When your interactions with others become challenging, how does your nervous system respond? Are you able to stay grounded with your connection circuits turned on? Or do your protection circuits take over and turn you into a people-pleasing or protecting machine?
“When we’ve grown up with predictable, reliable, loving relationships with our parents or caregivers, we learn from an early age that we are worthy of love, even when we’re struggling,” explained Sue Marriott, a clinical social worker and co-author of Secure Relating: Holding Your Own In An Insecure World, when we interviewed her recently. “This leaves us with the gift of a more regulated and connected nervous system that makes it easier to trust yourself and others.”
Studies estimate only 51.6% of children grow up securely attached, so what does this mean for the rest of us?
“No matter what our attachment history looks like, we can learn how to securely relate to ourselves and others,” reassured Sue.
‘Secure relating’ is a state of mind — a way of thinking, feeling, and behaving — that helps us embody trust and love. It can be achieved by understanding and visualizing how our nervous systems fluctuate along a spectrum of color between our connection circuit — when we feel secure and want to bond with others — and our protection circuit — when we feel insecure and threatened by others.
For example, in:
The Green Zone: This is your ‘secure relating’ sweet spot in the middle of the spectrum where the temperature of your attachment system is just right. You feel safe enough to allow your connection circuit to draw you toward exploration, bonding, and belonging — even when you disagree with others. We like to imagine a safety dial sitting at the base of our brain, with the arrow pointing straight up when we’re in the Green Zone. In this position, the blood and oxygen flow smoothly through to the thinking part of our brains—the prefrontal cortex—ensuring our curiosity, creativity, compassion, and flexibility are fully functioning. Tuning into where our brain’s safety dial is pointing has become a quick and easy way for us to gauge whether our connection circuits are online or not.
The Red Zone: This is the far right of the spectrum where you turn up your attachment system. When your mind and body feel threatened, your protection circuit experiences up-regulation, which intensifies your attention, emotions, and actions towards others. We’ve found it helpful to imagine our people-pleasing tendencies escalating from pink (“Please love me”) to fiery red (“Why won’t you love me?”) as we feel increasingly abandoned and our feelings towards the other person become more urgent. When we realize our brain’s safety dial is pointing to the right, we’ve learned it’s important to take a ‘Cool Pause’ and bring the temperature of our mind and bodies down through breathwork, rehydrating, or bathing so we can do our own inner work.
The Blue Zone: This is the far left of the spectrum where you turn down your attachment system. When your mind and body feel vulnerable, your protection circuit experiences down-regulation, which causes you to avoid emotional connections. We’ve found it helpful to imagine our protection tendencies dropping from turquoise (“I’m fine!”) to deep navy blue (“Leave me alone!”) as we feel increasingly vulnerable and turn away from others. When we realize our brain’s safety dial is pointing to the left, we’ve learned it’s important to ‘Find A Bridge’ by realizing we have isolated ourselves on an emotional island and asking someone to help us find our way back to connection.
We took away so many a-ha insights and practical tools from our recent podcast with Sue, that we’ve recorded an after-party podcast for you to dive deeper into how you can choose secure attachment over people pleasing. Just hit play above to join us.
Please note: We are mindful that ‘girl’ and ‘woman’ are socially constructed ideas of gender that can fall painfully short of defining the fabulous complexity of who we each are. If these words resonate with part of how you have previously or currently identified yourself, we’d love to hear about your lived experiences.
Are you a people pleaser?