← The Thais Gibson Podcast
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Do anxious attachment styles use sex and intimacy as a strategy for approval? And if so, are there actual costs to them in doing so, according to neuroscience? Well, today we're going to break that down. We're going to start by talking a little bit about the different studies that show the relationship between an anxious attachment style and sex intimacy. Then we're going to talk about the different pillars of intimacy and closeness as a whole. And most importantly, at the end, I will share with you three or four major patterns that I've seen after working with tens of thousands of individuals through online programs at the personal school or in one to one sessions that will really showcase for you some of these major themes and patterns that you really need to know and understand about yourself if you're listening, or even your loved one if you're here listening on their behalf so that you know how to approach sex and intimacy in a healthier way. Now, if you're new here, hello and welcome. My name is Thais Gibson and I'm the founder of Gibson Integrated Attachment Theory, the only proven method to leverage neuroplasticity to actually help you rewire your attachment style. And after almost 14 years of working in private practice and in our online programs with tens of thousands of people, I'm here to share with you the most powerful insights for deep inner healing from your childhood and past relationships so that you can truly live your best life. So I want to kick this off by sharing a study with you from Deborah Davis and Philip Shaffer in 2004 titled Attachment Style and Subjective Motivations for Sexual Here are the three main points that the study essentially found. Point number one, as you already know and can imagine, is that anxious attachment cells are hyper tuned to rejection. So the study found that attachment anxiety is linked to altered activity and emotion and self regulation regions of the brain. And this causes an anxious attachment cell's brain to essentially be constantly preoccupied with relationship security and potential rejection. Meaning that anxious attachment cells find themselves more through being in relationship with other people than they do in their own strong sense of self and identity. And one or the other in extremes isn't really healthy. Ideally, we're looking for an interdependence across both, right? So somebody's actually looking to have a sense of strong self. And what that means as an example is that they would have fulfillment across the seven areas of their life. They would have a career that they like, they would have a healthy and stable relationship to money, they would have mental hobbies. They're interested in the ability to emotionally regulate and know themselves more emotionally by tuning listening to their feelings. They would have a sense of physical health, habits that were helpful, constructive. They would eat and sleep and move their body in a way that was meaningful for them. And they would help a healthy relationship to God or higher power, along with multiple relationships in their life, friends, family, romantic relationships. Having a sense of stability across those seven areas of life allows for a stable sense of self. And that's a good thing. But if we over rely on our individual areas of life, but literally keep people at arm's length and never want to rely or lean into healthy relationships and vulnerability, then there's a cost to that. But by the same token, as you'll see with anxious attachment styles, they tend to over rely on relationships to the exclusion of those other areas of life, causing them to very much be preoccupied by those relationships and also causing them to feel like they literally need people to fulfill their sense of self esteem, which can be a very slippery slope and will play into how this shows up in sex and intimacy. And to take this a step further, point number two is that a very large study by Davis and Shaver of about 2,000 people showed that anxiously attached individuals were more likely to use sex for emotional closeness and reassurance for boosting their self esteem and for reducing anxiety about the relationship's stability, whereas dismissive avoidant individuals were much less likely to use sex as a strategy for emotional closeness. So in other words, yes, sex becomes an approval seeking strategy for anxious attachment style individuals and can often essentially be used almost as this neuroco neurochemical test for Am I wanted? Am I safe? Am I loved? Does this person like me? And after sex, oxytocin and dopamine can actually temporarily soothe anxiously wired circuits. But if the underlying core beliefs of the anxious attachment style are not dealt with, and this is so much of where integrated attachment theory comes in and takes shape. If somebody doesn't actually learn to rewind wire these core beliefs that were conditioned into your attachment cell, these beliefs of I'm not good enough, I'm going to be abandoned, I'm unloved or unlovable, if somebody doesn't actually change those brain circuits, then yes, sex and intimacy give this temporary sense of validation because there's an element of vulnerability and closeness. But then sex is over relied on as a way to soothe those brain circuits. But as I always say, you cannot fix an inside challenge or problem with an outside solution at best can only provide temporary fixes. And we'll see them move from a place of constantly trying to Soothe themselves through sex externally rather than through healing internally a lot of these underlying programs. So I really want to get into three major patterns here that I tend to see with anxious attachment styles and where this becomes sometimes very detrimental and painful for them. Number one, I have far too often seen anxiously attached individuals actually violate their own boundaries around sex and intimacy as a means of trying to prioritize approval. So, for example, we may have an anxious attachment style dating somebody, and they do not feel ready to be intimate with this person. They may, for different reasons, want to move at a slower pace, May want to wait until much longer into a relationship or even until marriage before having sex, or intimate an intimate relationship with them. But because their brain is so desperately seeking to soothe their anxiety through sense of approval, and they see sex as an ability to bond and essentially win over that approval from somebody, often anxious attachment cells are prone to violating their own boundaries around sex and intimacy for that reason. And that becomes very painful. And so it's really important to get clear about, hey, what are these wounds driving me to do that? And how can I rewire those wounds using integrated attachment theory. Point number two, Sometimes I'll see that anxious attachment styles end up being so involved in the other person's sexual experience that literally are not even present in their own body. And even at times, mildly dissociated. They're so focused on what that person is feeling that they're in a relationship with and how their experience of intimacy is that they're not ever really taking themselves into consideration. And they're often moving from a place of self sacrifice when it comes to intimacy instead of reciprocity around sex. The last major thing that I've seen, Rather than anxious attachment cells struggling with their boundaries around sex at times, and also being in a position where they're not really attuned to their own needs around sex and intimacy, is that anxious attachment cells can be extre. Hypersensitive to rejection around sex. So if after a sexual experience, somebody doesn't actually get extreme approval or connection, or the person doesn't cuddle with them for long enough, or things of that nature, they take it so deeply to heart because one of the reasons that they were often engaging in intimacy to begin with was often as a way to get to those other more intimate things. You see, we have different pillars of connection. We can connect intellectually, emotionally, romantically and sexually. And oftentimes anxious attachment cells often hope that by connecting sexually, it will then unlock the other pillars of connection, especially the romantic pillar. And at times that's often not the case because different attachment cells have a different relationship to sex as a whole. And so it's extremely important to be recognizing that if you are anxiously attached so that you can take the necessary steps to actually heal these patterns. And in doing so, you'll be able to have healthier boundaries, healthier sense of self respect around your own needs, and a desire for reciprocity in relationships, as well as the ability your approval about how you feel about yourself and be rooted in a place of self trust as well as co regulation with others, rather than something mutually exclusive, rather than it just being about approval. And that's it. So I hope you enjoyed today's video. Make sure you like, share and subscribe if you are enjoying this channel. Thanks for watching.