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[@ChrisWillx] Why We Fall for the Wrong People - Jessica Baum

· 7 min read
[@ChrisWillx] Summarizer
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@ChrisWillx - "Why We Fall for the Wrong People - Jessica Baum"

Link: https://youtu.be/l-FeIdQJgM0

Short Summary​

This YouTube video transcript discusses safety in relationships and its connection to attachment styles and childhood experiences. The speakers emphasize that true safety involves feeling connected, supported, and embodied, challenging the societal push for independence and highlighting the importance of recognizing and healing early attachment wounds to break negative relationship patterns and build secure connections.

Key Quotes​

Here are five direct quotes from the YouTube transcript that represent valuable insights:

  1. "Safety is just to feel really connected and like a sense of togetherness when you're with people and and a feeling of relaxed and openness in your body."

  2. "Knowing that you'll be okay no matter what happens."

  3. "Safety is not just something that exists inside of you. You can actually outsource it. You can be unsafe and the people around you can make you safe or you can be not okay and the people around you can make you safe."

  4. "We grow up in a culture, male and female, where we're like so pushed to be independent, self-sufficient, self-regulating, which I could go on forever about, and we shift into our left hemispheres and we become like productive little doers and very successful. The problem is when we're living life like like that, we're in survival mode most of the time and we're not in our right hemisphere and we are not relating and we're not connecting deep and deeply and we're just like doing all the time."

  5. "Without true safety, without fully tapping into that, you can't take proper risks anywhere else. Like the the the fundamental sort of safety that you get from your relationship allows you to go and do bigger, more extravagant, more risk-taking things in the real world, but people see opening up to an intimate partner as the very thing that is going to limit what it is that they can achieve in the real world. It's not that the everything is upside down."

Detailed Summary​

Here's a detailed summary of the YouTube video transcript, using bullet points:

Key Topics:

  • Defining Safety: The video explores different definitions of safety, both internal and external.
  • Attachment Theory: Attachment styles (secure vs. insecure), their origins, and impact on relationships are discussed extensively.
  • Nervous System Regulation: The importance of the nervous system, especially the ventral vagal state, in feeling safe and connected.
  • Protective Strategies: Examination of common coping mechanisms (e.g., workaholism, substance use) as ways to avoid uncomfortable feelings and create a false sense of safety.
  • Independence vs. Connection: The conflict between societal pressures to be independent and the fundamental human need for connection and its impact on women especially.
  • Embodiment: Discusses being connected to one's body, feeling sensations, and processing emotions as vital to feeling safe and resolving trauma.
  • Healing Attachment Wounds: Explores the process of healing trauma, which often requires vulnerability, co-regulation, and safe relationships.
  • Rupture and Repair: The importance of conflict and repair in building deeper intimacy and connection in relationships.
  • Familiarity vs. Safety: Differentiating between what feels familiar (even if unhealthy) and what is truly safe.
  • Intensity vs. Intimacy: Recognising the distincion between them and what is truly safe.
  • Practical Tips for Couples: Offers practical suggestions for couples to improve communication, co-regulation, and navigate difficult conversations.

Arguments and Information:

  • Safety is both internal and external: One perspective is knowing you'll be okay regardless of circumstances, while another highlights the importance of a supportive network. Safety can be outsourced through secure attachment with others.
  • Secure attachment is built from internalized safety: Secure attachment stems from being around people with a "window of tolerance" and internalizing their safety.
  • Signs of Unsafety: Physical sensations like a dropping gut, racing heart, feeling smothered, or feeling abandoned indicate unsafety in a relationship. Small behaviors like a blank stare can trigger these feelings.
  • Protectors are avoidance mechanisms: Protective strategies distance us from feeling difficult emotions. While not inherently bad, they become problematic when used compulsively to avoid deeper issues.
  • Left-Brain vs. Right-Brain Imbalance: A culture that values independence and productivity pushes people into their left hemispheres, disconnecting them from their bodies and emotions, leading to loneliness.
  • Independence can be a lonely pursuit: Being independent can be a protective mechanism, preventing reliance on others, but it can also lead to disconnection and loneliness.
  • Relational trauma is stored in the body: Trauma and attachment wounds are stored in the body as sensations, disconnecting people from their felt sense of safety and embodiment.
  • Western culture is largely left-shifted: 75% of Western culture lives in a left-shifted state, contributing to an epidemic of loneliness.
  • Success doesn't equal happiness: Achieving material success and status doesn't guarantee happiness; meaningful connections and relationships are crucial.
  • True safety allows for taking risks: Secure relationships provide a foundation for taking risks in other areas of life.
  • Implicit memory and repeating patterns: We tend to attract situations and people that recreate familiar patterns from childhood, even if those patterns are unhealthy.
  • Familiarity is not the same as safety: Our nervous systems can confuse familiarity with safety, leading us to repeat old wounds.
  • Attracting people who repeat old wounds: One explanation for this is that our nervous system gravitates towards what it knows and expects from others.
  • Generational trauma: Parents pass down avoidant tendencies to their children, leading to a cycle of unmet emotional needs.
  • Inner child work is not "woo-woo": Memory systems work in the body, and the past is internally present. Working with memory is crucial for healing.
  • Chaos vs. Chemistry: Intensity in relationships can be mistaken for love, but true intimacy involves vulnerability and emotional availability.
  • Safe love feels vulnerable at first: True safety can feel uncomfortable because it requires being present and vulnerable, rather than escaping through intensity or chaos.
  • Individuals have an obligation to show up for their partners: Those who desire a good relationship must be willing to face their coping mechanisms and work on healing.
  • Understanding and having conversations about nervous systems is an important part of healthy relationship: it is also an important part of getting back into connection and safety quicker, rather than repeatedly repeating behaviors.
  • Telepathic conversations: when in intimate relationships nervous systems are constantly speaking to one another.
  • Healing in relationship requires co-regulation: Co-regulation and adult anchoring (through therapy or safe relationships) are necessary to process trauma and move towards healing.
  • Anxious and avoidant attachment dynamic: These attachment styles are drawn to each other, each attracted to what they lost. The need and desire of what the other can provide, but the other person's nature can not actually do this for them.
  • Reassurance calms anxieties: The more often individuals in anxious states are reassured, the easier it is for them to internalize the calmness and security.
  • Healing attachment wounds: Includes holding difficult states, allowing vulnerability, and becoming conscious of avoided experiences.
  • Early childhood relationships inform adult relationship: Childhood dynamics are repeated, therefore, relationships will bring back feelings from those early relationships.
  • True masculinity through vulnerability: Letting go of keystone beliefs, such as being in control and being able to master emotional control, leads to increased awareness of and connection with the emotions.
  • Rupture and repair: Discusses what both healthy and unhealthy ruptures look like. Repair leads to building deeper relationships in intimate relationships.
  • True intimacy is built in repair: Can build upon already strong foundations, to build stronger ones.
  • Importance of disconfirming experiences: This gives the nervous system the opportunity to challenge it's long held assumptions in order to facilitate healing.