You're listening to On Attachment, a place to learn about how attachment shapes the way we experience relationships and where you'll gain the guidance, knowledge and practical tools to overcome insecurity and build healthy, thriving relationships.

I'm your host, Relationship Coach Stephanie Rigg, and I'm really glad you're here.

Hey everybody, welcome back to another episode of On Attachment.

In today's episode, I want to talk about quite a sensitive topic, but one that is really

close to my heart and is a

guiding principle underpinning a lot of how I approach this work, which is the demonisation

of avoidant attachment. Now, if you've been around here for a while and you're familiar with

my philosophy and my approach when it comes to attachment. You'd know that I am big on extending

compassion and curiosity to everyone, irrespective of their attachment style. And I'm very

deliberate about how I talk about avoidant attachment and anxious attachment in terms of not

villainising anyone and really encouraging a view of

people's behaviour and struggles as protective, you know, understanding that all of our attachment

strategies are ultimately designed in one way or another to facilitate us creating safety

for ourselves, creating a sense of belonging, as easy as it is

when you're on the receiving end of someone's behaviour that you don't like, that triggers something

in you to villainise them and to, you know, project ill intent onto them.

That's so rarely, I would say almost never the case that people set out with the intention to cause harm.

And of course, that compassion must be accompanied by discernment and boundaries and self-advocacy,

knowing our own limits and being very clear around our standards for what we will and won't tolerate

and knowing what behaviours, what behaviors, what qualities,

what traits allow us to thrive in a relationship. So it's not about over-indexing on

compassion in the sense of condoning any and all behavior because we can understand where it arises

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