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. Welcome back to another episode of On Attachment. In today's

episode, I'm going to be sharing five communication and conflict mistakes that I often see people

making in relationships and what you can do instead

in order to cultivate greater understanding, mutual respect, and ultimately to be able to have

conflict in a way that feels not only not scary, but actually positive, actually a bridge to

connection and an effective way to cultivate

greater understanding of one another and feel more connected rather than feeling like conflict

is a one-way ticket to really painful ruptures and disconnection and misunderstanding,

which I think is certainly the case, or at least the

starting point for a lot of us. So I'm going to be sharing, as I said, some of the things that

I think a lot of us do, and this will not exclusively be true for people who tend towards

insecure attachment patterns. I think even if you are broadly secure in your attachment,

you might have had less than ideal modelling around communication and conflict in your family

system. But more often than not, I think that people who are either anxious or avoidant in

their attachment strategies tend to be somewhat conflict averse and that can lead to a starting

point of being really self-protective when it comes to conflict. And so as soon as we're in that

self-protective mode straight off the bat, then obviously our strategies are going to be infused with

that energy of self-protection and it's really hard to connect from that

place. So I am going to be talking about all of that and more. Before I do, I just wanted to share

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