Chasing Chaos

Why do we chase after chaos?? As children, how our primary caregiver showed up creates an emotional map that we follow in adulthood.?

If our primary caregiver was unavailable, rejecting or had abandoned us in our primary years, we become ‘avoidant’ and are forced to distance ourselves emotionally to self-soothe.?

If our primary caregiver was unreliable or inconsistent, we become ‘anxious’ always wondering if the relationship we are in is going to be reliable or not.? In these relationships, we cling, please, or build relationships based upon proving ourselves worthy of consistency.? We want to matter enough to be worthy of the love and affection given.

In secure relationships, caregivers are consistently present both verbally and through touch during periods when the child is in stress.? Secure relationships are reassuring, soothing, but also encourage a healthy dose of independence and emotional regulation.? This nurturing attachment style sets the foundation for the ability to identify and balance emotions, to manage through them with successful and shorter recovery times.?

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As we grow into adults, our baseline for relationships (and what we naturally are attracted to) is the baseline we experienced most often.?

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I often wondered why I avoided ‘safe’ relationships (I thought they were boring) or why people I knew were attracted to the ‘bad’ boy or girl excitement that consistently made them miserable.? Lies, manipulation, continual arguing or ghosting and complete shutdown of communication goes together with anxious or avoidant attachment styles.?

How do we change this phenomenon?? We first must identify our attachment style and face our past experiences.? When we bring these into consciousness, we can look at the patterns of our relationships and see them clearly.? When we are in relationships that lack reciprocation, respect, trust, or emotional regulation, we are responding to both their attachment style dynamic (how they grew up) and ours.? We may feel the need to ‘fix’ the person or create an experience that will ‘change’ them because we see this as our role, to ‘save’ them.

The only road to move away from these anxious or avoidant dynamics is to address them in ourselves first.?That person you’re trying to ‘save’ cannot change if it doesn’t come from inside themselves.? We need to choose to break the cycle we were socialized into believing we should expect from others.? The cycle of abandonment and unreliability is what we become attracted to in relationships, bosses, colleagues, and romantic partners because that is what we are taught we deserve.

If we grew up without the soothing touch, safety, words of affirmation or the healthy learned independence of secure attachment relationships, we are bound to chase after those relationships that give us that feeling.? To change the pattern of what we experienced, we must learn (or re-learn) how to build secure attachment with ourselves before we can build this in our other relationships.?

It doesn’t matter if you are in a personal romantic relationship, friendship, colleague relationship or in a leadership position, these dynamics are at play every second of every day in all our relationships.

What’s at stake if we don’t address these issues of attachment?? Our physical and mental health, our careers, our families, and our friendships are all susceptible to the impact of our limitations to regulate and manage our emotions.? There is no easy fix to this, but doing nothing can be stressful, even deadly.? The antidote is to acknowledge your current attachment style behaviors, understand their root cause, and to work on the behaviors that over time will come to replace the muscles of anxiousness and avoidance that get triggered in our relationship dynamics.?

I always recommend to my executive coaching clients who choose to address their attachment style dynamics with me to do so in conjunction with a licensed therapist.? It’s important that you surround yourself with all the available expertise possible to drive toward a healthy result.?

The path to becoming the most effective leader possible starts with building and sustaining the healthiest relationships possible.? The most important relationship you have is the one you have with yourself.