Ep #64: I Got GHOSTED & My Anxious Attachment Gremlin Popped Up - Here's What Happened.

In this episode, I’m taking you behind the scenes of a very real, very recent dating experience… where I got ghosted. And not just ignored… fully unmatched. 😅

What made this moment so powerful wasn’t the ghosting itself… it was what happened internally. The thoughts that came up, the stories my anxious attachment wanted to run with, and the way I caught myself before spiralling into old patterns. Doing the work doesn’t mean you never get triggered again. It means you respond differently when you do.

I walk you through exactly what went through my mind in that moment, how I regulated myself, the questions I asked to shift out of anxiety, and the reframe that allowed me to move on within hours instead of days or weeks. This episode will show you what it actually looks like to embody secure attachment in real time — not just understand it.

In this episode, you’ll learn:
• What goes on internally when your anxious attachment gets activated, and why those thoughts feel so real in the moment
• The simple but powerful shift from reacting → regulating (and how to catch yourself before the spiral takes over)
• Why expressing your standards will never push away the right person, and what it reveals when someone disappears instead
• How to stop making rejection mean something about your worth, and start seeing it as information about compatibility
• The difference between knowing the work… and embodying it; what secure attachment really looks like in practice

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

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Come say hi 👋 (or DM me your biggest takeaway) on Instagram HERE!

Watch the ‘You Are The Problem’ Replay HERE: https://www.mimiwatt.com/you-are-the-problem-replay-opt-in-landing-page 

Transcript

0:00

You are listening to the Secure Love Club podcast. I'm your host, Mimi Watt. Hey friends. Welcome back to the Club. As you can tell by the title of this episode, I recently got ghosted and we're gonna talk about it today because when this happened, my anxious attachment gremlin popped up, and it was very interesting for me to observe this happening with inside my brain and inside my body. And I want you to know that this stuff still happens to me. It still happens to people who have done a lot of work on themselves and really transitioned from predominantly being in an anxiously attached place, into a securely attached place. And I want you to know that this is completely normal and I want share with you what happened, what went through my mind, how I handled it, and how I've come out the other side. So let's just get straight. Into it about a week ago or a week and a half ago now, probably. I matched with this guy on Hinge and he was cute. He was looking cute. His conversation was good, and I was really genuinely enjoying chatting with him. You know how a lot of people on the dating apps are unhinged. They can be quite flippant or non-committal. And not really putting in a lot of effort into the chats. And so when you come across someone who has good chat and puts in effort and has band art, it's really nice and it's refreshing. So I'm chatting to this guy, and on my hinge profile, one of my prompts is the prompt that says, all I ask is that you and mine says, all I ask is that you have an EQ to match your iq. And it gets quite a lot of responses or quite a lot of likes. And this guy in particular started chatting about it and he said, so, okay, why is that important to you? And I said to him, well, it's really the bare minimum. I think in this day and age, it's more important than ever to have emotional intelligence and yeah, it's high up on my values list. So I said to him, yeah, it's the bare minimum. And he said, okay, cool. What are your other expectations? And I said, good communication, consistency, follow through, and that you bring me coffee in bed on in the morning. No, that you bring me coffee in bed on the weekends. And he said, okay, I like that. I said, what are yours? He said. I don't really have any, I just like to let people flower as they wish to. And I called myself in that moment and I said, oh, I think expectations is the wrong word. What I'm referring to are more like standards. What are yours? And the next morning when I opened Hinge to check if he had replied, our chat was gone. And I realized that he had ghosted me slash unmatched me. It's one thing to just not reply to someone, but to go and unmatch is another level, if you know, you know. So I was quite shocked and taken aback, and I'm not gonna lie in the moment when I realized this, I was disappointed because as I mentioned before, I feel like it's. Rare to come across someone where you're really enjoying the conversation and you feel like there's a good vibe. And I noticed myself initially, my reaction was it felt like my anxious attachment gremlin, as I like to call it. Rose to the surface, and I started having all of this chatter going on in my mind, and these thoughts started coming to the forefront. Things like, oh my God, maybe you shouldn't have been so direct. Maybe that was too intense to voice your standards like that. Maybe you should have just downplayed it and been a little bit more, easygoing or chill or cute. And then he wouldn't have unmatched you and then you could have continued the conversation with him, and then you could have gone on a date and ran off into the sunset together. And these thoughts when they first come up, they feel so valid and they feel so real that you really have to try and catch yourself when they do come up to not take them as fact. And to not take them as law, right? Like that their absolute truth and that it's all your fault and you should have downplayed yourself or made yourself smaller in order to be more palatable for someone else. And I felt some anxiety come up in my body. I felt a sense of disappointment. A sense of, oh, like you just ruined a good chat. You ruined something. And I noticed these thoughts coming up. And I have to really stop myself in my tracks. I sat down and I just took a deep breath. I said, Mimi, let's just center ourselves here. Let's calm down because when our emotions are. Heightened and we step out of our state of regulation. We know that our intelligence and rational mind goes offline and our emotions take over. And when we're in that place we aren't really thinking clearly. We aren't thinking with. Proper perspective. And so we can often make situations mean something that they aren't or we jump to the worst case scenarios or we catastrophize. So the first thing I always do, if I catch myself going into a state of dysregulation or my emotions are getting the better of me, is before I respond in any way or make any decisions about what I'm going to do or tell myself a story about what it really means, I regulate. So in this case, I, I wasn't super dysregulated, but there was some there, so I just took a few deep breaths and what I did next was I challenged those thoughts that were coming into my mind. I really challenged them and I said, okay. Is it genuinely a problem that you said pretty non? It wasn't confrontational. I wouldn't say it was overbearing or intense. It was very simply put, I only put three standards. And then the one about bringing me coffee in bed on the weekend was like a cute little joke. It was pretty easygoing. And I said, is it genuinely too much that you said that? No. Should you have downplayed yourself and made yourself smaller? No. Okay. Why? Because then I would not be being true to myself. I wouldn't be authentically me. I would be presenting a version of myself that I would think that would be attractive or acceptable, but that is not sustainable. That is not how the secure woman who you have spent years stepping into would respond or would handle this situation. And I realized in that moment. If a man is going to unmatch me and not even meet me there in that conversation and respond, that says so much more about him and his character and his emotional availability than it does about mine. And I don't want to continue a conversation with someone who's gonna behave like that. Because I don't want to be with someone who would rather a woman, my or myself, silence themselves about what they want and need just to make him more comfortable. I want to be with someone who is attracted to that sort of confidence, who wants to be with someone who knows what they want and can say it directly and is obsessed with that kind of energy. I want to be with someone who tells me what their standards are, who tells me what they accept, and don't accept what they're available for, what they're not available for, because that kind of energy tells me that I'm talking to someone who knows who they are. Someone who respects themselves has high self-worth and high self-esteem who values healthy open communication. And wants to build something real. That is where I'm at. That is what I'm looking for, and that is what I will accept. So in the moment, whilst these rejections can sting, I want to encourage you, as I did, to really just first of all, pause, pause, pause, pause, pause, pause. Okay. Take a breath. Center yourself, center your thoughts, regulate your nervous system, and then get curious what? Ask yourself, what am I making this mean? And more specifically, what am I making this mean about me? Am I making it mean that I am not enough, that I am too much, that I am unlovable, that I need to be smaller? And then question those thoughts. Is that true? And do I want to believe that about myself? How am I going to respond to this situation? Am I going to do it in a way that is disempowering and that affirms these limiting self beliefs? Or am I going to do it in a way, respond in a way that is empowering and that. Creates new evidence that I am enough and I am worthy of love, and the next person who I'm gonna be with is going to be the right person for me. Because I don't hide behind fears and insecurities because I own who I am, and I let that be seen by the world because when you are in your power. When you are in your authenticity, that is when you are magnetic to the right people and you become a natural repellent to the wrong people. So if I had not spoken up in that moment and been honest and direct about my standards and what I want, then I could have continued a connection with someone who was not actually aligned with the type of person that I want to be with. And this is why having standards and understanding what you are available for and what you are not available for is so incredibly important before you go into dating. Because when we have an anxious attachment style, if we don't have these standards, what ends up happening is we just continue on with a connection because it feels so good to have some sort of attachment, some sort of attention validation. And we will continue with the connection even if the quality of that connection is not good enough and is not what we want. So the standards become like your compass or your guidelines for how you make decisions about the people who you continue to invest in, and those who you absolutely don't. And this is regardless of how much you like this person. Maybe back in our early twenties we could get away with getting involved with someone because we just really liked them and we had all this chemistry with them, and the sex was amazing. But we are not in that full. For most of the people listening and who I talk to, we're not in that phase of life anymore. We are in a phase of our life where we know who we are and we're ready or nearly ready to call in a real life partner. Someone who you want to create something real and meaningful with a relationship with someone who you can see yourself starting a family with one day, if that's what you want, or just building a life with this person. And when that is our intention, we need to be dating from a place of assessing compatibility, not just do I like this person and is the chemistry great. We need to be looking at three different key areas. We go through this in peacefully attached, but there's three sort of checkpoints we need to be assessing, and they are, from what I call your head, your heart and physical intimacy. So your head being, who is this person on paper? What do they value? What's their lifestyle like? How do they live their life? What do they, are they, what do they do for work? Are they passionate? Are they ambitious? Do they, what are their value, their values? What do they value? Do they value their family? What are they like with their friends? So on paper, who is this person? And then the heart is more around emotional intimacy and emotional safety. Do I feel that this person is emotionally available for a relationship? How do I feel in their presence? How do I feel when we're not together? Do I still feel safe and like I can rely on that person? How do they make me feel when I need to be vulnerable and have difficult conversations? Or when I need to ask for a need to be met, how do they respond? Do they hold space for me or are they combative? Do they get defensive? Do they try to change the subject or shut me down? So looking at that heart perspective, and then of course physical intimacy. So is there a physical attraction? Because that is of course, a very important aspect of a romantic relationship, and this doesn't mean that you have to, be getting all the fanny flutters from day dot and you wanna jump their bones. That's not what I'm talking about, because usually when the chemistry is insanely high, it can be. Dangerous territory because it means that it can often be representative of a bit of a trauma bond. It's a part of your pattern and just reflecting on your pattern, do you tend to jump into bed with people really quickly? Of the people you've dated, has there been a high sexual intimacy, but then you've realized that, oh, actually from the head and the heart space, there isn't much compatibility there. So I always say, as long as there is. Some sort of physical attraction. Maybe there's like a flicker or an ember of a flame that is there that can always grow with time, and I often find that. The more you get to know someone and spend time with them, and the more safe you begin to feel with them, that attraction does naturally and organically grow. So we need to be looking at all three of these checkpoints because if you have the, let's say on paper, they're fantastic. They tick all the boxes, the chemistry and the physical attraction is great. However, they don't make you feel safe to talk about your feelings. It's not gonna work if they. They do make you feel safe, and the chemistry or the physical attraction is great. However, there's a serious misalignment in your values and your lifestyle. So for example, let's say you're dating someone who wants to live out of a van and travel around the country for the rest of their life, and you want to build a home and have a family and settle down, then that's also not gonna work. And same goes for if they're great on paper, they make you feel safe, but over time you realize there is no physical attraction, that's also not gonna work. So we really need to be looking at these three areas, and this is what we go into depth into in one of the modules and peacefully attached, and talk you through how to do this and how to really assess this and notice if these people are compatible with you. But yeah, we can't just be going in with. It being led by our feelings, it's never going to lead us to a sustainably good place in these connections. When you have a pattern of getting attached to people quite quickly and emotionally invested sooner than you would like. Which most people with an anxious attachment will say yes, that's what that is. What happens, one of the biggest problems that I see is that you don't have any of these proper standards and non-negotiables and guidelines set up for yourself in place before you go out into the dating world, and this is where you get yourself into hot water. This is where you ignore red flags. You ignore your intuition, and you just throw caution to the wind and get involved with someone who may be deep, deep down, you know isn't right for you. But it's so easy to just overlook those concerns and push them to the side because maybe the chemistry feels so good, or you're just excited to be having a crush on someone or having a new connection. Alongside having these standards and prerequisites set up for yourself, it's important to get yourself to a place where you can carry yourself with a high self-worth and with high self-respect and also self trust, meaning you can trust yourself to follow through and to maintain the standards that you've set for yourself. Because when you don't view yourself in that light. Again, it's going to be very easy for you to disregard your standards the moment you like someone, because the, what's happening subconsciously is I'm, I don't really believe I'm that good. I don't really think I'm worthy of a great love, like the love that I see other people having. So maybe I should just tolerate this and, settle for this. So we need to be doing the work on paper around what standards we need to set up for ourselves, getting really clear on what these past patterns are, how they're showing up and doing the inner work to get you aligned with the version of you who does not tolerate this bullshit anymore. Who is only available for a healthy, secure relationship and for people who aren't gonna shy away or ghost you when you speak up about something that you want or need, or tell them your standards or call them out on their bullshit, we don't wanna be with people like that. When you arrive in this place, what's also going to happen is when these little wobbles or blips happen, because they will, they absolutely will. Like it just happened to me. But what's going to happen is you'll be able to process it and move forward so much more quickly than you have in the past. I know for me personally. Several years ago, before I'd done all this work on myself, if this had happened to me, it could have derailed me for a good week, maybe even two weeks. I could have gotten into that place where I put this person so high on a pedestal. I was so obsessed with them, and I would've been absolutely crushed that they had ghosted me and unmatched me. And it would have, it would've caused. Just chaos, emotionally, mentally, physically in my life and derailed me from other things that need my attention and my focus in my life. But now this happened and within literally, probably within one hour, I had processed it and reframed it and moved on, and this has no impact on me now, none. I'm just moving forward with my life. I'm like, yeah, here's loss. Getting to this place, it's. Yes, you're still gonna have slips, you're still gonna have moments of anxiety, but it's not going to derail you and you're going to be able to get back on track, so to speak, in lightning speed. And when you do that, what you're saying is, this stuff doesn't rule me anymore. It doesn't need to because that's not who I am anymore. It's not part of my identity, and you stay in that identity of someone who is an energetic match for a high value partner, for a meaningful worthy relationship. If this is the way that you want to be navigating your dating life and responding as your secure self, and you want to do this work in a space where you'll be supported and guided by someone who has been in your shoes and come out the other side and knows how to navigate these moments, then I would love to invite you to join peacefully attached, which is where we do all this work and so much more. This is my 12 week signature group. Program designed to help you ditch these anxiety riddled dating patterns and become secure within yourself so you can attract healthy love. The doors for our May, 2026 intake are open, applications are being accepted up until the 30th of April, and spots are filling quickly. If you are interested, if you've been on the brink of joining peacefully attached, then click the link in the show notes to learn more about it or to submit your application, and I will be reading through it personally and reaching out to you to talk all about it. If you have any questions about peacefully attached, just send me a DM on Instagram. I'm in there every day and I love to have conversations to help you make a really informed and empowered decision about if this is a yes for you and something you wanna invest in for yourself. Or if it's a no for now or a no full stop, and that's totally okay too. There's no pressure from me, I hope you enjoyed this episode and enjoyed hearing that this stuff still happens to me. I'm human, but it doesn't have to rule you. It doesn't have to derail you, and you can get right back on track very quickly. If you love this episode, I'd love to hear, but I'm gonna leave it there. I hope you have a beautiful week, my friends, 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.