Speak Honest Podcast: Real Talk on Relationships, Attachment Styles & the Work of Healing Childhood Trauma

74. Why You Can’t Let Go: Listener Questions About Love & Attachment

• Jennifer Noble, ACC | Certified Relationship, Dating, NLP, & IAT Coach • Episode 74

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Ever feel like your attraction to someone might be more pain than passion?
In this Q&A episode, I’m answering listener-submitted questions that get to the heart of what so many of us struggle with in relationships. We’re diving into the difference between anxious attachment and intuition (spoiler alert: your intuition doesn’t panic-text six times in a row), unpacking what activating and deactivating strategies really look like, and taking a hard look at trauma bonds. I also talk about what to do when you're still emotionally or physically attracted to someone you know is bad for you and why that doesn’t mean something’s wrong with you.

You might want to listen if:

  • You’re constantly questioning if it’s your intuition or your anxiety talking
  • You keep texting even when you promised yourself you’d stop
  • You feel stuck in a relationship that feels both intense and unsafe
  • You rationalize someone’s hurtful behavior and blame yourself
  • You don’t understand why you still want someone who treats you poorly

FIND OUT MORE!


DISCLAIMER: Speak Honest podcast content is informational, not professional or medical advice. Jenn is an ICF relationship coach, not a licensed therapist. Consult health ...

Speaker 1:

Hello and welcome to Speak Honest. I am your host and certified relationship coach, jennifer Noble. It has been my passion for over a decade to help women like you heal what's been holding you back from having the relationships you deserve. Are you struggling with a relationship where you can't seem to voice your emotions, needs and boundaries without having it blow up in your face? Then you have found the right podcast, my friend. Get ready for practical tips, empowering truths and honest conversations. Now let's dive in.

Speaker 1:

Hello everyone and welcome back to another episode of Speak Honest. I am Jen Noble, your go-to relationship coach, and on today's episode we are going to be answering some listener questions. So lately in the Facebook group I've been getting a lot of really great questions, as well as in the Relationship Reboot program, some amazing questions that these women keep asking me, and I thought to myself let me start kind of collecting these and let me answer them on the podcast. I answer them in the Facebook group when I can. I answer them in the program as well, during our group coaching sessions, but at the same time, I think they're really important to be giving to all of you, to all of you listening right now. You deserve to be able to get your questions answered as well. So if this is something that interests you, if you're listening to the questions today while you are listening to this podcast, and you want to ask your own question, then I invite you to join us over in our free Facebook community. We have a free Facebook community that is filled with women just like you looking to heal their attachment styles and better their communication with their partners. Or maybe you're not in a relationship right now, but you want to learn how to communicate better so you can in the future. That's what we do. We'd love to have you. You can scroll down to the show notes and you can click on the link to join our free Facebook community, or just go to Facebook and, in the search engine, type in speak honest. You're going to see these two little orange hearts on both sides. They'll say secure attachment and confident communication for women. That is our Facebook community. I would love to see you over there, but if you have a question, that is the best place to go and ask me, and then at some point in time, I might even be able to answer them here on the podcast.

Speaker 1:

So, with all of that said, let's dive into today's episode. All right, so I have about four questions right now that I was going over and I saw a bit of a theme happening in our questions for this week, and so we're going to be talking a lot about attachment styles. We're going to be talking about activating and deactivating strategies. We're going to be figuring out if it is my anxious attachment that's happening or is it actually my intuition that is coming up. We're also going to be talking about what exactly is a trauma bond, and if I'm in a trauma bond, how do I change myself emotionally or physically to stop being attracted to someone? So these are the questions that I had come up that I wanted to touch on today. So let's start with question number one.

Speaker 1:

My client asked what is the difference between activating and deactivating strategies? Well, the short answer here is that activating strategies are attempts to pull someone closer to you. So this typically happens with an anxious attachment style, and activating means you're kind of coming up in your body in a way in which you are getting activated. You can feel the kind of anxiety, you can feel the bubbles forming inside of you and you are trying everything you can to cling on to the person. This is an activating strategy. A deactivating strategy is when you start shutting down. It's when you start pushing them away. This happens a little bit more with avoidant attachment styles and so, for example, let's say, for activating, an activating strategy might be texting someone six times in a row because they never got back to you, so that one's really kind of important to notice. Maybe your activating strategy is you have to text this person right away and if you don't like, your insides feel like they might explode. That is when you are in your anxious attachment. That is an activating strategy. It's also an activating strategy to feel like you need to know where your partner is at all times. If you start feeling jealous, if you start feeling like they're going to betray you or cheat on you, if you start asking them tons of questions like where were you? Why weren't you home in time? What's that smell? Why is your shirt different? Your hypervigilance is picking up. These are all activating strategies and on the other end, a deactivating strategy might be just pushing someone away.

Speaker 1:

Flaw-finding is a really big deactivating strategy. This is where we see things in our partner and we think to ourselves we don't like them. We don't like the way they cough, we don't like the way that they chew with their mouth open, although I really don't like that in general. So maybe that's just a non-negotiable for me and not a deactivating strategy. But let's say it's something that's never bothered you really before, and all of a sudden it's starting to bother you. You hate the way he takes his socks off at night and all of a sudden you're convincing yourself we're not even meant to be together and so you avoid his texts, you don't answer his questions, you stay later at work because you don't want to come home. These are all deactivating strategies. So these strategies, remember, they are usually subconscious. They are just attempts to regulate our attachment fears. So let me say that again, activating and deactivating strategies are just unconscious attempts to regulate attachment fears. That's all they are, and so we're just going to work through them as we go along.

Speaker 1:

So great, great question. If you have any more questions about that, hop into the Facebook group, ask me more. I can dive into that deeper, but let's go to the next one. The next one is somebody asked me is it me or is it my anxious attachment? I love this question and in fact you can go back earlier on in one of the episodes I have Somebody asked is it me or is he an asshole? Right? This is often a question Is it me or is it something else? My first question there is usually to ask who is you? Who is the essence of you? Who are you? And oftentimes we don't know that. So until we know who we are, this can be a tough conversation to have, and we work inside the Relationship Reboot program to rebuild the relationship with ourselves so that way we know who we are. But otherwise, let's look a little bit as to what this might look like. So let's understand the difference between who we are and what anxious attachment is.

Speaker 1:

In this regards, I'm going to talk about who we are as our intuition, that deep knowing, you know, that feeling in the gut, that like, ah yes, that is what I know. I feel like that's what we think of when we think of our true essence, our true self. Well, intuition comes with a calm knowing. It's centered, it's grounded, it's slow, it doesn't need to fix anything right now. It's just a soft knowing. That is our intuition, whereas our attachment it feels like urgency. It feels like panic, obsession, rumination, like if we don't take care of it right now, we will die. It's kind of like what we were talking about in the last question. It's activating.

Speaker 1:

If you are feeling activated, if you're texting six times, that is not your intuition, sweetheart, that is your anxious attachment. Okay, you, the essence of you, does not text six times. I can almost guarantee you that. Listen, if you do text six times, maybe that's different. Maybe you're like talking with your bestie and you're the type of person that's like, hey, send, how are you doing? Send, let's get together. Send for some margaritas, send, right, that's different, and we all know that I talk to my bestie that way. Sometimes it's like I'm just a strain of thoughts that come out of my mind as I'm talking to them. But if you're talking like, hey, we really need to talk, where are you? What's going on this? This is not coming from your true self. This is not coming from the essence of you. This is not from your soft, grounded space. That is an anxious activation happening.

Speaker 1:

So that's the biggest thing I would want to touch on here. Is it you or your anxious attachment? Well, I would ask you do you feel afraid in this moment or do you feel grounded? And then another helpful question to ask yourself is if you weren't afraid right now. Maybe you weren't afraid of being abandoned, of being rejected, of being unworthy, of not being enough, of not being pretty enough. If you weren't afraid right now, would you still feel this way. So if your fear is he's cheating on me, if you weren't afraid of that fear, if you were like, okay, whatever, he's cheating on me, if he's cheating on me, his loss, fuck him, I'm going to go do what I do best. If there's no fear there, would you still feel this way. That is a really good life hack of understanding the difference between you and your attachment. Remember attachment it yells, it screams, it is intense, it is obnoxious, but your intuition, it whispers, it's calm, it's grounded, it's in control, and that's a really good way to be able to tell.

Speaker 1:

So now let's move on to question number three. In question number three, this client asks how do you know if it's truly a trauma bond? So I think, in regards to this question, what she's asking for herself is how do I know if I'm trauma bonded to my partner or not? Is how do I know if I'm trauma bonded to my partner or not? Well, I wanted to answer this one, because the first thing I wanted to do was I wanted to find what a trauma bond actually is, because a lot of people think it's something that it's not actually right Like. I hear this term thrown around in pop psychology a lot, and a lot of times they use it to describe any intense or messy relationship, or maybe one where both of you are bonding over your trauma. But that's not what a trauma bond is. So let's get this very clear. If we're going to use these words, I want to use them properly.

Speaker 1:

A trauma bond happens when someone hurts you, actually hurts you. This could be actual abuse, it could be manipulation, and then this gets mixed with just enough comfort, just enough affection or an apology to keep you hooked. It's a cycle of harm followed by moments of tenderness or connection, and this confuses your nervous system and it keeps you stuck. And it's not just that you have a history together or chemistry, or that your wounds lined up or you have similar situations. It's more of an attack that over there, like where you say like, oh my gosh, we both had terrible mothers, oh my gosh, like we both had issues in our life or we both come from cultures that kept us down, we both have religious trauma. That's more of an attachment bond. That's more of a connection. It's not a trauma bond, that's a connection or, as I call it sometimes, an attachment bond. It's when your familiarity from your childhood, which is your attachment, connects and that's an attachment bond.

Speaker 1:

A trauma bond, on the other hand, is when you're stuck in a loop of emotional abuse and reinforcement. Honestly, it's exactly like Stockholm Syndrome if you know what Stockholm Syndrome is and this is where you start to confuse survival with love. Like I have to win him over, I have to earn his love in order to be loved, and when I do, then I feel better about myself, and this is how we can get sucked into trauma bonds. So if you're asking yourself is this a trauma bond? Here are some things for you to look for. Do you feel addicted to him for? Do you feel addicted to him even though you're being harmed? Is he throwing stuff at you? Is he keeping you from your friends and your family? Like, let's get really real here, real quick, girl, okay. Has he hurt you? Has he abused you? Has he hit you and then apologized? And then you feel addicted to this and you feel like you need to go back.

Speaker 1:

Then, yes, there might be a trauma bond there and it's okay if that's happening. I want to hold space for that. There's nothing wrong. There's no shame around that. That's why we have an entire psychology concept called Stockholm Syndrome around this kind of stuff and that gets looked at as like big, massive abuse. And that's why when a trauma bond, it's more subtle. So I just want to say you're not alone in that. If that is happening to you, reach out to me. I will help you.

Speaker 1:

But let's look at some more questions. Do you rationalize their behavior? Or worse, do you blame yourself for it? He wouldn't have hit me if I had made him dinner on time. He wouldn't have yelled at me if I just had been better. That's rationalizing his behavior and we want to check on that because that can be indicative of a trauma bond.

Speaker 1:

And last one I want you to look at is do you feel like you can't leave? Are you terrified of being without them, even though the relationship feels unsafe? Do you feel unsafe with this person and yet you cannot leave this relationship? Then there is a high chance that there is a trauma bond going on there. And these trauma bonds, they are no joke. There's not something to be dismissed or questioned or be like why can't you just leave? That's always a question and that does a disservice to the people in these relationships. It is not that easy, it is difficult, and if you're going through that, let me know. We can work through this or we can find you the help you need for it. Okay, so if you answered yes to any of those questions, it is time to look a bit deeper and I just want you to know. If you are in a trauma bond, it is not your fault. Your nervous system is doing everything it can to keep you safe. It is just looking for the familiar, and healing means getting honest about the harm and slowly building the safety to walk away.

Speaker 1:

And now let's jump into the next question real quick, because I wanted to touch on this one how do I change my emotional or physical attraction to someone who is unhealthy for me? Now see, I think this one works really well with the previous question, even though two different people asked this question, which is really great. Think this one works really well with the previous question, even though two different people asked this question, which is really great. But this one works really well with the previous question because, let's say, you are in a trauma bond. Then how do you get out of it?

Speaker 1:

First, you need to work on your non-secure attachment stance. Are you anxious, avoidant, disorganized? What's keeping you stuck in this mix of fears? You have the fear of being unworthy. Keeping you stuck in this mix of fears? You have the fear of being unworthy, the fear of being alone, the fear of rejection. I want you to find the fear that hits deepest for you and then follow that fear all the way out. What's keeping you sucked in? Are you afraid to be alone? Are you afraid you're nothing without him? Are you attracted to him because he loves you so deeply when you're together, but when you're apart he doesn't give you the time of day? And if that's the case, then what's preventing you from just saying no, I don't want this anymore.

Speaker 1:

And we need to ask ourselves those hard questions. Not how do I stop being attracted to him, but why am I not leaving him if I know he's unhealthy for me? That's the question. We want the attraction to go away, so the leaving part is easier. I get it, but unfortunately that attraction, it will linger. And I just want to be very honest here. Like I'm still attracted to my ex, and this has been what five years later? But it's a constant reminder that I know he's not good for me and I know I deserve better and I know I can do better now. So that attraction, it won't just go away all on its own. It still gets stuck in there. It's just our body used to the familiar. But what you can do is rise above that attraction. You can see that he's unhealthy for you and you can let go. And once you get to that level of acceptance where you accept that you will always be somewhat attracted to him, then you can start to find what is holding you back from leaving. And that's the part I wanna dig into.

Speaker 1:

And if you're out there right now and any of these questions are resonating with you but you wanna dig deeper into them, then I invite you to come on the podcast and get some free, personalized, one-on-one coaching with me. I am a certified relationship coach with the ICF. I have my training and attachment communication inquiry, ifs, somatics, nlp. So it would be an honor for me to help you through your struggle. Maybe you're listening to me talk about how hard it is to leave an unhealthy relationship, but your brain is thinking yeah, jen, sure, but how? That's when it's best to jump on a call with me and explain to me your unique situation, because there's only so much I can answer honestly in these kinds of questions. But to truly get to the deeper healing we need to dig deeper. We need to ask questions, we need to figure out your unique attachment stance to see what would help you. So if that sounds like something you need right now, I want you to scroll down to the show notes and click on the link to apply to be on the podcast, or you can go to speak-honestcom slash podcast and find out more information there.

Speaker 1:

All right, everyone, I hope you have a beautiful week this week. Happy 4th of July to anyone that is celebrating. I will speak with you all next week. Take care, as we wrap up today's conversation, always remember that healing is a journey, not a destination, and it is an honor to be a part of your healing journey. If you want to dig deeper into the topics we covered today, be sure to head over to our show notes, where you can find all of the valuable information mentioned in today's episode right there, and please remember to rate, review and subscribe if you enjoyed today's podcast. Your feedback means the world to us and helps others discover our podcast. Until next time, remember to speak up and speak honest.

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