I was standing in the airport and I was watching my dad load onto the airplane. I saw the plane backing away from the terminal and I started crying. I asked my mom, “Is this how that whole scenario played out?” and she was like “I don't know how you remember that son, but that's exactly how it went, like wow”. I kept having these dreams, and I felt the need to talk to her about that. So, I think that might have been the day that my anxious attachment, my abandonment wounds, were birthed.
Hey what's going on my beautiful people this is certified life and relationship coach, Coach Court. On this YouTube channel we talk about everything from attachment styles, to rebound relationships, to helping you heal from breakups. If this is something that interests you, do me a favor and subscribe to the channel. I really would appreciate it.
In today's video, we're going to talk about how I became a secure attacher. I want to give you guys a little bit of a disclosure here, I am recovering from some type of cold. I don't know what's going on, I don't know what's going around, but a lot of even my clients have had it. So if you hear me cough, it's not the vids, all right, it's not the vids it's something different.
Today I wanted to talk to you guys about how I got here, where I am, as far as my secure attachment. I'm going to give you guys a little bit of foresight into the future. I'm not completely secure. I have fearful avoidant tendencies. As I tell you guys my story about my life, then you may understand how I got here.
So, where do we start? Let's start with when I started dating. I started dating really early on in my life. I look back, and I tried to understand why I decided to start dating so young. I think it was for a lot of validation. I grew up in St Louis. My mom was a single mom. My dad went to the military when I was three. It's super interesting, because I have these conversations with my dad, and he tells me about how some of the things unfolded. The thing about kids, we always think that something's wrong with us, like we're the cause for things to happen. I had no clue that he went off to the military. I just didn't. I thought, “oh I'm a flawed kid”. I literally have a memory of when I was 3 years old. I had this conversation with my mom. I was asking her, I think it must have been, it was Thanksgiving, around this time. My birthday's coming up so I'm trying to figure out what age I was. I want to say it was like 20 years ago. I was probably 22, 23. I asked her about a dream that I was constantly having. I was having this recurring dream, where I had this little pillow pet and I was standing in the airport. If you guys have seen what pillow pets are. It's like this little man shaped deal that was a pillow that I slept with all the time. I drug it everywhere with me. I was really anxiously attached to that pillow pet. My grandma made me throw it away and that was a very devastating day for me. I was standing in the airport and I was watching my dad load onto the airplane. I saw the plane backing away from the terminal and I started crying. I asked my mom, “Is this how that whole scenario played out?” and she was like “I don't know how you remember that son, but that's exactly how it went, like wow”. I kept having these dreams, and I felt the need to talk to her about that. So, I think that might have been the day that my anxious attachment, my abandonment wounds, were birthed. Up until that point, I don't remember anything else, but that was definitely a core memory for me. So I started dating when I was around 13, 14. I can tell you that every person that I dated, pretty much either left me, cheated on me, or abandoned me. I can't blame them for it, because I was partially part of the reason why it happened, I was an anxious person. I was always triggered whenever someone pulled away, whenever someone wasn't showing up for me. I felt like “oh no, they're losing me, so I became extra pleasy, extra needy and that's just not, as I've gotten to this age, I realized that that's really not good attractive energy right there. So I had a lot of different people that I was dating early on. I also blame it on my environment too. We kind of glamorized dating and having relationships, even the music that we were listening to. We listened to a lot of R&B music. A lot of love stories, and I mean really, I had every ingredient to become an anxious attacher. I was raised by women, essentially. I had lived with my aunt, my mom, sister, a couple female cousins, and I saw the things that they were going through. Sorry Mom, I'm over disclosing here, but I saw the things that you guys were going through, and it made me never want to hurt a woman. That didn't pan out too well for me, because at the same time, I wasn't taught how to advocate for myself, communicate my own needs. I was pretty much a walking doormat. So, as I started to get older, something snapped with me. You know I think it might have been my high school sweetheart. It really, really left a big wound in me, and I just kind of snapped. That was the day I feel like I might have turned into a fearful avoidant. Whenever I'm working with my clients, I tell them that if you are an anxious person and you were in unhealthy relationships or you are in toxic dynamics, you run the risk of becoming a fearful avoidant. You'll always have that anxious side of you, but there's something about that snapping. I think the fearful avoidant was always there, based on my community that I was raised in. There's several tests out there and the early test that I took, about adverse childhood experiences, was pretty simple. It didn't say anything about your community that can cause you to have different types of attachment wounds. I grew up in a very loving supportive environment, but in my community, I felt very unsafe, I felt bullied, I felt like I was an outcast. I wasn't a person that had a lot of friends. I'm going to just be honest, until I started playing sports I didn't really gel with people in my community. I was a loner, but the different types of traumas that I experienced out in the community, definitely birthed some fearful avoidant tendencies in me. The volatility, the snapping on people when I felt a certain type of way. That's not only fearful avoidant tendencies, you can be something else and have those types of tendencies, but I tend to see it a lot with people who grew up in those types of dynamics. People who I coach that are from overseas, that are from Palestine and Iraq, they have some fearful avoidant tendencies when I see them come and talk to me.
So, after my high school sweetheart, I kind of just snapped. I kind of just said, you know what, I'm not anxiously attaching to anyone, until I got married. Then, that's when those anxious tendencies started to come out again. So it was like a sway back and forth. If you guys have ever taken an attachment style quiz it's going to change with a different type of relationship dynamics that you're in. For me, I was swaying back and forth from that fearful and anxious attachment type. I was never a secure attacher. My secure attachment was always conditional. Which means, if a person is showing up in a certain way, I'm great, I'm secure, but you have to be with a secure person for that to stick for you to actually relearn and rewire some of those narratives, that negative thinking and reactions that you have in a relationship. So that marriage ended. Moving forward, a couple other relationships failed, and I look back and I think about ‘how many relationships did I ever break off’. I never really broke off any relationships. The relationships that I knew were unhealthy, the relationships that I knew weren't heading in the right direction, definitely were the ones that I was the most attracted to. The people who weren't showing up or investing as much in me as I was in them. I guess to a degree, you can say that I was a nice guy, but you guys already know about the ‘nice guys’. ‘Nice guys’ doesn't mean that we’re flawless. I read this book, “No more Mr. Nice Guy”. In the book, he talked about nice guy syndrome. Nice guys are actually guys who are very manipulative to a degree, because a lot of their niceness isn't simply because they want to just be a nice guy, they're looking for something in return. I was reading this book, and I'm thinking well, that kind of sounds a lot like anxious attachment. Like it's always a condition, like we're waiting for some type of return on our investment. If we don't get it, we'll do things unhealthily. We'll cheat, we'll form resentment, we'll protest. We'll do all these things to make sure that we get some type of receipts on what we've invested in. It wasn't until my last really really horrible breakup that made me do some internal thinking, and thinking this is ridiculous that I'm age 35, at that time I was 35, 36, really processing and trying to understand what am I getting wrong here.
I went to school for sociology and in the sociology courses I took a lot of psychology classes. I remember I did some courses and some continued education credits on attachment styles. At the time I'm thinking, that's not me, I don't need to know that information, but as I start going through my old notes, cuz I saved a lot of my old books, old training courses and stuff about attachment style theory, and I'm like this applies to my life right away, when I first started dating. That's where I started my healing journey. I immediately reached out and got a coach. I started studying attachment style theory like no one's business. I kind of have a life hack here. The career that I have, I'm able to bounce ideas, help people come up with different tools and really heal myself through helping other people heal. So I mean it's kind of not fair the way that I went about it, because all I think about is attachment style theories and relationship healing is all I talk about. My client base are all about heartache, heartbreak and anxious attachment, and helping understand what an avoidant is going through. So my career is kind of helping me out in that aspect, but you guys can actually do that yourself. The one way that I saw that worked the most effectively, is get yourself a therapist, get yourself someone who you can model a healthy relationship with. If you know for a fact that you have an insecure attachment wound, reach out to the opposite sex. It's important to balance out that masculine feminine energy. This is just my opinion. I'm not trying to tell you guys what exactly to do, this is what worked for me, this is what worked for people that I've seen in the past. Another thing that I did is I started journaling every day. I started challenging my thoughts. Journaling helped me challenge my thoughts. Have you ever noticed that when you're triggered and you're an anxious attacher or if you're a fearful avoidant for sure, you'll start texting something, you'll send it and you'll tell yourself don't send that message and then it's sent off, you're like why did I do that. So you know what I replaced that with, I started journaling instead of sending those messages that I wanted to send. I would maybe wait a day, look back on those notes and think ‘oh man this is just ridiculous’, ‘why would I ever’, ‘this didn't even pan out the way I thought it was going to pan out’, ‘what was I thinking at that time’. It's kind of a way to get those thoughts out there, put them on paper, get them out in front of you. Let you know whether or not it's something that's actually serious or if it's just completely fabricated in your mind. So journaling was another thing that really helped me out. Another thing that I started to do was meditate. I started to sit in my own thoughts and not act on those thoughts. That's honestly the hardest thing to do, not acting on an impulsive thought as someone who's now leaning fearful avoidant, was a hard thing for me to do. I still struggle with that to this day, but you know what, I kind of identify what exactly is happening. I identify ‘nope, this is the FA coming out’, ‘nope, I'm not about to just react, I'm going to learn how to respond’. So this is something that I still do. I've gotten so much better. I would say that the majority of my attachment style experience is now as a secure person, but I'll lean fearful, especially when something doesn't go my way. It's the little boy in me that starts to come out and I start to throw a temper tantum. Then I have to put him in his place and say: ‘You know what, we're not that old person anymore. We're trying to be better. We're trying to be the adult here’. Whenever I work with my clients., I talk to them about ‘all right, are you being hijacked now by that immature part of yourself or the person who didn't have their needs met?’.
So to recap on my journey, I started out with going back and educating myself. Going back and reviewing all the things that I learned about attachment style theory. I went off to school, got myself certified in attachment styles. Did some other coaching and did some other training. I started journaling. Started making sure that my thoughts were actually real thoughts and not something that was made up to fit a narrative that I wanted to run. Number three, I started to meditate a lot. Right now, my practice is to go over to the YMCA and I'll sit in the steam room or the sauna, and I'll just be present with my thoughts. I just let them do what they're going to do. I don't have my phone, I don't have my notepad, so I can't act upon those thoughts. I just have to let them be, let them play around at the dog park of thoughts and not act on them.
So if you found this video of any value, please like, comment and share. You can reach out to me on my other social media accounts. Instagram is [iamcoachcourt],TikTok is [i.am.coachcourt] and of course YouTube is [coachcourt]. Always remember when you go be love, you'll never have to find it. God bless.