Narcissistic Abuse and Attachment Styles

Have you heard about different attachment styles?

Having a secure attachment style makes it easier to choose and maintain stable and healthy relationships, so in this latest Thriver TV episode I want to talk about why we can be trapped in anxious or avoidant attachment styles – unless we turn within to heal.

I also answer the burning question of where do narcissists fit into attachment styles?

This is an episode you won’t want to miss – especially if you are a NARPer, as I talk you through how to let go of the trauma associated with each attachment style using your healing modules.

 

 

Video Transcript

Welcome, dear Thriver to Thriver TV, which empowers you to not only survive narcissistic abuse, but also to thrive after it. If you haven’t subscribed to my YouTube channel yet, please do so, and if my teachings make sense to you, please share them with anyone else you know who may be helped by them.

You may have heard about attachment styles in regard to relationships, but how does this play out in narcissistic relationships? How can we recognize these different styles and move ourselves away from disordered people into secure relationships?

That’s what we’re going to go through today in our Thriver TV episode, looking at each style and what it means, as well as how to heal from a particular style, especially if it’s plaguing your ability to have secure and healthy relationships.

I’m also going to grant Narcissistic Abuse Recovery Program (NARP) members the Quanta Freedom Healing shifts to heal your attachment style quickly and powerfully.

Please also know, you may have more than one type of attachment style. Many people do.

 

Secure Attachment

Let’s start off by looking at secure attachment. This doesn’t need healing, but it’s helpful to look at this because either we have a secure attachment style or we still need to heal towards this.

Secure attachment is an ability to give love and affection without being hung up on what’s coming back at you.

For example, if you are worrying that, “I didn’t get a text answer within an amount of time,” then that’s not secure. We don’t have those feelings if we have a secure attachment style.

It’s also an ability to receive love and attention whilst being able to have a healthy sense of yourself. This expresses as having your own interests outside of a partner and allowing him or her to have their own life as well. It’s about feeling unthreatened and secure even when you are apart.

Many people with secure relationship styles cannot fathom other people’s relationship drama and they refuse to participate in it because it’s just isn’t their programming. It’s not their reality.

People with a secure attachment style tend to form relationships with other people who also have a secure attachment style. That’s water finding its own level. It’s not to say that they’re always going to have perfect relationships, but they don’t have the narcissistic struggles that we had or have in our relationships.

This is because from an early age these individuals experienced caretakers who allowed them space and could give them love and soothing in healthy ways. They therefore learned from a young age it was safe to give and experience love, as well as detach and be their own individual self in the world.

 

Anxious Attachment

Now, let’s move on to the first of our painful attachment styles. It’s the anxious style, and this is a person who feels insecure, jealous and distrusting of their partner.

If the other person does something without them, they may doubt that person’s loyalty and devotion, and feel that they could be abandoned or replaced.

If their partner is texting, talking, or posting, this can trigger fears of indiscretion or unfaithfulness.

If the other person goes missing for a period of time, someone with anxious attachment could imagine that they are up to no good and lying to them on their return.

This style is confusing for many people in our wonderful community, as it was for me, because with narcissists, we experienced people we couldn’t trust – because they were untrustworthy. It can then be difficult to trust good people in our life, because of our past.

This attachment style is one of the most – if not the most – commonly exhibited in our community, and it’s definitely a style that I’d severely taken on myself.

However, what I really want you to understand is that it doesn’t matter whether or not we have a ‘reason’ for having these feelings. We still need to heal from them. The traumas generating an anxious attachment style are in our body, and nobody can heal them for us other than ourselves.

If we hang on to inner trauma, it doesn’t keep us safe from deceptive people – because of quantum law of ‘so within, so without’. Whatever level you’re vibrating on the inside of you is what you’re going to keep experiencing outside of you too. So whenever you have a fear, then you will keep experiencing more of whatever is creating that fear.

It’s the losing of these triggers, the letting go of them, which keeps us safe and healthy because when we are internally solid that we are not going to tolerate disrespectful, disloyal people, then we’re no longer in a match for them emotionally. We stop being attracted to them. We can also heal our insecurities so that we enjoy good, honest people in our life, rather than sabotage their love because of our unhealed fears.

After all, people with a secure attachment style are too healthy to put up with having to walk on broken glass around our insecurities, and it’s not their job.

So what caused us to have this style and experience the reality of it in our life? More of the same.

We were distrusted, micromanaged and controlled by caretakers, who didn’t believe us when we told the truth and who accused us of things that we didn’t do. This behaviour is familiar to us, and what we hated receiving is exactly what we perpetrate on those we love until we heal it.

Many may say, “I’m like this because of the adult narcissistic relationship.” Yet truly, if we’re honest with ourselves, many of us had this anxious triggered tendency and these feelings anyway, and it did relate to the way we were brought up as kids.

My best suggestion for shifting this with NARP is to use Module 4, with the intention of, “I’m targeting the traumas of injustice and pain that I felt as a child.”

Once you have cleared all those charges, set a new intention of, “I’m targeting the betrayals that I received from the narcissist.”

That’s what the Module 4 work is all about, so clean those out until nothing remains.

You can then use the bonus Goal Setting Module with this goal, “It’s safe to love, trust, and let go. I allow and receive space to be independent, and I know all information that I need to keep me safe is always going to come to me.” You can, of course, word this in a way that it feels right for you. Clear everything in the way of that until you get to a 10 out of 10.

I had to do these shifts myself, so you can take it from me personally that you’re not going to know yourself after these quantum shifts. Your anxious tendencies will melt away.

 

 

 

Avoidant Attachment Style

This is another very typical attachment style amongst people who are abused by narcissists. This may not make sense superficially, but when understand the deeper layers, the reasons become very clear.

If you are avoidant, it means you would rather go it alone. You find it hard to ask for help, accept help or delegate tasks to other people. You take most things on yourself because you don’t want the messy attachments of letting people into your life, where you might become entwined with them or let down by them.

You find it very hard to share your likes, wants and needs with people and you struggle to lay boundaries. If somebody oversteps a mark or says or does something that doesn’t feel comfortable or okay, you’d rather not speak up. You don’t stand in your own truth, values, and rights.

You don’t stand up for what you need with others, so it’s easier if you keep your distance from people. You don’t have many relationships, and within the ones that you do, you find it difficult to express love or your feelings.

Now, very cleverly, narcissists can come into an avoidant person’s life pretending to be everything that this person has been craving. They appear to lack the mess and the complications that the avoidant feels they have with other people. The avoidant perceives the narcissist as, “This person gets me and understands me and gives to me without strings. This person feels like me. It’s safe to connect with this person.” Whereas the narcissist was merely mimicking you, felt you out, and appeared to be everything you needed to feel like they were your other half.

Narcissists love to get with avoidants. Avoidants are very capable people who are usually very stable practically, very responsible, and they’re going to take on the heavy burdens themselves. They’re not going to put pressure on the narcissists to show up, step up, provide, or do the right thing.

The avoidant is the perfect partner for a narcissist. If the narcissist wants to be a narcissist and create numerous messes of irresponsibility and ridiculousness, then the avoidant (who by this stage is well and truly hooked in and trauma-bonded) will clean up all of the messes for them.

Before the narcissist came into their life, many avoidant people will have had short-term relationships with people that they didn’t fully commit to – including people with secure attachment styles who could have been really healthy for them. Someone with an avoidant personality style will opt out rather than become truly committed. However, a narcissist can capture their heart on a very deep level. Let me know in the comments if this has happened to you.

Now, if we go deeper again, there’s an absolute energetic match going on here. A narcissist is the ultimate avoidant because they never connect or commit to anybody. It may look like they do, but they emotionally never do because a narcissist is only committed to their own false self, their ego. Everyone else is merely a tool to serve the true master, the false self. Yet, the narcissist convinces the avoidant that they are the ultimate person worth committing to so an avoidant may give them their heart.

The avoidant personality forms in the first place as a result of not being validated or valued as a child. These children experience feelings of being unworthy of emotional and practical attention and support. At some stage they learned to give up and not ask for stuff, attention or care, and only rely on themselves because the constant rejection became too painful.

Alternatively, an avoidant personality can form as a result of a child receiving attention and care, but with so many controlling or abusive strings attached that the child decided it was much easier to disconnect, not ask for what they need and look after their needs for themselves. In this case, the anxious style and avoidant style may be interconnected, and I’ve seen this combination often in this community. Again, let me know in the comments if that’s true for you.

NARPers who recognise the unhealed avoidant pattern within themselves can use these healing suggestions

Use Module 1 or the Source Healing and Resolution Module (which is a personal favourite of mine) to target your inner trauma about being invisible, unimportant, unloved and unsupported as a child. Clear it all out until you can’t feel it in your body anymore, and then use the Goal Setting Module with this goal, “It’s safe to connect, ask for what I need, and receive it from available people. I can speak up and connect in my relationships safely.”

As always with the GSM, shift all resistance until you fully embody that goal and it is a 10 our of 10. This indicates that you’ve shifted, re-programmed and changed hugely within your inner being.

I would also suggest diligently working with Module 6 in NARP because this is the module about releasing responsibility for others who are not taking responsibility for themselves – this is otherwise a trap that avoidants can easily fall into.

 

Fearful Avoidant Attachment Style

The reason I’ve included this highly-traumatised style – some people don’t – is because our wonderful community is sadly filled with people expressing this style – and it’s perfectly understandable.

When you have a fearful avoidant style, you would love to be in love and be healthily loved like most people, but you’re too fearful of trying again. Unsurprisingly, an abusive narcissistic relationship can leave you terrified of getting hurt again and going through heartbreak, losses, and carnage of another failed relationship.

There are people in this category who say, “Well, never say never, but I’m never going to pursue it. This person would have to show up and be exactly what I’m looking for.”

In reality, their defences and their expectations are so high that it’s probably never going to happen. Or they could be so vigilantly looking for red flags and narcissism anytime they come across a potential person that they’re just not going to connect. They’ll run in the opposite direction.

This attachment style is caused by severe trauma such as neglect, rejection, abuse, or volatile or unpredictable circumstances. Many people seem to express this style in adulthood after experiencing narcissistic relationships.

Many people with fearful avoidance will have had periods in their life where they have spent years and years alone, even before the significant trauma of narcissism. They were expressing avoidance anyway. Oftentimes, these people did experience severe trauma in childhood, and their adult relationships only got worse every time they took the risk of starting a new one. Again, if that was you, let me know in the comments because I’ve seen that a lot.

Sadly and tragically, when this style is active within you, the relationships that get your attention are like the classic avoidant – a highly pathological and severely traumatic narcissist who knows how to appear as the person worth risking a relationship for.

To heal and come back from this, a fearful avoidant has to believe that they can heal let go of their pain and defences, and still be safe. This is not about being open to the pain and fear of another relationship. It’s about healing the traumas within yourself – so you don’t even have to put yourself at risk with another relationship while you’re doing this.

The entire NARP program is the way to go free from the significant trauma of abusive people from childhood through to adulthood system – step by step from Module 1 onwards to Module 10,.There are many fearful avoidants who’ve healed into beautiful lives and relationships, because they now express themselves as people with a secure attachment style, and thus attract other securely attached people.

 

Disorganised Attachment Style

This is another highly traumatized attachment style, and it slightly differs from the avoidant in that these people do seek out love. They crave it. They’re frenetic about it. They are rarely alone.

In relationships, they suffer from highly charged and destabilizing feelings of needing constant attention and reassurance, yet struggle to trust it and accept it.

These people have very low self-esteem, don’t value themselves and don’t believe that they’re lovable. They get in very dramatic, painful, explosive, abusive relationships.

Here, we have a lot of unhealed trauma from childhood, usually due to being brought up by a sick, personality disordered caretaker who was volatile, abusive, dismissive and unpredictable.

We may not imagine that narcissists would want to target these people as we may believe that narcissists are only interested in less traumatised people who have lots to. This is untrue for a couple of reasons.

Firstly, people with a disorganised attachment style share much in common with any other traumatised person. Whenever there is unhealed trauma, then narcissists come in – because traumatised people don’t have a strongly defined self, a firm sense of their own values, or healthy boundaries.

And just like other traumatised people, those with a disorganised attachment style can be highly attractive, creative, amazing people who have achieved great success in their chosen field because many people overcompensate in the world as a result of pain from their childhoods.

Secondly, people with a disorganised attachment style are often exciting. They’re funny and they are very generous with their sex and affection because they crave connection. They suffer from a lack of boundaries, which makes it very easy for narcissists to enmesh with them and then use them for their own purposes.

Narcissists also love the drama of being with people who are highly emotionally affected by them. For narcissists, good or bad attention is all the same. It’s attention and it feeds their ego. Narcissists also have a sadistic streak and they love to emotionally beat-up traumatised people – it’s how they offload their own unhealed trauma onto somebody else and then turn it all around and make it their fault.

Please have hope if you know that you’ve been locked into the disorganized style because of the trauma in your life. Over the last 10 years in this community, I’ve had many people with a disorganized attachment style heal their deep wounds with NARP and go on to create wonderful relationships firstly with their own self and life, and then with healthy others.

Of course, it takes inner work and self-dedication. It also requires the person to go on a determined ‘relationship fast’ until they work through their inner healing. With NARP, it’s usually around 6 to 12 months before they can start thinking about relationships, because this is the time needed to ensure they are steady and secure in their own self-worth, self-value and boundaries. Once a person understands Thriver-empowered dating, they don’t hand their power and their souls away again to narcissistic people, and so following this process can lead to fabulour results.

I know that a few of my friends in this community have broken through from having a disorganised attachment style. If you are one of these people , please share your results in the comment section so that you can give hope to others who are going through the pain of having this attachment style.

 

Where Do Narcissists Fit Into Attachment Styles?

The short answer is nowhere – and as Thrivers in healing, we really don’t want to try to work them out. There’s absolutely no value in working out a narcissist attachment style because there’s a dire overlay here that shrouds all styles when we’re talking about narcissists.

The narcissist is a false self, and that means they’ve buried their true self. They’ve created a fictitious ego character in its place. They’re not operating from self-awareness or a desire to heal anything.

Narcissists don’t view relationships in the same way as other people, because to them, other people are nothing more than objects to feed their false selves. Narcissists could exhibit some of the traits of any of the relationship styles – but there is no healing or solution for them, because narcissists don’t do relationships – they do takeovers. They do harvesting and exploiting other people, at those people’s expense. They’re not interested in relationship and unity as we are.

 

In Conclusion

I hope that makes sense to you, and that this Thriver TV has helped you understand the relationship between attachment styles and trauma. I hope it has helped you as much as I enjoyed creating it.

Please let me know in the comments what attachment style you relate to. Have you healed beyond that now? Are you still in that? Would you like to heal it?

If this has resonated with you and you would love to start healing with the Narcissistic Abuse Recovery Program (NARP) and our incredible community, then please consider becoming an NARP member today.

Please know you don’t have to do this alone, because you have me and the other Thrivers here, and in the private NARP Community Forum to help you every step of the way.

As always I look forward to your comments and questions below. Until the next one, keep smiling, keep healing, and keep thriving because there is nothing else to do. Lots of love.