Chasing Harmony.

Why some relationships have that "push - pull" feel to them.

And what you can do to change it.

Relationships can be tricky to say the least. Us humans can fluctuate a lot with our emotions, our understanding of our emotions, our goals and hopes and dreams and our general desire for excitement.

Why are some relationships SO tricky though? When you look at relationships through the lens of attachment, it will all start to make sense.

What is attachment? Well it is a theory credited to past researchers and mental health professionals like Bolby, Ainsworht and Mahler. And it suggests that humans for survival, need to 'attach' to an early caregiver(s). This attachment to the caregiver helps humans learn about themselves, about the world, about safety, love and belonging. And this early attachment helps humans learn about relationships.

So if we have chaotic or disrupted or tense or unpredictable early attachments - it really shapes how we subconsciously understand and function in relationships.

When we come to understand this, it can really dig up a lot. The point of learning about this isn't to just endure emotional pain by reflecting on what you learned in relationships. The whole point is to understand the MECHANISM that is the likely culprit to your current day relationship struggles.

There really is POWER in KNOWLEDGE. WHY? Because once you know this you can acknowledge it, AND you can decide now as an adult - what to do with it!

That is true empowerment and self authority!

Let's take a deeper look at the two components of attachment. Connection and Autonomy.

Human attachment serves two very distinct and necessary parts of human development. When we are infants throughout early childhood and even into our early teenage years - we NEED connection. Without connection to a primary caregiver(s) we STRUGGLE. it greatly impacts our overall development, physical health and emotional health. When we are so young, we are physically dependent on our primary caregiver(s) to feed us, keep us from harm, help us understand how to be in our body and things like hunger or thirst cues. We really take for granted, the amount of subconscious learning that is done in the early years.

Because of the very serious need for connection to early caregiver(s) (this is literally like survival in the body), we are at a bit of what could be called a 'disadvantage'. Why? Because we so greatly depend on these caregivers for survival, we will automatically choose connection.

We choose connection to a fault - when in fact, sadly it is sometimes not the best for us.

Let me explain. A primary caregiver(s) is emotionally unavailable and emotionally explosive. To a little person, this may be really scary and unpredictable. BUT. Connection wins. The little person will find ways to KEEP CONNECTED to the scary caregiver as a means of survival. The tradeoff as life continues forward - this little person has learned to keep the peace, not have needs and to definitely cause any type of trouble for the other person in the relationship.

"Scared to loose Love."

"Avoidant to receive Love."

Hope by just this one simple example...you can kind of see what I am getting at.

The teenage years are 'magical aren't they? (Said with some humour but also some truth). In human development there is an amazing phenomenom around our psychological development. We get a glimpse of it in toddler years - when a child learns the word "no".

The creation and ongoing development of the sense of "I". That you exist as an independent person outside of your primary caregiver(s). The teenage years is battleground for really diving into this sense of "I" - who am I, where do I fit in, what do I like, what do I believe...the list goes on.

This is what can be called AUTONOMY. And autonomy is ALSO necessary for survival as well as our overall health and development.

Ok, hopefully you can see these two components of attachment. Our early years we rely heavily on our instinctual need for CONNECTION. And as we continue to grow and development in life, we start to really get a sense of our need for AUTONOMY.

The PUSH-PULL in Relationships.

Now let me say something first - most of us have strains in our human relationships. Remember? Humans are dynamic and needs and understandings change frequently.

We can have early relationships wounds that set up our individual understanding of connection and autonomy. Or we can have relationship traumas that deeply impact our understanding of connection and autonomy.

In the most simple explanation...

If we are hurt in our development and need for CONNECTION, it can show up in adult relationships as EITHER:

AUTONOMY PREFERENCE. We become avoidant to genuinely receive love, care, affection and relationship safety because in our early development it wasn't safe. We didn't learn a healthy and good feeling for relationship connection. We easily keep walls up so people can't actually get to know us, and we feel that then they cannot hurt us. But ultimately, we end up starving ourselves of the connection we need.

OR

CONNECTION PREFERENCE. We become so pained by lack of relationship love, safety and belonging we are almost physically hungry for it. We are anxious to loose whatever love we may have. This can show up later in adult relationships with a near constant need to reinforce we are loved and accepted and safe. What can happen is we end up perpetuating that early childhood relationship hurt - and it pushes people away from us and what we so deeply wanted in the first place. We haven't grown up knowing that a healthy sense of autonomy is actually beneficial to our relationships.

The first step to trying to bring relationships more into harmony, is to really take a look at our preferences for BOTH connection and autonomy. And to maybe take a little time to reflect on WHY and HOW you developed those preferences. This can sometimes be really painful and I would say finding a good counsellor can help with exploring these lived experiences; especially if there is trauma involved.

BUT! There is a but - once we can take a look underneath, we can turn it into our own empowerment. We can take back "control" of our relationships BECAUSE we understand our early development and how it set us up to function. Let me say it this way - once you understand how the program runs, you can find ways to change how it runs or to support it to run more smoothly.

If you want to learn just a little bit more about relationships, your preferences for autonomy and for connection, consider this!

It is a webinar that is less than an hour and gives you the basics of attachment, the 4 attachment types and a way to better understand your preferences for autonomy and attachment.

BONUS! There is a bonus workbook for download to walk you through the material and really get a good handle on what is causing that push-pull feel in your relationships.

And to make sure this new knowledge really is power for you! Two extra tools to understand boundary types and how to communicate clearly in your relationships.

High Achiever's & Attachment

Buy Now

Thank you for taking the time to check out this blog! There are other great posts too if you are looking for more personal development, a little humour, a lot of knowledge and some tools to help you along in life.

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As always, journey on.

Chrissy.