The Healing I Didn't See Coming

When I started therapy, I thought I had done the hard work. I had spent years healing, growing, and becoming comfortable in my own company. But then I found myself in a healthy relationship... and realized there were still wounds I didn't know were there.

In this episode, I'm opening up about my journey with anxious attachment, what attachment theory taught me about myself, and why healing isn't always something you can accomplish alone. We talk about childhood patterns, nervous system responses, taking ownership of our healing, and how God's grace meets us in the middle of the work.

If you've ever wondered why you overthink, need reassurance, pull away, or struggle to feel safe in relationships, I hope this conversation helps you realize you're not broken—you may simply be healing.

 Because healing isn't about finding the right person. It's about becoming the healthiest version of yourself—one surrendered step at a time. 

Transcript

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Have you ever had something explained to you that in the moment somebody got done explaining it, it just made so many things in your life add up. It's Cheyenne, and this is Nothing to Prove. And today we're gonna be talking about attachment theory. And we're not gonna be diving into a bunch of the psychological takes on attachment theory, but we're talking about it because I'm literally going through this right now. And to be honest, I just want to talk about it because I feel like so many people either don't know about it or they sweep it under the rug, and it's just not at the forefront of people's minds where it needs to be. And I want to help you. I want to help you understand and I want to help you realize that you're not alone, your spouse's withdraw from you is not because they don't love you, it's not because they don't like you, it's because it's how they're designed to be. Or I want you to understand that when your spouse is trying to pull you close and it feels suffocating to you, but they're constantly asking for some form of reassurance. It's not because they don't trust you, it's not because they don't love you, it's not because they love you too much. It's because they have to heal something inside of them that they might not even know exists right now. And I'm going through this right now, and I have a ton of notes on this because frankly, I didn't want to get any of this wrong and I didn't want to lead anyone astray. So I do have a lot of notes because I, like I said, I'm going through this right now, and it just feels like something that we need to talk about. So we're gonna talk about attachment theory. Um, and again, if you don't feel like this is you, if you don't feel like you need to listen to this, you probably actually do. So stick around. Hi, my name is Cheyenne, and I have an anxious attachment, and I am currently trying to heal it, and it is one of the most painful experiences I have ever had to go through where my healing journey is concerned. Let me explain. I have been single for a really long time, and for the majority of my singleness, I have been totally fine with it. And that is true. I have been really locked in step with my own self and my own healing, making sure that my kids had my attention, my career had my attention, and I really wanted to hyperfocus on the type of healing that I needed to do. Because there was a lot of it. I my story is you you might not even know my story, and you might know a part of my story, but it is a lot. It's very in detail, it's very detailed, it's very intricate, and honestly, it's not something that I talk a lot about because it's not fully my story to tell. So I don't really talk about a lot, but I've been through a lot of trauma. I've been through a lot of things in my life that were designed and, you know, created partly the chaos I created on my own self, which is a huge part of healing and a huge part of the healing journey that I went on with therapy, was being able to look at myself in the mirror and recognize where I had faults. And I had my own faults. I created a lot of chaos myself. I created a lot of my own circumstances, but there are also things that I didn't didn't have anything to do with that were created in my childhood and a part of my childhood, and then in these relationships that I had as an adolescent and in my young adult life, because that's how attachments are formed. Attachment theory starts, and attachments start when you're like five weeks old because your neuropathways start to form. And I told you I'm not gonna get into the psychology of it, I'm not gonna get into the neuroscience of it, but I am gonna tell you what I know. And your neuropathways get formed out of from your cortex when you're like this, starts at like five weeks old, right? As soon as you're starting to experience life and you're seeing your parents interact with each other and you're seeing their love and their marriage. Their marriage is literally, and us as parents, we are creating the blueprints for our kids on how they send and receive love, how they feel safe and secure in relationships. And if they're experiencing parents who are withdrawing their love, if they're experiencing parents who are so insecure, they're creating those neuropathways within their kids, which then create attachments that we as adults have to sit down and look at and say, okay, I need to figure this out because it's not only fair for myself, but it's not fair for my spouse either. So this is attachment theory 101. We're gonna be very, I'm not gonna, we're not gonna go crazy on it, but here we go. So there are a couple of different types of specific attachments. There are differentiating kinds between like mixtures of some and some that are like off the beaten path of this, but these are the couple of main ones. The first one you're gonna have is a secure attachment. A secure attachment, this is straight off Google, so you could literally just go Google this, okay? So a secure attachment, how they feel, okay? They're comfortable with intimacy and trust and emotional balance. In a relationship, they communicate openly, they handle conflict well, and they value both closeness and independence. But their childhood roots come from the fact that their caregivers were consistent, they were warm, reliable, and responsive to emotional needs, okay? So that's somebody with a secure attachment. The dream, right? The dream. And then you get into somebody who's avoidant. This one is specifically for avoidant dismissive attachments. How it feels to them, they value extreme self-reliance and views emotional and views emotional intimacy as a threat. So somebody who you are trying to get close to, and the closer you try to get, the more they pull away. Okay, that is what emotional intimacy to them. It feels like a threat, so they're gonna pull away. In relationships, they keep partners at an arm's length, they suspress they suppress feelings and emotionally withdraw when things get too close. For their childhood, it looks like their caregivers were emotionally unavailable, distant, or overly strict. Then you have a disorganized, fearful avoidant. How it feels to them is they feel trapped in a push-pull cycle of craving love, yet fearing getting hurt. In relationships, it looks like acts unpredicta they act unpredicta unpredictably, alternating between clinging to a partner and suddenly pushing them away. In their childhood, early environments involved chaos, fear, and lack of safe caregiving. And then you have an anxious attachment. You have somebody who's preoccupied, right? For them, it's how it feels to them is driven by deep-seated, a deep-seated fear of rejection or abandonment. In relationships, they crave high levels of closeness, often becoming clingy or demanding, and constantly seeking external reassurance. In their childhood, it's rooted in caregivers being unpredictable or inconsistent in meeting emotional needs. And again, I got that straight off Google. Like you can go Google it yourself if you want to dive a little bit more into that. So those are really the couple of main ones that we have in attachment theory. And I know people who range on every every attachment of that scale. I will tell you, and I'm gonna be the point of this podcast is to be honest with you guys. I am an anxious attachment. I thrive on knowing that there's reassurance. I thrive on knowing that you're there. Physical closeness is really important to me. And I have done enough work in this area on myself to know how my nervous system is handling certain responses from people and what's gonna happen next. And the reason I want to talk about this, and the reason why we're talking about it today is because I am living through this right now. And it's not something you can understand your attachment style when you are single. A thousand percent you can understand it when you're single. The problem is until you're looking at it in a mirror within a relationship, there's little hope in fixing it on your own because you have to have somebody who puts you in a position where you have to face those fears. You need somebody who is going to make you look at your instinctive reaction and recognize it in yourself and say, I recognize what this is. I know that this is a spiral for me. I recognize that I am getting very anxious. I recognize that they haven't texted me back in their normal five to ten minutes of texting me back like they normally do. Why is that making me so uncomfortable? And as much as I would love to dive into other attachments, it's gonna be really hard for me because I don't know them like I know my own, because I've done work. I know a lot about avoidance because I tend to date avoidance. Uh so I do, I do know a lot because I have to learn how to communicate with somebody who tends to be avoidant, right? So that's why we're talking about this today. And again, these are things that we learn in childhood. These are things that our parents are teaching us. Us as parents, I'm very, I try very hard to be conscientious about how I parent and how I respond to my kids' emotional needs because I know that with every step that I take, whether I am there for them or not, is going to create an attachment for them. And I want them to be as secure as they can moving forward in their relationships so that their spouses have the best version of themselves that they can be. And if I can't do that, I will learn as much as I can to be able to coach them through learning attachments that they unknowingly to them have created because of childhood, right? So anxious attachment. It's a hard one. And I had said earlier that this is physically one of the hardest things I've ever had to go through where healing has been concerned. And I want to explain that because that's a really big statement. And I think for people who don't understand or who haven't really been through it before, don't understand why it's so physically demanding to heal an anxious attachment in the extent that I have one. And this is me taking full responsibility of my nervous system, of my healing, of my growth, and recognizing that this is a problem that I have. Okay. So, how did I realize that I had an anxious attachment? Well, first and foremost, I went to therapy. Therapy makes you look in a mirror in a way that nobody else can because they don't, they don't, there it's it's so unbiased. They just their only goal is to help you heal and to look in the mirror and tell you what exactly it is that you need to fix. So, in my years of therapy and trying to heal myself and heal the wounds that I never gave myself and then the wounds that I did give myself, I realized in this journey that I had an anxious attachment. And I realized that the way that I handled relationships previously was a direct result of that anxious attachment. And when I could come to terms with that, I was able to do a lot of research. I did a lot of research. I have spent hours in scientific audiobooks. I have spent hours reading books. It's actually learning about attachment theory is where I started to read in the first place because I wasn't really a big reader, but attachment theory made me realize that I enjoyed reading when it was things that I really, really cared about. So I started reading other people's experiences on attachment theory and understanding that I had to give myself grace, number one, because I had to understand that the attachment theory, the attachment that I had wasn't because of things that I had done on my own. It was because of everything else that I had experienced in my life. And I had to give myself grace. And so then I took, I wouldn't say that I was intentionally single for three and a half years. I would say that I was very cautious about the relationships that I allowed in my life because I wanted it to be, I wanted to be healed enough to be the best version of myself, and I wanted somebody who recognized that I also had healing to do, right? And then with that realization, I had to make the other realization that I wasn't gonna heal everything on my own. And I I even with that realization though, it I still didn't realize how much more work I had to do on myself. And it wasn't for emotional capacity or lack of capacity, it was for just lack of really understanding the work that still needed to be done and how deeply rooted my fear of abandonment was, and how much I was reliant on reassurance and just having somebody close nearby and how my clinginess was a a problem for the majority of people. So it took a lot. But when we got into our relationship, I knew that I had to be honest with him because I knew what was coming. I I could tell, I could feel it. We had spent a week together, and when we came home, I was like, What do you mean you don't want to spend more time with me? What do you mean you need space? What do you mean you you have five days off and you don't want to spend those five What do you mean? That was the internal conversation I had with myself. So I sat him down and I said, Hey, look, I have done a lot of work on myself, and I am realizing that even though I've done a lot of work on myself, there's a lot of healing that I still have left to do. And I need your grace and I need you to I need you to work with me and I need you to be patient, and I will try to communicate as much as I can as to what I'm feeling and what I'm going through and just try to be a team player because I don't know what I'm doing either. It's hard. I freaked out, and I'm really embarrassed to say that. Like I am truly embarrassed to say it wasn't even a trust issue, you guys. It wasn't even that I didn't trust him, it was that my nervous system was panicking. That he wasn't gonna be around me, and he would be around other people, and he would see that I was not worth it, and that I wasn't worth the chaos that this healing was going to bring, and that I wasn't worth the time that it was gonna take to heal. Like I was in a full spiral. So I'm gonna tell you exactly what happened because I need you to understand the level of physical hurt that healing looks like when you allow yourself to look in the mirror. With the way that I operate, I will overexplain. I always used to credit it to being just an over-communicator, like, oh, I'm just gonna over-communicate with you because that's how I am. No, that's how I was designed to be in the blueprint of my child. I will over-communicate. And then what happens is if you don't respond because you're, I don't know, working or busy or spending time with people, I don't know, I will re I will send you another text message that is re-over-communicating the over-communication and re-telling you in a way that I think makes a little bit more sense to you so that you understand. And then if you don't respond to that, I'm gonna do it again. And then I felt myself backing into a corner. And when I tell you that I physically could feel my nervous system deteriorating, it was like I was watching the coast erode into the ocean. And with every second that ticked by, that I didn't have a response, every moment that he didn't acknowledge and didn't uh reassure me that everything was gonna be okay and that he was coming home to me, my every inch of my nervous system eroded and I backed into a corner like a scared, beaten puppy. It was really bad. It was I cried, I screamed at myself, I screamed into a pillow, I prayed, I talked to I the amount of praying to God that I had to do in that moment was unlike anything I really had ever experienced ever. And I had seen something on Instagram the other day that said there's no healing like healing within the relationship of an avoidant because nothing brings you to the feet of God like having an avoidant partner when you're anxious. And I felt it to my core, but I dropped to my knees and I prayed and I prayed and I pled the blood of Jesus over him and I put the armor of God on him, and I just for 24 hours it was all I could do was to pray and pray and pray, and then I got uh that moment of relief where he was like, Hey, we're good, it's fine, but I'm working, which is what I had been praying. I just needed something, and so God delivered that to me. But I need you guys to understand, and the reason why we're talking about this is because I think so many people will chalk their avoidantness, their anxiousness, their dismissiveness up to that's just how I am. I need space because that's just how I am. I need you to reassure me because it's just how I am. And the reality of that is that it's it's not. It is how you've been conditioned to be for your entire life. And you unfortunately haven't been in a position where you've been able to fix that. And I want to give you guys that opportunity to look at yourselves in the mirror and recognize what it is that is driving your attachment and how can we fix that? It's not easy, I'll tell you that much, but it is fixable. Neuropathways are redirectable. Neuropathways essentially are like a roadmap in your head where you see love and your neuropathways tell you how to receive it and what's happening, and if you can feel safe in this relationship. For avoidance, they feel safer with distance. Emotional intimacy and emotional closeness scares them. For anxious people, we feel the safest and the most loved when you're in our skin. Okay, be in my skin, because that's what I need to feel safe. I need the reassurance. And I am learning that that reassurance might be what I need, but it's not what he's capable of giving me right now because we have different attachment styles and the amount of work, and we regularly have to talk about this. We regularly have to say, I don't know how to do that right now. I know that that's what you need, but I don't know how to do that. Okay, so it is something that has to be worked on. I am here to tell you with 100% certainty if you have a certain attachment style and your spouse has a different one, and you have that push pull, someone's hot and then they're cold, and then they want to be close to you, and then they don't, and then you have your anxious partner who just wants to be near you, but then they get scared, so they withdraw, and then it becomes some form of punishment. That is a very real thing, and it happens a lot. If that is what you're going through, and the both of you don't recognize it and don't agree to fix it, you're gonna either constantly be in this push-pull and it's gonna be miserable, or it's not gonna work, and you need to walk away. It's fixable, you guys. Attachment due to trauma and due to childhood circumstances that you had nothing to do with is fixable. It's not easy, but it is fixable. But you have to be willing to stand in the discomfort of what that looks like. You have to be willing to look at yourself in the mirror and take accountability for something that you didn't have control over, but your accountability comes into play when you recognize it, you take ownership of it, and you say, I am going to actively work on this. And then how blessed are you to have a partner who says, I am this, you are this, I love you enough to work through this no matter what that looks like. And it is going to be painful and it is going to be hard. And it is going to be one of the most physically nervous system wise demanding things you will ever do. But it will be so incredibly worth it in the end. Because how great will it be in a couple of years if you just put in the work and And you dig in your heels and you put in the work and you guys can look at each other, knowing where you came from, and knowing that you have a secure attachment to each other. Knowing that you don't have to seek this validation of your relationship because you know they're showing up at the end of the day. How awesome can it be that you guys came from two totally different attachment styles from an anxious and an avoidant attachment style, and you looked at each other and you said, I love you so much, and I care about you so much, and I care about myself enough to say, let's fix this together. How incredible can that be? I know that that is what I am working for. That right now I am actively working on trying to fix myself so that if he does decide that this is where we're gonna stay and this is we're gonna ride or die this out together, I can be the best wife for him that I can be because I am dating for marriage. And then at the end of the day, he can be the best husband that he can be for me because that's the dream. So I'm telling all of you this. I'm telling, I'm setting you up for this. I am setting you up to tell you that attachment is hard. I am telling you that it is not easy to look at the mirror and say, I am a part of the problem. But I have to take responsibility for that. It's not easy to look at your partner and say, I need you to take responsibility and accountability for you so that we can take accountability of us together. What a learning moment. So if you're going through these things, and I know that you are because most of us are. So you can't even lie, okay? You can't even sit there and say, Well, that's not me. Shut up. Yes, it is. It is too, and you know it is. So don't lie to yourself. Don't lie to me either. I don't want you to lie to me. I definitely don't want you to lie to yourself, but more so I don't want you to lie to your spouse. That sucks. Just be honest and open with each other. But you have to be honest with yourself first. So take that accountability. Do some prayer, get on your knees and pray. Pray to God that He shows you your faults, that He shows you your shortcomings, so that you can continue to be the spouse that your spouse deserves to have. So that you can continue to show up for your kids so that when they're actively pursuing relationships, they're not having to fix the damage that you caused. And not because you did it on purpose, but because you were functioning off of the only thing that you knew. And that's pretty incredible. So if this feels like you, I would love to pray for you. And I'm gonna pray for your attachment, and I'm gonna pray that God opens your eyes. Heavenly Father, we just thank you so much for the blessing that you've brought to us today. We thank you so much for giving us the ability to listen to podcasts like this, Father. We thank you for giving us the ability to look at ourselves and own our own faults, Father. And Father, if the person listening to this right now is struggling to see their own faults, Father, I ask that you give them a moment in the next couple of days where they truly have to take a good, long, hard look in the mirror and own and have that accountability for where their shortcomings are in their relationships, Father. Father, I ask that you make it so eye-opening for them that the only thing that they can do is fall to their knees, Father, and ask for your direction. Father, I ask that you open up their spouse's eyes as well so that their spouse can see not only their shortcomings, but also be able to live in a space where their spouse can be receptive and hearing of what it is that needs to take place to be able to move forward, Father. Father, we ask that you pull the wool off of everybody's eyes and you give them eyes to see, Father. We ask that you give them the drive and the want to open up to you and their partners, Father, and to open up to themselves and be honest with themselves about where it is that they need to make changes, Father. Father, I ask that you bless them today, you guide them today, and you give them a moment of your undying love today. In your heavenly name we pray. Amen.