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, we are talking all about the power struggle stage of a relationship,

which is a stage that pretty

much every relationship will go through. And it can be really challenging. It's the stage that

follows the honeymoon period, in that initial period where you're so swept up in the love and the

lust and the excitement and the chemistry, that fresh love feeling where you want to

spend every moment of every day with your partner and they feel the same way and everything feels

hopeful and optimistic and you might be having these thoughts and feelings like this person's the

one and finally I found someone and it feels so great.

And then it transitions into something where there's a little more friction, where you start

to rub each other the wrong way, where you start to feel annoyed or upset or disappointed.

And the fall from grace can be really jarring. And particularly if you've got more anxious avoidant

dynamics at play, it can stir up a lot of core wounds on both sides and all of the self-protective

strategies that accompany those core wounds. And that's where we see a lot of the really typical

anxious avoidant conflict cycles

starting to bubble up and we know how hard that can be. And it can feel like you get really

...