Ep #58: Feeling Confident in Every Area… Except Relationships

This episode is for the high-achieving, self-aware woman who feels grounded and powerful in every part of her life, except when it comes to dating. You’re decisive in your career, clear in your friendships, aligned in your lifestyle… but the moment you start liking someone, everything feels foggy.

Inspired by a powerful question from a client inside Peacefully Attached, I’m breaking down why your intuition can feel sharp everywhere else but suddenly “go offline” in romantic relationships. We talk about what’s actually happening beneath the surface, how attachment wounds override your instincts, and why protecting connection often becomes more important than protecting yourself.

If you’ve ever wondered, “Why can I trust myself everywhere else… but not in love?” — this one’s for you.

In this episode, you’ll learn:
• Why romantic relationships activate your nervous system more than any other area of life
• How anxious attachment can override your intuition and turn “Is this aligned?” into “How do I not lose this?”
• The subtle ways you may be self-abandoning to preserve connection
• Why boundaries feel threatening in dating and how to make them feel safe
• Practical steps to rebuild self-trust in love (without just telling yourself to “be more confident”)

🎧 Tune in now! And if this episode resonates, send me a DM on Instagram—I’d love to hear your thoughts!

Check out Peacefully Attached HERE

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Transcript

2:44

You are listening to the Secure Love Club podcast. I'm your host, Mimi. What. Hey friends. Welcome back to the Club. I hope you're having a beautiful day. Today's episode is. Inspired by a question that one of my beautiful clients inside peacefully attached, brought to the table today. And this woman is amazing as as you all are. As they all are. But she is a go-getter. She's driven like she's the founder of a startup. She loves to travel, she has amazing friends. She's absolutely thriving. But when it comes to dating, that's where she's struggling she's finding it hard to maintain boundaries. She's finding it hard to trust herself and those intuitive nudges that come through, you know that feeling when you're like, is that my gut instinct? Is that intuition? Am I overthinking it? I don't know. Like, is this what I really want? Is it not? And the whole situation just can get really foggy and confusing and. You're not alone if you feel like this, If your intuition is sharp in your friendships, your career, your lifestyle, but then it suddenly goes offline in dating, or when you feel chemistry with someone and you have that spark and it's all exciting, but maybe there's a few red flags sprinkled in there and. There's that little voice in the back of your head that's telling you, Hey, maybe this is dodgy. Maybe this is repeating my pattern, but you don't listen to it either because you're unsure or you're just afraid, of having to give up that connection. So I want to talk to you if you are in this boat today, because. Honestly, so many people in my community are like this. You are the woman who is self-aware. You journal, you work out, you prioritize your health, you eat well. You have standards, you have boundaries. In a lot of areas, but one, okay, you stand up for yourself at work. You don't tolerate pettiness or high school bullshit with your friends. You're above that shit, okay? You have moved on from that, but in dating, it's foggy. You're feeling unsure. You're second guessing. You're overriding your natural primal instinct. Your most. Precious internal compass that is trying to direct you into your higher self, and it's frustrating. And the thing I want to say straight off the bat is that this sense of confusion that you're experiencing, most of the time it is actually just activation. So activation in your nervous system, fear coming online, that is masking itself as confusion. So in today's episode, I want to really just demystify this whole situation and talk about why this is happening because. Like my client, and maybe like yourself, there can be a lot of confusion around why the fuck is this happening? Why is it that I can be one person in all these areas of my life? But then as soon as I step into dating, I feel like I'm a completely different person and my confidence seems to get a bit wobbly. I can't trust myself. I'm not setting or maintaining boundaries. And basically it's not a fun time. Let's dive into why this is happening and how you can start to uncover the reasons where this is really showing up for you and what you can do to begin to shift the narrative so that in dating you can feel as confident, grounded, and composed and secure as you do in every other area of your life. Because honestly. We don't have time to be second guessing ourselves and feeling unsure and wasting our time with the wrong people. Oh, so with that being said, let's dive in. Romantic relationships are arguably the most vulnerable and exposing. Dynamics that you will encounter in your life because romantic relationships activate your attachment wounds. Yes, they trigger the primal need that we all have to be chosen and loved and kept seen and safe. And so because of that, they expose our fear of rejection. Our fear of abandonment. All of the stories we have about not being enough or being too much. You know what I'm talking about? All the shit that comes up when we start dating someone, when we, especially when we meet someone that we really like or that we think we might really like or we can potentially see a future with. Even though the emotion of rejection is just one thing. I do believe it is context dependent because a rejection in your career or in your workplace, yeah, it's gonna sting, it's gonna have an impact, but it's not the same as a romantic rejection. And so the fear or how we handle rejection, let's just say in these two different settings does feel quite different. Because a fail, a failure or a rejection in your job or in your business, yes, it's hard, but it doesn't hit the nervous system the same way that perceived abandonment does. Okay? So it's not that you are any less secure of a person when you are dating. You're just more activated. It really does feel like on a primal level that there is so much more on the line. I have conversations like this all the time and I see it all the time. One of my good friends she's someone who is extremely confident, very self-assured, has high self-worth, is an absolute go-getter in life, but. She has areas for growth in relationships and, has shared with me at times, she's like, this is so triggering, this is so fucking scary. And it's, it's challenging and I completely understand where she's coming from because you are, when you meet someone you like, it's going to bring up stuff. Maybe is unhealed. Like poking at a wound that has been lying dormant, but then you start dating someone and someone starts poking at that wound and it's like, oh fuck, that fucking hurts. Or your fears come to the surface, those fears of, I'm gonna be hurt again. I'm gonna be rejected and left and abandoned. And when we are having those fears of pain and rejection in a relationship sense, it's really scary because we are relational beings. We are dependent on our relationships for survival. And as we become adults and we are working with and talking about romantic relationships, when you are. Coming from a lens of anxious attachment, which I know a lot of my listeners are, that need is magnified by about a thousand because we are already operating from a deficit of having those emotional needs not being met. Yeah, not being met from childhood experiences. That's why we have the anxious attachment in the first place because we have conditioning that tells us that love is hard to attain, or we might get it, but it's gonna be scarce and we're gonna have to fight like hell and grip and cling to hold onto it. So of course, of course, when you enter the dating arena. You're gonna start to feel a bit on edge. You are gonna start to feel scared, wobbly, because you know what is potentially about to happen based on past experiences. Because remember, our brain is always looking for evidence from what we've already experienced so that it can project it onto the future or the situation you're about to enter because that is your brain's way of creating some semblance of familiarity and therefore safety. So when we are using our past experiences as a prediction of what's going to happen moving forward. Yeah, you're gonna start to, you're gonna start to be a little bit afraid, a little bit on edge. When you have that primal need that is really driving things of I need love and I need connection, I want validation. I need to be chosen because of that deficit that I just mentioned. That's when things start to. Go wrong. This is when your attachment begins to override your intuition. So what's actually happening internally is instead of asking yourself, okay, is this aligned? It becomes, how do I not lose this? You see the difference is this aligned, which is coming from a very grounded, empowered, I'm making a conscious choice if this is for me or not. Versus how do I not lose this? It's a scarcity energy. We are gripping, we are not feeling grounded. There another example, instead of do I like them, it becomes, do they like me? So again, instead of coming from a lens of you are grounded, you are secure, you are assessing the other person to. See if you like them, if they could be potentially a good match for you, if you're interested in getting to know them more and giving them more of your time and attention and energy. It becomes, do they like me? We're dipping back into that scarcity energy because there's this underlying need to try and control the outcome. And that's not your fault, that's just a result. Of experiences when your attachment system was developed as a child, what happens, and you've heard me say this time and time again, but I will say it again because sometimes we need to really hear things multiple times in order for them to land when we are. Abe, when we are children, we really can't distinguish and tell the difference between when there is. A disconnect. When there's a disconnect between yourself and your parents, meaning, for example, you are upset, you're emotional, and in that moment you really need your parents' attention and soothing and love. But instead, they tell you to go to your room, they shut you down, and they're all stressed and they can't deal with you. Now, as an adult, you could look at that situation and easily. See that it's not that the child is doing anything wrong. It's not that that child is too much or too emotional. They are just being a fricking human being who is not of the age yet, where they know how to soothe themselves or manage their emotions or even understand what the fuck is going on. It's not that they're the problem. It's that the adult at that moment in time doesn't have the capacity to meet the child's emotional needs, does not have the capacity or the knowhow, because there are a lot of people on this earth that are parents who actually don't have the. Awareness or tools to know how to properly validate emotional experiences in other people and hold space for them. So maybe the parent, yeah. Can't do that. And in that moment, even though we can see what's actually going on, the child can't. So you internalize that lack of connection and love to be about you. You must be the problem. So then as children, we begin to do anything we can. To fix that connection, to get that love to come back close to us. So we start self abandoning. We stop thinking that what we need actually matters, and we become really, really good at reading our parent to assess what is their mood, how are they feeling? What can I do to make sure I don't make them angry? What did I do last time? Got praise and got their attention and their love. Let me do that again. So we start morphing ourselves and this happens. This is exactly what continues to happen in adult relationships. So you start morphing yourself to stay liked. Maybe that means you are not speaking up when there's something you actually really want to say that's important to you. Maybe it's changing your physical appearance. You're dressing in a certain way to keep their attention or to be what you think that they think is attractive. This is when you start softening your boundaries. You start ignoring red flags. You start confusing chemistry with compatibility, and you call anxiety. Butterflies. You just tell yourself, no, no, no. This is normal. This fluttery feeling in my stomach, this tightness in my chest. This is normal. This is just what happens in relationships. So your gut instinct is still actually speaking to you. It doesn't disappear. But what happens is that your fear starts to get louder. And let's examine the difference here between the different, uh, contexts or situations. So if you are at work and a coworker disrespects you, what are you gonna do? You're probably gonna walk away. You're probably gonna not be around that person if a friendship starts to feel misaligned. So if your values, you're noticing that your values aren't really aligning anymore, you're going to slowly start to distance yourself from that person. But in dating, setting a boundary can feel really threatening to the entire connection. And when. Connection feels scarce. Your boundaries feel dangerous. Remember, when you have the anxious attachment system, your number one priority, which this is usually happening on a subconscious level or on a somatic level in the body, your number one priority is protect the connection at all costs. Because you haven't yet created the sense of internal safety of knowing that actually we are safe. Actually we don't need this person in order to feel safe.'cause it always comes back down so that it always comes back down to safety. Because it doesn't have that, your body thinks like, no, no, no. I need to maintain this connection no matter what. And so this is where the self abandonment creeps in. In any other situation, you're probably gonna stand really firm and your boundaries and you're gonna back yourself and you're gonna say, no, no, no. This is what I said. This is the situation. And you trust yourself fully, maybe it's a work setting or if it's a friendship, you can more confidently say, Hey, we, we aren't aligning here. I can see that, you are moving in this direction and I'm moving in this direction. And yeah, it, it sucks that it's not working out anymore, but this is how it is. However, in dating, the self abandonment comes in, like I said, and this is where you start to say things to yourself like. Oh, maybe I'm overreacting. Oh, it's still too early to tell. I, I don't know. Or, mm, I just don't wanna be too much. Or there's a red flag. It's like, oh, let's just see. It'll probably go away. Or I can make that goal away. Or, oh, I know what this is. I've dealt with this before. I can manage this. It is sounding familiar, no shame if it is because trust me. I have been there, I have done all the things. I have self abandoned in every way possible, every shape, way, form, so I get it. But what's happening here is you are protecting the connection more than you are protecting yourself. I just want you to notice for a moment how this feels for you and your body when you. Think about this type of situation. If you are resonating with, if you're still here listening, I'm guessing you're resonating. So in these situations, when you start dating someone you like and you can tell that you are letting your boundaries slide a little bit, you're not doing the things you said you or you promised yourself you were going to do, and you're not really feeling that. Assured or emotionally safe in this new dynamic because the person you're dating is a bit flaky, a bit inconsistent, they're stringing you along. You don't really know where you stand, something you know that resembles that sort of situation. How does that feel for you? My guess is that it doesn't feel very good. I'm guessing that it makes you feel a bit sick in your stomach. You feel anxiety in your chest. Maybe you feel a bit of tightness in your throat. In your shoulders. Oh, it's just like a shiver all over your body this is valid to feel this way is so, so valid. But do you wanna continue feeling this way? Because the good news is that you really don't have to. Now, is it going to be easy? Not necessarily are you gonna be able to just flick a switch and feel completely differently? No. However, there is a real way to approach your dating life and relationships so that we can get you to a place where you feel as confident as grounded and secure. As confident to set your boundaries, to use your voice, to trust yourself, trust your intuition in dating as you do in other areas of your life. So let's talk about what does that look like? What are the tangible, practical things to do to begin to shift the dynamic for yourself? And this is not about just being more confident, not about to sit here and say to you, just be more confident. Be more confident. You know what to do. Trust yourself. No, because that is completely overriding your nervous system and the lack of safety that you actually feel on a bodily level. So I'm gonna meet you where you're at, and the first thing that I'm going to recommend, which don't roll your eyes, but I'm gonna say it, you've gotta slow down in dating. We've gotta take it really, really slowly, especially as you are on your journey of healing your anxious attachment. Because when that attachment wound is activated, your attachment system is going to latch on very quickly. You know, the feeling. So the more time, and when I say take it slow, what I mean is. Create a lot of time and space between dates. Don't be texting this person 24 7. Don't be going on three dates a week with this person. Don't be going on the first date that last 72 hours. Really take your time, like bite-size pieces, and the reason you wanna do this is so that you can remain aware and present of what's going on in your body. How are you feeling talking to this person? How do you feel when you see them, when you leave each other? What's going on for you in your body? We need to create time and space so you can be present to actually tune in. The next thing we need to do is get radically clear on your non-negotiables. We need to stop leaving dating up to chance. This is one of the first things that I do with my clients inside peacefully attached, is we get so painfully clear and aware on what your non-negotiables are and what you want and need going forward in your relationship. And this goes both ways. It goes for how you are going to show up. And what your non-negotiable boundaries are, and also what you need from a partner or inner partner if you're going to continue to invest time in them. And the reason we do this ahead of time before you're actively dating or we do this nice and early, is because when you are dating and you are starting to get emotionally involved, you're not gonna be thinking super clearly.'cause when our emotions are high, our intelligence. Is low. The part of our brain that has long-term thinking, that can have clear perspective, it starts to go down because the emotional part, the limbic part of our brain comes on strong and we get really swept up in all the feels. So when we are emotional, we're probably gonna make decisions that favor the connection without ensuring that we are looking at it from a very clear lens. From a lens of. Uh, it more like a scientific analytical lens. Okay. Which doesn't sound very sexy, but this is what you gotta do. You can look at your list of non-negotiables and almost like cross-reference them with what you're experiencing with this person, and ask yourself like, does this line up with what I said I wanted, or is this going against what I said I wanted? And the clearer that you can be, the harder it is to lie to yourself. The harder it is to ignore those non-negotiables. So get radically clear, because if you're not clear on this stuff, that's when you get confused in dating. That's when you start to doubt yourself.'cause something will come up that doesn't feel very good in your body, but you'd be like, Hmm, I don't know. Like, does this matter to me? Is this really important? Mm, I'm just gonna let it slide. Let's just see how it pans out. So we want to be setting ourselves up for success. Number three. The third thing we need to focus on is building internal safety so that boundaries don't feel life threatening. Remember what I said earlier when we don't have a sense of internal safety, meaning literally knowing how to come out of that chronic fight or flight state and genuinely feel so grounded and at peace in our physical body. Then it makes setting boundaries really hard because what's happening is we have given away our ability to feel safe to this person outside of ourselves, to the external. We can't control other people. So if you are giving your sense of feeling safe to this person that you barely know that is going to fuck with you. Isn't it? At least it definitely used to fuck with me. So we need to get to a place where we can confidently set boundaries without self-sacrificing, we can set a boundary and trust that this is going to be magnetic to the right person because they're gonna be like, fuck yeah, that's so hot that you're setting these boundaries. And I value that and I value the same things. And it's going to repel the wrong people. People who don't like that, they can't just do whatever they want and get away with it. People who don't like that, they can sense that, ah, fuck, she's got standards, she's got boundaries. I don't wanna fuck with that. I just want something easy. And those people are gonna fall away, which is what you want to happen. But in order to have that level of confidence to do that. What needs to happen is you need to create the sense of safety that basically says we are gonna be okay no matter what. Whether this person stays or goes, we are gonna be okay. So I'm talking about nervous system regulation here. Good old fashion, nervous system regulation. It is so, so important and there's so many ways that you can regulate your nervous system. We can do it through. Breath work using the breath. We can do it through somatic movement. We can do it through sound, through co-regulation with another person, like with someone close to you that you feel safe with. And all of these tools, I mean, you can learn these tools anywhere basically, but it's, it really comes down to practicing them and having the accountability to practice that. Regulate your nervous system. Do whatever you need to do to make that a priority in your day-to-day life. The next is separating familiarity from alignment. We don't want to be dating from a place of just being on autopilot and attracting the same person with a different face and doing what we've always done, because what you've always done is not necessarily what you need in the future. It is not necessarily aligned with the person you are becoming and the relationship you say you want to call in. So again, this comes back to getting radically clear on not just your non-negotiables, but what are your green flags? What are the things that matter to you on. What we go through in, in pa, the gut trust process, when we're looking at the three body checkpoints, your head, your heart, and physical intimacy, what boxes need to be ticked on those three levels in order for it to feel like an aligned relationship for you to move forward? We really need to spend the time. Getting clear on these things before we are getting attached to someone, it's gonna make your life so much easier and help you to avoid a lot of unnecessary pain. And then lastly, number five is you need to practice choosing yourself in micro moments. You know that trust is built, self-trust is built in all of the small moments. You don't just wake up one day and say, I trust myself. No, you trust yourself. You build self trusts by listening to that little niggle, that little whisper and nudge that your body is sending you in small moments in your day-to-day life that tell you, go this way, not that way. Stay home or go for a walk. This person, I can trust this person. I can't. I think I should wait before I eat because I'm not actually hungry, whatever small moment where you can feel any little whisper in your intuition, start listening to it and acting on it, because the only way to prove to yourself that your intuition was right is through hindsight. Is through looking back. So we have to sort of take these little moments of like mini leaps of faith in order to build that self-trust. You get a little niggle, you say, okay, I'm gonna follow that niggle. So you act on it. And then 9.99 times out of 10, you will thank yourself for doing that.'cause you'll be like, oh, I knew that was the right decision. And then that creates a brand new little piece of evidence to show you and to show your brain that you can trust yourself, you can rely on your intuition. So we wanna create lots and lots and lots of little pieces of evidence to build that self trust. And the more you can start doing this in dating, the earlier on, the stronger that muscle is going to get. Self-trust in dating is built the same way that it was built in your career, for example. It's by honoring your boundaries and managing the discomfort that comes with that, because there will be discomfort in honoring your boundaries. It doesn't always feel good. It does not always feel sexy. It does not always feel like the thing you want to do in the moment, but it's always the thing that you are grateful that you did in the long term. I am gonna leave you with some reflection questions that you can just reflect on on your morning walk, or maybe if you love to journal. I would encourage you to write these questions down and start reflecting on the answers. So the first question is, where am I currently overriding my instincts? Can you reflect and pinpoint. A few moments recently where now looking back you can see, ah, yeah, I had that instinct there and I didn't listen to it. Where are you overriding your instincts? Number two, what am I afraid would happen if I honored them? This is key here because there is always some sort of fear that is driving your actions. So what are you actually afraid would happen if you honored them? Next. Am I trying to preserve connection at the expense of self-respect? At the expense of my higher self and the, the relationship that I say that I want? Am I trying to preserve connection at the expense? Of that future vision of respecting yourself. And then lastly, do I actually know my non-negotiables or just my preferences? Because the two are quite different. What are the, your non-negotiables are the things that are actually deal breakers. Do you know what they are? Or do you just have a, a rough sort of floating idea in your mind of what you think you want? Get clear on the difference. You get to thrive in love and relationships just like you do in every other area, I promise. Because if I can do it, you can do it. Trust me, my friend. And it starts with exactly what we've covered today in this podcast. So I encourage you, I invite you. To reflect on those questions and to answer them and to see what comes up for you. You might just uncover something that you've been overlooking or that hasn't come to the forefront of your awareness until now. If you do have a powerful insight, send me a DM on Instagram. I would love to know how this episode landed for you. And until next time, you have a beautiful week my friend, 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.