#98 Attachment Styles and Your Sex Life

Ever wondered why your relationships follow the same frustrating patterns? The answer might lie in your attachment style—a psychological blueprint formed in early childhood that shapes how you connect with others throughout your life. In this eye-opening episode, certified relationship and attachment trauma practitioner Bev Miteleman, M.A. reveals how these unconscious patterns dramatically impact our sex lives.

What makes this conversation so powerful is how Mitelman connects the dots between our earliest bonding experiences and our adult sexual behaviors. She expertly breaks down the four attachment styles—secure, anxious-preoccupied, dismissive-avoidant, and fearful-avoidant—explaining how each approaches intimacy differently. The anxiously attached person who initiates sex primarily to feel emotional closeness. The avoidant who enjoys physical pleasure but avoids overnight stays and deeper connection. The securely attached who naturally integrates physical and emotional intimacy. These patterns explain so much about why we behave the way we do in relationships.

Perhaps most fascinating is Mitelman's explanation of why anxious and avoidant people frequently find themselves attracted to each other, creating relationships where one partner constantly seeks closeness while the other pulls away. As she notes, "Attachment styles are not gendered"—contrary to popular memes, these dynamics can appear in any relationship configuration. But there's hope in her message too. These patterns, formed through emotion and repetition in childhood, can be rewired using those same mechanisms. With awareness and consistent effort, anyone can develop more secure attachment and experience deeper, more fulfilling connections.

Whether you're struggling with relationship patterns that leave you feeling unfulfilled or simply curious about the psychology behind intimacy, this episode offers invaluable insights into how we love and connect. Check out Securely Loved on Instagram, YouTube, or at securelyloved.com to learn more about healing attachment wounds and creating healthier relationships.

Chapters

• 0:00 Introduction to Attachment Theory
• 2:12 Understanding the Four Attachment Styles
• 10:06 How Attachment Affects Sex
• 16:57 Anxious vs. Avoidant Sexual Behaviors
• 22:42 Healing Attachment Wounds
• 29:34 Closing and Resources

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

Welcome to the Straight from the Source's Mouth podcast. Frank talk about sex and dating.

Speaker 2: 0:06

Hello, tamara here, welcome to the show. Today's guest is Bev Middleman. She's a certified relationship and attachment trauma practitioner and founder of Securely Loved, and we'll be talking about attachment theory as it relates to dating and relationships, primarily sexuality. And thanks for joining me, bev.

Speaker 1: 0:25

So happy to be here. Thank you for having me on.

Speaker 2: 0:28

Yes, I think this, like I've mentioned attachment style before, but this will be perfect to talk about the sex side of things.

Speaker 1: 0:34

So, yeah, I mean we all like talking about sex, right, and I think most people haven't even thought like how and why would my attachment style even impact sex? But it does.

Speaker 2: 0:46

Spoiler alert yeah, yeah. So where should we get started on what it is exactly or jump right into that?

Speaker 1: 0:53

Well, is it helpful for your audience for me to sort of talk really briefly about the different attachment styles and then talk about sex? Or your audience sort of already has a pretty good understanding of what attachment style actually is?

Speaker 2: 1:07

Yeah, we've had a few episodes, but in case they missed them, because a lot of people pick and choose and you know not all the episodes, so maybe just a quick, like you said.

Speaker 1: 1:15

An overview. Okay, I'll make this very quick. So when we talk about attachment, what we're really talking about is the way in which we form an emotional bond with someone else. What we're really talking about is the way in which we form an emotional bond with someone else and the way in which we navigate the world and how much trust we have with ourselves and how much trust we afford other people. All of this really does go back to our earliest imprints in our childhood. So how it is that we were given and how we received love as a really young child we're talking about we're most suggestible from like zero to five. So the interactions that we have, usually with our primary caregiver, sets a template, an imprint in our mind for how it is that we are going to interact with people all throughout our lifetimes, well into our adulthood, and again, it does have a significant impact on sex, which we're going to get to. So there are two general categories, we'll say, of attachment styles.

Speaker 1: 2:19

We talk at a high level of someone who has a secure attachment or someone who has an insecure attachment. Someone who had a secure attachment grew up in a home where the caregiver, the parent, was emotionally attuned. For the most part. We're not talking about perfection, that doesn't exist but for the most part they were emotionally attuned to the child. The child was given, you know, the freedom to understand their feelings, to express their feelings. The caregiver responded in a healthy way to the child when they were maybe experiencing difficult feelings, as we all experience and so the child learned at that point in time to not only connect to their feelings but to learn to trust themselves and to learn to trust that others were going to respond to them in a healthy way. And so these individuals, they grow up. This is like the utopia, right? They grow up and they get into adult type relationships and they typically do very well. So, you know, they enjoy being in a couple and being independent. Right, they trust themselves, they trust others, they generally have good communication, they're generally emotionally regulated. These are the people who we see most often in long-term relationships and again, you know, it's not that they don't have issues and things to work out, but they have a pretty good, solid base. Right Now there's a whole other group, let's say the other half of our population.

Speaker 1: 3:53

I'm talking about statistics in North America it's about 50 50. So the other half of our population unfortunately didn't grow up with the same level of emotional attunement in their you know homes of origin. And so what we see is is that there's various strategies the kids will adopt when they, when they develop this insecure attachment right, and it really depends on the interaction again that they're having with their caregiver and the imprinting. So we have three subset categories that form out of that insecure style. So all three are insecure but they present a little differently. So one is the anxious, preoccupied.

Speaker 1: 4:40

On this side of the scale, this is the individual who is generally always seeking closeness, who fears abandonment. This is a person who had a high degree of unpredictability in their childhood. So maybe a parent, you know, was alcoholic, for example, and one day they were very happy and loving and the next day they drank too much and they were mean and the child would not really know what to expect. We often see in this cohort of people children who are parentified, who have to take care of the parents themselves. So they take on the role of becoming the caregivers. So they take on the role of becoming the caregivers, the people pleasers. They're overly congenial and they tend but afford way too much trust to others. Okay, so you can start to think how would that cause a problem in a romantic relationship? It starts to become a little bit obvious right Now.

Speaker 1: 5:58

On the other side of the spectrum we have the individuals who are dismissive avoidance, and they are individuals who grew up in a home typically where there was emotional neglect. Maybe the parents were very stoic or the parents were heavily critical of their children, but they got the message early on that they could not rely on their parents for any sort of emotional support and so anything that they had to deal with, they got the message that it's me myself and I I have to deal with it myself. I have only myself to depend on, and so they trust themselves entirely but afford very little trust to other people. Right yeah, there's like a feigned helplessness there. Why would I bother to ask anyone? No one's going to help me. This is imprinted in them really early on. So again, how does that impact us?

Speaker 1: 6:51

When we get into romantic relationships, you can start to see there's a small cohort of people that have a third, less discussed attachment style. We call it the third style under the insecure branch, but it's the fourth style and it's the disorganized style or the fearful avoidance. Now the fearful avoidance will have traits of both the anxious attacher and the avoidant attacher, and they oscillate between the two depending on who they're interacting with. And this style develops primarily when we're looking at a child who grew up in a home where there was a high degree of chaos, unpredictability and, oftentimes, abuse. Any and all kinds of abuse emotional, verbal, physical, could be sexual but what happens is is that the child actually takes on an imprinting where there's some love in the house, so they know what it feels like to be loved and they want more of that, so they move towards it.

Speaker 1: 8:01

But at the same time, often the person that they're seeking love from is also harming them. And so if we think of, let's say, a father who's kind to you, once in a while you're going to want that kindness. It feels good, it's validating, it's reassuring, right? Every little girl wants the attention of their father, right, every little girl wants the attention of their father, right.

Speaker 1: 8:24

But you know, the father could also maybe not every day, but maybe every second, third, fourth day can get violent. And once in a while, you know, the father pushes you or kicks you or smacks you across the face or calls you names or invalidates you. And so there's a point of harm there too, and so the child becomes very confused. Hence disorganized attachments, because they're seeking both closeness. They're seeking closeness from an individual who is both offering them love and hurt, and so what happens is, when they grow up and go into romantic relationships, is that they have this they're called the hot and the cold partners. They come close, they get scared, they push back. They come close, they get scared, they push back. And this, again, is modeling what they knew to be normal or familiar from their childhood to be normal or familiar from their childhood.

Speaker 2: 9:44

Yeah yeah, that makes so much sense. I'm glad we did that overview. It was a little more in depth and like more nuanced, for sure.

Speaker 1: 9:48

It's interesting because you mentioned at the top that you had read the book Attached, which is a great book. But Attached does not talk about the fourth style of disorganized or fearful avoidant. It is a smaller cohort, it's about, let's say, 10% of the population, but it is real. I myself grew up as a fearful avoidant. I have done the work at this point to move myself much more towards secure attachment, but I can tell you that that emotional conflict and the feeling so conflicting that you know I desired and I wanted love and connection, but it also the idea of intimacy, feared me Like I was. It was a great fear to me because, as I you know, my experience was, as I got too close to someone, I got hurt.

Speaker 2: 10:44

And you talked about how this can relate to sex. Do you want to go into that right now?

Speaker 1: 10:49

Oh, it really does relate to sex, right? So what's so interesting about sex is that sex really does mean different things for different people, right? Even for the same person in different times of their life or different moments in time, it means different things. So we always have to approach sex in terms of what does it mean for people, right? So there's lots of parameters around sex and I want people to understand that attachment styles are one of the things that does actually come up frequently. So we're going to talk specifically about the anxious, preoccupied person and the avoidant person.

Speaker 1: 11:33

Before we get into this, I can say people who generally have a secure attachment will see sex as lots of different things. They'll see it, as you know, playful. They'll see it as emotional connection. They'll see it as bonding. They'll see it, as you know, just physical pleasure, which, of course, it is all of these things, right? Usually people who are in in that, who have a secure attachment, they gravitate towards longer-term relationships. They're less likely like much more less likely to be the individuals who are having one-night stands every second Tuesday. That's not them. They prefer to have a partner and they see it again. You know, physically it feels good, but it's the emotional bonding that they really enjoy too, because these folks have a really good sense of intimacy. And what does intimacy mean? Right? Intimacy is all sorts of things, right? Like sharing that level of vulnerability with your partner emotionally, physically, sexually, all those things. So for people who have grown up with caregivers that were very attuned, all of that just fits within their imprint, right? This feels normal and natural that emotions would be a part of sex.

Speaker 1: 12:59

But, as you would expect, not everyone sees it the same way, and so when we're talking about folks who are on the insecure attachment styles especially anxious, preoccupied and then dismissive avoidance they do, in fact, engage in sex differently. So this has a lot to do with the needs of the people. So, when we're talking about anxious, preoccupied, their primary core wound is abandonment. Again, these folks don't have a lot of trust in themselves, but they have a lot of trust for others. They're often the people who are called needy. They need a lot of attention, validation, reassurance, which is true. These are things that they didn't get consistently in their childhood. So, because they're not good at self-soothing, they rely on external sources to make them feel better. Make them feel better, and one of the ways that people who are anxiously attached. One of the ways in which they can easily and quickly get attention, validation from other people, is through sex, right? So oftentimes sex is weaponized. It's used not because the individual themselves actually want sex, but because they want to feel closer to the other person, and so we see that happening a lot.

Speaker 1: 14:32

They have people who are anxious, you know, anxiously attached. They have this desire to be really, really close to their partner. So these are the folks who want to make love to you, they want to stare into your eyes, they want a whole night of romance. For them it's emotionally based, right. So physically, yes, it feels good, but it's emotionally based. They are very focused on pleasing their partners. So, you know, they are much more likely to give in to risky sexual behavior, unwanted sexual behavior, and the reason is is it goes back to the core wounds. I fear abandonment. So if I say no to your request, you're going to leave me, and so if I just people please, and I give you everything that you want, regardless of what it is that I want, that will keep you around, right? So this extends far beyond sex, but we see it, of course, in sex as well. So these people have a very hard time with boundaries when you're more extreme on the scale. It's a continuum where you fall on the attachment scale. But those that are more extreme in their anxious attachment, they really almost don't understand boundaries and so they don't have boundaries for themselves. But they also won't respect your boundaries. They, for them, boundaries are almost like an insult. Well, you know what do you mean? You don't want me to come over, you don't want to see me. What do you mean? You don't want me to sleep over, right? So someone who's anxiously attached will have, for example, some of the behaviors we see. Sometimes it's not everyone, but you know they'll have, for example, some of the behaviors we see. Sometimes it's not everyone, but you know they'll sleep with you, they'll have sex with you, because what they really wanted was to spend the night cuddling in your bed, but they didn't know how to ask for that. So they'll have sex with you and hope that you allow them to stay the night, right, night Right. So a lot of the work that I do with folks is sort of unraveling some of this and the stories that they have in their head and their core wounds and teaching them how to put forth not only understanding their own needs, but how to ask for their own needs and how to communicate that and how to identify and lay down, you know, strong boundaries.

Speaker 1: 17:00

Now, people who are avoidant, the avoidance, are interesting. I will say this before we go any further the the people who are, uh, avoidantly attached and who are anxiously attached, tend to find each other in romantic partnerships, and I know there's lots of memes about this on the internet. Um, attachment styles are not gendered, which you know. It's not that women are this way and men are that way. They're not gendered. There are plenty of women who are avoidant or anxious and plenty of men who are anxious or avoidant, and it's about half and half in terms of who are, you know, who are actually securely attached as well. The internet loves to show the meme of the man who's avoidant and the woman is chasing after, the anxious woman is chasing after. That's one scenario, but it could easily be flipped as well. I've worked with plenty of men that were anxiously attached and who were, you know, in relationship or pursuing women who are avoidant, so it does go the other way.

Speaker 1: 18:02

So sex for an avoidant means something a little bit different. It's usually more about the physical. So we're talking. The anxious person really wants sex with the emotional and the closeness. The avoidant person is trying to avoid that level of intimacy, vulnerability. They still enjoy sex, the physical act of sex right, so they will engage in sex as, again, a physical act.

Speaker 1: 18:34

The relationship is secondary. Right, it feels good, it's great, let's do it. Typically, these are the people that it's done Okay, great, they leave your place. They don let's do it. Typically. These are the people that it's done Okay, great, they leave your place. They don't want to sleep over, they don't want to have pillow talk, you know, because that's the. They don't want to do anything that would increase the possibility of pair bonding with you. Yeah, right.

Speaker 1: 18:59

So because they really do experience discomfort with that level of closeness, they are the group that is at the highest, I would say risk. Maybe risk isn't the right word, but we'll say this group is generally the group that, for the most part, would be most interested in casual sexual relationships. They're far less interested in having one partner and mating with that partner. They typically what they do is they have a partner for a few weeks, a few months, and then they change partners. When things get to be a little bit too close they do. You know, one night stands suits them very well, anything that doesn't put them in a position where they feel that they have to be too vulnerable. Right, and so it's.

Speaker 1: 19:56

And what's interesting again is that, because a lot of times they're dealing with someone who is anxiously, you know, anxiously attached, the anxiously attached person. If, for example, you're in conflict the avoidant and the anxious person are in conflict the anxious person will likely, more than likely with a high degree, initiate sex as a form to repair the relationship and to feel that closeness, because for them, being in a conflict is so uncomfortable, you know, because in their mind, if we don't resolve this, you'll leave me. But the avoidance will actually shut down sexually, and the avoidance, typically, the way that they deal with this, is they deactivate, they move away from the relationship and they look for solace alone, and so they self-isolate. And so we see a lot of interesting behaviors on the sexual front too.

Speaker 1: 20:55

Whereas even if an avoidant is in a partnered relationship, often they still will, I would say, appreciate more or they'll choose solo sex. So, even if they're in a partnership, they'll choose masturbation because it's easier for them, right, it's like efficient, it's quick and I don't have to do pillow talk and I don't have to make sure that my partner's needs are being met, because really their focus is on okay, this is what I need in this situation, right? So, whereas the anxious person is not so good with boundaries, the avoidant person's very good at upholding their boundaries, right. So the avoidant person will say say, okay, come on over at 7, but by 8 30 I need you to be gone yeah, I believe it yeah, and and and, and you know 8, 29, they're walking into the door and they're like there are your shoes, right?

Speaker 1: 22:01

yeah, so you're not sleeping over. They don't. They don't want to wake up in the morning and have scrambled eggs with you. This is not, this is not typically who they are Now. This could change, right Again, they did they.

Speaker 1: 22:13

It wasn't modeled for them that emotional closeness when they were younger, right, so vulnerability feels unsafe to them, right? So of course we can. You know, when we talk about attachment styles, this is learned behavior, so we can, of course, unlearn and relearn this behavior, and that is again the work that we do. We take a look at some of these patterns and what once served you to survive in childhood might no longer be serving you, you know, as an adult. So you know we absolutely can undo some of that programming that makes you feel that getting too emotionally close to someone is unsafe. That might have been true if you were speaking about, for example, your parents, but you're no longer there, so we have to update. I call it the software, right? Our mind is like a software. It stores programs. We have to update. You know the iOS to say, okay, you are safe now and maybe you know we can try to allow a little bit of, you know, vulnerability, intimacy back into our lives.

Speaker 2: 23:28

Little bit of, you know, vulnerability, intimacy, back into our lives. Yeah, as I say, they say if you're with a secure person which of course we already talked about most of them are together, so it's harder to find them, but if you are with someone, you can. That can speed up your healing and unlearning. You know to be with someone who is more secure, but outside of that, is there a way that you found that works best to start unlearning all that stuff?

Speaker 1: 23:53

so, um, the first thing actually is just awareness, right. So people don't even realize that attachment styles are a thing. Um, people would like to believe that they've got all sorts of free agency of their mind, right, right. And when I say you know most of your mind, you're repeating patterns over and over and over, like most of what you do in the day is sort of on an autopilot, and that's actually patterns that are stored in the subconscious mind, so we're not aware of them. Our conscious mind impacts our emotions, our thoughts and our behavior at a very small percentage, like 3% to 5% Our conscious mind. So that's what we're aware of. So everything else, the bulk of it, is actually being driven by these programs that we have imprinted into our mind and are stored in our subconscious. So can we tap into our subconscious mind and actually change these programs? Yes, we can. It's done in a very specific way, essentially the same way that the programs were put there in the first place, which was through emotion and repetition. So something that you heard or you felt or you experienced or you saw repeatedly over time, that was attached to a strong emotion when you were young let's say you were three years old that would create an imprint, and so we use the same technique to create new imprints so that you can start to feel safe in different scenarios. So it's a very specialized field of work and it's quite effective. We could see these changes, you know, within a couple of weeks. It's like anything else, you know, and the body is very malleable, right. So it's like if you decide, okay, I want to get in shape and I want to put on, you know, five pounds of lean muscle mass, okay, great, you can do it. Right. There's lots of different ways that you can do it. Some ways are more effective than others, but you have to be realistic that it's going to take you a couple of months and you have to be consistent and committed, right. So you can't go every second Thursday and expect that you're going to see results. So the mind is the same way when I work with people. I go listen, give me a couple of weeks, but be committed, do the work and I promise you you'll see the changes. So, yeah, we absolutely can.

Speaker 1: 26:43

And oftentimes anxious people will work with me because they realize that it can be quite disruptive to their lives, because they are highly for the most part, they're usually highly emotionally dysregulated, which means that when something does trigger them, they feel their emotions in such a big way and it almost shuts them down, it overtakes them, right? So they can be at the middle of work and they get a text from their boyfriend and they don't like the tone of the text and all of a sudden they're sobbing, they're crying and the relationship is over and they've created a whole story. And so they tend to exaggerate right, Like the sky is falling. And so people who are anxious tend to realize that their thought patterns are not serving them well. Right, it's disruptive that their thought patterns are not serving them well. Right, it's disruptive Avoiding people.

Speaker 1: 27:32

It's harder for them to recognize that it's disruptive. They've built up such an armory of walls and they're like I have my peace, no one can get in, I'm not granting anyone access, all is fine. But they don't realize that what they're actually doing is not only are they repressing just the negative emotions, they're also repressing all of their positive emotions. You cannot just repress some and not others. And so if you're disconnected to that sense from your emotions, you're pushing everything down, you're keeping your walls up, you're keeping connection to a minimum, you're nowhere near experiencing life in the way that it was intended to be experienced Like. As humans, we're connected people, right, and sex is just part of that, and so oftentimes what will happen is that we'll see a partnership between someone who's avoidance and anxious and the person who's avoidance just really yearns for a deeper emotional connection that the avoidance simply doesn't know how to give. They don't know how to give. It's never been modeled for them, so that's where we could really help.

Speaker 2: 28:42

Okay, and speaking of that, how can people work with you if they want to? How do they reach you?

Speaker 1: 28:47

So it's not only myself. I am the founder of Securely Loved, but I have a number of practitioners that we work with both men and women, because I work with men and women and some women prefer to work with a man or some men prefer to work with whatever it is. You have a selection. Our website is securelylovedcom. We're also on Instagram at securely underscore loved, and we're also we're trying to launch our YouTube page. I have all this content that I that I put together for people free content and I'd love for people to start consuming it. That again, on YouTube is securely loved.

Speaker 2: 29:25

Okay, yeah, it's helpful to have them all be the same title.

Speaker 1: 29:30

That works out, yeah.

Speaker 2: 29:31

Yeah, all right. Well, are there any like last takeaway you want to offer before we wrap up?

Speaker 1: 29:37

You know, I always just remind people that again, attachment styles is, everyone has one. It's simply the way in which we form emotional bonds with others, like how we give and receive love, and it is learned, which means, you know, it's not a mental illness, it's not a disorder of any kind. It's learned behavior and, like every other piece of learned behavior, we can unlearn and relearn. So you absolutely can learn about your attachment style. And then if you decide, hey, I want deeper connections, or hey, I can see why this is causing a problem in my life, um, there is, there is help, and there are some really effective ways to be able to, to, um, channel new patterns into your subconscious so that that changes your emotions and ultimately your behavior.

Speaker 2: 30:31

Yeah, that's awesome. Yeah, this is really great. Thank you very much for this. I think people will learn a lot from it, especially how it relates to sex, because, from what I know as well, I would say it's very, very accurate, as you know.

Speaker 1: 30:43

Yeah, it is.

Speaker 2: 30:45

It's quite predictive. Yes, very much. All right. All right. Well, if you left this episode, be sure to tell your friends about it and rate it as well, and follow the show, of course, too, and check out securely loved on all the platforms she offers. All right, thanks again, bev. Thank you, all right. Thanks everyone. Frank talk, frank talk. Sex and dating educate.