#56 Understanding & Healing Anxious Attachment with Jessica Baum, LMHC, Psychotherapist

Our early experiences with primary caregivers can profoundly affect our relationships later in life — often in ways that are deeply unconscious — and it takes conscious work to change our patterns and facilitate healing. Psychotherapist, Jessica Baum, joins us today to guide us through the different attachment styles and unpack how our early experiences shape adult connections.

Tuning in, you’ll learn about the differences between anxious and avoidant attachment styles, why these types tend to be drawn to one another, and how you can support your partner if they are either of these types. We discuss what secure attachment looks like, the benefits of it, and why it’s essential to have a sense of safety in your relationships. Our conversation also unpacks the importance of setting boundaries, the healing practices in Jessica’s book Anxiously Attached, and how parents can support secure attachment in their children. Tune in to learn all about relational patterns and how to embark on a journey toward healthier, more fulfilling relationships!

Key Points From This Episode

• What led Jessica to the field of psychotherapy.
• How she came to specialize in co-dependency.
• Imago therapy: how it helps us heal original wounds through our relationships.
• What secure attachment looks like.
• Anxious attachment and the signs that you might have this attachment style.
• Steps you can take to start healing from anxious attachment.
• Healing practices in Jessica’s book, Anxiously Attached.
• Understanding how memories and original wounds are stored in the body.
• The importance of setting boundaries for healing to take place.
• Why setting boundaries requires support.
• Parenting styles that prevent anxious attachment in children.
• How parents can support a secure attachment in their child.
• Assessing what level of anxiety is normal (especially in our current society).
• The definition of avoidant attachment.
• Why anxious and avoidant individuals tend to be drawn to one another.
• How social media and dating apps could be contributing to anxious attachment.
• What you can do to support an anxious or avoidant partner.

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Transcript

“JB: There’s an abandonment wound that you were usually conscious of, so we will try to keep people close. We will self-sacrifice a lot. There’s a conscious fear of abandonment. There’s an unconscious fear of intimacy. We’re not always conscious of the fact that we’re scared of slowing down and being with our own abandonment wound and being intimate in that way. So, we do a lot of like maneuvering around. Sometimes in relationships, anxious people could be a little bit controlling, because they’re scared to be left alone.”

[INTRODUCTION]

[0:00:32] SJ: This is The Bad Girls Bible Podcast. I’m your host, Sean Jameson, and this is the place where I interview experts and professionals and everyone in between to teach you how to dramatically improve your relationships and have more enjoyable sex more often. If you’re not already subscribed to The Bad Girls Bible Podcast, you just need to open your podcasts app, search for Bad Girls Bible, and hit that subscribe button, so you get the latest episodes delivered straight to you the moment they are released.

[INTERVIEW]

[0:01:05] SJ: Today I’m talking to Jessica Baum. She’s a Psychotherapist, Founder of the Self-fulfilled method. She’s also the Author of the book, Anxiously Attached. Jessica, thanks so much for coming on the show. 

[0:01:17] JB: Thank you so much for having me. 

[0:01:19] SJ: I’d love to start off with you a little bit about your background, and how you came to be a psychotherapist and right anxiously attached? 

[0:01:29] JB: Oh, yeah. Sure. Yeah, I’m a psychotherapist here in Palm Beach, Florida. Originally, I went into the mental health field, because I had my own struggles with depression and anxiety. I really wanted to help people who were struggling with mental health, because for me it was like having a broken leg that no one could see. I became very fascinated with all different types of mental health issues that you can’t see, because I knew how real they were and I knew how much other people were suffering.

 As I started my practice over 15 years ago, I specialized in codependency, family systems work, and eventually relationship work, and a lot of that came from, again, my own experiences in relationship and something called a Imago Therapy and a special type of therapy that I got trained in. I did a lot of my own work in, so I just became fascinated with attachment theory and how relationship dynamics play out. I see so many people suffering in certain dynamics and in certain ways. So, what was working in my practice, I turned into a book, and I just really wanted to get these messages out there, because it’s what I needed when I was young, and it’s what many people needed, and it’s been doing wonderfully. 

People are just loving the book and getting this information out there, and for anybody who’s listening who identifies as codependent and doesn’t know a lot about attachment theory, anxiously attached really covers anyone who falls in that bracket and struggles with the same patterns repeating over and over in their romantic life or even in their closer bonds. 

[0:03:00] SJ: You mentioned Imago Therapy. What is that exactly? 

[0:03:03] JB: Imago Therapy by Harville Hendrix and Helen Hunt is it means image – it’s Latin for image – and that we attract people who have similar qualities to our primary caregivers, and that we reenact subconsciously some of our patterns, and our paradigms, and our wounds, and our closer relationships. Imago Therapy helps us get conscious of what’s on repeat with our romantic partners and heal our original wounds through our relationships. 

[0:03:33] SJ: Awesome. Before we talk about anxious attachment, I’d love if we could talk a little bit about what healthy attachment is, and then maybe a little bit about the other attachment styles that people should be aware of. What is a healthy attachment? 

[0:03:52] JB: Yeah. I mean, I don’t really like to categorize them as like good or bad, healthy or unhealthy, but I think we’re all looking for interdependency. So, a secure attachment is one where we can really depend on another person. We can also be ourself. We can work through conflict, and rupture, and repair, and feel safe in our body. Not that the relationship is perfect, but that we have a sense of safety in it. We can evolve and we can self-reflect, and we can get through hard times together that we don’t have to shut down our needs, or parts of ourselves, or how unique we are, that that doesn’t threaten our partner, that we’re encouraged to be our whole selves in the relationship. 

[0:04:32] SJ: Then what is anxious attachment? How does that differ? 

[0:04:37] JB: Anxious attachment is an adaptation, and a pattern, and a particular style that a baby develops when they’re young. Often with a mother who’s preoccupied, the baby will regulate the mother or reach out. We can self-abandon and usually can sense the feelings of other people. So, we adaptively learn to put other people’s needs before ours to stay in connection. We fear abandonment. We always feel like the shoe might drop, because connection wasn’t completely consistent. I would say that’s the hallmark of anxiously attached people, is that we always feel like the connection will drop at any moment, because that was our nervous system experience early on in our connection to our primary caregivers. 

If you’re listening, it’s not something that you remember consciously. This is something that happens on a very unconscious level. You sharpen relationship and you often self-sacrifice. You often know what your partner’s feeling before you know yours. You can get angry pretty fast. You can get fearful very fast of abandonment. You can be a people pleaser. All of these common traits to try to maintain the connection or the fear of the loss of connection take over can control you being your authentic self. 

[0:05:49] SJ: You mentioned knowing how your partner’s feeling maybe even before they’re knowing how they’re feeling. Are there other common signs that you should look out for that might indicate that you personally have this anxious attachment?

[0:06:03] JB: Yeah. So, anxious attachment. I mean, every kind of codependency list, but yeah, I think the hallmark is that we can read a room and we often know what other people are feeling and we’ve had to self-abandon and know what other people are feeling in order to survive. We’re very empathic at times. Like I said there’s an abandonment wound that you were usually conscious of. We will try to keep people close. We will self-sacrifice a lot. 

There’s a conscious fear of abandonment. There’s an unconscious fear of intimacy. We’re not always conscious of the fact that we’re scared of slowing down and being with our own abandonment wound and being intimate in that way, so we do a lot of like maneuvering around. Sometimes in relationships, anxious people can be a little bit controlling, because they’re scared to be left alone, so they’ll need their partner by them often. Those are like relatively the signs. 

[0:06:58] SJ: Then let’s see, you noticed this where you work with a therapist to uncover this. What would you recommend as the next steps maybe for healing from or overcoming it and moving more towards healthy attachment?

[0:07:12] JB: Yeah. I mean, well, buying my book would be a good start. I only say that, because my book has some healing practices in it. My book also says this message so many times. We cannot heal attachment wounds alone. We literally need to heal these wounds in a new corrective experience. So, I give a lot of exercises, but I also say like bringing these exercises to a therapist or someone who does work with Somatics, and understands how wounds live in our body and start to connect to the original pain. 

If your partner is shutting down on you or leaving you and it’s causing like a whirlwind of pain in your stomach or in your chest, we know that the science says that this is memory too. When we start to understand how memory works and how it shows up in our body and then how it gets reenacted in our relationships, we can start to be with the sensations in our body differently. We can start to understand the root of it. It’s like mind-blowing, right? Because most people don’t understand. 

We think memory is a picture or in our mind’s eye something that we can recall, but like actually, we don’t store that type of memory when we come out. We store sensation as memory. Often, these sensations that we have, particularly in our gut, in our fascia, and in our heart, when they are really strong and they show up in our romantic life, we felt that before. It’s a real, like stop here and heal, and stop here, let’s attend to what’s going on in our body. It’s a real window and a portal in to becoming more embodied and healing these original wounds. 

[0:08:44] SJ: I think you make a great point. These things aren’t a picture you just see in your mind. It’s like a feeling. It’s the same if you go past, maybe a school or someplace where you’ve had a bad experience. You can see it and then feel then for the next hour to maybe a little bit, I guess anxious, as supposed to just seeing it and remembering the things and having no emotions attached to it. 

[0:09:08] JB: Yeah, absolutely. If you’re feeling anxious or sad or whatever that’s an opportunity to be with that, to bring it to someone who can help you process it, there’s potentially a memory or a story there that never got held to hear. That’s how we integrate trauma from our body up through our right hemisphere and into our brain and move everything. It’s such a brilliant awakening when these things come along, but we don’t look at them that way, because they’re quite dreadful to go through at times, but they’re really a memory and an awakening of, oh, wow, this is bringing something to the surface for me to hold. 

[0:09:43] SJ: How important then are boundaries for yourself, for others in developing a more healthy attachment style? 

[0:09:52] JB: I mean, boundaries in general are important, but I think people with anxious attachments struggle with boundaries. People with insecure attachment styles in general, because everyone thinks that a boundary is something you set on the outside, like don’t come near me, or don’t call me, or whatever you need to do, but really boundaries start internally and you need to have an internal boundary system and a level of awareness of what’s going on inside of you and a connection to what’s going on inside of you before you can even begin to set a boundary outside of you. 

On top of that, if you’re so scared of losing connection, setting boundaries are terrifying, right? It’s really hard. I remember like the biggest boundary I had to set one time in my life was I had to walk away from a relationship that was really unhealthy for me. I said to him, I was like, “Listen, if you get help, I’ll come home, right? I’ll come back.” It was a boundary that took me a long time to get to. I was so scared of losing the relationship, but at times we have to like have a come to Jesus with ourselves and say, “Okay, this isn’t healthy anymore. I need to set this boundary.” I lost the relationship, because I left and he wasn’t willing to get help. 

Sometimes boundaries are terrifying to set, because we do lose the connection or we can risk losing the relationship. That’s why when everyone’s like, “Oh, be a boundary boss or get your boundaries together.” It’s like really setting boundaries can bring up so much. We need so much support around them. We need to understand why we’re setting them and any fears that might be attached to when we set them. 

[0:11:25] SJ: It’s funny. It’s so easy to say it or even read about it or whatever, but then actually doing it. Yeah, it’s I know what you mean. It’s pretty tough. 

[0:11:34] JB: I know. I even had to like energetically block someone. I don’t believe in like torturing your partner. I literally said, “I need to grieve.” So, in order to grieve I need like to stop this energy, right? I think that, and it’s the first time in my life that I’m like even blocking someone which then put me rest a little and it was really hard for me. But actually, that energetic boundary helped me heal. So, these boundaries really do work. We need so much support when we set a boundary and we really need to know like this is really going to help us in the long run, even if this is going to be scary for us in the short run. 

[0:12:11] SJ: It’s something, I guess even I struggle with that. I absolutely know what’s the correcting to do. I know the outcome would probably be much better than the current situation. Yet, I still hesitate. I still struggle for even more simple boundaries. We’ve been talking about maybe people who personally feel that they have anxious attachment. Let’s say maybe you’re raising a kid and you want to, obviously you’re trying your best, but you want to be aware of the things you can do to help your kid have a healthy attachment style and maybe not have an anxious attachment style. Do you have any recommendations for that of parenting styles? 

[0:12:56] JB: You’re just being consistent for your kids. The way trauma gets stored in the body is not that trauma doesn’t happen to us. Traumatic experience is actually little ones every day can happen to children, right, like they get bullied at the school or they get a bad grade. There’s a lot of little things that upset a child, right, on a daily basis. So, what actually the child needs is a safe place to process, so when they come home, being able to hold space with them and say, “Yeah, that really is hard to get that bad grade.” Instead of fixing the child, being with their emotional experience, allowing them to have the emotional experience, being consistent for them.

If you don’t do that, they shut down and all of those traumas get stored and they get stored in the body eventually, right, and it’s complicated, but if you can hold space for their emotional experience consistently and not fix them. Teach them to be with their sadness, be in their sadness with them, validate their experience. If you can do all those things every day, they learn to have like be uncomfortable with them. They learn to have a capacity to be with their own emotional experience. They learn to rely on you. They learn that they can rely on you. That’s my best parenting advice. 

I understand it’s really hard. I think most parents are just doing what they can and most parents are giving their children what they received, because we can’t give what we didn’t receive, right? Also, if you’re a parent and you have some inner work to do, if you see a therapist or a coach and you start to do some of your own work and you start to receive things differently and start to see things differently, then you can start to give and receive differently for your own kids and it’s also like a mirror. I love there’s a program called Conscious Parenting. That’s also like a really great tool, if you’re struggling with parenting on how your own work comes up with your children too and how to get conscious in those dynamics. 

[0:14:50] SJ: Is a certain element of anxious attachment actually normal? I know there might be people listening to this and trying to figure out every little single thing they did and maybe getting anxious about it, but every little relationship pickup they had was that was anxious attachment. I’m in deep. I’ve got to get this fixed. Is there a certain level where it’s actually pretty normal? 

[0:15:13] JB: I think that our society and our culture is making us more anxious. It’s more transactional. We’re moving in a direction where the anxiety is the norm. Building security when we’re young, the parent needs to be attending 66% of the time in rupture and – like there’s a like sense of security where we expect that we will go out in the world and we will get our needs met most of the time and we’re relatively safe and we have the felt sense of safety inside our system. We either have that or we don’t. 

If we don’t have that, it’s going to show up in a lot of different ways and it definitely needs to be healed. If we have a relatively sense of safety in our system, we’re not going to have the same behaviors that someone with a lot of fear and inconsistency and abandonment might have in their romantic life. I don’t know if I answered your question. 

[0:16:10] SJ: Oh, I guess it’s a tricky one, because maybe it appears on a spectrum that you can have varying levels of anxious attachment and sometimes it’s debilitating, and sometimes it’s easy to overcome maybe. 

[0:16:23] JB: I would say that you have your patterns. Your patterns show up in combination with who you’re attaching to these patterns. There’s a relational pattern and a relational dance. If you’re anxious and you attach to someone who’s more secure, you’re going to have an easier time. If you’re anxious and you attach to someone who’s more avoidant, which happens very often and I write about this, you’re going to have a more turbulent relationship. Unfortunately, anxious and avoidant are very attracted to each other. 

It’s not so much that your patterns are worse or it’s a combination of how you are feeling in relationship to the person that you’re attaching to. I might be more anxious with a lover than I am with a friend. I might actually be more avoidant with a friend who’s very anxious, right? It’s a two-way street and it’s a combination of two people’s embedded patterns and a relational dance and depending on the other persons insecurities and patterns really determines the quality of how that dance is going to play out. So, everybody’s so uniquely different. 

[0:17:27] SJ: You mentioned avoidant attachment. Could you give a quick definition of what that is and maybe how it presents itself in a romantic partner? 

[0:17:35] JB: Well, avoidant babies traditionally had parents who met their needs, just not their emotional needs very well. We live in a culture with a lot of avoidance and we tend to focus on success, task-oriented, stuff, very left hemisphere driven. Often that parent doesn’t have the emotional intelligence or capacity to really be attentive and show up for the baby emotionally, so the baby just learns, I can’t rely on people. So, they shut down and they’re like, more like focused on success, and more independent, and self-reliant which are all trauma responses, right? They show up and for an anxious person they look very stoic, and very independent, and very stable. Everything an anxious person secretly desires and wants, but really behind the – 

[0:18:25] SJ: Lone wolf.

[0:18:25] JB: The lone wolf, right? Yeah, who hasn’t been attracted to the lone wolf, right? The anxious person’s like, “Oh, I could never be that.” Right? So, they have something that I don’t have, but behind their calm demeanor is a lot of anxiety. The avoidant person will look at the anxious person and be like, “Oh, they’re so vibrant, and expressive, and emotional, and free.” Look at their energy and be like, “I couldn’t ever be like that. That’s so appealing to me.” They’re attracted to the lost parts of themselves. 

It’s an energy thing, but unfortunately, as the relationship progresses, anxious people need a lot of co-regulation and really struggle with self-regulation. To feel safe, they move closer to their partner to try to get reassurance. Avoidant people start to feel smothered or are more independent in order to feel safe, they need space. We have competing needs when fear is being signaled in one partner, they’ll run towards and the other person will unconsciously run away. So, we get stuck in these loops of shutting down and explosives and cycles. It’s really nervous system reactions. 

Anxious people struggle and need exactly what an avoidant person can’t give them in the moment. An avoidant person needs exactly what an anxious person can’t give them. There can be very turbulent and quite miserable relationships unless you get conscious and you really do the work. 

[0:19:49] SJ: Sounds like a good first two weeks, and then it all goes downhill. 

[0:19:54] JB: Yeah. I mean, I’ve experienced a good first two years. It really depends on the relational dance and when the ruptures start to show up and all of that. It can be two years later where your partner starts shutting down on you and you’re in the dance. 

[0:20:09] SJ: You mentioned kind of modern life is leading to a lot of anxiety. What about dating apps, things like Tinder, Hinge, Bumble? Are they also contributing to more anxiety, more anxious attachment or not really? 

[0:20:27] JB: I think, I would have to say they are partly, because people are using them in addictive ways, as avoidant ways. They don’t really want relationships or they’re so transactional, or you don’t get time to work through things with one person, you can easily swipe and there’s another person. It’s just really, really hard to get past, like the initial on these apps, because they’re really, really challenging. That’s what I’m hearing across the board. Unfortunately, right? Then you hear the stories where people have met on an app and I think it’s how you use the app and there’s a lot of factors. Yeah. I don’t think, there are breeding ground if you’re insecure for all your insecurities to show up for sure. 

[0:21:12] SJ: If you’re a listener, hearing all these things about anxious attachment, you suspect maybe my partner has anxious attachment or you just definitely know they do. Are there things they can do to support their partner? 

[0:21:26] JB: Yeah. I mean, asking them what they need, being very consistent for them. I mean, the more consistent you are for your partner, the more the fear goes down. The consistency is the most important thing for someone who’s anxious. Knowing that you’re there and the more that you know that your partner’s there, eventually you learn to trust that and the fear goes away. A secure person will be able to do that and an avoidant person will not. There hence the problem. 

[0:21:51] SJ: If your partners maybe has avoidant attachment, are there ways you can support them? 

[0:21:56] JB: Yeah. They need a lot of space. You need to understand that they are not trying to hurt you when they shut down. Their love language is usually acts of service. They really show love by doing things. So, to really appreciate what they do, to understand that they might have limited capacities emotionally, they might not be able to co-regulate with you at all times. Yeah, and getting vulnerable for them is incredibly hard. Creating safety around that is very important. 

[0:22:24] SJ: Well, they really sound like the lone wolf. 

[0:22:27] JB: Yeah. 

[0:22:29] SJ: What about the love language for anxiously attached people? Is there a common –

[0:22:34] JB: I think it’s time spent together. I would say, I’m only speaking from personal experience, but everybody’s different, but we love closeness and we love quality time. Partly, because we didn’t get enough of it as a kid. We’ll want more of that as an adult. 

[0:22:51] SJ: Jessica, thanks so much for coming on the show. Before you leave, I just have one last question that I ask a lot of guests is, what’s your number one relationship tip or piece of advice that you’d like to leave listeners? 

[0:23:07] JB: Yeah. It’s a good question, because relationships are everything. The quality of your relationships determine the quality of your life. Starting to assess relationships that are really heartfelt, and really genuine, and creating spaces or opportunities for more of those relationships to be in your life facilitates healing. So, understanding what that is, appreciating what that is, calling in more of that, because the right relationships can make your life amazing and the wrong relationships can really be detrimental. So, really figuring out. I don’t like to say right and wrong, but there are just relationships that are safer and learning what those relationships are and calling in very heartfelt nurturing relationships to help you heal. 

[0:23:53] SJ: Awesome. If people would like to know more about you, we’re going to put a link to the Anxiously Attached, your book in the show notes, but if people want to get in contact with you, what’s the best way for them to do that? 

[0:24:06] JB: Yeah. I mean, so if you put Jessica Baum, my site comes up. Also, the Relationship Institute of Palm Beach comes up. There is contact on both of those. I have an Instagram, Jessica Baum, L-M-H-C. I actually, personally, respond to people on my Instagram, so if you contact me, it is me responding on my Instagram and that’s also, yeah, that’s a great way to get in contact with me or just follow me in general. 

[0:24:32] SJ: Awesome. Thanks for coming on the show. 

[0:24:34] JB: Thank you so much for having me. Thank you so much for listening, you listeners out there. 

[OUTRO]

[0:24:39] SJ: One last thing before you go, if you want to hear more podcasts, just like this one, open your podcast app. Search for Bad Girls Bible and hit that subscribe button.

[END]