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 breakups and specifically how different attachment

styles, people with different attachment patterns,

are likely to experience and respond to breakups.

So I know I say this at the start of every episode, but this is something that I get asked

about a lot, particularly from my anxious attaches.

No surprises there.

And people wondering, you know, A, why breakups

feel so intensely hard for people with anxious attachment patterns, but also desperately trying

to decipher what their often avoidant leaning X partner is thinking, feeling, why would they do this,

why aren't they doing that?

And while you would know, if you're familiar with my work, my approach, that I usually will

politely decline to join you in analyzing and hypothesizing about someone's behavior,

why would they do this? What does it mean when they do that? I think that playing that game actually just keeps us more stuck. And so I usually opt out

of that and gently discourage you from spending too much time and energy in that, you know,

spinning around in the hypothesizing. At the same time, there are some

clearly observed differences in the way that folks with anxious attachment patterns tend to

process and experience a breakup compared with those who have more avoided patterns.

And I think that in having a conversation around this, we can cultivate

greater understanding and be less inclined to project our own way onto the other person's

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