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 about what to do when you don't feel like a priority in your

relationship. So maybe you are always feeling like you're striving to get a place in your

partner's life, like you're always competing for their attention, like you're the one who's

always initiating contact or initiating plans, basically that everything is originating

with you and you're really having to earn your place and that creates this overall impression

of not feeling important or valued to your partner. And I think that this is incredibly

common among anxiously attached people. It's certainly something

that I'm fielding questions on every week, multiple times a week, from students in my courses.

It's so endemic. And yet, it's probably not one that we talk about in so many words enough.

And so today I want to address this head on in this episode, talking about why it's such a

common dynamic for anxious attaches to land in, how it interfaces with some of our other

wounds and patterns around unworthiness and fear of abandonment and fear of rejection and all

of the protective strategies that can accompany those wounds, what it looks like in an anxious,

avoidant kind of pairing and why those differing attachment styles might exacerbate this

dynamic. And ultimately, what you can and maybe should be focusing on if you find yourself

in a relationship where you are constantly battling to feel like a priority. You know, where is your energy best spent?

Because I think oftentimes the instinct is to just keep pushing and try harder and keep striving and

keep over functioning. But oftentimes that keeps us in the pattern rather than releases us from the

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