129: Understanding Your Adult Attachment Style with Sarah Sherwood

02/26/18 • 54 min

I invited Sarah Sherwood back on the show today to talk about adult attachment theory and adult attachment styles. I'm relatively new to attachment theory, but the little I have dug into it helped me start understanding my own patterns of relating and why they exist.

The basic understanding of this theory is that how you regulate and experience yourself is in some ways a product of how you learned to relate with your primary care givers. We develop patterns of engaging with other people and relating based on whether or not our needs were being met and whether or not the world felt safe.

As you'll hear Sarah talk about, we develop behaviors from that experience to relate with other people to ensure we get what we need.

In this episode you'll learn

How each of us have these biologically wired in patterns of relating
Our most driving need is connection with other humans and how that helps us understand our sense of safety
How these styles get patterned into our nervous system
The 4 Attachment styles
How our emotional needs getting met or not greatly impacts our attachment style and patterns of relating
The relationship between attachment style and healthy boundries
How anxiety and distraction could possibly stem from these attachment styles
A mantra for parents is perceptive over perfect
Having a balance between chaos and rigidity in parenting
Practicing affective communication and vulnerability in safe relationships are some of the biggest places to start

As you'll hear Sarah talk about, we develop behaviors from that experience to relate with other people to ensure we get what we need.

In this episode you'll learn

How each of us have these biologically wired in patterns of relating
Our most driving need is connection with other humans and how that helps us understand our sense of safety
How these styles get patterned into our nervous system
The 4 Attachment styles
How our emotional needs getting met or not greatly impacts our attachment style and patterns of relating
The relationship between attachment style and healthy boundries
How anxiety and distraction could possibly stem from these attachment styles
A mantra for parents is perceptive over perfect
Having a balance between chaos and rigidity in parenting
Practicing affective communication and vulnerability in safe relationships are some of the biggest places to start

Previous Episode

128: The Art of Empathy with Karla McLaren

Karla McLaren, M.Ed. is an award-winning author, social science researcher, and empathy pioneer. Her lifelong work focuses on her grand unified theory of emotions, which revalues even the most “negative” emotions and opens startling new pathways into self-awareness, effective communication, and healthy empathy.

Karla also developed the groundbreaking Six Essential Aspects of Empathy model that makes all of the processes in empathy easily understandable and accessible -- so that people can develop and manage their empathy intentionally.

Karla is the author of The Art of Empathy: A Complete Guide to Life’s Most Essential Skill (2013), The Language of Emotions: What Your Feelings are Trying to Tell You (2010), and the multi-media online course Emotional Flow: Becoming Fluent in the Language of Emotions (2012). She is also the coauthor (with cult expert Janja Lalich, PhD) of Escaping Utopia: Growing Up in a Cult, Getting Out, and Starting Over (Routledge, 2018), which focuses on the stories of 70 people who grew up in and escaped from cults spanning a dozen countries.

In this episode you'll learn

Ways to slow down and examine your choices when different emotions arise.
Tips and practices to overcome the anxiety of our modern world.
The reasons you shouldn’t run from your emotions and how to work with the ones that make you uncomfortable
Why emotions are neither good or bad, and how you can use them to your benefit
How shame can be used in a healthy way to help you control your actions.
Learning to read other’s emotions so you increase your caring and empathy
How to increase your emotional vocabulary and better handle feelings when they arise.

Next Episode

130: Staying Centered, Tending To Your Personal Vibration, And Living In Your Home Frequency with Penney Peirce

It's pretty tough to deny the fact that we are influenced by unseen forces, energies and frequencies that we can't fully explain or describe from the rational mind. Frequencies, energy, and even emotion are an experience.

Giving more attention to how we feel and tending to our personal vibration and choosing to come from what Penney calls our home frequency is what I would consider a direct translation of what it means to be your authentic self, or that eternal aspect of you.

Penney Peirce was on the show at episode 120 to talk about her book Transparency and this particular stage in the Transformation process. Today we are going to come back around to understand another one of the stages of transformation through Penney's book Frequency: The Power of Personal Vibration.

Penney unpacks and builds some powerful distinctions in here to help us understand what frequency is, different ways to regulate our personal vibration (especially in social situations where we may "assume" the frequency of others), and the importance of finding our home frequency and center.

Through mindfulness practices, meditation, and directing our attention, just to name a few, we can start to bring our awareness to more subtle levels of energy and tap into things like intuition, creativity, and even more peaceful states.

The desire for people seeking more meaning in their lives, have more fulfilling careers, and searching for a deeper purpose are just a few of the ways this desire to integrate the physical and the spiritual are starting to not only emerge, but be the norm.

In this episode you'll learn