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So a lot of people end up getting their attachment style wrong. There's a massive group of people who start off thinking that they're anxiously attached because they have that anxious side to them and yet don't recognize that they are also deactivating, pulling away, shutting down, even pushing others away with force. And this is often a symptom of fearful avoidant attachment style, especially if you find yourself moving kind of rapidly from that anxious side to that dismissive avoidance side or that deactivating shutting down side. In today's video, we are going to break down the major, major 10 signs that you might actually be a fearful avoidant. Now, one other thing I want to note is that fearful avoidant and disorganized attachment style are these same thing. And again, this is something that comes up where people get confused quite frequently. So let's break this down so that you know this once and for all. But you can also use this to navigate a relationship with somebody you've just met and are thinking of dating, or to know and notice signs that somebody could be fearful avoidant, AKA disorganized in your life. Family members, your parents, your children, friends. So let's dive in. The very first sign is that you may find yourself, and this is one of the big differences from anxious, preoccupied, flip flopping back and forth, between fearing abandonment and commitment. I think of the fearful avoidant as like the pendulum swinging. And you may find yourself as a fearful avoidant or one day feeling this like fear of losing somebody and really having strong feelings. And literally the very next day or even that same day thinking, wait, I'm scared. I'm scared of committing. I'm scared of feeling trapped. I'm scared of feeling too vulnerable to this person and starting to really have these doubts. And that strong flip flopping is literally because of your attaching in childhood or whichever past relationship caused you to be a fearful avoidant. So generally we develop our attachment style between the ages of 0 to 2 because of neuroplasticity. Things are getting reprogrammed and reconditioned throughout our lives, but it has to be significant enough so we can also have a really substantial adult romantic relationship where maybe you were AP and then you had a lot of trauma going on in that relationship and you actually turned FA in your adult life. So this flip flopping back and forth, if we just look at it from a childhood perspective, is that generally you had a lot of chaos in childhood one way or another, and that chaos led you to. And I'll just use one example, but it can be many different variations of this. One example could be that you had a parent who was an alcoholic. And let's say one day the parent was sober and they were nice and another day they were sober but they were going through withdrawals and they were really mean. And then one day they were drinking and they were really warm and nice cause they have a couple drinks in them. And another day they were drinking and they were really mean and cruel. And that constant inconsistency that's just so unpredictable leads that person when they're learning to attach to that parent, leads that person to one day feel like there's great things about love and connection and another day to just really fear it. And so they learn these simultaneously different and really opposing themes about the same thing. They learn that love is great and loving and warm and kind and it's terrifying at the same time. And that can also be because parents are fighting a lot in the home or there's chaos or there's, you know, there can be so many different variations. But you know, I think that that parent drinking is just a really clear illustration of these competing associations about love. Love is wonderful and love is terrifying. And it leads fearful avoidance in their adult life until they do reprogramming around this to feel like I want this thing and it really scares me. And that's the experience of them flip flopping between wanting connection and fearing commitment and sort of fearing like oh my gosh, am I going to be trapped though? Or when will the other shoe drop or what bad thing will happen? And so they can really go from, and this is point number two, they can really go from activating like fearing abandonment and trying to get closer and closer in proximity to the person they're seeing, to then deactivating, right, Fearing distance and really trying to sort of push somebody away, either through withdrawing or even through actively pushing them away, which is something fearful avoidance will do like saying something harsh or saying something mean or doubting the relationship or making a comment to try to again create distancing between themselves and another person. So those are our top first two. We've got many other ones, not necessarily in any particular order of top, just those are the first two. If you ever want to dive in to the discover, embrace and fulfill your personal needs course. It's really an in depth assessment on your own needs. What lights you up in relationships, what lights you up in your personal life. It's a great way to deeply know yourself. And you can also do the needs assessment with somebody else or on behalf of somebody else and really deeply understand somebody else. Number three is that we'll often find fearful avoidance really jumping to conclusions. I've often heard and I was fearful avoidant and I literally think of this, but I've heard this many times in my client practice over the, the, the last I had a relationship before I did a lot of work on my own attachment style and healed and became secure. And I had a past relationship in my late teens, early 20s where somebody said to me, you always jump the gun, you're always jumping the gun, you're jumping to conclusions. Then I proceeded when I, when I started working with people to hear that expression from the partners of your whole avoidance all the time. And it's like, oh, you're, you're think you're just assuming bad things will happen, you're jumping to conclusions, you're jumping the gun. And what that actually reflects is if there's a lot of chaos in the home growing up, for example, going back to that example with the, the parent who was drinking, what ends up happening is you're kind of forced to jump the gun and look at worst case scenarios because there's these extreme events taking place. And so the mind will jump to assuming extremes because it actually gets conditioned to do so. And as a result, we'll often see somebody who's fearful avoidant in their, in the way they attach to others, seeing incongruencies. They're very hyper vigilant. They've become like their attachment strategy basically because of chaos in a variety of potential different forms. Their attachment strategy is to be hypervigilant, is to be super good at reading between the lines, to notice immediately if something's off in any which way, shape or form. But then they tend to jump to worst case scenario conclusions. And that's a protective mechanism. That's something that protected them as children, but may not necessarily be serving them in their adult life and can actually cause a lot more friction and miscommunications in relationships. Um, and so it's really related to trust at the end of the day. An adaptive strategy to try to deal with feeling afraid, feeling like there's chaos and worst case scenarios happening. And so that can manifest in adult lives as suspicion, jumping to conclusions, jumping the gun, all those different things. Our next one, number four is you are terrified of feeling helpless. I would say when fearful avoidance really look within themselves, there's this really big fear of feeling out of control. And fearful avoidance may deal with that fear and try to mitigate it within the relationship to themselves through Controlling their environment through controlling themselves a lot, their routines, what they do, how they show up. Or they may just feel a lot of emotional dysregulation when they feel helpless. And the idea that they have to rely on somebody else to get their needs met makes them feel very afraid. And again, when we reel this back towards past relationships, what do we see? Well, usually when you were in a chaotic environment, there was an element of you having to rely on unpredictable individuals to get your needs met, which can leave you feeling really helpless. So because of that conditioning and programming, that's now there a subconscious level. As the fearful avoidant grows up, there's this fear of going back there again, right? This fear of like, oh my gosh, what if I have to be dependent on somebody else again? So we'll see that manifest in this person's adult life through being afraid to ask for help, through being afraid to give up too much control, give up too much freedom or independence, because it's all at a deeper level to avoid this fear of helplessness that's been embedded there because of conditioning from past experiences. Our next one is that we see fearful avoidance generally tend to be highly empathetic or sympathetic towards other people. There is a big difference between sympathy and empathy. I won't go into it too much, but sympathy is. We tend to project onto others what we think they're feeling. We imagine their feelings according to what we would feel. Empathy is more we see them and know them and learn what they might be feeling according to what we understand about them. So for a very small example, without diverting too much sympathy might be, if I'm afraid of being abandoned in this situation, you must be afraid of being abandoned. But with a fearful avoidant, let's say they're dating a dismissive avoidant or a different attachment style, they might assume that person's fearing abandonment when there's an argument. But maybe that person actually needs space. And so empathy would be, oh, I know that my partner tends to need space in an argument. So when they say they need space, they're not actually saying it to test me. And because they're fearing abandonment and they want me to come closer, they're actually saying it because they need space. And so there's this ability to see others not as we are, but as they are as we come to try to understand them. I face tend to experience a good bit of both of these. They can be really good at empathizing. And they can also be, and I would say in their early days before doing some work tend to be a lot more sympathetic. And so they can really take on other people's emotions. They have very permeable boundaries in their emotional boundary environment. They, they tend to sort of really be the helpers, the ones that try to assist and show up and take on people's emotions and fix things for them. And again, where do you think this comes from? Often this comes from the type of environment they were conditioned within. And this often means in childhood or past relationships or experience that were really impactful where there was this sense of I need others to be okay, so I can also be okay. Like almost like if we go back to that original example, it's I need my parents to stop drinking so I can be safe. So I need to do everything I can to caretake for this person's emotions so they don't drink and become more unpredictable. And so there's this dynamic that this FA gets conditioned with where it's like, if others are not okay, I won't be okay. It's going to be more stress for me. So there's a lot of energy put into making others okay. And that tends to be a big part of the fearful avoidance programming. Our next one, you tend to struggle with boundaries as a result of this as well. Often fearful avoidance will be boundaryless, will pour into other people and then eventually they'll feel taken advantage of. And again, like, these are some differences from aps. Aps are not so afraid to rely on others. Going back to that earlier one, they're not always jumping to conclusions that bad things will happen related to trust in general, though, they do jump to conclusions around abandonment specifically. But with fearful avoidance, they tend to be boundaryless and then eventually get frustrated and upset and feel like they have to go into that avoidant side and push people away. Or these APs will just keep trying to maintain proximity and closeness. And we've got FAs who are. They'll be boundaryless and then eventually they'll sometimes get angry and even struggle with like saying harsh words or again, like deactivating trying to push people away, either through indirect pushing people away, like withdrawing or actually pushing people away with telling them to go away, saying something mean over a text message or things of that nature. Our next one is you may experience a lot of really strong emotions and have a hard time regulating them. Sometimes you'll express these emotions towards others. Sometimes you'll just kind of like take them in yourself and those emotions will tend to be really intense. The biggest emotions FA struggle with are hurt, anger, betrayal, and I would say a sense of like feeling unsafe and it's really like small bits of low level anxiety but it tends to be quite pervasive and you may even find as if you're full boy and you have a hard time resting, you have a hard time like staying regulated, just being, just having peace and calm. And there's more of this all or nothing mindset that fearful avoidance tend to have. And we actually know from a lot of research that all or nothing thinking really goes hand in hand with trauma because there's a lot more all or nothing extreme situations. And so we tend to perceive events that way as a result. And we really see this show up the most with fearful avoidant attachment styles. Okay, next one. You seem very vulnerable about things that you may not actually be vulnerable about. Fearful wouldn't tend to build these one way connections. Again, where do you think it comes from? Often the condition patterns in their childhood where they were meeting the needs of their caregivers to try to deal with the chaos in their environment. But their needs weren't necessarily seen or understood or met. But they did get some connection from doing so right. They, they were positively reinforced enough for it to feel like it kind of meets a need for them to meet others needs. So you'll often see fearful avoidance can be really good at building these one way connections where they really draw out information from other people. They get people to open up, people really see them and open up to. And you may see that you're really good at sort of harnessing that experience, but you either won't really open up much back or if you do. This brings me to our next point. You may find that you under share and then sometimes overshare. So it may be like again this polarity where sometimes you won't really share much at all and then you'll share a lot or the other variation of this experience is that you find yourself in a position where you'll share vulnerable things, but you won't actually ever share anything you really feel vulnerable about. So maybe you'll share about like a, a painful past relationship, but if you, you know, did something that you felt was bad in that painful past relationship, you may like take that and keep that and not open up about that at all. It's almost like this vulnerability to connect, but it's not necessarily really opening up. And I do want to say that while we don't have to share everything with everybody in our really close relationships, it is a part of how we feel loved. And when we share things that we do feel vulnerable about. We don't have to do it right away, but when we build trust and we do share more vulnerable things and we will actually come to see the vast majority of the time that we still get accepted, we still get loved anyways, it really helps us feel more seen, more deeply understood, more deeply connected. Vulnerability really goes hand in hand with depth and real connection in relationships. Okay, we have two more. You may find yourself struggling with extreme guilt and shame. Sometimes the guilt can be as a result of like getting angry and then kind of saying too much or being triggered and then being harsh with your words and feeling really badly about it. And also that you may shame yourself and be really harsh to yourself in your own internal dialogue. Like, your thoughts about yourself can be putting yourself down a lot again, again, sometimes because of the way you are talked to or the patterns you observed between how other people talk to each other in your environment. And often the dialogue we hear a lot in our home environment growing up, we internalize and that becomes our own internal dialogue in our adult lives. And then last but not least, I kind of mentioned this earlier as number two, but it was supposed to be for number 10. We may find there's a strong activation deactivation. So you may see that there's this dynamic of really going towards somebody and then getting afraid and then pulling away and really going towards somebody and then pulling away again. And. And then. And there's no specific like, oh, this is going to make you activate. You can fear abandonment and then you can deactivate. You can fear abandonment, be like, oh, I don't want to fear this from somebody. I don't want to feel this vulnerable to somebody. I'm going to shut down and pull away. Or you could fear abandonment and then try to activate. So it can really be all over the map in terms of that pendulum really swinging. So I hope this makes a lot of sense. Hopefully this really shows you some of the differences between anxious preoccupied and fearful avoidance. And I hope this was beneficial. Thank you so much for watching from being here. Please like share and subscribe if you're enjoying this channel and got value from this video and I will see you in the next video.