Understanding Attachment Styles: How to Navigate Trauma-Informed Dating [Episode 934]

Kimberly Snyder (00:00.76)
Hi everyone, welcome back to our Thursday Q &A show. I hope you are having a lovely week so far. And today our topic is around relationships and in particular, navigating attachment styles, dating apps and heartbreak. We have been getting a lot of relationship questions lately and with no surprise, of course, we’ve been talking about the heart so much and how it relates to our overall holistic lifestyle.

with a new book that’s out, The Hidden Power of the Five Hearts. And when it comes to relationships, first of all, when it comes to the heart, there’s this incredible science about the heart brain, how the heart has the ability to elevate our health, the efficiency of all our bodily systems, including our digestion and increasing our immunity and our hormonal balance, and so on.

And the heart is also the seat of emotional intelligence. And as we connect more to the deepest wholeness inside of us, it allows us to better connect with ourselves and then better connect with others. And a really important part of this unfolding work is the ability to see ourselves clearly. So one of the things we’re going to talk about today

which is a question from our lovely community, is about attachment styles. Now in the book, in the steady heart chapter, which is stage three, where heart coherence, heart and brain start to communicate, I talk about attachments. Attachments are ways in which we give our power away outside of ourselves. So attachment is, know, I need this particular food, this dish at the restaurant, otherwise I’m gonna get really upset.

I need to be in a relationship. Otherwise, I feel like a loser. I need to stay in this job. Otherwise, I’m not going to be okay. It’s all the things outside of us. When it comes to relationships, as we’ll get into in just a few moments on our show, there are styles within this type of attachment that play out in patterns in our relationships. So there’s anxious attachment, there’s healthy attachment, there’s avoidant attachment. So having this knowledge

Kimberly Snyder (02:18.808)
which we’re gonna get into today is a really powerful way to continue to grow in our self-awareness. If we are not aware of our patterns, then we cannot change, we cannot grow, we can’t expand. If you have not yet checked out our self-awareness guide at mysaloona.com, our free download, I highly recommend you check it out. Thousands of people have already downloaded it just in the last few weeks. We’re getting incredible feedback about it.

because awareness is really the beginning of shifting and changing. And we can create awareness in our lifestyle patterns, in our relationship patterns, in the ways in which we react to things in the outside world. And it’s just an incredibly empowering thing to do. So let’s get right into our show today. I’m very excited. So…

MySaluna.com are the show notes for today’s show, that self-awareness guide, the meditation tracks for the heart-aligned meditation, information about the new book, The Hidden Power of the Five Hearts, which is also now available wherever books are sold. Let’s get into our question from Jill, who lives in Seattle. She says, I’m recently divorced and getting over the heartbreak of that. I’m trying to get back out in the dating world, but it feels overwhelming with all the dating apps and my friends talking to me.

about adult attachment styles. So I would love to get your thoughts about opening my heart and learning to love and trust again. Jill, thank you so much for bringing this topic to our attention. And the first thing that I want to start talking about here when you talk about opening your heart and learning to love and trust, this is something that was part of my process when I went through my big breakup.

And I moved out on my own and my mom had just passed. Many of you have heard me tell this story. And I had a really young child, Emerson, who was barely, maybe he was a year and a half, maybe a little bit younger. But one of the things that’s really necessary is that we work on our steadying of our own heart before we try to get into another relationship, before we worry about

Kimberly Snyder (04:35.404)
you know, trying to get set up again, we have to study ourselves. Otherwise we could end up in a very similar type of pattern, a very similar type of relationship. This is a topic that we actually talked about this week in our four week heart reset program. So when we study inside of ourselves, there’s a steadying that happens throughout our lives. It radiates out from our heart. And what this means is

steadiness is the ability to be resilient, to stay present, to pivot and flow with life, to not feel this desperate holding or pushing people away or self-sabotage or whatever type of patterns we may have enacted in the past. When we are steady in our hearts, what it means is that we are here, we are alive, we are whole, and we can start to discern

How is the, what is the best thing to say? What’s the best way to flow in this situation without the unsteadiness of past reactivity, past trauma, past wounds coming into this moment and creating again these re-enforced patterns, these neural networks which keep playing out the same thing over and over again, giving us limited results. So across the board, if you are interested in coming into a healthy relationship, if you are interested in

getting over heartbreak, you need to stabilize your own heart. How do we do that? We do that through growing your coherence capacity. So a few things I recommend is number one, doing the heart-align meditation at least four to five times a week, which was the amount of times that we studied in our study with the Heart Math Institute, where we found that coherence, getting into a coherent state grew on average 29%.

The meditation itself is about eight minutes long. You can get the tracks on the website, our website, visaluna.com. You can read about it in the book. When we do this in the morning, especially, we start to ground in to this deeper resilience to not feeling so much fear, overwhelm, desperation, a chaotic energy that is resonating out through our magnetic field.

Kimberly Snyder (06:58.006)
One of the things that I talk about in the Dark Heart chapter of the book is this electromagnetic field around the heart, which is measured by magnetometers, which measure magnetic fields, they measure frequencies. When we’re stable inside, it is registered by other people. This is felt, this is scientifically measured, this isn’t just something that sounds nice or feels nice. When you wanna attract a relationship that is healthy, that is fulfilling, that is peaceful,

that will continue to grow in depth. It is so important to work on your own heart fields and your energy. And I can say for myself, I came out of a period where, because then it becomes more harmonious and magnetic. You literally become more magnetic. I remember when I came out of this period of feeling quite isolated and being quite isolated. wasn’t even the pandemic. I was isolating myself, just working on myself, meditating a lot.

taking care of my child, taking care of my dad who was living with us after my mom passed. It was a really inward time and it was a stabilizing time. And there was parts of me that felt time pressure because I knew that I wanted another child. I felt, there was part of me that said, you better go out there and you better try to meet someone. But my heart…

You know, I would use that language now. There was the deeper guidance inside of me that said, it’s not time yet. And I also had a deep guidance inside of me that said, you know, you don’t need to go on dating apps. Now there’s nothing wrong with dating apps and people are drawn to different things, but because I’m not really into technology, you know, my husband laughs, he said, I can barely use the internet. I don’t know all the functions on Instagram.

I’m just not, you my mind doesn’t work in a tech based way. I just feel like dating apps would be quite stressful for me. And so I just had this inner knowing that it wasn’t my path, but I did work on my own energy and I did naturally meet my husband at a dating, at a dinner party. And one thing that became clear because my energy was clear, I could see him and he could also see me now. And I’ve been talking about this as well.

Kimberly Snyder (09:17.874)
It doesn’t mean you meet somebody and it’s all perfect. I started to learn about these attachment styles, which we’re going to talk about here, and realized that I can have an anxious attachment style and he can have an avoidant one because sometimes traumas match up. And because of that, we’ve had to work on ourselves and find balance. And that’s one of the beautiful things about awareness.

about being mirrors to each other, we can really start to help each other heal with compassion and with love. So a study in 2009 in the Journal of Clinical Child and Adolescent Psychology found that insecure attachment styles are linked to higher levels of anxiety and depression, as well as difficulties in forming and maintaining relationships. So anxious attachment,

means that you always want to be in touch with that person. It means there’s an anxiety when you’re apart or you can’t get in touch. Now, because of my past, I had always picked people that were a little bit, felt safe to me. I have, my mom went back to work when I was really young. So what surfaced later in life is that I had a bit of abandonment issues. And because of this, there was this anxious attachment, always wanted to be connected, always.

you know, together. And it worked to an extent, but then sometimes it would feel too much, you know? And I said to myself, this doesn’t even feel like me. I’ve never been like this before. But it was because our relationship didn’t feel as safe as other ones. couldn’t feel like I could control it. There was all this love. I did love him so much versus, you know, picking someone who was really nice, but they would, you know, I’d be the one that would do the abandoning, not him. So it brought out this anxiety in me.

And once I started to really see it, that there were stories I was making up, he’s not texting me back, this is his fault, blah, blah, the steady heart, the self-awareness realized, it made me see that where I could show up for myself and where I was letting my wild horse mind run into these stories and these thought patterns from my past wounds versus the truth of being present.

Kimberly Snyder (11:41.132)
It’s fine. He’s, you know, at a work dinner. He can’t get in touch with me right now or it’s okay. You know? And so after I started to see it, again, this is why self-awareness is so important. I was able to heal and it was amazing. there’s another type of, another type of attachment style known as avoidant attachment. And I have a very dear friend who characterizes this. I wouldn’t even say my husband, John.

but there’s another, there’s someone I know quite well, we’ll call him David. And he doesn’t want to be too close to someone, right? So there’s this avoidance of intimacy. I mean, it’s a protection mechanism because there’s a wound or a thought or a belief somewhere that if I don’t let myself, I can protect myself by not letting myself fully be seen.

or connected to. And so what David does is he gets, you know, somewhat close to his wife, but doesn’t go all the way into full intimacy and to talking about his feelings into the depths that I know she would like. And so there’s something there to look at as well. What is it that makes us keep a distance from other people so that we never

get vulnerable or we never let ourselves fully get seen. Because the problem with that, of course, is feelings of loneliness and ultimately feeling unfulfilled and disconnected. So then there is another type of attachment style, which is balanced, healthy attachment, which is where we’re okay when we are, we’re happy when we’re together and we’re happy when we’re apart.

and secure. We’re secure, we call it secure attachment, secure together, secure attached. Time spent apart is healthy and it’s enjoyed. There isn’t the anxiety, isn’t avoiding pushing away. There’s just a real inner stability. And this is what we can all get to in our relationships as we find the steadiness from inside of us. It is never going to be fulfilled or corrected or balanced from an outside relationship because

Kimberly Snyder (14:07.68)
It has to come from ourselves in our own heart, in our own energy field, in our own self connection. So I can say for myself as noticing and being a bit surprised that anxious anxiety attachment actually came up in my relationship was, as I mentioned, doing the heart aligned meditation, learning about these hard stages, which I’ve talked over about over and over again has been so impactful for me and understanding that

It was a lack of steadiness in me that was pulling into attachments and relationships in my life, particularly my relationship with my husband and creating unhealthy patterns or continuing to live out unhealthy patterns. So there was just this, just the teachings, just having access to the teachings helped, doing the heart aligned meditation helped. And also for me, particularly the heart aligned steady in life practice, which is in that steady heart chapter.

And it’s a practice about stabilizing yourself when these anxious feelings of attachment come up. Or our topic today is also about, you know, heartbreak, going through tough times in relationships. When those feelings come up, really being there for yourself, being there in your heart, feeling this security and the steadiness inside of you, because that’s the truth. We can always feel steady and secure from inside. And once we learn these vital life skills, what happens is that

things can come and go, relationships can come and go, people can come and go even for periods or if we get anxious if people leave for a few weeks or they do a big work trip or whatever it is. And we realize that no matter what happens on the outside, we ultimately have the strength and the resilience to handle whatever life brings us. This is the real power of heart coherence. And this knowledge allows us to move from attachments and unhealthy attachments into secure attachment or I like to call it

real connection. So we’re connected when we’re together and we’re connected when we’re apart. But when we’re apart, we’re not thinking about the next time we’re going to be together because we’re in that present moment connected to ourselves, having, you know, a beautiful, joyful, fulfilling time, whatever we’re doing here. Anxious attachment is the missing energy. I’m missing you so much. I’m missing you that I’m not enjoying my time here. I don’t feel complete when I’m not with you. Missing.

Kimberly Snyder (16:35.798)
versus the wholeness of the steadiness means there is no lack. There is no lack. I’m here. I’m alive. I’m whole. I’m going to enjoy what I’m doing now. And I look forward to seeing you. when we’re together, we’ll enjoy our time, but I’m also okay on my own.

Kimberly Snyder (16:57.07)
A 2018 study in the Journal of Research and Personality found that while attachment styles are relatively stable, they can change over time through experiences in relationships and therapy, particularly with interventions like cognitive behavioral therapy. So experiences in relationships. I want to focus on that. When we reflect back, this is why journaling is really powerful, and we can start to see patterns play out.

and understanding the heart stages for me, I could see where the dark heart stages in my life, which is where the heart and brain aren’t speaking, and there’s a good deal of incoherence or just a lot of energies coming up that are…

bringing up fear, overwhelm instead of really great.

communication inside. So in these moments where I didn’t feel like I had a lot of security in my life, this is where we pick the safer relationships. You pick the people that are there for you, but it’s more like a friendship, right? This is what I experienced versus like a really romantic relationship because it was safe. Right? So for me, as I awakened my heart, and as I mentioned, when I met John, my husband, it felt out of control because there was so much love.

but I was also in a place where I was connected to myself and connected to the love. But then I had to face these attachment styles and the fact that I really did have lot of anxiousness that was brought up from being in a situation that I could not control. So awareness, coming into the heart, using these heart tools, learning about heart coherence is gonna be really, really, really impactful.

Kimberly Snyder (18:49.526)
And now it is also really important to understand, to steady ourselves because as we become steady, another very important aspect of healthy relationships grows, especially if you’re in the dating apps or you’re out there in the world of dating, and that is intuition. And this is where we start to transcend the shiny appearances of what people look like with their Photoshopped picture or their witty, you know,

incredibly well-written profile piece into really discerning who is the right fit for you. Even if in my case, my husband looked nothing like what I pictured my husband would be like. He didn’t have a similar lifestyle. He wasn’t plant-based. He didn’t do yoga. He was just, you know, a very different type of person, but there was a connection that I felt on an energetic level.

So the other power of really being in your heart is that you’ll start to get these, you can call it what you will, like this deeper guidance inside of you, almost like a little hit of intuition, a flow will come to you, just guiding you. And in order to really allow our intuition to be in its highest potential, it means we have to get past overthinking.

And the mind will reinforce patterns. It will create the same sort of thing over and over again to keep you safe. Or I’m attracted to this shiny looking coin, this person that looks a certain way versus the intuition of your incredible intelligence in your heart, your heart brain telling you that, you know, this I’m led here. I don’t know what it is, but I’m really drawn to this person or

There’s something that really doesn’t feel right about this person, even though there, if there isn’t an overt red flag, it just doesn’t feel right to me right now. So it’s really important to steady yourself and to work on your heart as you go into the dating world, because it’s not time wasted. It’s actually going to save you so much energy and time. And you can date and at the same time be working on your heart coherence and your heart intelligence.

Kimberly Snyder (21:08.898)
But I can say from personal experience, the mind will tell you, know, rush, hurry up, be in more dating apps, you’re running out of time, there’s so many single people in the city. And what you can know inside of yourself is that the truth is energy attracts. And the thing that is in your control, the thing that no one else has is your energy and your ability to step into your wholeness, which is so magnetic and so attractive.

and it bypasses the rational mind’s idea of, you know, this is going to lead to this, and this is going to work out, and this isn’t going to work out. A 2020 study published in Cyber Psychology, Behavior and Social Networking explored how the use of dating apps impacts romantic relationships. It found that dating apps reported lower relationship quality and stability compared to those who met their partner through other means.

And I believe that on average it’s because there’s so much that people can hide behind on a screen. You can change your picture. You can not meet up for a while. You can write these witty, you know, things. So what I would encourage you to do is if you are in dating apps, as soon as it feels like the right time to have a zoom, to really have an in person, but a true authentic interaction with that person.

so that you can blast through perceived appearances and ways in which things can be contrived or fabricated and inauthentic. And then because you’ve been working on studying your heart and your intuition, when you do have that Zoom or you do meet up for coffee for the first time, instead of just trying to force something to work that ultimately is going to drain your energy and isn’t gonna work out anyway,

you can nip it in the butt. On the other hand, if you have that interaction, that FaceTime call, and you say, know what it is, this person isn’t my type, but you know, my type that I defined in the past, but I’m really drawn to them and I want to continue to talk to them and maybe do, you know, go out for lunch or whatever it is. So you want to move it away from where things can be hidden and contrived just from the, you know, the static of screens into the real world.

Kimberly Snyder (23:37.066)
And so, there’s so much here around relationships. There’s lower self-esteem and body dissatisfaction can occur. There was a research study in computers and human behavior found that low self-esteem happened with prolonged use of dating apps. We do not want to give our power away, our wholeness away to these

you know, these cultural phenomena, dating apps, things that are based on technology. It’s easy to, for people to paint this shiny picture and to these perfect photos and whatever. Again, when we’re secure in ourselves, when we realize that we really are this unique true self energy and no one is exactly like you and it’s not, love isn’t based on having to look a certain way or having

to have a certain amount of achievements or make a certain amount of money, it’s based on you being yourself and someone connecting with your energy. And what it does is it gives you this power to realize that the most powerful thing to do is to really to be yourself. One of the quotes that I say in The Hidden Power, The Five Hearts, is that it’s not about being something different than yourself, it’s actually being more of yourself, taking away these layers of reactivity,

inauthenticity, delusion, bringing over emotionalism into certain situations versus really sinking it down into this energy inside of you. And I believe our natural state in our whole hearts is connection and kindness and compassion and love. And then this starts to burst out of you. This radiance starts to come out of you. And this is the most incredible energy which will attract the right type of energetic, romantic,

connection that you want if you’re looking for a long-term relationship beyond just a short-term physical fling, but to have a real deep spiritual emotional connection with someone as well. This deep inner work is also going to help you get past heartbreak and the trauma and the reactions that come from going through something really tough like that.

Kimberly Snyder (26:00.8)
In 2003, a study in personal relationships found that individuals who engage in reflective thinking after a breakup are more likely to experience personal growth, learning more about themselves and what they want in future relationships. So we realized that, and I went through this as well in my relationship after I broke up, there was a period, and I think this is natural, where we start to feel like there’s something wrong with me, that’s how I was feeling about myself.

I can’t hold on to a relationship. I’m not worthy of love. I’m not good enough, whatever it is. And then we realize just like the way that we can reframe any type of rejection or something not working out, this wasn’t my path. This person wasn’t my person. This wasn’t meant to be. And so we can use a mirror and see what part we played, how we want to grow, how we need to attract someone who can fulfill us or not play out the same pattern.

And again, I’ll say it again, as we continue to study our own hearts, we start to realize that from the wholeness of our steady heart and not coming from a lack based place, this is where we can start to transcend limited attachment styles, anxiety, avoidance, and come into such incredible, profound connection with ourselves that we make ourselves

like beacons of light and radiance and the most attractive that we can be because that is what really attracts people is on an energetic level, long-term, not just, you know, a quick physical flame, but someone that we really want to deepen and spend time with and potentially build a life together with or a family together with. So we can learn a lot from breakups and awareness is key. We can see

where we might have a certain attachment style and where we may still be projecting out or living out old patterns that we want to look at and address before we try to date someone else, before we go out into the world, onto the dating apps, into another relationship. And so this is true whether we’re in dating apps or not. And then of course,

Kimberly Snyder (28:27.843)
When we’re talking about relationships, we also want to talk about social support. A 2015 study in the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships found that social support and positive self-reflection helped those recover more quickly from heartbreak. It’s hard when we shift in relationships or things aren’t working out, we can start to get down on ourselves. This is where the mind starts to tell us stories. We start to believe in our stories that we’re not

enough that there’s problems with us that challenges, just start to have some really dark thoughts. And this is where we want to have a really positive support network around us that can help to lift us up and help us to keep that perspective. Positive communities are really important. I to keep things really positive on my Instagram, which you can check out at underscore Kimberly Snyder. There’s a

you know, big community that we have around heart-based living, lots of messages around this. Please also join our newsletter at mysaloona.com. At some point, we’ll be running this four week heart reset program again, or similar programs to it. And I encourage you to really learn about this work in conjunction with, if you are dating in conjunction with having a release, some friends, some people around you, community that you can really count on.

so that it doesn’t make you feel even more lonely or that you really need to be in a relationship or you need to make this relationship work that isn’t clearly working in order to feel okay. The truth is the steady heart, as Swami Sri Yukteswar teaches us, needs nothing outside of itself. We can enjoy life, we can be connected to others, we can certainly have loved ones.

But ultimately we are there for ourselves. We are self-reliant. And this is the most powerful energy that we can emanate when it comes to attracting love and being in healthy relationship. We don’t need things from the other person. We can enjoy our time together, but we can fulfill our own needs and then be there for each other in connection versus attachment.

Kimberly Snyder (30:42.7)
So thank you so much for tuning in today. I hope this gives you some interesting things to reflect on, including attachment styles, anxious attachment, avoidant attachment, secure attachment in particular. Think about what it would mean to feel connected versus attached. And if you have not yet read the steady heart chapter of The Hidden Power, The Five Hearts, I highly recommend that you do. We’ll be back here Monday as always for our next interview show.

Until then, sending you so much love and lots of connection from my heart to yours. Remember to keep your questions coming over on the website, mysaloon.com. You can leave questions. Please also write us a review for the show. It’s a wonderful way to support. And so I thank you so much in advance and I’ll see you in a few days. great care. I’ll see you on social media anytime. Take great care and sending you much love.