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I am really excited to discuss the topic for today, which is fearful avoidant attachment style and recovering long lost self connection. So in this video we're going to talk about what this actually means and what recovering long lost self connection truly looks like. We are also going to have a discussion about the three core aspects of self connection that you may not even realize are extremely important. And we'll also talk about how to achieve this long lost self connection so that you can stop feeling like you have to emotionally numb, like you have to escape yourself, like you don't know yourself yourself or know what you really want in certain areas of your lives. For example, what you want in a relationship dynamic, what you want for your future. Covering these three steps today should give you insight into the steps you want to take to really deepen that connection, which has a tremendous healing element to it. When we talk about the second major piece here of self connection, you'll see what I mean. First and foremost, I find that a lot of individuals actually really struggle to feel self connected. And what I mean by this is if we are living our lives on autopilot, if we are living our lives trying to appease others all the time to win their approval, to win a relationship over, if we are people pleasing. There's probably so many times in your experience where you are going against yourself and your needs and your truth without even realizing. And on top of that, if you find yourself in this chronic escapism sort of vicious cycle where you go and you have your commitments for the day, like you go to work, maybe you come home, you have to clean your house or take care of your children, and then in your spare time you find yourself kind of numbing out, distracting yourself, being on social media, going down some sort of rabbit hole without actually connecting to yourself, without, without actually checking in with yourself. If you find yourself just living in the external world without much relationship to your internal world, then you probably struggle with long lost self connection. Now symptoms of this will be feeling disconnected, feeling emotionally numb, feeling like you are in a position where you don't know your needs, you don't know your boundaries, you may not feel like you even really know your truth and you may not experience a lot of Clari. Your emotions are magnified. In other words, you may not even feel like you're really clear about how you feel towards a person, how you feel towards a job or an experience, or if something hurt you or you didn't like it. You may not even realize this until the point where it's so extreme that it's almost like, oh my gosh, it becomes so obvious at that point. So if you have a lot of kind of repressed emotions until they become really strong again, a really strong component of long lost self connection. So if you grew up in a household or some sort of environment where you're constantly having to focus on the outside in, maybe you are in chaos all the time and you have to walk on eggshells. Or maybe you're the eldest sibling of a larger family and you constantly have to take care of all of your other siblings in the household. If you're exposed to situations where there isn't room to, to really take care of yourself, if you're parentified as a young child, you are the parent in the household in certain ways, maybe emotionally or again like caretaking the other children in the household. If there's a lot of stress, chaos, uncertainty, trauma, like any of these things, they're going to cause you to get first of all into sympathetic nervous system mode, which is like chronic fight or flight state. You may even find that you seek out and you even crave that chronic fight or light state. And because it feels like there's sort of like this high, this emotional high when you're in that space. But really your body's just addicted to the neurochemistry, usually of dopamine and cortisol. But you'll find all these different things force you away from yourself, force you to disconnect from like who you are deeply, what your truth is, all these different things. So there's three major components of healing this. The first major component is introspection. You have to learn who you are and that takes time. I would really compare this to if you're on a dating situation with somebody and you're getting to know them, maybe it's a dating app or you're on the first couple of dates. You can't for fall in love with somebody you don't know. So you have to actually ask them questions about themselves. You have to learn about them. And that whole process takes time. And you know, in particular, you probably want to know, you know, what the person's boundaries and pain points are, what their needs are, what their fears are, what their major concerns are, what's really important to them as a person, what lights them up. And these are questions you want to ask yourself. And sometimes introspection isn't something where you're going to sit down and ask yourself a question and the answer is immediately going to pop up. Sometimes these questions like what are my needs? What makes me light up are actually you entering into states of self observation. In other words, you actually taking the time to consistently introspect with yourself. So actually taking the time to be like, okay, this week let me see what my boundaries are. Let me. If I have no idea where to start, I'm actually going to just take the time to observe. When I feel like a boundary is violated, when I feel like I wish I said something and stated a boundary but didn't, or what makes me light up. Let me observe myself this week and just see the things that I'm, you know, inclined towards, the things that I get a little bit excited about, you know, and what does that mean for me? Why do I value those things? Why do I care about those things? What are my needs and relationships? What I feel like is missing from my life. And sometimes we actually have to gather that information and be in that sort of gathering space for a period of time. And that's a huge, massive first step towards recovering that long lost self connection. I just want to let you know if you're struggling with a breakup or struggling with getting over somebody, even if it was a situationship somebody you were just dating for a short period of time and you really want to do the deep inner work to heal. I have a course called how to heal from a Breakup and you can check it out fully for free. It goes through four major pillars of actually healing from a breakup so much faster. Learning to sit with your pain, learning to regulate your nervous system. Understanding what grief is actually made up of, which is a lot to do with your unmet needs that your ex was meeting and how to meet them in the relationship to yourself. Which doesn't just help you grieve the breakup faster, but actually helps you heal your attachment style at the same time. It's just available for a limited time. So that's down there. The second major component of self connection is embodiment. It's the ability to be present in our body through presence and being able to stay anchored in our body. What you'll find is that we are more attuned to ourselves. We can take ourselves into consideration. Like if somebody comes along and they say to you, hey, do you want to come over this weekend on Friday? And you know, I live an hour away, but come up here and I'll see you this weekend. If you're not in your body when somebody asks you a question, you'll feel that you often just say this compulsive yes, yes, for sure. I'll see you on the weekend. And then you might walk away and be like, wait, I don't want to drive an hour there and an hour back this weekend. I have a lot on my plate right now. You may find that you don't know a boundary until later, after you've left a conversation or exited. You don't know what you actually need or want until you've left a conversation. If these are things that you're experiencing, chances are you're struggling with embodiment and how we actually heal. That is, we learn to get present in our bodies. We learn to actually do body scans. We learn to recognize that emotions are sensations in the body. So happiness can feel like an expansion in your torso and the lightness sort of feeling and maybe a very small sense of like kind of tingles and you may feel like sadness, feels like a hollowness, a happiness in your chest, shoulders and torso, an emptiness. You'll see that all of our emotions are just sensations in our body. And when we are embodied, we are also more likely to stay in parasympathetic nervous system mode. In other words, we are more likely to stay in a position where we are present, we're in rest and digest mode. And we're able to feel like our world slows down and we're able to feel like we can consider ourselves, we're attuned to ourselves, we know what we're feeling, we know what we're needing. Then we actually feel safer in ourselves and in our environment. And so this embodiment piece, you know, it's a really important piece and it also has a massive impact on healing because as children a lot of the times what you'll see is that you don't get presence from your caregivers enough or in the way that you need. It's a very common thing for fearful avoidant attachment styles. And so part of reparenting is learning to give to ourselves what we couldn't get as children. And so by being embodied and present with yourself more frequently, it also heals a deep childhood core subconscious wound. And that has a massive ripple out effect on many different things. So we've got introspection, we've got embodiment, and then we have identity. Something that's really interesting here is a strong self identity tends to be one of the big opposing forces against something like borderline personality disorder. Generally you'll see individuals with BPD really struggle with a sense of self, a self identity. And then we'll have these competing kind of thoughts and ideas, like from a spiritual perspective, right, that like Hanging on to your identity or your ego is damaging. Overly attaching to things is damaging. And I would say like from a truly, you know, like let's look at the security kind of perspective for a securely attached style. We can have a strong sense of self or a strong self identity without over attachment. You can know who you are, what you need, what's important to you. And at the same time be open to change, be open to evolving, be open to, hey, we always grow and evolve and change and that's probably going to happen to me and that's perfectly fine. And I'm open to that experience. And this gives us this ability to like know who we are, feel confident in ourselves, confident in our truth, make decisions that back the highest expression of ourselves, that support the highest expression of who we are because we know those things about ourselves. Be in alignment, be in attunement to self, and also be open to change. And this is a very healthy balance of both. Because if we have no self identity, we're in chronic people pleasing. We say yes to all these different things, we never say no. We can get burnt out from doing that, we can really lose ourselves in the world from doing that. And there's a lot of downsides to that. On the flip side, if we're too strongly attached to who we are and we're too rigid and we're never open to change, I mean there's detrimental effects to that too. And so I like to think of this concept or phrase of identity without over attachment, meaning I know who I am today, I am open to changing, I'm open to evolution, I'm open to the world and my experiences, showing me things that I could learn about myself that I didn't know. And I'm open to taking all that information in and seeing if there's aspects of self that I have to shed, that I have to let go of. Old coping mechanisms, outdated strategies. And so it's like we can have this sense of self without this over attachment to sense of self at the same time. So these are the three major components to recovering long lost self connection as the fearful avoidant introspection around your needs, your boundaries, what lights you up, you know, all the different things that we mentioned, embodiment, getting back in our body, being present, being attuned to self, seeing if we're in alignment in our lives and identity, really developing and actioning out those components that we learned about introspection and embodiment into designing our life, creating who we are. But that strong sense of self identity without over attachment.