Zoombombing, Tiger King, Kittens in Heat - Is Your Family Driving You Mad During Lockdown? This might be why

Now that we’re all home and living with our significant others because of CoVid-19 aka the coronavirus from Hell, it’s making some of go a little… Well, a little crazy. Why is this? Here we are housebound with the people we love with all our hearts and suddenly just listening to them breathe is making us want to throw knives when we really should just be so thankful that we’re not sick.

Are you feeling this way and freaking out about it?

Well, you are not alone. Not only is Covid messing with our anxieties, our livelihoods, our health and sending some of us into spirals of depression and grief, it’s also changing our routines and schedules and patterns and that can make us feel kind of vulnerable and off kilter.

This is where attachment styles come in. In her essay “Coping With an Insecure Attachment Style” on VeryWellMind on carriejonesbooks.blog, Marni Feuerman talks about how our attachment styles can be either secure or insecure and how they arise from our childhood.

She writes,

Feuerman“A secure style comes from consistency, reliability, and safety in one's childhood. As an adult, those with a secure attachment style can reflect back on their childhood and see both the good and the bad that occurred, but in the proper perspective. Overall, they generally feel that someone reliable was always available to them in their formative years. In adulthood, they enjoy close, intimate relationships and do not fear taking risks in love.”

Who are these magical, well-balanced people? They are the ones who are chill and not freaking out about how their significant other is loading the dishwasher, that’s who they are.

The rest of us have three insecure attachment patterns, she explains, and those are avoidant, ambivalent, and disorganized.

THE THREE INSECURE ATTACHMENT PATTERNS Feuerman again“Avoidant: Avoidant people have a dismissive attitude. They shun intimacy and have many difficulties reaching for others in times of need.
Ambivalent: Those with an ambivalent pattern are often anxious and preoccupied. These people may be viewed as "clingy" or "needy," often requiring much validation and reassurance.
Disorganized: The disorganized pattern is often the product of trauma or extreme inconsistency in one's childhood. Disorganized attachment is not a mixture of avoidant and ambivalent attachments—it is a far more serious state where a person has no real coping strategies and is unable to deal with the world.”

I am ambivalent AF. Gabby, our dog, is also ambivalent.

What do attachment styles have to do with writing?

Well, when you’re writing about relationships in a dystopian novel or apocalypse, you want to account for those different types of personalities and levels of attachment.

We ran out of space on here, so for the rest of the notes check out carriejonesbooks.blog

SHOUT OUT

The music we’ve clipped and shortened in this podcast is awesome and is made available through the Creative Commons License. Here’s a link to that and the artist’s website. Who is this artist and what is this song? It’s “Night Owl” by Broke For Free.