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.

Today's episode is how perfectionism impacts our relationships and specifically looking at

competing dynamics of perfectionism in anxious avoidant relationships.

So I think that for a lot of us, we associate perfectionism with high achieving and

striving to you the best and maybe being competitive or maybe being a bit particular about the way we like things.

But I think that perfectionism runs a lot deeper than that and it's almost always coupled with

fear, shame, anxiety and aversion to vulnerability, a lot of resistance to being seen by someone in our authentic expression,

in our mess, in our imperfection. And so perfectionism in that way can be seen as a protective

strategy to keep us safe from, you know, those things that we fear most.

And in relationships, I think it can show up in a few different ways.

And so that's what I'm going to be talking about today,

looking at how it shows up differently for more anxious-leaning people

versus more avoidant-le leaning people. And then what happens

when those opposing dynamics, both fueled by aspects of perfectionism, what happens when they

come together and those opposing forces meet? So that's what we're going to be talking about today. To be very transparent

with you, I'd actually recorded a whole other version of this episode and it was all ready to go.

And then at the last minute, I had some new ideas about what I wanted to say. There was a little

bit different. And so I decided to scrap

the original version and re-record this. And no, it is not lost on me, the irony of me doing that

...