are remarkable, then we stabilize that construct until that is who we will eventually become.
Some of us need to take a pause on dating and turn inward to heal, deconstruct and rebuild ourselves. This can allow us to bring forward a more fortified and healthy self that is able to relate in secure ways with others.
Others may need to first have enough positive experiences where we feel seen, loved and met before embarking on inner work.
In the nonmonogamous world there is a popular saying that love is infinite, but time and resources are not.
This saying highlights the paradox of ultimate versus relative reality—love is not a finite resource, so it is possible for us to love more than one person at a time, but we are all in bodies that are limited to the relative realities of space and time, so having infinite partners is not actually possible.
