39: The Anxious-Avoidant Love Trap: Schemas & Attachment Styles
- Gemma Gladstone
- November 11, 2021
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Some of the ways we think and some of our behavioral tendencies are called schemas. Schemas could be described as the lens through which we see the world. They are closely related to our ingrained core beliefs but tend to be a little broader than those.
Schema therapy makes things very clear and gives us some easy-to-understand labels to describe our behavior. Justine and Gemma have found schema therapy useful for problem-solving and understanding what is going on beneath the surface in relationships.
In this episode, they dive into the area of relationships and look at how early schemas can overlap with people’s attachment styles to form the antagonistic push-pull relationships in which so many of us seem to find ourselves. They describe the anxious and avoidant styles of attachment and discuss some general terms that could help us think in terms of schemas rather than larger categories of behavior. Stay tuned for more!
Show highlights:
- There are four categories of attachment styles.
- Gemma discusses the secure attachment style.
- Literature tells us that 50% of the world falls into the category of secure attachment. Gemma and Justine discuss whether or not that is accurate.
- Gemma and Justine describe and discuss the anxious and avoidant attachment styles.
- How the anxious and avoidant attachment styles fit in with schema therapy models.
- Anxious and avoidant people often tend to get together and cause each other a lot of pain.
- Why anxious types often tend to be women and avoidant types tend to be men.
- Anxious and avoidant relationships tend to be nuanced. Gemma and Justine discuss some of the nuances and explain the best approach to ensure that your emotional needs get met.
- People have different ways of coping with their unmet core emotional needs.
- Schemas tend to overlay and present in varying degrees with the anxiously attached person.
- People who are avoidantly attached often tend to use avoidance across other areas of their lives as well.
- Attachment styles tend to present on a continuum.
- Gemma and Justine will be doing a live webinar on schema chemistry on the 26th of November at 10 o’clock Sydney time. It will be recorded and will be available on the new RedFlag.com website.