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Fearful avoidant attachment styles often believe that they are super independent, but underneath, emotional dependency quietly takes over their relationships once they are actually in them. You may find as a fearful avoidant attachment style that when you're on your own and single, you feel like you are an independent person and constantly comfortable doing your own thing. But when you deeply actually attach to somebody and feel vulnerable and develop real feelings, everything seems to change. So in today's video we are going to break down three major self signs of emotional dependency in relationships that you can look out for. Then we're going to talk a little bit about the neuroscience, what actually happens to your brain and how this has roots in your own childhood that may cause you to have these themes and patterns take shape. Then we are going to get into some ways to actually heal this so you don't feel like you are constantly caught between either being in a relationship where you love and care about somebody or being in a relationship with yourself. Because oftentimes you'll think that when I'm in one I lose the other. But it doesn't have to be that way. So we'll talk about how to heal this specifically and at the end I will share a fact about fearful avoidance in relationships that may really surprise you that you may never have heard before. Before we dive in, I want to hear from you. Let me know in the comments if you've ever had the experience of literally feeling like the moment you enter into a relationship with somebody else, you lose yourself in the process. I remember when I was fearful avoidant because that's how I got into a part of the reason I got into this work I found that I constantly felt like, oh my gosh, the moment I end up in a relations I can't exist. My own needs don't exist anymore. And it's actually a big sign of enmeshment and I'm curious if you've ever had that theme before. So here are some signs that you want to pay attention to and really look out for first that may show that you are entering into emotional dependency. Number one, the moment feelings get really real, you feel like you are over identifying with your partner. So you may feel like your sense of self worth and even your sense of happiness, of peace feels tied to how well the relationship is going now. This is something that often happens for anxiety attach individuals in relationships, but this does happen for fearful avoidance later on in the relationship. So in the dating stage, the first six months fearful avoidance don't necessarily feel like that. But once there's a commitment Once things feel real, once you have real feelings for somebody, you may feel like, oh my gosh, how could I go to work? We're in an argument. How could I be happy today in front of my kids? I'm having a hard time with somebody. You may feel like. You see these stories spinning of feeling like your worth or your happiness on any given basis is almost directly tied to how well the relationship is going. And, you know, I think if somebody told me this when I was fearful avoidant, it would have surprised me. Because what you'll come to learn is when you become securely attached. If you're going through a hard time or a hard day in the relationship, if you have a disagreement or there's some friction or conflict, it doesn't quite affect you in the same way. When you're secure, like, you'll still care. But a. Usually the disagreements are much more subdued. They're not like these huge arguments and fights. They're more like, as you become secure, you navigate them better. But. But if there is friction or tension, you'll be able to park it for a minute and know that you're going to come back to it and everything's okay. And that's actually a sign that you're rooted in an individuated relationship to self rather than moving into codependent and enmeshed territory. Which again, doesn't usually happen to fearful avoidance early on, but does happen a little bit later in the relationship. So important things to look out for. Here's the second thing you may find in the relationship. Although it's really hard for you to ask for it, you're looking for reassurance. You are looking to see that you matter to this person. Maybe you even find yourself needing to know that they're as far in the relationship as you are. And you may even be preoccupied with this. This fear of like, I only feel calm if I know that my partner cares about me to exactly the same degree or more that I care about them, you may find a lot of preoccupation of thinking about this person throughout the day and not just thinking about them like, oh, I'm excited to see them later this weekend, or it's not like that. It's like this preoccupation with wondering what they're up to. Do they care about you? Are their feelings changing? Are you on the same page? Like, a lot of these kinds of dynamics often indicate this self sourcing. Like you're sourcing your sense of self from more externally outside of yourself than internally inside of yourself. Whereas Securely attached people, they'll often, you know, they may have a passing thought of like, are we on the same page? I should have a conversation about that if I'm not sure. They move into productive strategies of coping so much earlier that it doesn't allow for these problems to fester. Right. If you don't think somebody's on the same page as you in a relationship and you're secure, you address it. You're like, hey, I'm interested in you. I like how this is going. I also am mindful and considerate of my time and I want to know that we're moving in the same direction. Like, you'll open a dialogue because you won't feel so scared of being vulnerable that you'll be able to do that. And you'll be rooted in your courage and strength to do that. Whereas for fearful avoidance, sometimes there's this. On the surface it appears like a toughness or a strength, like, oh, I don't need anybody, I don't need to ask for reassurance. But deep down it's actually that you're just scared to ask a lot of the time, quite honestly. I also want to say before this, if you want to do a deeper dive into healing your attachment style, we have a 90 day attachment healing bootcamp. It really dives deep into your attachment themes and patterns. Some really powerful tools to start that journey of getting massive results and really healing. You can check it out for free for seven days. And with it, just for a limited time, you actually get to keep for life the attachment styles and sex course. So all about different attachment cells, their patterns around intimacy, their patterns like their fears, their wounds, their boundaries, their needs. Like it really dives into just as a, a helpful resource for anything you wanna learn about in that area, whether it's about yourself or about somebody that you're in a relationship with. And so this brings me to point number three, which is sometimes you'll feel these emotional highs and lows. And I think it's really important to recognize that emotional dependency truly creates cycles of closeness and panic when it feels like the relationship is threatened. So you may find yourself even being preoccupied with can I trust this person? Wondering what they're doing checking their social media. You may even have these sort of suspicious type of feelings that link back to these emotional dependency roots that can often have origins in painful events that happened from childhood that caused you to fear these things to begin with. And that's where if you also didn't learn healthy boundaries in childhood, you may start off and you're all independent and cool as a cucumber. But as soon as you actually feel feelings, you may find your nervous system get really disrupted. So I want to talk about what's happening from a neuroscience point of view, because I think this gives a little bit of validation, honestly. Like, I can't even begin to say how. How hard it is to be a fearful avoidant. I mean, I lived it. And it's really hard when you're a fearful avoidant at the time, because everything feels really, really chaotic and relationships feel confusing and overwhelming, and it may feel easier to just push people away sometimes or cling, but really, we want to do the inner work and healing so that you can get into a healthy, secure place and have healthy relationships where you've got novelty and excitement and passion. But keep yourself in the process. Keep the relationship you have to you, too. So the original person who talked about attachment theory, research out of Cambridge University, John Bowlby's early research, showed that because of the chaos in childhood, because of such extreme polarities in childhood for the fearful avoidant, AKA disorganized attachment style, often you'll see that there's this yearning for closeness, but this fear of it simultaneously. And this can lead to dependency, this constant fixation on whether or not I can get closer or whether or not I should pull away further. And it's funny, because you would think that when you're pulling away further or thinking of pulling away, that it's the opposite of dependency. But really, it's still that whatever action you take is based on what you think is happening in somebody else's mind. And so wherever you think that you stand with that person is still determining your actions of push, pull. And what this shows is that unpredictable love from childhood and the way that you've been conditioned is. Is very much determining your behaviors. And again, all of those things I want you to notice really clearly, they are not rooted in my truth. They are rooted in what I think I should do according to the things I'm afraid of. You're moving more from fear than truth. So, for example, if somebody gets close to you, you're like, okay, closeness. Is closeness safe? Do they like me a lot? Can I trust them long term? And you're kind of deciding your behaviors from what you think is going on for that person. This person's pulling away. Are they going to leave me? Okay? And you determine your behaviors more from your fears, Fears of being engulfed or trapped, or your fears of being abandoned. Whereas securely attached people, what they do very well is they, they stand in their truth. So when you become secure, you'll find that you'll do things like, hey, I don't like the way this is going right now. I better have a conversation and express my truth to the person. And then I'm going to vet and see how they respond, if they're ready, willing and able to meet my needs and to be what I'm looking for. And if the answer is yes, we'll keep growing. But if not, then maybe I reconsider if this is the right relationship for me. So there's a moving from I am honoring my truth and I know what want rather than I'm going to see how they feel about me and then decide whether to cling tighter or push away further. And it's a really important thing to pay attention to now in polyvagal theory. So Dr. Stephen Porges, who talks a lot about polyvagal theory, the nervous system, nervous system states, from a polyvagal theory point of view, actually explain why fearful avoidance swing between hyperactivation or anxiety and deactivation, AKA avoidance. And this means that they basically feel unsafe in both closeness and, and distance, which fuels dependency cycles. So if you're feeling unsafe in either way, then you're going to find yourself feeling like, okay, I don't know where I stand in this. And it's going to fuel that kind of fixation that's often there. And I think it's one of the things that we have to recognize is that as fearful avoidance, there is a hidden preoccupation with your partner specifically, and only when you're in a relationship where you have real feelings, okay, sometimes they'll find that fearful avoidance, they get into a relationship, they date somebody, for the first three months, they're not really serious. And that's not going to cause you to see these themes. It's particularly and specifically when you develop real feelings because the moment that you feel vulnerable to somebody, it triggers stored subconscious associations from childhood. Your conscious essentially speaks to your subconscious mind and says, what do we know about feeling this vulnerable? Oh, childhood and how love felt as a child. Oh my gosh, it felt really scary, really confusing. And now we project those types of themes onto our adult relationships. And that's why it is so important to rewire the subconscious mind. So I want to talk a little bit about healing. First thing that you're going to learn to do is learn to meet your own needs because it will help you regulate without having to lean on a partner. Now, the goal is not that you regulate by Yourself all the time. That's not the output here. The goal is interdependence. So the goal is that I can regulate on my own very well, and at the same time I can regulate with somebody else as well. And it doesn't have to be either or. So for example, you might try to regulate with or through your partner. Great, that feels good to do. You feel comfortable being vulnerable, having the conversations, regulating with them. But if your partner's unavailable, if there's some distance because you're away from each other physically, maybe you're in a long distance relationship, maybe you've both had a busy week, you haven't gotten to connect for the first few days of the week too much. You can regulate on your own too, and you're a master at both. And the more you are able to do that, the more you will find that not only does your nervous system get more regulated as a result of you meeting your own needs and knowing what they are, but on top of that, you'll feel this sense of attachment to your partner without dependency. And there's a difference between attachment and dependency that you have to be able to note. Okay, attachment is healthy. Dependency goes down the path of a little bit of unhealthiness. Okay, the next piece is that you want to have your relationship to you as a human being outside of the romantic relationship. So you want to feel like your whole life, your whole world doesn't become the person you're in a relationship with. That may seem nice from a romantic point of view, from romantic movies that condition us growing up or things like that, but it's actually not at all how secure relationships function. Secure relationships are people having a rich sense of self and having a relationship be a beautiful part of that, not all of it. And so this means that when you're looking at the different areas of your life, you want to be able to have a healthy relationship to a person romantically and have your own hobbies, your own interests, your own career goals, your own time to really think about your future and what that means for you and what's important to you. Your own time to build friendships, spend time with family, have physical health habits and routines that you take yourself consideration around or yourself carrying through. You want to be enriched in many areas of your life. And the more you are able to do that and be in a relationship at the same time, the more you are strong and steady as a person outside of just your relationship, actually the more stable your relationship becomes. And the last thing here is you want to really make sure that you are taking the time to rewire old triggers from past relationships. That's something where I talk about this on, on this channel. You can search subconscious reprogramming on this channel. But truly, you're not born with your core wounds. You can rewire them, okay? And when you do, your whole world will open up. Okay? Your core wounds are the source of your triggers. They're all the source of the glass ceilings you have in your life, be it relationally, career wise, anything. And in that 90 day bootcamp, that's the first thing that we get fearful avoidance to really dive deep into is rewiring that. And we give you a whole bunch of different reprogramming tools to do that so you can pick the ones that you're most interested in so that you can stop fearing betrayal and abandonment and being trapped and have all of these triggers going on within you when you get into a relationship. And this reminds me, because I've always loved to see the overlap between psychology and neuroscience, that how it sort of overlaps with ancient wisdom. And one of the quotes that comes to mind is this quote from the Buddha who says, peace comes from within, do not seek it without. And I think this is so important because in reality, the more connected, the more strong, the more rooted we are in a healthy relationship to ourselves. Okay, so meaning that we are self loving, we are caring, we are compassionate towards ourselves. We are not seeing the world through all of our triggers all the time. The more you're coming from that rooted, balanced space, the more room you have for others and the more you can have a heart that's rooted in contribution and care. You're not seeing the world through the lens of, you know, scary past triggers and an attachment based trauma that you've had to live through and try to overcome. And you know, true healing from that place comes from the ability to say, okay, I might have gone through these things in the past, but I can shed these systems, I can shed these beliefs and really heal moving forward. And so this allows us to build interdependent relationships with others as a result. And it's a really important lens to be working through. So I hope this is helpful for you today just in terms of noticing the types of themes that show up for emotional dependency, noticing what you can do to start changing some of these things. And if you have more questions, let me know in the comments down below. I hope you subscribe to this channel if you enjoy enjoyed today's video. I put daily videos out here all about attachment styles, the subconscious mind and healing. And I hope to see you join our community here so you don't miss any of them. Thanks for watching.