The 4 Obstacles of Anxious Attachment: Uncomfortable Emotions

Hello and Welcome! On today's podcast I am going to be continuing a series on breaking down the 4 obstacles of Anxious Attachment: Overthinking, Feeling Uncomfortable Emotions, Fear of Abandonment and Seeking Validation Last episode 39 was about overthinking so if you didn’t get a chance to hear it go check it out.

Today I want to talk about Uncomfortable emotions and why they trigger us with anxious attachment so much and how understanding the impact of uncomfortable emotions will help you take care of your anxious attachment and soothe your nervous system.

When I use the term uncomfortable emotions: I refer to rejection, fear of not being liked, fear of rejection, fear of abandonment, disappointment, any feeling that you can not sit with, without taking action or without shutting down. I also use uncomfortable emotions to refer to the feeling of urgency- that we feel when we are consumed by a lot of negative emotions- urgency is often felt when our anxious attachment is triggered and we feel the primal panic of we have to hurry and do something now.

For example most of us right now are not able to sit with the feeling of urgency and do nothing, most of us can not stand to feel any form of rejection without trying to do something to “prove our worth” or seek out validation or connection, most of us can not just process and sit with anxiety, we either take action to feel better or we shut down and shut people out.

Processing your emotions allows you to experience different situations without so much fear, anxiety, it allows you to slow down and stop being so reactive. Learning how to feel and handle hard emotions allows you to comfort yourself and stop needing to reach out to others for comfort, validation or approval.

Since we do not have the skill to sit with these uncomfortable feelings because they activate our anxious attachment cycle- and sometimes activate our primal panic we feel that we have to hurry up and do something now because our brain has told us that we are in danger and it feels like we are going to die (even though we know we won’t die our brain is receiving all of these alerts like hey hey we are in danger do something now) so we have gotten into the habit of hurry up through emotions and taking actions without sitting with emotions and seeing where they are coming from.

We feel anxiety, we feel panic, we feel fear and our brain is like Oh Shit… get us out of here right now! (Literally freaks the f out) So we reach out to our partner,our ex, our friend, our coworker, we seek validation, we seek connection, or instead we shut down and close people off because we think that by doing this we will protect ourselves from further pain.