Welcome to UnFuck Your Brain. The only podcast that teaches you how to use psychology, feminism, and coaching to rewire your brain

and get what you want in life.

And now here's your host, Harvard Law School grad, Feminist Rockstar, and Master Coach, Kara Loyenthyle. Hello my chickens, how are you all? Is everybody ready for the holiday season?

I'm recording this right before Thanksgiving. I don't know whether it's because it's cuffing season or what.

This is very cold New York, but I feel like I have been doing a ton of coaching on dating recently,

and I've been doing some of this work myself and really

doing a lot of reading and self-coaching about it. And so today I want to take a

deeper dive into something that I've addressed briefly in a previous episode. So on the episode about kind of

personality tests I talked also about attachment theory and I'm going to dig

more into attachment theory in this podcast today and I always like to

preface this by saying it's all just thoughts right like some people believe in attachment theory some people

maybe don't I think that some of the patterns that attachment

theory describes are brain patterns that I recognize and myself and other people and

in this episode I kind of want to teach you how I think about those patterns and where I think the kind of traditional view of them is useful and then where I think it kind of misses the mark. So I'm going to focus mostly on anxious

attachment and how I see it relating to perfectionism and all or nothing black

and white thinking because that's an area that I don't see the literature on attachment theory addressing as much and if you listen to the podcast and especially if you're in the clutch and doing this work with me you probably have some of those patterns.

I also want to talk about how patriarchy and the socialization of women fits into attachment theory,

which again is not so much addressed by the kind of mainstream books

that you're likely to have read about it.

So this kind of attachment theory the unfuck your brain way.

So let's start with the basics of attachment theory as they're traditionally explained.

Attachment theory refers to the theory that as children we develop attachment systems

...