Avoidant, Anxious, or Secure? What are attachment styles and how does our past shape them?

Emotional Badass

Nikki Eisenhauer

Health & Fitness, Mental Health, Education

4.8 • 2.2K Ratings

🗓️ 22 June 2025

⏱️ 55 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Many people misunderstand their attachment style, overidentify with labels, or confuse trauma responses with personality traits. Today we break down secure and insecure attachment, discuss how anxious and avoidant dynamics form, and look at how emotional abuse and trauma erode self-trust. Many highly sensitive people (HSPs) often internalize critical voices and lose their sense of emotional safety. With radical honesty, self-awareness, boundaries, and emotional maturity, we can rebuild secure attachment—starting with our relationship to ourselves. Workshops & Programs: THE BOUNDARIES INTENSIVE:⁠⁠ https://EmotionalBadass.com/boundaries⁠⁠ Services, Products & Content: WORK WITH NIKKI 1:1 :⁠⁠ https://EmotionalBadass.com/coaching⁠⁠ PATREON: ⁠⁠https://Patreon.com/emotionalbadass⁠⁠ WEEKLY NEWSLETTER:⁠⁠ https://www.EmotionalBadass.com/newsletter⁠⁠ Follow us: YT:⁠⁠ https://www.youtube.com.com/emotionalbadass/⁠⁠ IG:⁠⁠ https://www.instagram.com/emotional.badass/⁠⁠ FB:⁠⁠ https://www.facebook.com/emotionalbadass⁠⁠ TIKTOK:⁠⁠ https://www.tiktok.com/@emotionalbadass Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello, welcome to the show.
0:02.6	This is Emotional Badass, where Moxie meets Mindful.
0:06.0	I'm your host, Nikki Eisenhower, life coach and psychotherapist.
0:09.8	And on today's episode, we are discussing secure and insecure attachment styles.
0:15.4	Music All right, y'all, attachment styles are all the rage online. So I want to try to break this down for you.
0:35.3	Attachment style is the pattern that emerges from our childhoods. We all have
0:39.9	an attachment style. It develops from a combination of factors. It's no one thing that creates
0:46.4	our attachment. It's part our innate personality that we were born with. It's part our temperament.
0:53.1	It's part the parenting style that we experienced.
0:56.8	And it's also all of our experiences that we've had relating to the human race. For most people
1:04.7	out there in the world, I'll say that I don't think their attachment style will change very much.
1:10.4	But if you're a listener of
1:11.7	this show, you're not the average person out there in the world. You're a seeker. You're working on
1:17.1	yourself. And I want you to know that you can work with your attachment style. You can work with it
1:23.5	wherever you sit right now in this moment and you can become more secure. What we want and what
1:31.3	sensitive people are working towards is security. This means being securely attached. Now, if we
1:39.5	aren't securely attached, we're insecurely attached, and we can sort of lean one way or another. We can lean towards an
1:49.2	anxious attachment style or an avoidant attachment style. What's popular right now in mental health,
1:56.4	more so than just attachment style, is like a branding and a rebranding, different people
2:03.8	owning different concepts and trying to come up with how to own those concepts. So I keep seeing
2:09.6	more things being named. We're also living through an obsession in culture with naming things,
2:16.9	categorizing things, and then identifying and,
	...

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