370 - Repeating Unhealthy Relationship Patterns Part 1 of 2
Examples of unhealthy relationship patterns
Some of the unhealthy relationship patterns that are discussed during this episode include:
Feeling a lack of safety in the relationship (emotionally or physically).
Unhealthy communication patterns.
Neglect or over-dependency.
Feeling a loss of sense of self.
Unwillingness to make compromises.
Walking on eggshells or feeling drained about the relationship.
Four horsemen of the apocalypse behavior (criticism, defensiveness, stonewalling, contempt) becoming the norm.
Lack of empathy or not feeling like you and your partner are on the same team.
Lack of validation.
Emotional distance from your partner.
Feeling controlled or manipulated (or being the one doing the controlling or manipulating).
Unhealthy hierarchy and power dynamics.
Having a “type”
Many studies have confirmed the idea that we often have a certain type of person we like to date. This differs from what we discussed during episode 366 about preferences and desirability politics; in this case, “type” is referring to having certain personality traits, not physical characteristics.
The “why” behind repeating unhealthy patterns
There are a few different reasons we might repeat unhealthy relationship patterns, despite knowing they’re unhealthy. Some possibilities include:
Repetition compulsion:
We repeat what's familiar.
We repeat what we learned as children.
We repeat what was traumatizing in an unconscious effort to gain mastery over it.
We think we deserve to suffer.
Change, even when healthy, feels foreign and scary.
From Psychcentral.com: “If you were abused or neglected as a child, the neural pathways for those relationship patterns were strengthened and your brain becomes accustomed to them. So, you're likely to seek out relationships with a similar pattern without even realizing it.”
Trauma and intimate partner violence tend to be indicators that someone might enter into another traumatic or violent relationship.
Connections with attachment theory
These characteristics seem to have a lot of ties to attachment theory. For example:
Avoidant attachment: Your parents weren’t really around and therefore in every adult romantic relationship you may feel as though you can only truly rely on yourself. An unhealthy relationship pattern might be a tendency to distance yourself from your partners and choose to never fully connect or engage with them in a meaningful way.
Anxious attachment: A member of your family of origin may have abandoned you in early life. As a result, you might seek reassurance from your partner in an obsessive manner, or exhibit other types of insecure behavior. Your link to your partner may directly tie in with your own feelings of self worth.
Secure attachment: Generally you can retain feelings of autonomy from your partner, while also having their back and knowing that they have yours. Your relationships have a sense of overall security and those feelings are carried from one partner to the next.
Fearful (disorganized) attachment: Might bounce between needing an immense amount of reassurance and intimacy from a partner to pushing a partner away. This is a less common form of attachment and can be generally disorienting to a partner on the receiving end.
Attachment theory can be another way to bring us more awareness of our relationship patterns, as well as opportunities to work through them if they are not serving us well.
Part 2 of this series will be discussing specific types of unhealthy relationship patterns, how repeating unhealthy relationship patterns can be especially challenging in non-monogamous relationships, and as always, some actionable takeaways for you to work towards changing those toxic behaviors.
Transcript
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Jase: On this episode of the Multiamory Podcast, we are going to be doing Part 1 of a two-part discussion about unhealthy relationship patterns and what causes us to repeat them. Many of us enter into relationships with similar people over and over again, or engage in events that resemble those that we haven't liked in the past, or just end up in the same conflicts over and over again. Even if we know that a specific type of a relationship or a specific type of person may be bad for us, we might date them anyway.
Today, we're going to be exploring why we do this, how it relates to past trauma and attachment theory, and attempt to answer the question, do people really have a type? Then next week we'll be continuing this with some other subjects.
Emily: Yes, I wanted to start out and ask the question, this overarching question that I wanted to answer, and that is, throughout the course of the two of your dating lives, have you ever felt like you've tended to get into relationships with similar people or repeat unhealthy relationship patterns? Why do you think you were compelled to do this?
Dedeker: Oh, Emily.
Emily: That's a huge can of worms right there potentially, but yes.
Dedeker: I'm like, "This is literally all of therapy."
Emily: Yes, I get that. I do.
Dedeker: Let's see. Just off the top of my mind, some similar patterns, I've dated a lot of cancers and I usually had pretty positive experiences dating cancers. I did have a period in my life where I jumped out of a verbally and emotionally abusive relationship straight into a physically abusive relationship. That was not very fun and definitely gave me some pause to think about like, "Huh, interesting that I repeated that just back to back." A little two for one special of some life lessons for me. I'm still unpacking what compelled me to do that.
Emily: I get that. How about you, Jase?
Jase: It's such a tough question because it's both funny and also very serious. It's right on a funny level, it's like, "Oh, dating cancers," or whatever. It's like, "Okay, I've tended to have crushes on a lot of women who turned out to not date men." That's a fun one. That's not quite like relationship patterns if that's a pattern that I had.
Emily: Interesting.
Jase: I think, yes, but thinking about more seriously or serious but still light, I guess, is I feel like I've done similar things in relationships for several years of my life. Then I'll move on to a different cycle or move on to a different type of thing.
Emily: Different type of thing you're unpacking and working on, perhaps.
Jase: Yes, it's not like it's always the same all the time, but that it's maybe gone through some chapters.
Dedeker: I have another fun one to help bounce out my heavy one, which many people know and are intimately familiar with the fact that I've dated 16 VFX people in a row, approximately.
Emily: Oh, yes.
Jase: That is true.
Dedeker: There's just something about-- Yes, I don't know, I guess I just attract that particular type of nerd.
Emily: Yes, exactly. I know. I agree that nerdy people tend to be who I date as well. Also, I feel like I've dated people who at least I perceive to be accomplished. I do wonder if that's trying to feed my own internal perception of this will make me look and feel more accomplished because that's something that I don't always feel about myself, therefore, I try to date people who I think the world will see as accomplished and therefore I will be deemed that or something along those lines. Yes, my father was very accomplished, but was not interested in knowing me and so I do wonder if I'm trying to fix that a little bit.
Dedeker: Gosh.
Emily: I don't know.
Dedeker: That's interesting. It does remind me of-- I think I read an article once that talked about how some people, and particularly people who are socialized as women who date men or who date heterosexually are more likely to sometimes long for or seek for someone who can accomplish the things they feel like they can't, or haven't been able to sometimes, or for some reason think that they can't, either that is because of social structure or because of internal beliefs, I don't know. Again, this is all speculation, but that's what that makes me think of.
Emily: Yes, well, something that got me interested in this topic in general was listening to a podcast with a therapist, a pretty well-known therapist that has written a few very best-selling books. They talked about something called repetition compulsion on the podcast. I was really interested in this idea, but looking into it further with a research assistant, we found that it was initially a Freudian concept and that many of the initial ideas about it are pretty outdated at this point because Freud tended to think like, "Okay, this is a heteronormative thing that if you are a woman, you are always trying to find your father as a partner.
If you are a man, you're always trying to find your mother as a partner, something along those lines. That you're repeating that pattern of trying to find just your mom or your dad and that's it. That is a pretty outdated stance for a variety of factors at this point.
Jase: It's still something that gets thrown around culturally quite a lot today, even though psychologists today have mostly moved on from the ideas of Freud and refined those much further.
Emily: Well in this, I guess, it is still talked about, repetition compulsion is still talked about now, but it's a bit different than that, I think, it's getting into things like attachment theory and looking at past traumas and stuff like that, not just necessarily your own opposite sex parent or whatever. From there, we decided to pivot this discussion instead to looking at unhealthy relationship patterns in general and asking the question why we tend to repeat those unhealthy patterns over and over again, but just right off the top at the beginning, I did want to touch on repetition compulsion very briefly.
Dedeker: Another caveat that we need to give before we dive into this is sometimes I've felt hesitant about this topic because it can very quickly slip into some indirect victim blaming. There can often be this sense of, "Oh, you have some unresolved trauma that you're trying to fix by--" or, "You have low self-esteem or low self-worth or there's something wrong with you essentially and that's why you keep ending up in these relationships with all these crummy people."
Sure, sometimes those things can be informing our decisions about the people that we choose to be in relationships with and we'll dive into that, but also at the same time, it doesn't mean if someone abuses you or is crappy to you, it's not 100% your fault. I Just want to get that out right at the gate here.
Jase: Yes, let's start off with the definition. Repetition compulsion, as Emily just said, is defined as, in psychoanalytic theory, an unconscious need to reenact early traumas in an attempt to overcome or master them. Such traumas are repeated in a new situation, symbolic of the repressed prototype. Repetition compulsion acts as a resistance to therapeutic change since the goal of therapy is not to repeat, but to remember the trauma and to see its relation to present behavior, also called compulsion to repeat
Emily: According to psychiatrist and researcher, Bessel van der Kolk, "Many traumatized people expose themselves, seemingly compulsively, to situations reminiscent of the original trauma. These behavioral reenactments are rarely consciously understood to be related to early life experiences." That's interesting. Again, this is more, I think, the nowadays thought process around this idea of repetition compulsion as opposed to that early Freudian idea of what it was. Just something to think about in the back of your head, that we're talking about all of these things and why we're repeating unhealthy patterns. It may be because of your past, it may be because of experiences that happened to you in young adult life, or a variety of other reasons. Let's get into some of those a little bit. We're going to talk about what some examples of unhealthy relationship patterns or behaviors look like. We talked about toxic relationships all the way back in episode 191. It's been a little while, but some--
Dedeker: Well, the good is we did that episode, and then there's been no more toxic relationships ever since.
Emily: Never. Maybe not quite sure.
Dedeker: We fixed it.
Jase: We fixed it.
Emily: Exactly.
Dedeker: That was easy.
Emily: Some of these examples come from that episode but there are updated examples as well. Here's a list of some of the patterns that might be unhealthy in a relationship and these come from our own examples, and then also a variety of articles on the subject. You may feel a lack of safety in the relationship emotionally or physically, you may have unhealthy communication patterns between yourself and your partner or partners, you may feel neglect from your partner, or on the flip side of that, you may feel an over-dependency, like you really depend on your partner and that could be an unhealthy pattern. You also might feel a loss of sense of self and you may feel an unwillingness to make compromises, you or your partner.
Dedeker: You may have that sensation of walking on eggshells. Feeling like you can't really relax around a partner or you're in a situation that's very high octane or very reactive, which may lead you to feel drained about the relationship. There may be several instances of what the Gottmans called Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse behaviors. Those are criticism, defensiveness or blame, stonewalling or contempt, and those may become the norm in the relationship. You may feel a lack of empathy or you may not feel like you and your partner are on the same team, or able to empathize or listen to each other.
Jase: Similarly, you might find a lack of validation. Validation, either for just who you are or for your feelings or anything like that. Emotional distance from your partner, Emily mentioned over dependency and neglect, it could also just be that withdrawing that happens, feeling controlled or manipulated, or finding that you are being controlling or manipulating even if you don't intend to going in, and then just unhealthy power dynamics or hierarchies in place that are not something that's fun and pre-negotiated, but something that's happening unintentionally or unwillingly.
Of this list, some of these things sound like they may tie pretty closely to attachment theory, which we're going to get into later on in this episode, but the bad relationship patterns and behaviors don't only come from our family of origin. What are some other reasons why we might have a tendency to re-expose ourselves, as it said in that definition, to re-expose ourselves to some of these unhealthy relationship dynamics over and over again?
Dedeker: Well, that leads us to that big old million dollar question of, do we have "a type"? I feel like nowadays, something that's floating around in the culture is usually hearing from a lot of straight women complaining about like, "Oh, gosh, yes, my type is emotionally unavailable men." That is very so ubiquitous that I think it starts to speak to more of maybe some bigger social trauma and socialization cues that we have, because that's such a universal experience for so many people that it probably goes beyond just your own attachment or your own individual trauma, but that's something that I see floating around quite a bit.
The thing is that, whether we like it or not, there are studies that suggest the idea that most of us do have a type of a person that we like to date. To clarify, this may sound like what we were talking about back in episode 366. The idea that, oh, we have preferences, and that led to our whole big discussion about desirability politics, but we need to clarify that when we're talking about type here, we're specifically discussing personality characteristics as opposed to physical characteristics.
Emily: There was a study that really tried to answer this question and look at this whole, do we have a type or not? There was a study done in 2019, but actually, it was done over a nine-year period, so it was published in 2019, called the consistency between individuals' past and current romantic partners' own reports of their personalities. This was done by G MacDonald and Y Park, and it was a 2019 longitudinal study done over a nine-year period.
They used data from 332 participants, it was 159 men, and 173 women who had self-reports of personality available from two different partners during the study period. Basically, it was a current partner that they were still with and then one ex-partner over this period of time. On average, these people were around 25 years old, it always tends to be young people and the participants had been with a partner for generally around a little under four years on average and 80% of the past relationships had been non-marital, and 31% of the non-married participants were cohabiting.
They looked at what these people called, and I guess this is a thing in psychology, the Big Five Personality Traits, and for those of you who don't know, it includes extraversion, conscientiousness, agreeableness, neuroticism, and openness. They were essentially looking at all of those factors within this nine-year period.
Jase: That's all pretty complicated, but to sum up, basically, over this nine-year period, they were able to get personality surveys from the people that the participants were dating and over time, some of those became exes, and they dated new people and using these Big Five Personality Traits, which are pretty commonly well studied universal personality traits, rather than just situational, these tend to be more like an actual trait that that person has for most of their life.
They were able to compare those between those two partners, the one that became an ex and the one that's the current partner, and then did some fancy maths comparing them to the person they were dating to help determine how similar or different those two people were from each other.
Dedeker: Interestingly, in the text of the study, they mentioned the fact that after a person experiences a breakup, they generally believe that they're going to be better equipped to understand what they want and what they need out of the next relationship, which I totally get. We've all been there. I think we all internalize that sense of, "Oh, gosh, well, that was a mistake." Maybe or, "Well, I'm not going to make those same mistakes again, I'm not going to date a person like that again. I guess I've learned that lesson."
I know that's definitely something I'm going through right now, but despite that, they reference the fact that other studies have found that-- At the same time as we think, "Okay, I've learned my lesson, and then the next time it's going to be different, I'm going to find someone different," people will describe an ideal partner's personality traits pretty consistently over time.
They find that over the course of people's lives, what they want in a partner, as far as personality goes, doesn't tend to change. Then this study found, when they compared those self-reports of personality between a person's current partner and their former partner, they found that people ended up being with people who were similar to each other and more similar than the chances of if you picked up two random people off the street, how similar they might be to each other.
It was distinctively similar, not just by chance. I'm going to directly quote the study here. The present findings provide evidence that people's new partners tend to have a degree of similarity to their previous partners, suggesting that people consistently engage in relationships with a particular type of person, to at least some extent. This appears to be less true of individuals high in extraversion, or openness to experience, although these conclusions remain tentative.
It sounds like there's maybe some wiggle room depending on your personality, but if we're looking at trends, chances are high that you're going to be with someone who has similar personality to people that you've been with previously.
Emily: I'd say that's generally true.
Jase: It doesn't surprise me, but it's--
Dedeker: I don't like it to be true. I think it's such a, "Don't you put me in a box."
Emily: It's science.
Jase: When I was talking about those fancy maths that they were doing to determine the degree of similarity, one of the things that they mentioned having to account for is this well-established thing called assortative mating, which I hadn't heard that term for it before.
Emily: What is that?
Jase: Basically means you're more likely to date people similar to yourself.
Emily: Oh, yes, I guess that makes sense.
Jase: What they had to do was some fancy maths to be like, "We want to be sure that we're saying these two people are similar to each other, not just because they're similar to the person they both dated, because there's going to be a certain degree of similarity there. We're canceling that out to try to make sure that there's actually similarities beyond just that between them," because otherwise you might get a false positive and say, "Oh, they're all similar," but that's just because they're similar to the person they dated. Even beyond that, there is this pretty significant degree of similarity between them.
Dedeker: I'm really uncomfortable.
Dedeker: I'm sorry.
Emily: That was not the point of this whole thing.
Dedeker: No, no, no, it's not bad. I'm just examining what's coming up in this moment thinking about my whole life.
Emily: I do. Like our discussion on preference and desirability politics, this is a little similar in just the idea that, "Okay, we, I guess, as people, do tend to repeat the same types of people that we're interested in, the same types of people that we date, personality or physical or a bunch of things." That, I think, is just really interesting to examine and to question why, because probably so many of us go through life never questioning that and never really thinking very critically about why it is that we're doing the things that we do. Studies like this and conversations like this are great, just because it's important for us to get to the bottom of things like that, and if it's not serving us, to maybe change that.
Jase: Dedeker, your reaction to this is bringing up some memories of something that really struck me when I was in college and was taking psychology courses, and was talking to a friend of mine, at the time we were talking about cognitive dissonance and how that can affect us to develop opinions about things that we might not have had if it hadn't been for this dissonance affecting the way that we remember an event or affecting our opinion about something. I remember being so shocked at how angry my friend got about me just talking about the stuff that I'd been learning.
Emily: Wow. Jeez.
Jase: That to him, it's like Dedeker said, it's like, "I don't want to be put in a box." He was so upset by this idea that he's not in control of his thoughts or that there's these psychological factors affecting him, that he doesn't have direct control over. It's something I've thought about a lot in the years since then, of what's going on there. Yes, it's freaky to think, "Oh, I'm being put in this box," or, "I don't have control."
The analogy that I ended up coming up with in talking to this friend was thinking about it more like learning about gravity, where it's like, "Okay, I've learned about how the physics of gravity works." It's like, "Gosh, now I'm put in this box that I can't fly or hover or grow taller or whatever." Something like that, but by knowing about it and understanding it better, I'm now able to work with it or manipulate it to better accomplish what I want, like being able to make airplanes or lighter than aircraft, all things that rely on gravity.
That idea of learning these things can help you to overcome them or to change them or to influence them rather than if you don't know about them and put your head in the sand, you're more likely to keep repeating these things or have less control. It's this interesting ironic thing.
Emily: You're right. I should probably think about this and break against type and date an airplane next.
Jase: Yes, that's what I'm saying.
Emily: That would be interesting.
Jase: Or maybe an astrophysicist.
Dedeker: Then it'll finally break the chain of VFX nerds.
Emily: There you go.
Jase: There you go. Perfect.
Dedeker: Oh, no, Jase, I've already dated an astrophysicist, or sorry, not an astrophysicist, an aerospace engineer. I've already been there. It's the closest I've been to dating a airplane.
Emily: An airplane.
Dedeker: I don't think you do remember that person. I don't think you ever met them.
Emily: Oh, I don't think I've met--
Dedeker: This is before I met you, Emily.
Emily: Oh, okay. I thought that I-- Maybe not…
Dedeker: Maybe you just heard tales of the aerospace engineer.
Emily: Yes, maybe tales. It's fine. All right. Well, we're going to move on from there and talk about why we want to date the same people over and over again, things like attachment theory, and then also move on to a little teaser for the next part of this episode, but before we do that, we wanted to talk about some of the ways that you can support this show and make sure that it continues to go to all y'all out there for free.
Jase: Now in the second half, let's dive more into this question of, well, okay, we've established that there seems to be some research backing up the idea that we date people with similar personality types even if we think we're not going to, but why might we be doing that? Especially why might we be doing this if they're bad for us, or at least not the best for us or we're getting into habitual patterns.
We're going to go through some concepts here. These are a combination of things from a few different articles. For example, one from Psych Central, why do we repeat the same dysfunctional relationship patterns? Another one from Psychology Today, why do we repeat ourselves? Or why do we repeat the past in our relationships? You'll notice that title, there's a gazillion articles with a pretty similar variation on those terms in the titles.
Emily: People are questioning and wondering those and seeking answers.
Jase: Exactly. Let's look at some of these answers that various people will come up with for why do we repeat these destructive patterns. The first one, just right off, is that we repeat what's familiar. It's like, "Well, maybe I don't like this, but I know it, or I'm used to it." Or maybe even all the little things leading up to it, at least I know these, they're comfortable. When I'm not actively thinking about doing something different, that's what I'm going to fall back to just because I know it. That's familiar.
Then to add onto that, a lot of it is repeating what we learned as children, whether that's what we learned about how you show affection or what relationships even look like or how we communicate in our relationships. Again, just because it's what we know.
Emily: This goes a little bit back to the idea of repetition compulsion, but we may repeat what was traumatizing in unconscious effort to gain mastery over it. That's an interesting idea for sure. It's something that I feel like if I scale back and look at my life in various ways and, "Why did I do that again? Why did I self-sabotage here?" Stuff like that. It's hoping for a different outcome in some way, even though perhaps you're not capable of producing a different outcome, you may unconsciously hope that you are.
Dedeker: Yes, this is a thing. Of course, not everyone who's traumatized does this and depending on what type of trauma you have, that can change the way that you respond to it, but I know that that is something that's talked about a lot in these circles, is this idea that we want to complete the thing we didn't get to complete sometimes, whether that was getting to safety or being able to speak up for ourselves at a time that we should have, or being able to
Emily: Yes, Brian talked about that.
Dedeker: Yes, definitely. That's why we do see often, again, that compulsion or that impulse sometimes to relive or sometimes to repeat, or sometimes it is just that. Trying to complete the story in a better way sometimes. Sometimes we can be very conscious of that and sometimes we can be very, very unconscious of that as well.
Jase: Maybe this is a silly comparison to make or maybe it's super profound, but if you think about when you get really into a certain game, a video game or possibly even a game like chess or something like that, it's like I keep losing at this point, but then I keep thinking about it. It's like, "What if I just could do it a little different this time?
Emily: Like Elden Ring?
Jase: Right, like any kind of a Dark Souls game, where it's just the thing that's addictive about it is, "I know that if I do this enough, I'll be able to figure it out." Maybe that's on a macro level playing out in our lives.
Emily: We may think that we deserve to suffer. Again, we don't want to say that this is a victim-blaming thing, but sometimes internally, and I've definitely been there, we may feel like, "Hey, I deserve this thing that's happening to me." Or, "I've done something bad in the past." Or, "My upbringing or whatever causes me to feel as though these things that are happening that are shitty, it's supposed to happen or it deserves to happen to me."
Dedeker: There are certain values in our culture that really encourage that. I think there's a lot of capitalist culture, for instance, that really makes us internalize that work should be a freaking bummer, basically, and there's no way out of it. We should be suffering through our days with our work. I think that there's a lot of pretty toxic traditional dating culture that also encourages us to think that relationships are good and then they become a slog, and then you just have to suffer through them for as long as you can stand it. That affects us.
Jase: We've mentioned this many times before, but on every sitcom ever, that's the plot. It's just, relationships are not fun, you're resentful of each other, you're jabbing at each other all the time. It's like that's what we see, and that's like, ok, true.
Emily: That's such a sitcom true.
Jase: It's gotten boring, but it's still there.
Emily: We've talked about this a lot in the podcast, but change is very scary. Even when it's healthy, even when it's the best thing for us, it may feel foreign and scary, and we may truly just not even want to go there because it's not something that we're used to, and it may feel much safer to go back to the things that aren't good for us, but it feels safe and something that we know.
Dedeker: Again, there are so many factors involved here that go beyond just your willful, conscious, decision-making. If you suffered abuse or neglect or some kind of trauma as a child, that there can literally be neural pathways for that pattern of being in a relationship or for that pattern of receiving affection or not. That is just strengthened and your brain gets accustomed to that. Then when there's a relationship with a similar pattern, you don't even realize because it just feels so normal, or maybe just feels so familiar.
There's also research out there that suggests that if you've been traumatized or if you're a victim of intimate partner violence, those tend to be indicators that you may enter into another traumatic or violent relationship again. There's a lot of factors that go into that. To talk about the change a bit, this is actually a topic request we got from another listener that I want to do sometime.
Talking about if you have a history of being a victim of violence or of just being in bad relationships, it doesn't even necessarily have to be abuse, how would you be in an actual good, healthy relationship because that can be the other side of it, is sometimes really healthy behaviors from a partner can be very destabilizing and anxiety producing if it's not what you're used to or expecting. That may be a future episode.
Jase: Yes, that's a really interesting topic. It gets into this concept we've talked about a long time ago and haven't revisited in a while, but the idea of safe people and that sometimes a safe person isn't always just a nice, happy, friendly person all the time, and that sometimes we can mix those up. That we'll feel like, "Oh, this is bad," because it doesn't feel good all the time when it actually might be healthier behavior. It's the tricky thing to learn both for ourselves and to recognize that in partners or friends or co-workers or whoever. Yes, that could be an interesting topic to get into.
Emily: For sure. All right, let's go back to attachment theory because as we said before, a lot of this has ties to attachment there. We love to talk about that on the show. I think it's a pretty hot thing right now, for sure. In terms of attachment style, it may be interesting to view your relationship habits good or bad through a lens of whatever specific attachment style you tend to have. Attachment styles aren't end-all be-all, one and done, you're this and that's it, many of them may ebb and flow and change based on what partner you're with. You may be two at once or a few of them at once or you may really default to one.
For the purposes of this, we took each of our specific attachment styles. Jase, I like how you were like "I'm secure attachment and also secure attachment." Let's talk about each of these.
Dedeker: Yes, just for a quick run-through, I do want to give a quick call back to our episode that we did with Jessica Fern back in episode 291, where we were speaking with Jessica about her book Polysecure. We go much more in depth about attachment theory and about attachment styles and how that intersects with non-monogamy. Again, you can go listen to that episode 291. Just for a quick primer, talking about attachment styles, which has a lot of overlap, I think, with our ideas that we've explored so far about repetition compulsion, because it essentially does have this seed in what happened to you as a child or how you got love and affection as a child and then sometimes repeating those coping mechanisms in your adult relationships as well.
For example, when we're talking about avoidant attachment, it could be a situation where your caregivers maybe weren't around and maybe weren't very responsive to your needs and so therefore you are instilled with this idea that, "I can only truly rely on myself. I have to be independent." That means that there can be a repetition of an unhealthy relationship pattern where you distance yourself from partners, or maybe if someone gets close to you, you very intentionally choose to pull away, push them away, maybe you choose to never really fully connect or engage with someone in a meaningful way because of repeating that pattern.
Emily: For all y'all out there who are on the anxious attachment side of things, maybe a family member or somebody who was super close to you in your life, perhaps abandoned you when you were young, or just wasn't around very much. As a result, in your adult relationships, you may constantly seek reassurance from your partner in a more obsessive manner or you may exhibit other types of insecure behavior and that may be an unhealthy relationship pattern that you get into over and over again.
You also may feel like your partner and your relationship with them directly ties into your own feelings of self-worth that, "Am I a good person because I'm with someone, because I'm with this person? Am I a valued human in this world? Am I a valued member of society because I have a partner or multiple partners?" Things like that that may tie into an unhealthy relationship pattern as well.
Jase: In a secure attachment style, generally you can retain feelings of autonomy from your partner while also being able to connect to them, having their back, knowing that they have yours and that your relationships can have a sense of overall security and those feelings can get carried over from one relationship to the next. A quick thing I want to say before moving on from this, though, is that with attachment styles, as Emily mentioned, they can change a little bit but they can also fluctuate a little bit by relationship. You might feel a little more secure in one type of relationship but then veer more toward one of the others in another one.
Just something to be aware of with all of these. You might be like, "Oh, I've done that, but I've also done that, I've also done that." Yes, absolutely. That can happen too.
Dedeker: Just to add some more complication to it, there's also disorganized attachment, which involves sometimes bouncing back and forth. It's often described as gas and brake, sometimes gas and brake at the same time. Bouncing between needing some amount of reassurance and intimacy from a partner to then pushing the partner away. This is a less common form of attachment, but it's definitely disorienting for everyone involved.
We just wanted to do that really quick primer on attachment theory because this is yet another way to bring awareness to these relationship patterns and to be curious about what's repeating.
Something that we hit on quite a bit in the Jessica Fern episode was talking about the fact that your attachment style, identifying it, or even identifying a pattern, isn't a get out of jail free card. It doesn't mean, "Okay, this thing happened to me as a child," or, "Oh, I was in this abusive relationship, okay, that's why I get to do whatever I want or I can act out or I can be really crappy to the people that I'm with." It doesn't mean you're just off scot-free now. It enables you to ask the questions to shine a light on it and to be able to find ways to work through these patterns and release some of these patterns, if they're not working out for you.