Ep #35: The Ripple Effect of Becoming Securely Attached (It’s Bigger Than You Think)

Today, I’m pulling back the curtain on something I’ve seen time and time again in my own journey and in my clients’ lives: when you commit to healing your anxious attachment and developing secure attachment, the ripple effect is massive.

This transformation isn’t just about dating or finding “the one.” It shifts your friendships, your career, your self-worth, your hobbies, your boundaries – literally your entire life opens up.

In this episode, you’ll hear:
- Why anxious attachment keeps you stuck in cycles of chasing, overgiving, and abandoning yourself
- How becoming secure gives you back time, energy, and emotional space to thrive in other areas of life
- Real-life examples of what changes when you stop shrinking and start valuing yourself
- The questions you need to be asking if you’re ready to create a life and love that feel deeply aligned
- How self-regulation, self-trust, and authenticity make you magnetic to the right people and opportunities

If you’ve ever thought, “This is just how it is for me in love,” I want you to leave this episode realizing that your patterns are not your destiny. Becoming secure doesn’t just give you better relationships – it gives you a better life.

And if you’re ready to do this work in a guided, powerful, proven way, my 10-week group program Peacefully Attached is enrolling now. This is your chance to finally become the secure, grounded, magnetic version of yourself you’ve always known was in there.

👉 Apply for Peacefully Attached HERE!

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Transcript

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You are listening to the Secure Love Club podcast. I'm your host, Mimi Watt. Hey friends. Welcome back to the Club. How are you doing today? How are you? I hope you're well. I hope you're smiling. Hope you're having a beautiful day. I just, before I went to hit record, I said, wait, let me go and check what date this is airing. And to my pleasant surprise, this episode is airing on my birthday. So if you are listening to this on Tuesday, the 23rd of September. Happy birthday to me. I am in Sydney with my family. Fun fact, my dad and I actually have the same birthday, so his nickname for me is my twin. Um, so we're very close and it's, it's our birthday and it's a big birthday for him. It is his 70th birthday and we are having a party for him. So. Actually, as you're listening to this, the party will have come and gone, and I'm sure we had a great time, but it is, it's a special birthday for him and I'm so excited to be with my family and be with him and celebrate, actually find it to be a really beautiful point of connection for him and I to be able to celebrate our birthday together every year. But enough about that, um, today is about you and I want to talk to you today. About how developing your secure attachment in the area of romantic relationships has such a powerful ripple effect into the rest of your life. When I say developing secure attachment, I say that because that's really what it is. When you grow up with a anxious attachment style that is embedded into your nervous system, right? It's part of your conditioning for whatever reason, whatever your experience and journey was growing up, that really is our default and we never truly. Fully get rid of our anxious attachment. I always believe there's gonna be that little anxious attachment gremlin that lives inside of us. It's always gonna be there to some degree, but as you work to earn or develop. Your secure attachment style, that anxious attachment gremlin becomes smaller and smaller and smaller and has much less power over you over time, and you build a much stronger relationship with yourself so that when it tries to, you know, rear its ugly head, you're able to catch it much quicker and work with that part of yourself to self-soothe and come back to a grounded state so that you can go on to. Show up as your best self in your relationships or in other areas of your life. And I was reflecting on this this morning and yesterday, and I thought I wanted to talk about it because so many of the women that I work with are just really incredible ambitious women. Like they have big dreams for themselves. They're already doing great things in their life, and. What's really important to them, and maybe you are. One of them is they're at a stage in their life where they're really prioritizing the people and the things that bring a sense of peace and calm to their everyday life. They wanna make decisions that are gonna serve their mind, body, and soul, and I'm so about that. I'm fucking about that. I want you to live. The most abundant, grounded, fulfilling, satisfying, exciting life as you possibly can. I want that for all of us, and when I was reflecting back on my personal journey, I could really see this. Thread, if you will, that is kind of like the through line that has connected a lot of the most amazing experiences in my life in the last five years and the most amazing relationships that I've developed both romantically and platonically. The through line in all of that really has been. Working to heal my anxious attachment, and at the same time developing my secure attachment style. So I want to talk to you today about what that looks like and why that is the case, so that you can begin reflecting for yourself on your life and start to realize that earning your secure attachment isn't only gonna benefit you in your romantic relationships. It has a powerful ripple effect into the rest of your life because how you do one thing is how you do everything and how you show up in your romantic relationships is going to have a direct reflection on how you show up in your relationship with your family, with your friends, and most importantly with yourself. So I'm excited for today's episode. It's gonna be interesting. It's gonna be juicy. I'm gonna share some personal stories, some client stories, and my hopes for you is that you come out on the other side feeling even more hopeful, invigorated and fucking pumped to develop your secure attachment. Alright, my friends, let's dive in. I wanna kick off by sharing something that. I once heard from a mentor of mine, and this is a mentor that I've never worked with directly, but she is huge in the life coaching world and she's been a mentor that I've looked up to for the last five, six years, and she's the reason that I got into coaching. Her name's Brooke Castillo and she has an amazing podcast called The Life Coach School Podcast, and she did this episode once where she was. It was an interview with someone else. I can't remember who, but she said, just imagine for a moment, if we put us on a scale of one to 10, where you think your life is at right now in terms of one is it's shit. I hate it. Everything sucks, essentially. And 10 is we are thriving, we are firing on all cylinders. Life couldn't be better. Okay. And so if you feel, let's say I said, okay, I think my life is a seven or an eight. She said, okay, now I want you to imagine that your seven or eight is actually a two or a three, and all of a sudden you realize that, holy shit, if my life as I know it today was an eight. No, sorry. If my life as I know it today was actually a two out of 10, not an eight out of 10, then what does that mean for how much better life could get? How much better my relationships could be? How much more success I could have in my life. How much more happiness and day-to-day fulfillment and joy could I have if all of a sudden I was at a two out of 10 and things were already feeling pretty good. And this was such an eyeopener and such an expander when I heard it, because we have a tendency as human beings in general to get comfortable in our lives. We get comfortable with the friends that we have and the the dynamics we have with family, with the routines we have on a day-to-day basis and a week to week basis. We can get really comfortable and that's okay. It's part of our nature, but there's not that many times where we actually stop and really begin to question, is this as good as it gets? Can it get. So much better. And we need to be asking ourselves questions like this that get us thinking on levels that we have not thought of before. And then another question that comes up is this, if you could wake up tomorrow and everything could be different, what would be different? Right. I'm gonna say that again. If you woke up tomorrow and everything in your life could be different, what would be different? This is a powerful question because it gets you to stop and again, reflect on your life as you know it and say, well, if things could be different, could be, so we're removing the. Self-imposed limitations that we place on our mind of what's possible. If it could be, what would be different. And I want you to reflect on that for a moment. Now, would your living environment change? Would you wanna live somewhere else completely different? Would your friendship circle stay the same or, or if you could have something different, what would your friendships look like? If you could have. A different romantic relationship. What would that look like? If you could have a better relationship with yourself, maybe different hobbies, different interests, the way you spend time with yourself, how present you are with yourself, what would that look like? And so I just wanna really get you to crack the hood in your own mind, in your own being for the way you're showing up for yourself. And ask like, is this as good as it gets? Or could it be so much better? And this brings me to the priority that I know is in your life of developing your secure attachment in relationships. The reason why this is such a powerful through line in impacting all other areas of your life is because when we are anxiously attached, we can get hyper fixated on needing other people or another person to make us feel okay. To feel grounded and safe and reassured and validated. And I'm not saying that that's a bad thing to want or need that from other people. It's, it's a normal part of relationships. But when you are in the place of anxious attachment and you are stuck in a perpetuating cycle of attracting people who are emotionally unavailable and avoidant, who cannot meet your needs. Who give you just enough attention to keep you hanging on your nervous system is hooked into these people because you have conditioning that says, I need to win this person's approval and love and validation because your nervous system stay with me, thinks that that person is essentially your parent. Because that's where our anxious attachment style grew is. We didn't get the love or consistency or emotional support in the way we needed it when we were children. Maybe we got some, we got just enough to survive, but there was a void. And so when we don't heal our anxious attachment wounds, we carry that void, if you will, with us into our adulthood. Into our romantic relationships and the the parent figure just gets replaced with a romantic partner because it's our closest source of attachment. And so when you are in that place of still trying to fill that void through another person, you don't have the mental space or emotional capacity to be present in your own damn life. I want you to let that land for a second and think about a situationship, or maybe it's a relationship you're currently in where you are the anxious person and they're the avoidant, and think about how much fucking time, energy, emotion that that relationship takes up in your life. Now think about if that was no longer the case, if you didn't have that huge void internally that you believed only another person could fill, if you didn't have that anymore and that void was now filled up by your own ability to give yourself the love, reassurance, validation that you are craving now you have all of this time. Energy, mental capacity and emotional resources to invest in other things. You with me? Are you seeing the pattern here of what I'm talking about? Another question to ask yourself if I wasn't anxiously attached, if I didn't have this identity. Of being the person who is quote unquote too much, who would I be or better yet, who could I be? Who could I be? I want you to play with the possibility for a moment because let me tell you, when I began to heal my anxious attachment style, this rippled into every area of my life. For example, it was not until I finally walked away from the last, you know, toxic relationship of heavily anxious, heavily ab avoidant dynamic that I finally took myself seriously enough to get my business going. It was not until that point that I realized. That certain friendships that I'd had for a very long time no longer aligned. I realized at that point that I didn't have any fucking hobbies and I needed to get some hobbies to fill up all of this spare time that I now had, all of this energy that I had. I realized that I was actually craving more presence with myself. A relationship with myself, and so I started learning how to do that. It was wild. I'm telling you. All these things just started to become clear and I could see things in a new light for the first time in my life because I had made an internal declaration to myself, an internal decision to commit with everything that I had. With all of the tools and support and guidance that was accessible to me to give this everything I had to developing my secure attachment, because I decided I'm not fucking going back. I'm not going back into another relationship that felt like that, where I felt like a shell of myself and like I couldn't focus at work. I couldn't be present in my friendships. I avoided my family. Because I was obsessed with needing to feel in control in a relationship where I never felt in control. So thinking about your life, where could you be investing your time and energy in your life if you weren't? Constantly getting hyper fixated on people who aren't a good match for you, for people who trigger you and activate you to the point where you cannot function properly on a day-to-day basis. Another fascinating realization I had when I, as I was developing my secure attachment, was the realization that I'm actually a really interesting, cool person. And that's not to sound egotistic, it's just what happened. I realized that holy shit, for so long I have just been, I've been downplaying my needs so much. I've been making myself so fucking small to make my partners comfortable and secure the connection at all costs that I've just been really not giving myself an opportunity to shine. Or to even see who I really am as my authentic self, because that's, I'm sorry there's a lot of layers to this podcast, but just stay with me. That's another thing is we don't access our true authenticity when we're in these anxious and avoidant relationships because we shape shift and we morph into who we think our partner wants us to be in order to love, to be loved, to feel attractive, to feel worthy. So it was like in every relationship, I just became a version of myself. I didn't fully recognize because I was becoming a chameleon based on what my partner at the time was into, or what I thought they were attracted to. And so when I finally decided to break the pattern, I. Got this incredible opportunity to meet myself for what felt like the first time in my adult life. And I wonder if this is an experience for you too, of maybe you've had partners who didn't like certain parts of your personality when they began to shine through. Like maybe you are really intelligent and you love to have intellectually stimulating conversations. Or maybe you are really competitive in sport and athletics and your partner doesn't like that, or your partner tells you that you're too much to have to wanna have these deep intellectual conversations all the time. Or maybe this was one for me. You have a certain dress sense and a certain style where you feel like your most confident self. So for me it's oversized, baggy clothes. I love that style. But your partner doesn't like that because they'd rather see you in more form fitting clothes. And so you start to dilute your personality and you start to change all these parts of yourself, which then erodes your self-esteem and self-confidence and connection to yourself. So allowing yourself to stay in these patterns and the, with these types of partners, it is not just. That it's affecting how you feel in a romantic relationship. It has such a big flow on effect to everything in your life. Now when I, as I said, so when I moved away from this connection, I started to uncover that, yeah, I'm an interesting person. I've got shit to say. I got passions and interests, and that's when I started to take my business seriously, and I gave it everything I had and it opened up this. Whole new part of my world that I got to give and receive from every day, like it truly gave me such a sense of purpose that I had never felt before in my life. I then, because I wasn't dating or because I was not so consumed by people who I had to fucking chase, I had all this extra time for myself. And so that was when I began to pick up new hobbies and I put myself out there with surfing and I went and posted in a Facebook group and I met these amazing women in a girl's group of surfers, and I went and met these people and that opened up a whole new part of my world. I ended up slowly over time, removing myself from friendships that I didn't feel seen in anymore. I, I had been friends with people from high school and at, at a certain time in my life, those friendships served me, but as I was finding my authentic self and going through this like dark night of the soul experience, I began to realize that when I was hanging out with them, I didn't have anything in common anymore, and I didn't feel seen for who I truly was. I didn't feel. Respected. Even a lot of the time I would constantly be spoken over. I found myself always being the one to try and initiate Catchups, but it wasn't reciprocated, so I was always chasing there. Okay, so you're seeing the link. So then when I started to become securely attached to myself and not feeling a desire to chase partners, I also started to have no desire to chase friendships because I began to value myself on such a new level with so much. Uh, such a high value that my natural default became well, I only wanna spend time with people who wanna spend time with me, who match the energy and effort I'm gonna put into them. And if that's not there, I'm not interested because my time is valuable. My worth as a person is highly valuable and the way that I treat myself teaches other people how to treat me. So I want you to think about that for yourself as well. Where in your life and what other relationships are your friendships or family or coworkers or whatever, where are you overgiving? Where are you abandoning yourself to appease other people? And if you were to stop making an effort, what friendships would fall away? That is a very insightful question to ask yourself. I'm sure there's a few people you can think of in your life where if you stopped making an effort, you probably wouldn't hear from that person again, because guess what? You are the one who's always making the fucking effort. As your self-worth increases, you'll also begin to shift the DY dynamics you have with some family members. You'll begin to set more boundaries to protect your peace and your energy to be able to give to people. Only when you actually have capacity to give and support, not just as soon as someone calls on you and needs you. You become protective over your time and your energy, and you know what happens. Yes, initially some people might not like that you are setting boundaries because all of a sudden they don't have unlimited access to you and they don't like that. But over time, again, as they see you treating yourself in this new way, the people who value you enough to state to want you in their life will start to respect you. They will start to respect your boundaries because they realize they don't have a choice. If they want you in their life, they're gonna have to respect boundaries. And so that's what happens. And so when you develop your relationship with yourself, it becomes this natural filtration system in your life. It's like people who don't like that you are now someone with boundaries, someone who speaks her mind. If they don't like it, they're gonna fall away or they're gonna rise to meet you there. So really take this away. Like when it comes to other relationships, take away the message that you teach other people how to treat you by the way you treat yourself. So if you are always attempting to set boundaries, but then you just let people walk all over them all the time, you're teaching them that, that's okay. If you have an inkling or an urge to need to speak up about something because it doesn't sit well with you, but you don't, people are going to not give you the time of day to speak your mind, so they're not gonna take you seriously'cause you're not taking yourself seriously. What really happens when you develop your secure attachment? Is your life begins to fall into alignment in a way it never has before because number one, you get present with yourself enough to recognize what's out of alignment. Okay? When we are in the throes of our anxious attachment, we are pretty much chronically dysregulated, meaning we're in a state of fight or flight or freeze, and. We're always trying to find some sort of quick fix to feel better. And when we are dysregulated, so in a heightened emotional state, we can't think clearly about what's going on in our life. We're not calm and grounded and present with our own mind. And when you're in that place, you, you can't really feel what is out of alignment. But when you become more grounded and secure. And you come back to a regulated place and your emotions are no longer running the show, but you are running them. You are in control. You can get quiet and still and find safety in that stillness with yourself. And when you do that, incredible things begin to happen. You have ideas. And inspiration and thoughts and downloads and drop-ins as I like to call them, that come into your mind, that tell you or show you what's next. They show you where your natural, uh, intuition naturally wants you to go. Your subconscious can pick up on things around you of like, yes, this is for you, or, no, this is not for you. And you start to follow those urges, those natural inclinations that come up for you. And when you follow those feelings, you'll start to find things and people that are in alignment with who you are becoming. It's just what happens. I can hardly explain it, but I promise you this is what begins to happen. And when your life falls into alignment and the people and things and situations that are not aligned with you, fall away. That's when life gets really magical. I remember when I had a download. When I first, when I kind of, it was when I got first into relationship coaching. I moved out of life coaching. This was a few years ago, and I started to specialize in relationship coaching. And at this time my community and business was still quite small. Like I think my Instagram following was a few thousand. And I was at home working one day and I was having a moment where I was feeling a bit anxious. I can't even remember why, but. I was feeling a bit anxious, and so I sat on my bed and I started to self-regulate. So I started to use some of the breathing tools, uh, to help myself move through the feeling of anxiety. So this is what we are doing, is we are secure. We know how to manage our emotions with ourselves so that we're not needing to clinging to other people to feel better. So I'm sitting there, I am like practicing what I preach. I'm self-regulating. I'm breathing, I'm hugging myself, and I just decided to film it. It was really spur of the moment. I said, you know what? I'm just gonna put my phone in front of me while I do this and just film it because I wanna show people what this looks like in real time. And I filmed it. I put together a reel for Instagram saying, I was talking about when you're single and you don't have that designated person to run to for, um, support or comfort, you've gotta be your own greatest source of comfort and. That reel went mega viral, and I think I gained like 30 or 50,000 followers over the coming few months from that catalyst. It was wild. And from there, my business and community have just continued to grow and grow and grow. Why? Because I'm in alignment. Because I'm doing exactly what I'm supposed to be doing. It feels so natural and so right, but also because I was present with myself, I was regulating my emotions. And then look what happened. Now, I'm not saying that you have to be a relationship coach, or you have to film yourself and put on Instagram for your life to open up or to build, but I am saying that when you are present with yourself, when you self-soothe, when you can be calm and grounded internally, amazing things can happen. Amazing sources of inspiration can drop in. Another example was when I was at a crossroads with my living environment, um, a bit over a year ago, and I needed to make a decision on where I was gonna move to. And someone, a good friend of mine, you may have heard me tell this story, suggested to me, why don't you move to Bali? Because I was already going there for a fitness retreat and she said, you don't need to be here. You've got your business. You can go work from anywhere. Like why don't you go have that adventure? And had I not been in a grounded state to properly hear that and absorb that and have a clear internal channel where my intuition and I could connect with each other, I may have just immediately shut down that suggestion. But I didn't. I heard it. I thought about it. I asked my intuition. I listened tuned into my body, and for some reason it felt right. It felt like it aligned, and so I trusted it because that's the other thing. The other really cool thing that happens when you develop your secure attachment is you start to build this radical self trust. You start to be able to rely on yourself to know what's best for you. It's the greatest gift you can give yourself. And so I trusted that feeling and I followed it, and I moved to Bali within five weeks of making that decision, having never been there before, might I add? And it turned out to be one of the best decisions of my life. It was an amazing experience. I got to know myself on such deep levels. I met amazing people. It opened up my world and my eyes. And so that was another, just another really cool experience that comes from developing your secure attachment. And honestly, I could go on and fucking on about the flow and effect that this transformation has in your life. But I think you're starting to get the picture. So I want you from this episode to. Look at your life from a new perspective, and if the life you're living today is an eight out of 10, what if it was a two? How much better could your life get? How much better could it be? If you finally decided to take your greatest source of pain and struggle, which is being stuck in these perpetual patterns of toxic relationships, and you decided to prioritize that in position number one in your life, and gave yourself the chance to see how good life can get when you are secure. You are grounded, you are magnetic to the right people and opportunities in your life. If you are ready to prioritize this, I want to invite you to join peacefully Attached. We are in the final week of applications and enrollment for our October round, which is beginning very soon, on Monday the 6th of October. Peacefully attached. Is where your journey of becoming your most secure self takes place. I can't tell you the number of women who have come through this program as one version of themselves when they enter, usually a woman who is successful, ambitious, driven, passionate, emotionally intelligent, heart led, but also stuck in patterns of anxious and avoidant relationships. Chasing the wrong people when they pull away feeling a lack of self-confidence in relationships and really just craving to be in that place where she can attract and be magnetic to a secure, loving partner who wants what she wants, who wants that committed partnership for life, someone who she can potentially build a family with. And the number of women I have seen. Go through this program and come out the other side as that version of themselves is countless. I've seen enough people have these results that I know that this shit works. Not only that I have lived it, I am a living, breathing example of what the work inside this program leads to, the results it creates. And I would love to take you through your personal transformation. Inside this program, so we kick off on Monday the 6th of October. This is a 10 week immersion. It is a group program where you'll be guided by me step by step every single week as we move through the program, and you will also be surrounded by a group of amazing. Like-minded women who will be there cheering you on every step of the way, and honestly become like a new family for you, a new sisterhood who are gonna help hold you to that higher standard that I know you are calling in. So if that is feeling like a fuck yes for you. Or it's like, oh my God, this is like a 90%. Yes, my intuition is pulling me towards this, but a little bit of fear is coming up. That's okay. That often means that this is the right thing, and that often means that on the other side of that decision, the most amazing expansive transformation is going to take place when you feel that blend of excitement and buzzing, but also a little bit of fear mixed in, you know, it's the good shit. So I'm gonna leave the link for the application. In the show notes below. If you have some questions or you just wanna have a bit of a conversation with me before applying, then jump over to Instagram, send me a DM, and I'll be more than happy to answer any questions that you have. I'm so excited to work with you and to continue connecting with you in my community. Thank you for being here, my friends. Thank you for listening. Have a beautiful week and I'll talk to you soon. Bye-bye. If you enjoyed today's episode, hit that subscribe button and leave a review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. Share this episode with your friends and come find me on social so we can hang out between episodes. All the links are below in the show notes.