Your Body Isn’t Overreacting; It’s Remembering What Childhood Taught It About Love

Your nervous system learned about love long before you had words. In this conversation, we follow that thread from early implicit memory to the patterns many of us feel in adult relationships—chasing, shutting down, or spinning between the two—and we unpack a kinder way forward. We explore the spectrum of attachment styles with clarity and nuance, showing how secure, anxious, avoidant, and disorganized patterns actually feel during conflict and what they signal beneath the surface.

We dig into why secure attachment isn’t the absence of disagreement but the presence of clear thinking, emotional range, and timely repair. For anxious responses, we talk about flooding, impulsivity, and the urge to pursue for relief. For avoidant responses, we name the quiet danger of numbness and faux self-sufficiency. When disorganization enters the room, we map the chaotic swings between fight, flight, freeze, and fawn, and we emphasize the need for pacing, safety, and often professional support to prevent harm and restore clarity.

Most importantly, we offer practical steps to widen your window of tolerance and rewire old rules through new experiences. Somatic reparenting becomes a simple, powerful tool: a steady hand, slower breath, and curious questions that help you hear what your younger self needs right now. From time-bound pauses that honor reconnection to concise repair language that lowers defensiveness, you’ll leave with grounded strategies to reduce resentment and build trust. If this resonates, subscribe, share the episode with someone who needs it, and leave a review to help others find the show. Your inner child is loved, accepted, and important—and you can learn to love in ways that feel safe to your body.

Looking to begin a conversation with your little one? Try these prompts:

“Sweet one… what’s going on?”
“Are you feeling small, unimportant, or unsafe right now?”
“Did someone hurt your feelings…
 or speak to you unkindly?”

Thank you for tuning into And Still WE Rise! If you would like to learn more about me or the work our practice is doing, feel free to follow us on Instagram at:

@atltherapygirl and @risetherapycenter

Or check us out at www.risetherapycenter.com

Disclaimer: And Still We Rise is meant to provide perspective and meaningful conversations around mental health topics. It is not meant to provide specific therapeutic advise to individuals. If anything in these podcasts resonates, ASWR recommends consulting with your individual therapist or seeking a referral from your primary care physician.

Chapters

• 0:00 Why Patterns Repeat In Love
• 0:26 Implicit Memory And Early Needs
• 2:38 The Spectrum Of Attachment
• 3:27 What Secure Attachment Looks Like
• 4:54 Anxious Attachment In Conflict
• 6:42 Avoidant Attachment And Numbing
• 8:14 Disorganized Attachment And Chaos
• 10:01 From Trigger To Clarity: Somatic Reparenting
• 11:07 Window Of Tolerance And Repair
• 12:16 Invitation To Heal And Connect

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:01

Hello and welcome to In Still We Rise. I'm your host, Christine Seidel. And today we're going to talk about why some of us have patterns of difficulties and dysfunction and relationships and how this may be our nervous system trying to draw our attention to childhood experiences that taught us not the healthiest ways to navigate relationships. So with that, let's take a deep breath and jump in. To begin, we have to talk about childhood experiences and implicit memory. So implicit memory is the nervous system's data gathering way of bringing in information and creating patterns from it. It's kind of the if-then statements that are kind of delved into our subconscious and creates these belief systems around a various amount of topics. Now, in childhood, aside from our very fundamental needs like safety, stability, food, shelter, all of those, we also have emotional needs. And these emotional needs have to be belief systems around our love, acceptance, valued, being important, being seen, being heard. And from the time we're in utero to the time we're about seven or eight, our nervous system is developing this implicit memory. It's making meaning, it's making connections around how to have our emotional needs met. So it's kind of like the if-then logic maker. If I cry, I am fed. If I am hurt, I am comforted. And it's creating these beliefs around connection with those that are our caregivers or that are available to meet our emotional needs. So when we have childhood experiences that develops into implicit memory that is somewhat dysregulated and difficult for us to navigate, we tend to have some of these patterns within relationships that become a little distorted and disruptive. So let's talk about how this comes about in terms of connection. So again, like I said, aside from food, shelter, we have this second need of belonging, having these emotional needs met. And again, we're talking about being loved, being accepted, being important and valued, being seen and heard. And those change to some degree between the time we're born and the time of seven or eight. You know, if you look at a three-year-old, they have different emotional needs than, say, an eight-year-old. So when it comes to our implicit memory and our connection, we tend to develop what we all have probably heard of, which are attachment styles. So let's look at the four different types of attachments. That's right. I said four. There's not just one. There are four different types of attachments. And this is where, you know, in my own therapeutic work, people become somewhat confused. They kind of say, well, I had this type of childhood, my parents weren't really there for me, but it wasn't that bad, right? So when we talk about attachment, we want to understand there is a spectrum of attachment that we can have. Not any one person falls specifically just within one of those four categories. We sometimes can run on a spectrum in between them and hoping to get as close to possible to more of a secure type. So we'll start with secure. Secure attachment is kind of the attachment we all want to try to work towards. But fundamentally, there really isn't a ton of people in this world that have a fully healthy secure attachment style. And secure attachment is developed when we have caregivers that really were emotionally available to attune and attend to our emotional needs. And that requires a caregiver to have a very conscious awareness of emotional availability to where a child is developmentally. So let's say a child falls and scrapes their knee, their, yeah, their knee. And that parent has the capacity and availability to sit with a crying child and comfort them. There is no, you know, frustration that they're projecting, there's no blame or shaming. They're just available to, you know, validate that that is painful and then attend to the knee. Or if a child is overwhelmed, the parent is available to be patient with the child and help them problem solve or understand what the child needs without being frustrated or irritated that the child is not solving their own problem. So secure attachment is when that parent has that emotional availability and maturity to be able to attune and attend to a child's needs throughout the different needs of their development. The next attachment is anxious attachment. Now, anxious attachment is when a child has a parent who is emotionally available to meet their needs sometimes, and then you guessed right, other times not. So this might be a parent who can handle these types of emotions, maybe when you are sad or scared, but if you were angry, they couldn't handle that. Or if you were excited and exuberant, that was too much. But if you were happy and compliant, that was just enough. And so this is a emotional availability to not really be succinct and you know stable in the range of a child's emotions. Now, the avoidant type tends to just be kind of that, very avoiding of any of the child's emotional needs andor kind of the of the the other needs as well. You know, maybe there was clothing and food on the table and a roof over your heads, but there was no real uh investment into the child's world. These tend to be caregivers that are very dismissive or uncomfortable with children. Uh, they may be unavailable or neglectful. They really just do not want to interact too much with the child's world. Now, the fourth one is called the disorganized attachment. And this becomes kind of this mixture. You sometimes hear it being called an anxious avoidant. And the disorganized attachment occurs when the child actually develops a sense of fear of the caregiver. And this does happen in cases of abuse and significant neglect. The child really does not know how to enter into a connection because it was just one, unavailable and two, exceptionally unsafe in childhood to be in connection with those caregivers. So when we look at those four types of attachment, and again, remember, we can fall on the spectrum. We may have anxious attachment, but really be working towards secure. And maybe we we've made some therapeutic work and we can find ourselves more in the secure, or maybe we've been avoidant and we've been working towards secure, but we have those moments of triggering and we see ourselves kind of turn into the withdrawal of the avoided. So we have to understand that we can do therapeutic work and move within this spectrum of secure through disorganized. You don't have to stay there. But we do want to become very consciously aware of how we experience this attachment within our intimate relationships. Because as adults, our family of origin and our relationship with our caregivers and our siblings really help shape our belief system and the neuropathways that we we fall into when we are seeking connection, when we are looking to not only be in a relationship, but have our emotional needs met within ourselves and with others, which is a human experience we need to have. And adult relationships, intimate relationships are a mirror of what our emotional needs, belief systems are. And that's where we tend to see our nervous system become dysregulated or becomes very difficult to navigate. So let's look at how our nervous system responds to disconnect or conflict within the body. Not so much our belief systems, but how our body responds to any type of disconnect when we are seeking our emotional needs being met within a relationship. The first one, we're going to come back to secure attachment. Now, secure attachment does not mean that you do not have conflict with other people. It does not mean you never go through disconnect with partners. What it means is that when you go into conflict or disagreement or disconnect, you are able to feel a spectrum of all of these feelings and yet not be reactive to those feelings. There's a really low level of impulsivity. You're able to think clearly, you can listen to other perspectives. And what that actually means is that you come to repair sooner. You're able to see perspectives. So you're able to come to a place of understanding. You can listen to other people, other people can listen to you if they have a secure attachment. And you come to repair sooner, you come up with solutions with a lot less harm and damage to the relationship. But what that means is that there's not this underlying resentment within the relationship. That's really what is harm and damage to relationship is a lot of resentment, meaning somewhere along the lines, we really didn't have resolution. So again, secure attachment is not about not having disagreements or conflict. It's that your ability to feel those feelings and to think clearly occurs, and you're able to move through the disconnect, through the disagreement or or conflict without any harm or damage to the relationship. Now let's move to anxious. Now, anxious attachment within the nervous system starts beginning to feel overwhelmed. We call it flooding. It starts being flooded with a with a range of fear hormones, or not hormones, but fear belief systems. It does spike your cortisol and adrenaline. However, what that means is that the nervous system is signaling, again, the nervous system like likes to signal through that fight, flight, freeze, or fawn belief system about how to address this disconnect, going all the way back to childhood, right? And the anxious attachment sees a situation where there's disconnect, disagreement, or conflict, and it wants to pursue, it wants to chase, it wants to um fight, it wants to try to come back into connection to be able to resolve this because it's flooded with this panicky feeling. It pursues, it chases, it fawns sometimes. And what it's really trying to do is get this external relief from the nervous system dysregulation. The nervous system feels panicky, it feels overwhelmed, it can't think clearly, it's exceptionally impulsive. This might be where you're like, I'm gonna send 15,000 text messages back to back to back trying to get a response from you, or I'm gonna call you, or I'm gonna drive by your house, I'm gonna try and get some response to get this resolved. And what that's saying is, I need you to make me feel better. It's this external seeking of regulation. Now, the next one is avoidant, and the avoidant goes into a nervous system that is very hypo vigilant, meaning it goes into this avoidant withdrawing, numbing out place. Now, this occurs again, same thing. If there's disconnect, disagreement, or you know, some type of conflict. And again, we when we talk about these things, we also have to like understand is this is this something we're perceiving or is this something that's that is actually happening? Is this in reality? We'll talk about that next. But what that avoidant attachment does is it wants to withdraw and avoid any interaction. Now, the the nervous system may not seem like it's having as significant of a response, but it's still a harmful response because the nervous system is disassociating, it's numbing out. There's a belief system of I don't need anyone, I'm fine without connection. And the nervous system is still not thinking clearly. It's avoiding feelings, it's withdrawing from feelings. And yes, this person can appear self-sufficient, yet is not meeting the fundamental needs of emotional needs within relationships. Now, the last one is the disorganized attachment. And I don't want this to sound like I'm hating on the disorganized attachment, but we do need to be very consciously aware of this attachment style because it can be very misleading and confusing. And that's what makes it so difficult to be in a relationship with. Now, remember, the disorganized attachment tends to come from a childhood that was unsafe in some way, shape, or form, whether that's through abuse or some significant neglect, those emotional needs were not met. And so the availability for these people to understand their emotional needs and communicate about them is very, very low. And so for somebody who is in a relationship with somebody with a disorganized attachment, you're gonna see a range of dysregulated nervous system responses. Anything from fight, flight, freeze, or fawn, all within the spectrum of one conflict, all within one disagreement. That can be, you know, maybe something was said and it was perceived the wrong the wrong way by the other person with the disorganized attachment. And all of a sudden there are accusations, and the other person withdraws and the disorganized pursues. And the person says something and they they flee. So this is where you get a lot of chaotic relationship dynamics play out. And this is where it is really, really important that if you see the signs of disorganized attachment, you find a way to remove yourself until there's an ability to have some type of clear conversation, whether it's with a therapist or with a third party, because there can be a lot of harm in this relationship. It can become very confusing. It can be become confusing to the person who has the disorganized attachment and for the person who may be in a relationship with them. And so there needs to be professional support when we're navigating that type of a detachment. And with therapeutic support, you can navigate through disorganized on your way to a secure attachment. So when you're in these states where your nervous system is actually either being flooded or whether it is numbing out and withdrawing, it is your nervous system's call back to listen to what that emotional unmet need actually is. And we want to talk about that from a realistic standpoint to a perceived standpoint. Part of the work is to come back to a place of grounding, check in with yourself. And one of my favorite ways is through somatic reparenting, where we actually put a gentle hand on ourselves. I'll put a link in my bio to this. There's another video that will pop up for you guys to watch how to do this. And it's a way to actually check in and find out what it is that your little self is feeling disrupted by. So whether that's your feelings are hurt or you didn't feel listened to, or maybe you're being judged, it's a way for your nervous system to regulate to a point where you're getting clarity as to what is disrupting it. And this might be something that the little one needs to address. Maybe there is a trigger and you know, something needs to be worked through. Maybe it's something individually that needs to be worked through. Or maybe your inner child is responding to something that really isn't appropriate from somebody else and needs the gentle guidance of that reparenting self to guide them to understanding. There are some gentle prompts at the end of this video. There is a link down in the description below. But this is really where the inner work begins, is in really understanding when your nervous system is dysregulated. If we look at Daniel Siegel's window of tolerance, we'll see that the window of tolerance really does, sorry about that, Sean, really does address where our nervous system finds itself. If we are anxious, we find ourselves hyperactive, overwhelmed, panicky, we can't think clearly. If we're in that avoidant, we're down here where we're just numbing out, we're disassociating, doom scrolling. Hello, anybody out there on social media, you know what I'm talking about. And we may not be actively dysregulated, meaning in an anxious state, but we are numbing out and we are avoiding what it is that needs to be addressed. And remember, that doesn't satisfy us. We're still seeking connection. And disorganized goes into the bounce back of anxious, avoidant, anxious, avoided, anxious, avoided. So what we seek is to really be in this secure attachment place where we are, we can be activated, but we can still experience all the feelings, think clearly, come to solutions, and eventually have a solid repair and reconnection within the relationship. But our nervous system is actually pointing us in the direction we need to go. And somatic reparenting is a place where we can get guidance as to what is that actual unmet need and how that inner parent, that inner adult, can guide you to receiving it. And again, a link in the bio. So I invite you, if this podcast or this video resonated with you, please go like, subscribe, and follow us. We love to be in this healing journey alongside you. And if as always, our inner child and your inner child are loved, they are accepted, and they are important. Thanks, and we'll see you guys next time. Bye for now.