Shadow Work For Anxious Attachment
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All right, team, welcome back to the Man Talk Show. Connor Beaton here, and today we're going to be talking about shadow work for the anxious attachment. We're going to talk a little bit about shadow work in general, what it is, why it's important, talk a little bit about the anxious attachment, and then how shadow work is going to help you become more securely attached. So let's dive straight in.

First and foremost, what is the anxious attachment? Well, I have a whole video on a man's guide to anxious attachment. Hopefully you've watched that. If not, go queue it up. But a very simple version that I'm going to give you right here is that an anxious person, their internal experience is, my world is not okay unless you are okay. So for the anxious partner,

They are constantly looking for cues, looking for evidence that their partner is okay, their husband, their wife, their boyfriend, their girlfriend. They're looking to see, are you all right? Because if you're okay, then maybe I can be okay. But if you're not okay, then I am disrupted. And so the anxious attached person learned or didn't learn, let's just say didn't learn, how to self-regulate, how to self-soothe.

how to basically get their internal homeostasis to a baseline on their own. And through different circumstances and events, what they learned was I need somebody else in order for me to reclaim any type of baseline, to reclaim any type of homeostasis, peace, calmness, grounding inside of me. So for the anxiously attached person, it's very disruptive

sometimes for them when they're single, but it's very disruptive when their partner is absent, vacant, maybe traveling. It's challenging for the anxious person when their partner is disrupted internally, angry, upset.

I mean, you name it, right? So for you as the anxious person, what I want you to keep in mind is I'm not okay unless you're okay. This is kind of the motto inside of you as the anxious partner. And here's where shadow work comes into play. And I'm simplifying some of this, but hopefully this simplification can help you understand what's happening inside of you. Because

For an anxious person, your nervous system is in a bit of a stress state constantly. And that stress state is looking to outsource regulation, outsource calming, soothing, grounding. So for the anxious partner, you're always looking to your other person to help you feel better, to help you ground, to help you feel better.

safe in the relationship, etc. Where shadow work comes into play, for those of you that don't know, quick little synopsis of shadow work. I have a bunch of videos on this, more coming on this soon. The shadow is a piece of Jungian psychology. Jung actually created the concept of the shadow. And the shadow is essentially the part of your personality that

It sort of lives in your unconscious mind. It's the part of you that you don't know about, you don't like, you don't want other people to know about. It's an amalgamation. I call it the hurt locker sometimes of your fears, your worries, your doubts. And for some people, specifically the anxiously attached people,

Some of their shadow is very forward-facing. So it's very front and center. It gets projected out into the relationship a lot. Those fears, those insecurities, those worries, those doubts, where a lot of people, their shadow is sort of hidden and sequestered away from relationships and sort of shows up in more

we'll say dubious ways, right? It's very unintentional and conscious ways. For the anxious person, it's very front and center. Those fears, those insecurities, they're right there. They're driving your behavior. They're causing you to text bomb. They're causing you to constantly worry in your head. Like, are they okay? Do they still love me? They still want to be with me. Obviously, I'm exaggerating, but I'm sure I got some of that right. And so in your shadow, it's very common that for the anxious person, what's in their shadow is...

Safety, security, groundedness, authenticity, alignment,

self-suredness, the ability to self-regulate. All of those things have been not rejected or denied, but they've been pushed out of the conscious part of your psyche and your identity and your personality. And so the reclamation, this is why shadow work is so important for the anxious person. It is well for the avoidant. I'm going to talk about that in a different video. But this is why it's so important for the anxious attached person.

Because what you need to develop is hidden in your shadow. It's very likely that somewhere along the way, growing up, you were taught directly or indirectly that you had to rely on other people in order to feel safe.

You had to rely on meeting other people's needs first above your own constantly in order for you to get love and affection or for you to be safe in a relationship and not get criticized or punished or having love withheld, stuff like that.

So for you, what is paramount is to start to learn what actually is in my shadow. There might be anger in your shadow, for example, because it's very common that anxious people are usually, not always, but usually they're the ones that have disconnected

from their anger. So it's very common that anxious people in relationships are either very disconnected from their anger and they're sort of meek and they don't express their anger, which causes them to not set boundaries or really stand up for themselves, or they hold it in, they hold it in, they hold it in, and then they explode. And they have this big outburst of anger, this big outburst of tears, fire, etc. And you and the other person are sort of left wondering like, what happened? So

Your shadow are the things that you, and this is what I want you to write down. This is what I want you to ingrain in yourself because this is really going to help to contextualize what your shadow is. Your shadow is an amalgamation of everything that you had to disown, that you had to disconnect from or ignore in order to fit in growing up.

So another way to look at this is in order to maintain relationships as a kid, specifically, let's just say in your family system with mom and dad, you had to disconnect from certain traits.

Maybe every time you got angry, your mom or your dad would come over the top. They'd become verbally abusive or physically abusive, or they would just not talk to you for days on end, or they'd lock you in your room for hours on end. Maybe you got punished for expressing certain traits and qualities that are just natural for any human being, right? Maybe when you cried,

you were punished in a certain way, or you never really knew where mom or dad stood, and so you're constantly sort of walking on eggshells. Or you had a parent, this is the last example I'll give you, you had a parent who inadvertently or directly told you that you needed to rely on them in almost an unhealthy way in order for you to be okay.

So some parents will actively cause an anxious attached style, not because they're trying to, but because they're trying to keep their child safe and close.

And that can inhibit the child from being able to understand, oh, I can develop the skill of keeping myself safe. I know how to take care of myself. I know how to do things for myself. I know how to, when I'm emotionally dysregulated, when I'm sad or angry or whatever, I know how to bring myself down back to a baseline. Well, that's not what some people get.

So because of that, you've had to abandon certain characteristics or certain traits as a child in order to fit in to your family, to your school environment, with your friends, etc. So shadow work is really about unmasking or sort of bringing some of those traits and characteristics forward so that you can see what you abandoned in order to fit in, in order to belong, in order to feel safe.

when you were a kid. Because remember, for the anxious attached person, the motto is what? I'm not okay unless you're okay. So part of what we need to do is to develop the skill and the competency internally of being able to say, I know how to help myself be all right. I know how to return to a grounded, calm state.

without other people necessarily helping me all the time or reinforcing that we're okay, et cetera, et cetera. So what do we do with the shadow work? I'm gonna give you a couple things that I want you to explore, okay? These are questions that I would like for you to journal on

this isn't one of those videos that you just like sit and listen to and it's like some cool concepts. I actually want you to do some work to help you unravel some of these pieces. So you might want to pause this part or just write them down, or you can take a note on your phone so you can journal on this later.

But I want you to start to identify the shadow self. And there's a series of questions I'm going to give you. So number one, I feel anxious in my relationship when? I feel anxious in my relationship when? And just write out whatever comes to mind, right? When my partner pulls away, when they're gone, you know, when I have to make a decision or whatever it is for you, just write down whatever comes to mind.

Number two, this feels similar to my childhood when. This feels similar to my childhood when. And again, just write whatever comes to mind. This is a very unconscious process that you're working with. So you might even write down some examples or memories that come up and you're like, huh,

I guess I did feel that way when I was a boy or a girl or whatever. And so just write that down. The next thing is, I'm worried that if I stood up for myself in my relationship, what would happen is. I'm worried what would happen if I stood up for myself. What would happen is. So here you're trying to get a sense of,

If you didn't act from an anxious place, if you set some boundaries, what would happen? Okay. Are you worried that they'd leave? Are you worried that you'd get punished? Are you worried that they would break up with you? And then again, this feels similar to my childhood when. This feels similar to my childhood when. So where in your childhood, who did you feel the same sort of dynamic with, right? If you stood up for yourself with dad, did he come over the top and

you know, was super loud or did he disconnect or, you know, would mom criticize you and pull away, reject you or start to character assassinate you? So just start to get a sense of that.

The next question is, what I know I need to develop in order to feel safe is. What I know I need to develop in me in order to feel safe is. And then the follow-up to that is, I didn't get a chance to develop that as a kid because. I didn't get a chance to develop that as a kid because. So here you're looking at

What actually got missed developmentally when you were growing up as a child that you know you need to start to develop internally?

For some of you, it's actually going to be a healthy relationship to anger. It's very common for the anxious person that, again, they're disconnected from that anger. For some of you, it's going to be the ability to grieve or be sad. For others of you, it's going to be the capacity to be more assertive and more direct about what you need. And then the last piece is really get clear on why that was interrupted as a kid. This is a really important part of the equation for many of you.

For all of you, this will have been interrupted. Whatever you identify in this last question of the thing that you need to develop inside of you in order to feel more secure in the relationship, this

skill, this ability, this characteristic will have been interrupted in your childhood. Meaning that somewhere in your childhood, because of your family system, the circumstances or whatever, that process of developing assertiveness, directness, the ability to ask for what you need, the ability to say no or set boundaries or just express some anger, that will have been interrupted.

And this is probably something, if you're in a healthy enough relationship, whatever you identify in these questions as the anxious person, you probably want to bring one or two of these forward into the relationship. One of the things that usually causes disruptions in a relationship is when one person starts to do all this work and they start trying to make all these changes and you disrupt the homeostasis of the relationship and the other person's like, what are you doing? Why are you acting this way? How come you're talking this way all of a sudden? And they don't like it. And so they start to push back.

And for the anxious person, that pushback can be enough to shut them down and push you back into your old patterns. So as the anxious person, it's super important, especially if you're with a more secure partner, to say, hey, here's what I've discovered and here's what I'd like to start to work on. I'm going to start to ask you more for what I need. I'm going to start to make more decisions myself. I'm going to start to set more boundaries or speak up for myself. Or I'm going to start to tell you when I feel a little angry.

because that did not feel safe growing up. I wasn't okay. So you start to communicate with your partner what you're doing so that they know and expect these behavior changes in the relationship and it's not out of left field for them. And this is going to help them to not kind of get disrupted so that they're with you in this process.

So that's a little bit about shadow work. Again, the key here that you are trying to do is reclaim the things that you never really developed. Now, there's one big caveat that I want to put into here that if you experience some type of

trauma or abuse, your anxiety and that anxiousness is probably coming from a little bit of a different place in the sense that it might be that relationships feel unsafe or just generally are unsafe because of the trauma or the abuse that you have experienced. And so it might be helpful for you to work with somebody through this process, whether it's a coach or a therapist or whatever, so that you can get to the bottom of processing that core wound and

that core pain or trauma that caused you to feel very anxious in a relationship. And oftentimes when I've worked with people who have had some type of trauma or abuse growing up that caused an anxious attachment, a couple of things, often it's very early on in life or it's tied to something very early on in life, right? Like two, three, four years old. And secondly, by working through that initial pain and wound,

it actually reduces a lot of the anxious behaviors in the relationship because your nervous system starts to acclimate to a very different way of relating and being in relationship. So comment below, let me know what you found really helpful. And until next week, Connor Beaton signing off.

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