Affect and Attachment Part 3: The Missing Link in Attachment: How Your Core Feelings Shape Your Relationships

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Hi, I'm Dr.
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Scott Concrete.
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What if your body is holding memories your mind can't access?
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Hi, I'm Dr.
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Scott Concrete.
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Welcome to the Meaningful Happiness Podcast.
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Today I'm going to talk about affect theory and attachment.
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Before I talk about what goes wrong in attachment in childhood, let's spend time looking at what healthy looks like.
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Keep in mind, when I'm talking about healthy, I'm talking about healthy on a continuum.
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There is no such thing as perfect healthiness, there's healthy attachment and so forth.
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It is aspirational.
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It is not a place that you land and you stay at, and somebody achieves it, and there you are, and you never have any struggles.
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Just just it is it just is not the case.
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But we have to have this aspirational idea in order to make sense of the other ones, of terms of what goes wrong, so to speak.
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How things are not ideal when parents are not able to be their care caregivers are not able to provide perfect or ideal attachment.
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I'm wanting to lay this out for you all because most people don't really understand how attachment styles actually become attachment styles.
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In my model, they are related to the core affects, the core feelings, especially about how shame is dealt with.
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So that's where we're going to begin.
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Someone with secure attachment has what's called flexible volume control.
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They can read the emotional demands of a situation and respond with the right intensity.
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They can stay online during both high and low intensity experiences without collapsing into chaos or shutting down completely.
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Let's break down what this actually means in practice.
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Proportionality has to do with feelings matching the situation.
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A minor disappointment feels like a minor disappointment, maybe a three out of ten.
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Not much devastation, which would be like a nine out of ten, which you see in the anxious pattern.
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Not like nothing, which would be a one out of ten, which would be more like the avoidant pattern.
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The intensity matches what actually happened.
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Your friend cancels plans, you feel mildly bummed, maybe a little annoyed, that's it.
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Not they don't care about me, I'm never I'm always gonna be alone, everything is falling apart.
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And not dismissive either, not whatever, I don't care anyway.
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Just a proportionate level of disappointment that fades relatively quickly.
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A major loss feels like a major loss, maybe a nine out of ten.
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Not like a minor annoyance you should just get over, as an avoidant pattern.
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Not like the end of the world combined with every previous loss you ever experienced, rolled into one unbearable feeling, which is anxious pattern.
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Like an eleven out of ten.
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Someone you love dies?
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Well, you feel deep, profound grief.
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You cry, you feel absolutely shattered.
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That's appropriate.
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That's what that situation deserves.
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The intensity matches the stimulus.
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This might sound obvious, but when you have insecure attachment, nothing is proportionate.
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Everything is either amplified or dampened.
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You've lost or you struggle with the ability to match feeling intensity to situation intensity.
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In healthy attachment, you have flexibility.
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You can access the full range.
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You can feel strongly when it's appropriate.
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Deep grief added death, intense joy at birth, real fear when you're in real actual danger, righteous anger at injustice.
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But you can also feel moderately or mildly whatever's happening when that's what fits, mild frustration in traffic, gentle disappointment about something small, soft contentment on an ordinary day, slight nervousness before presentation.
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You're not stuck in one mode.
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You have access to the full range of intensity levels, and you can adjust based on what's actually happening.
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This is what anxious attachment can't do.
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Everything trends towards high intensity, even small things feel big.
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This is what avoidant attachment can't do.
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Everything trends towards low intensity, moving towards numbness.
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Even big things feel small or like nothing at all.
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Flexibility means you can go high when high is called for, low when low fits, and everywhere in between.
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You also have in healthy attachment recovery.
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You can return to baseline.
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After intense feeling, you come back down.
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You cry deeply, feel the grief fully, and then the crying subsides.
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The grief is still there, but at a lower intensity.
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You return to a regulated state.
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You feel intensely angry, express it appropriately, and then the anger resolves.
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You're calm again.
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You're not stuck in prolonged upset for hours or days, which is like anxious attachment, and you're not defensively suppressing everything, and then having to having it leak out in weird ways later, which is the avoidant pattern.
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You complete the feeling cycle.
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You have the feeling at the intensity it deserves.
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It runs its course and then it fades.
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You recover.
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This might take ten minutes for small upsets, it might take days or weeks for major losses.
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But the pattern is the same.
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Intensity rises, peaks, then falls back to baseline.
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Both insecure patterns break this.
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Anxious attachment struggles to recover.
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Feelings stay too high for way too long.
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Avoidant attachment doesn't allow the rise in the first place.
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The feelings get cut off before they can even start.
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In healthy attachment, you also have integration.
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Everything lines up.
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What you feel inside roughly matches what you show outside in what's happening in your body.
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If you're sad, you feel sad consciously.
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Your body shows signs of sadness, like appropriate arousal level, maybe tears if the intensity is high enough, slowed movement, drop shoulders.
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And you display sadness in ways others can perceive and respond to.
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Your face shows it, your voice conveys it.
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There is coherence across all levels of the system.
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Conscious awareness, body state, and external expression are all saying the same thing.
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This is what gets fragmented in insecure attachment.
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In anxious attachment, everything is online but amplified.
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What you feel inside, what your body is doing, and what you're showing outside are aligned, but they're always turned up way too high relative to the situation.
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In avoidant attachment, there's a massive disconnect.
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Your body might be having a big stress response like heart racing, cortisol spiking, and so forth, but your conscious awareness registers almost nothing.
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And your face and behavior show even less.
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Nothing lines up.
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You're split into fragments.
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Understanding secure modulation gives you a clear target.
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It's not about feeling less or feeling more.
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Those are way too simple.
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It's about building a system that can flexibly adjust intensity based on context, that can access the full range, that can recover after intense feeling, that maintains integration between what you're aware of, what your body is doing, and what other people can see.
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That's what we're trying to build.
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Most of us didn't get it as kids, the stuff that we need.
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You can build this capacity later in life.
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That's why I'm here trying to help out.
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It just takes longer than you'd like, and it requires understanding what you're actually trying to change.
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If you're the anxious one where everything feels like an emergency, and I'm of course exaggerating for teaching's sake, your work is learning to notice feelings when they're still quiet, before they explode into panic.
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Right now, you probably don't register anything that's under six, seven, eight out of ten.
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By then, you're already spiraling.
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You need to start catching feelings at a two or a three.
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You need to start building body awareness in real time, and this means learning to track your body's signals moment by moment before the feeling amplifies to overwhelming intensity.
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You're sitting on the couch, your partner hasn't texted back in an hour or something like that.
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Instead of waiting until you're in full panic with your heart pounding and your mind racing, already composing the fourth, Are You OK text, you practice catching the very first body signals.
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You notice a slight tightness starting in your chest.
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A flutter of anxiety beginning.
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If you can notice your breath, it might be getting a tiny bit more shallow.
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These are the two out of ten signals that you need to start reading.
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The early warning system.
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Most anxiously attached people blow right past these because they've learned that only maximum intensity gets noticed.
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But I'm suggesting that train yourself to notice and name the quiet signals before amplification takes over.
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I want you to start labeling these low intensity feelings.
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I want you to start practicing naming the feelings when they're small, not when they've already consumed you.
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I'm feeling a little worried.
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Notice that when you're when it's still little.
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Don't wait until it's I am completely panicked and convinced something terrible has happened.
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This creates conscious awareness at earlier points in the escalation chain.
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It gives you a chance to intervene before the automatic amplification pattern takes over completely.
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You're also going to be building tolerance for small amounts of uncertainty or separation without immediately seeking reassurance.
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Can you stay with, I wonder if they're okay, at three out of ten for five minutes without texting, then ten minutes, then thirty.
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You're discovering that the feeling can exist at that low level without escalating into crisis.
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That uncertainty doesn't automatically mean catastrophe.
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This is hard.
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Your feeling system has learned that uncertainty equals danger, that any gap in connection means abandonment.
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You're slowly teaching it something different.
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The most important part happens in relationships, particularly therapy or with a secure partner.
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You need to experience repeatedly hundreds of times that moderate expression of needs are noticed and responded to, that you don't have to amplify to maximize to be heard.
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You can say, I'm feeling a little anxious about our plans at a four out of ten, using a normal voice tone with a face that matches four out of ten.
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And your partner responds with taking you seriously.
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They can offer reassurance or information.
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Your feeling system begins to learn that moderate intensity works.
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You don't have to scream to be heard.
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This can't happen in one conversation.
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It needs hundreds and hundreds of repetitions.
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Your automatic memory needs massive amounts of new data to override decades of learned amplification.
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A good therapist creates this experience by responding to subtle cues, by noticing when you're slightly anxious, not waiting until you're in crisis, by showing you that quiet gets noticed too.
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You also need to develop the internal structure that was never fully built in childhood.
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This means learning to be helped to regulate by a therapist or partner, and then gradually extending the time you can maintain that regulation independently.
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At first, you might be able to self-sooth for a few minutes before you need external help.
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Then 10, then 20.
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You're building the capacity incrementally.
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You're not trying to become completely self-sufficient.
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That's the avoidant pattern.
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You're building the ability to regulate yourself for reasonable periods of time while still being able to reach for help when you need it.
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After some months of work, you might notice a few things.
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You might notice your partner didn't text back for two hours.
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May have felt some anxiety, maybe a five out of ten, you noticed it, named it, sat with it for 20 minutes, then you sent one text asking how things were.
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They responded that they'd been in meetings.
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The anxiety resolved.
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The whole thing lasted 30 minutes instead of consuming the entire afternoon.
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That is progress.
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Not perfection, progress.
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If you're the avoidant one, your work is learning to survive vulnerable feelings at higher intensities without shutting down or disconnecting.
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Right now, you probably suppress feelings before you even know they are there.
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Your body might be having a full stress response while your conscious mind registers nothing.
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This means reestablishing the connection between what your body is experiencing and what you're consciously aware of.
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You're in a conversation with your partner about something emotionally important, they're upset.
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You think you're fine, but if you actually check, your heart is racing, your chest is tight, your jaw is clenched, your breathing is shallow.
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These are feeling signals.
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Your body is responding, but the signal isn't making it to conscious awareness.
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You're learning to notice my heart is racing, my chest is tight, my breathing shallow, and recognizing these as emotional responses instead of dismissing them or not noticing them at all.
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This sounds simple, but it's not.
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Your feeling system has spent decades cutting the connection between body and awareness.
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You're rebuilding a pathway that's been severed.
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You're also building capacity to experience vulnerable feelings without immediately suppressing or disconnecting.
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Can you let yourself feel sad for 30 seconds before you shut it down?
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Then 60 seconds, then two minutes?
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You're sitting with your therapist and they ask about your mother.
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You feel a wave of something rising.
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Normally you'd immediately intellectualize, change the subject, or go numb.
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Now you're trying to stay with it.
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Thirty seconds feels like forever.
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Your system wants to slam the door shut, but you're practicing keeping it open just a little longer.
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This can be terrifying at first.
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Vulnerable feelings have been linked with danger for so long that your feeling system treats them as actual threats.
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So you are slowly teaching it that they won't destroy you.
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You're also learning to identify feelings that exist in your body but not in your conscious awareness.
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A good therapist might say, I noticed you just clenched your jaw and your eyes got wet when you mentioned your ex.
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What are you feeling right now?
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And you might say, Nothing, I'm fine.
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May change the subject and so forth.
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But if you do that, the therapist might say, Your body doesn't look fine, your jaw is tight, your breathing is faster, there's moisture in your eyes.
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Something's happening.
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You're learning to connect these physical signs to emotional content.
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You might say, Oh, I guess I'm sad.
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I didn't realize I was sad.
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But yeah, I think that's sadness.
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This needs to happen thousands of times.
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Each time you're building a bridge between body signals and conscious feeling labels.
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The most important work happens through experiencing repeatedly, hundreds of times, that vulnerability doesn't get you rejected.
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You share something vulnerable, you admit you're hurt or scared or sad.
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And instead of your partner or friends pulling away or seeming annoyed, which is probably what happened in childhood, they move towards you.
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They offer care and comfort.
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Your feeling system begins to learn something that showing vulnerable feelings brings connection, not rejection.
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This can't happen in one conversation.
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Your automatic memory reads massive amounts of new data.
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You need hundreds of experiences of I showed vulnerability and it was okay.
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They didn't leave.
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They cared more, not less.
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A good therapist creates this by meeting every expression of vulnerability, every expression of vulnerable feeling with warmth and interest, never with dismissal or minimization.
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Over time, you learn it's safe.
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A secure partner does the same thing.
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They don't punish you for having feelings.
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They appreciate when you share them.
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They move closer, not away.
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You're also building coherence between internal experience, external expression, and physical reality.
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Learning what you feel, what you show, and what your body is doing can all match instead of being split apart.
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Right now, you might be experiencing this body at high stress, like heart racing, conscious awareness, which is much lower, you think you're fine or more fine than you are, and your external expression may not show the reality of what's really happening.
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Integration means that the body shows stress, you become aware that you're anxious, your face shows that, shows some of the anxiety, and your partner can see it and respond.
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And they're lined up.
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No more.
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Fragmentation.
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After a fair amount of work and therapy, you might notice that your partner could be upset about something you did, and you had the familiar urge to go numb or to disconnect.
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But you stayed present.
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It felt uncomfortable, maybe a little scary, a little worried that you might lose them.
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And you definitely wanted to run.
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But you stayed.
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You stayed with the feeling.
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You didn't leave.
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They were just upset about that specific thing, and it got resolved, and you felt relief.
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And the whole conversation lasted 10 minutes, and afterwards you felt closer to them instead of more alone.
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That is a lot of progress.
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Real hard won progress.
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I'm going to be straight with you.
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This is slow work.
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Recognizing the patterns takes time.
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Catching it in the moment sometimes takes months to learn.
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Choosing differently takes a long time to learn that.
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New patterns that you can start having in relationships, new scripts takes longer.
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Deep change in how your nervous system operates, that takes a lot of time.
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This is in no way meant to discourage you, I promise you.
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It's meant to set realistic expectations.
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You're rebuilding something that should have been constructed in childhood, but wasn't.
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You're reprogramming automatic responses that have been running for decades.
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You're retraining your entire feeling system.
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That takes time.
00:23:42.000 --> 00:23:43.359
It takes patience.
00:23:43.599 --> 00:23:47.759
It takes thousands of repetitions of new experiences.
00:23:48.400 --> 00:23:50.640
But it is truly possible.
00:23:51.279 --> 00:23:52.400
People do this.
00:23:52.640 --> 00:23:53.440
You can do this.
00:23:53.599 --> 00:23:56.000
I've been doing it for 35 years with patience.
00:23:56.240 --> 00:24:09.440
You just need to understand what you're building and commit it, and commit to the long, often very frustrating work of rebuilding your emotional operating system from scratch almost.
00:24:09.680 --> 00:24:15.039
Every culture has rules about when and how feelings should be expressed.
00:24:15.839 --> 00:24:19.039
Researchers in my field call these display rules.
00:24:19.279 --> 00:24:23.279
It's okay to cry at funerals, but not at business meetings.
00:24:23.599 --> 00:24:28.640
Enthusiasm should be shown, but not to embarrassing excess.
00:24:29.599 --> 00:24:34.960
Anger might be acceptable in some contexts, but not in others.
00:24:35.279 --> 00:24:40.960
You learn these growing up, and you figure out the social game.
00:24:41.680 --> 00:24:44.160
But here's what matters for attachment.
00:24:44.480 --> 00:24:49.039
In your early relationships, you learned something more fundamental.
00:24:50.000 --> 00:24:55.839
You learned which feelings were welcomed and which created problems.
00:24:56.319 --> 00:25:02.319
In secure attachment, most of your feelings were acceptable to express.
00:25:02.960 --> 00:25:10.240
Your caregivers could handle the full range happy, sad, scared, angry, excited, so forth.
00:25:10.799 --> 00:25:16.799
They didn't need you to manage your feelings to make them comfortable.
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You learned to organize expression based on the context.
00:25:22.640 --> 00:25:25.200
Inside voice versus outside voice.
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It's a good one to learn.
00:25:27.039 --> 00:25:31.759
The kind of enthusiasm that's okay at home might be too much at a restaurant.
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That makes sense.
00:25:33.599 --> 00:25:41.519
But in healthy attachment, you didn't learn that entire categories of feelings were forbodden, they were forbidden.
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You didn't learn that sadness pushes people away or that excitement annoys people.
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You developed authentic expression that calibrates to social context, not defensive suppression.
00:25:55.599 --> 00:26:02.480
If your feelings were sometimes welcomed but inconsistently, you experienced something confusing.
00:26:02.720 --> 00:26:08.079
You reached out and sometimes got a response, sometimes got ignored.
00:26:08.880 --> 00:26:19.440
The adaptive solution your feeling system came up with was to make everything louder, which is the anxious attachment style.
00:26:19.680 --> 00:26:23.039
Make your feelings so obvious they can't be missed.
00:26:23.359 --> 00:26:29.119
Subtle expressions got overlooked, so everything had to be maximized and amplified.
00:26:29.440 --> 00:26:32.720
Facial expressions became exaggerated at times.
00:26:33.039 --> 00:26:35.359
Voice tone heightened.
00:26:35.680 --> 00:26:38.799
Body display of feeling magnified.
00:26:39.039 --> 00:26:42.400
I want to make clear that I am exaggerating right now.
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Most people are not on the extreme end of an anxious attachment or avoidant attachment.
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I'm putting in I'm pushing these examples to the extreme.
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Most of all of us, me included, are somewhere in the middle.
00:26:56.799 --> 00:27:02.480
And also, I want to be clear, some of us learned to use both.
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But we realized sometimes avoidant worked, sometimes anxious worked.
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Just trying to try to give you an idea of like how this works growing up and how it's currently present in your life.
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What I'm really trying to show is that it isn't performance or manipulation.
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It isn't conscious.
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It's now an automatic organization of expression of feelings based on what worked in your early environment.
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As an anxious adult, you might be described as wearing your feelings on your sleeve, or very emotional, or dramatic.
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These are descriptions of an expression pattern you learned in childhood, and you can't really see yourself executing them.
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It just happens.
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They just happen.