115. Anxious Attachment: Why You Spiral Waiting for a Text Back | Somatic Attachment Series Part 1

Have you ever sent a text, felt good about it… and then spiraled after  they didn’t respond? 

In this episode, I break down what’s actually happening in those moments and why it has nothing to do with you being “too much” or overthinking. We’re going deeper than your thoughts and into your nervous system, where anxious attachment really begins. I walk you through how to recognize what anxious attachment feels like in your body, how to stay with those sensations instead of reacting, and how to start showing up differently in your relationships without shutting yourself down or needing constant reassurance. This is where we stop trying to think our way out of anxiety and start learning how to move through it.

You might want to listen if:

• You feel a wave of anxiety the moment someone doesn’t text you back
• You find yourself over-analyzing messages and questioning what you said
• You feel an urgent need to fix things or reach out when something feels off
• You know you’re overthinking, but can’t seem to stop in the moment
• You want to feel more calm, grounded, and secure in your relationships

FIND OUT MORE!

• Join the Speak Honest Academy 
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DISCLAIMER:  Speak Honest podcast content is informational, not professional or medical advice. Jenn is an ICF relationship coach, not a licensed therapist. Consult health professionals for specific concerns. Client opinions do not reflect Speak Honest’s stance. We aim for accuracy but are not liable for errors or outcomes from this information. 

Transcript

Welcome And What We Heal

SPEAKER_00 0:05

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. Hello, ladies, and welcome back to another episode of Speak Honest. I'm Jen Noble, your go-to relationship coach and author of the best-selling book, Dance of Attachment. And on today's episode, we are diving into the world of somatic experiencing. I want to bring you into something that might feel very familiar. So you meet someone, things are going well, and you start to feel yourself opening up to them. You're a little more relaxed, a little bit more expressive. You're letting your personality finally come through. And then you send a text. Something light, something cute, something playful, something that feels natural to you. But then he doesn't text you back all day. Oh, the worst, right? You start freaking out. Your chest tightens, your stomach drops, your breathing shifts, and this is all happening and you don't even realize it. And there's this pressure that builds, that makes it feel like you need to do something right now. So what do you do? You go right back to your phone and you send another message. Or you reread the one that you wrote and you wonder, and you're questioning your tone, your words, how you came across what you said on last night's date. And you wonder if you said too much. If you are too much, if maybe you're just too excitable or too needy or too much. And even though part of you knows he's probably just busy with work or he's doing something with his family, your body is already telling you a completely different story. But you try to tell yourself it's not a big deal. Stop overreacting all the time. You know, this is what you're telling yourself in your brain. You try to convince yourself he's just busy. And that's the part I want to slow down with us today. Because this is where so many of you get stuck. You try to think your way through something that is happening in your nervous system. You try to use logic to calm something that your body has already decided is a potential threat. And I want to talk about how somatic experiencing can actually help you move through this instead of getting pulled into it. So if you're listening to today's episode and something is resonating with you and you want to go deeper into this work, later on after this episode, I'm going to invite you to join us inside of the Speak Honest Academy. This is where we slow things down in real time, where we look at what's happening in your body, not just your thoughts, and where you can start to build the capacity to stay with yourself instead of reacting or trying to fix everything in the moment. But for now, as you're listening to today's episode, I want you to pay attention to these three things. First, notice what happens in your body before your thoughts even catch up. That initial sensation, that tightness, that drop, that shift, whew, that right there is your starting point. Second, notice the urgency, that feeling that you need to do something right now. That's not coming from logic and it's not coming from your intuition. That's coming from your nervous system trying to create safety. And third, notice how quickly you start to make it mean something about you. Not just what's happening, but what it says about who you are. Now, let's dive in. All right, so let's start right here, okay? Most of the conversations that are happening out there right now around anxious attachment tends to stay at the level of thoughts and actions. So this can look like you're overthinking, you're rereading text, you're ruminating, you're needing lots of reassurance, you're being a little bit extra clingy, you're trying to figure out what something means and being very preoccupied with the other person. And while that is part of the lived experience of an anxiously attached person, it's not actually where this begins. I want you to understand that all of this begins in your body. There's this moment that happens, and you've probably experienced this more times than you can count. But let's say you send the text or you say something that feels a little vulnerable, and then there's a pause. Maybe he doesn't respond back right away, and you feel that ugh feeling in your body. Maybe his tone is just a little bit different this time. Or maybe something just feels slightly off in the moment, but you can't quite put your finger on it. And your body reacts before your mind can fully catch up. It feels like your chest is tightening. Maybe your stomach drops. You might even feel a little bit sick to your stomach. Your breathing changes, and there's this pressure that builds that makes it feel like you need to do something right now in order to feel okay. You want to fix it, clarify it, smooth it over, and make sure everything is a-okay. And then your thoughts come in. Ooh, boy, and are those thoughts big. They want to explain what just happened. Did I say too much? Was I annoying? Did I do something wrong? But those thoughts, they're not the starting point. They are the interpretation of a sensation that has already happened. So today, we are going to walk through three key ways of looking at this. First, we are going to look at how to identify what anxious attachment actually feels like in your body. Second, we are going to talk about how to work with that somatic sensation instead of against it. And third, we are going to look at how to start bringing this into your relationship so you are not stuck in the same patterns. And we are going to be starting this with a four-part series. Today I'm going to be talking predominantly about anxious attachment. Over the next coming weeks, I will also get into avoidant, disorganized, and eventually what secure feels like. But for right now, I want us to start to learn how to identify what we're feeling in our bodies as an anxiously attached person. So the first key point here is figuring that part out, learning how to identify what anxious attachment actually feels like in your body. And I think the best way to explain this is to talk about one of my clients, and I'm going to call her Ava. And Ava came in to see me because she kept finding herself in the same situation over and over and over and over again. And she would meet someone new, things would be going really great. And then the moment there was any kind of pause or shift, she would spiral and she would tell me everything she was thinking. She could walk me through the text that she sent, what she said, what he said, what he didn't say, what he meant, what he might mean, and what she was worried about. She had this whole story in her head. So I stopped her during one of our sessions and I said, Okay, Ava, I hear everything you're thinking, but what are you feeling in your body right now? And then she immediately went right back to her thoughts. And that's what most of us do. So I brought her back and I said, Okay, no, not what you think, but what do you actually feel? And she paused for a second and then she said, I think my chest feels tight. Ah. And so I said to her, Great, stay there. Tell me more about that. And then she replied, Well, it feels like there's a rubber band around my chest and it's being pulled tighter and tighter like it's about to snap. And that right there is the moment everything started to make sense, both for her and for myself as her coach, because now we're not talking about a text message anymore or about what he thought or didn't think. We are talking about a physical sensation happening in her body. And from a nervous system perspective, this is what's actually going on. Your body is constantly scanning for safety or threat, especially when it comes to connection. So when something even slightly feels like a shift, your nervous system reacts quickly. That tightness in her chest is not random. It's not just randomly there. It is her body picking up on something and then responding to it before her mind even has a chance to catch up. And when her thoughts come in and try to explain it away, did I say too much? Was I annoying? Did I do something wrong? But those thoughts are not the starting point. Those are the interpretation of a sensation that has already happened. So the work here is not to jump into fixing it or analyzing it right away. The work is to slow down enough to actually notice what is happening in your body. Where do you feel it? What does it actually feel like? And now that we actually know what we feel, where it is in the body and what it feels like, just like Ava was doing, the next step is learning how to work with it. Because this is where most people go straight into trying to stop the feeling. Ava's first instinct when she felt that tightness in her chest was to get rid of it. She wanted to send another text or clarify what she meant or smooth it over or breathe it away. She just wanted to make sure everything was okay. And that urge, it makes a lot of sense. And it it made sense to her body because her body felt like something was wrong. But what we started doing instead was slowing that moment down. I had her pause, I had her put her phone down, and then I said to her, Hey, stay with that feeling in your chest for a second if you can. Just give it some attention. Not to get rid of it, not to make it go away, but just be with it. And this is where the research around the nervous system is really helpful. When your body goes into that activated state, your stress response is online. Your heart rate changes, your breathing changes, your body is preparing you to act. So if you immediately react from that place, oh, you are reacting from a stress response, not from clarity and girl, that is not gonna go well, trust me. So what we do instead is we regulate. And I'm not talking about forcing yourself to calm down or breathing your way through something. I'm talking about giving your body something to anchor so it can start to settle. So with Ava, we did start with her breath, slowing it down, giving it a rhythm. But then we brought her attention back to that feeling. What does it feel like? Does it have a shape? Does it have a color? If it could talk, what would it want to tell you? Because what's actually happening in that moment was not rejection, it was a pause. And her body needed to feel a difference. See, we're not getting rid of the feeling. You're learning how to stay with it long enough that it doesn't immediately turn into action. So now that we know how to identify the feeling and we know how to work with it, the next step is learning how to actually use this in your relationship so you're not stuck in the same patterns every single time. See, Ava didn't need to become someone who never felt that tightness in her chest again. That was never the goal. The goal was for her to feel that sensation and then not immediately act on it the way she had in the past. So instead of going straight into sending another text or trying to fix it, she learned how to pause first. She learned how to stay with that feeling before bringing it into the relationship. And that changed everything. Because now, when she does communicate, it's not coming from that urgent, activated, anxiously attached place. It's coming from a place where she's actually grounded in what she's feeling. She's curious, she's compassionate, and she can communicate effectively. So instead of reacting in the moment, instead of sending something she might overthink or regret later, maybe now she gets to say, hey, I noticed I fell a little bit off when I didn't hear from you all day. And I think I'm realizing how much I enjoy your text in the morning. See, that is a completely different experience for both people in the relationship. From a research perspective, this is where we start to build secure attachment. Not by avoiding activation, but by learning how to move through it and then come back into connection in a regulated way. This is what creates safety over time. This is what allows your nervous system to start trusting that connection doesn't disappear the moment something feels uncertain. And this is also where repair comes in. Because relationships are not about getting it perfect. There are always going to be moments where something feels off, where you feel unsure, or where your body gets activated. What builds secure attachment is what happens after that moment. So instead of freaking out when he doesn't text you back or making it mean he's not putting in enough effort or starting to question everything, you start to relate to those moments differently. You feel it, you work with it, and then you choose how you want to show up. That's the shift. That's how you stop repeating the same pattern over and over and over again. All right. So as we wrap up today, I want you to really sit with this. If you are someone who feels that urgency, that tightness, that need to fix or figure things out the moment something feels off. This is exactly the work we do inside of the Speak Honest Academy. This is where we take everything we talked about today and actually apply it in real time. We slow those moments down. We look at what is happening in your body, and we build your ability to stay with yourself instead of immediately reacting. This is also where I teach my somatic affirmation practice, which is not just something you say in your head, it is something you learn to feel in your body. So you can start creating a different experience from the inside out. Inside of the academy, you get access to both group coaching and one-on-one coaching with me. So you are not trying to figure this out on your own. And if you are anxiously attached, if you are constantly overthinking, reading into things, or feeling like your emotions take over in those really important moments, this is where I help you work through that step by step. You can go to speakhonestacademy.com or just scroll down to the link in the show notes and sign up there. And as a special gift, for anyone who is following along in the Somatic Attachment series, I want you to be able to try out the Academy for a full month before deciding if it's right for you. Listen, I know how many programs and coaches are out there right now. So as I always say, I just want you to try before you buy and come try us out. We meet every Tuesday and Thursday evening at 7 p.m. Eastern. So if you can make it this week, we would love to see you there. And if you would like to join us when you are signing up, use the code secure start for your full month free. And remember, you do not need to get rid of your reactions. You just need to learn how to stay with yourself long enough to choose something different. All right, everyone, 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.