Transcription
Most people think disorganized attachment is just chaos. It's random explosions. It's unpredictable behavior. One moment they're all in, the next minute they're gone. But it's not chaos. Not really. It's actually much worse than that. There's a secret pattern buried inside disorganized attachment style. And once you see it, you'll understand why commitment feels impossible for many of these people. No matter what they choose, no matter how hard they try, they feel like they will never be complete, never be loved the right way, never be safe inside a relationship. That pattern is running the show whether they know it or not.
Now, if you're watching this right now thinking, "Wait, isn't that a contradiction? That doesn't make sense." Stay with me. And if you're thinking, "Isn't this just borderline personality disorder?" No, it's not. I'll explain why. And if you're watching this thinking, "I'm not that dramatic." The quiet ones never think they are. That's part of the problem.
Now, if you're the person with this pattern, you're going to see yourself in this video in a way that no one has ever described you before. And if you're loving someone with this pattern, you're finally going to understand why nothing you do seems to ever be enough. If this is your first time here, I'm Adam Lane Smith, the attachment specialist. I've worked with thousands of clients with the disorganized attachment pattern. The loud explosive types who destroy everything good in their life every 3 to four months and the quiet invisible types who stay for decades but never actually show up.
Here's what I'm going to walk you through today. What's actually happening in the brain when someone cannot commit even when they desperately want to. The specific sabotage patterns, loud and quiet, and the exact six-step pathway out. Commitment means permanently binding yourself to your own destruction. Think of it that way for these types.
Let's start with where this pattern actually comes from. Because if you don't understand the origin of disorganized attachment style, you will never understand the behavior. This pattern gets built in childhood. It's not chosen, it's built. When this person was a child, they needed their caregiver. Every single child obviously does. Your survival literally depends on your caregiver actually literally surviving. But for disorganized people, that caregiver was also the greatest source of fear. Maybe that person was abusive. Maybe they were just erratic. Maybe they were loving one moment and cold the next. Back and forth, back and forth. It doesn't really matter exactly which vision it was. But what matters is the impossible choice it created for that child. The child then was demanded to choose between safety and love. Do you want to feel loved or do you want to feel safe? You can only have one. You can't run to the person who scares you to get comfort. You also can't survive without them. So your brain tries to do both at the same time. And when it tries to do both, it can't organize around a single strategy. This is actually where the term disorganized comes from.
Some people develop an anxious attachment strategy of "I will always pursue because I always have to chase safety and if I work hard enough, I'll get it." Some people have an avoidant attachment strategy. "If I just stay far enough back and withdrawn, no one can hurt me." That is anxious and avoidant. Now, if you cannot be neatly organized into either of those groups, John Bowlby, the original creator of attachment theory, said, "You are disorganized." Meaning, you cannot be put into either place. You are disorganized, a blend of both. It's both strategies. Chase and pursue and run away at the same time. This is what disorganized means. It's a terrified kid running to a frightening parent for comfort, getting met with the source of their fear right there, and having it reconfirmed. "I shouldn't have tried. There is nowhere safe for you to land." But you can't really stop. You can't seek safety and escape danger when they're the same thing. And that impossible choice installs a belief that you carry into every adult relationship. The belief sounds like this: "If I bring up what I need, it will make things worse. Nobody's going to have a reasonable conversation with me. Nobody's going to help. Nobody's ever going to make my life better. So, don't bring it up. Perform. Get through. Push. Maybe I hint. Maybe I try to make people like me. Maybe I fawn. Maybe at times I fight or I run away. But I can never really relax and no one's really going to help me." That's the imprinted family model. That's a lens that disorganized people see every relationship through. And it's usually invisible to them because it's been running since they were children. They know it's there, but they don't know that anything else is possible. Everything is safety and fear blended together.
Let me show you what this looks like in the nervous system. It is simultaneously seeking and craving connection, but at the same time being terrified that connection is going to hurt you. But you can't just do what an avoidant person does and step out and say, "Fine, I give up." Your system says, "I need to be around people. I can't be alone and they're going to hurt me at the same time. So, I need to develop a strategy to take care of myself so that when they hurt and attack me, I can step out and breathe and live." The part of your brain responsible for bonding and closeness. It wants to be near other human beings. It's activating when you're alone. So, it drives you with loneliness. It feels like you're going to die. But then your threat detection system comes on. The amygdala, the anterior cingulate cortex, the hippocampus, the limbic system, all of those crash into fear and say, "I need to be around people." But that means I also have to fight, flight, fawn, freeze. Whenever I'm with people, I am stressed and scared and hurt. Connection is terrifying, but so is loneliness. The conflict then is two bonding systems inside of you. Bond with others or run away from them. Your threat system activates when you're close and your threat system activates when you're far away. Those two systems fire back and forth. So your brain really is saying, "What am I most afraid of right now? I'll do the lesser of the two."
Let me highlight that again because this is what disorganized people are feeling. They have to choose between the pain of loneliness and the pain of closeness. Which one hurts more right now? That's the only question the brain is answering over and over and over every day. And usually the one you're most afraid of is the one that's happening. So you run to the other one. Then the other one's happening and that one becomes the most fearful. So then you have to run away from it to the other one which then becomes the most fearful. Back and forth. You are always living out your worst fear again and again and again.
And this shows up in two very different pathways. Two very different behavioral structures based on what kept you alive in childhood. The first pattern is what we call loud disorganized. This was most visible back at the time of the formation of attachment problems with John Bowlby in the 1950s. Loud disorganized is chaotic. It's expressive. It's explosive. Usually they find a new soulmate every 3 to four months or they blow up a relationship and then cycle back in every 90 to 100 days. It's visible destruction. It's often actually the most likely one to have an affair and then to regret that affair and try to cover it up. It can be screaming matches, sabotaged milestones when you cut off the relationship at the moment when you were about to move in together or get engaged or get married, cheat, and then come back a week later and say, "I'm so sorry. Let's do it again." Over and over and over. Loud, disorganized. Also the most likely to have addiction problems because they're endlessly trying to numb the fear that they're constantly living in. That oscillation is external and very obvious and everyone can see it. They are so, so chaotic. They also often get demonized and told that they're bad people. They're not. They're disregulated. But that's the process.
The opposite is quiet disorganized. They are silent. They are invisible. They're usually very high functioning. They usually though look like a doormat to other people. They often get called ice princess. They appear cold to everyone around them because inside they are paralyzed by fear. They are most likely to have the freeze response because nothing else in childhood worked. Fighting made it worse. Running away made it worse because people chase you. Fawning pleasing other people wasn't often enough. So then they would just go blank and flat and wait for the damage to be done. Freeze response. This is also called a dorsal vagal shutdown. Inside they're paralyzed by fear. The oscillation is internal and invisible. They go back and forth, but no one ever knows it. This is why I said disorganized attachment style is not just chaos, it's controlled chaos that makes sense with a pattern.
Now, if it's not just chaos, what exactly is it? Well, this is an adaptation. It's the most sophisticated adaptation your nervous system is capable of making. When your childhood environment was completely unstable, when you could not predict what was going to happen next, your nervous system learned something that kept you alive. Always be moving. Be unpredictable. That means you are free and safe. If no one can predict you, if no one can control you, then no one can trap you or hurt you. A child growing up in a zero trust, zero safety environment learns the safest strategy is never to be pinned down. Never commit to a single approach. Always adapt because any single approach can be used against you and it will never be enough. Circumstances will never actually align correctly. You will always have to face another choice and the problems will get worse. They adapt too. So you became a moving target. Not because you want to be difficult, but because staying means getting hurt. That's what you bring into adult relationships.
In adult relationships, disorganized people, either type, will usually swing from one extreme to another. Very loving one day, cold the next day. Clinging in the morning, gone by dinner. They have no stable identity, no rational identity to anchor back to because their nervous system never learned one baseline. Every version of them is a survival response to the current threat level. Now, I want to be clear, this is not usually intentional manipulation. It's an adaptation. The brain does not have a neutral state. It has an "I'm always in danger no matter what" state. Danger is the resting position. This brain is "I am always, always, always in danger," locked in, screaming that at them no matter what's happening.
This is why traditional therapy usually does not work for these individuals. Most of my clients with disorganized attachment style come in and say, "Adam, I've been previously diagnosed with borderline personality disorder, but it just doesn't quite seem to fit for me. They really, it doesn't work. And it's also not working the treatments they're giving me for that. Adam, talk therapy hasn't worked. Adam, reassurance isn't working. It all actually makes me more scared." Reassurance doesn't usually work in relationships either because it's the person holding out their arm saying, "Come here. I love you." And your brain is remembering your parent that did that and then hurt you so horribly. You crave the comfort. You want it to be real, but you're afraid it won't be and that you're going to get more hurt than you've ever been. Remember that the deepest love and closeness and intimacy led to the deepest agony and existential level, pain and destruction. Closeness triggers fear. Space triggers fear. Neither peer anxious strategies nor peer avoidance strategies work for these people. Both will actually make it worse. So you're dealing with two alarm systems that learn danger in the same person who was supposed to teach you safety.
Now, do you understand why there's no stable identity here? They have to swing from one extreme to the other. But even they don't know who they are or how to live without this endless fear.
Now, if you're watching this and recognizing yourself or maybe you're recognizing your partner, I want you to know something. Thousands of people with this exact pattern have sat across from me in sessions. They thought they were beyond help. They thought they were just this, that this is who they are. "Adam, I'm just broken. I'm just difficult. I'm just too much." No, you're not. Your nervous system learned these patterns to survive. And it can learn new ones. My coaching program is built specifically for overcoming patterns like this. We don't just talk about your childhood. We don't just give you insight and send you home. We rewire your alarm systems that are driving the sabotage. We give your nervous system corrective experiences that prove at the body level that intimacy won't destroy you. That's what makes this approach different from the therapy that hasn't worked for you. And for people who want the most rapid transformation possible, my relationship mastery intensive compresses months of work into days. Immersive intensive, this retreat is for those who are ready to work on themselves and their relationships. The links are in the description below.
But right now, let me show you the specific sabotage patterns because once you see them, you'll never be able to unsee them. Here's what most people get wrong about disorganized sabotage. They think the person is choosing to do it. They think maybe the affair was a conscious decision. They think the explosive fight was about the dishes. They think the emotional shutdown is laziness or indifference. And it's not really a choice. The avoidant core of that person is in control. This is not me coming in to absolve people or condemn them, by the way. This is me coming in to show you what nervous systems are doing. People make choices and nervous systems compel and drive us. Both can be true. Until a disorganized person becomes secure, they will usually default to avoid and escape sabotage every single time intimacy gets close enough to trigger that alarm. And then they usually hate themselves for it every time. That self-hatred is actually one of the clearest diagnostic markers for this group.
Now, there are signals before the spiral tends to happen. So, if you're the partner, learn to read the room first. About 5 to 10 minutes before an explosion or a freeze, something shifts. The person becomes suddenly hyperobservational. They're watching your reactions more than they're actually engaging with you. They're policing your tone. They're focused in. Their eyes are bulging like this. Their nostrils are flaring. Requests for space might escalate without explanation. Provocative statements might come out almost like they're fishing for a fight or you might see them get cold and withdrawn and suddenly answers are one word at a time. If that, that's their nervous system winding up. Pressure is building. If he's watching your reactions way more than he's engaging with you at this moment, he's actually probably testing you because he's smelling unsafety. Even if you're not unsafe, something has triggered him and says, "Yes, you are."
Now, let's talk about loud disorganized sabotage first because it's very specific and unique. Here's the mechanism. Pressure begins to build internally. The nervous system is carrying tension that it now can't process. Eventually, it surrenders to an impulse. They lash out. They attack. They run. They cheat. Whatever it is, not because they necessarily want to. It's because the system can't hold it anymore. Executive functioning gets hijacked. The logical brain gone and offline.
Pattern number one I see a lot here is affairs. It could be physical affairs, emotional affairs, going back on Tinder, rolling through Instagram, sending, "Hey, baby, you look good." kind of messages. They'll say, "Something came over me. I I just couldn't stop. I I don't know." It feels compulsive to them, not calculated. It's a pressure valve. When intimacy deepens in the relationship, the alarm fires off and they create distance through betrayal. "I can do anything else I want and you can't control me." So, they jump out and do that. Again, I want to be very clear here. I am not absolving people of their moral problems. I am not saying I'm condoning this. I'm not saying that they're the real victim here. I am trying to say if we're framing it as a simple moral failure that has never helped anybody. Remember the mitigating factors of the nervous system and the compulsion. No, it is not acceptable for them to cheat. And we can understand what's happening whether we choose to forgive or not. We can choose to understand.
Pattern number two, explosive fights. These are disproportionate intensities totally unrelated to the trigger that's happening. The fight is not really about the dishes or the shoes or or whatever it is. It's about the unbearable closeness that's been building and building and building and now they feel it's unsustainable and you're going to betray them or they're going to fail you. So, it's better to make it explode now before something bad really happens. They pick battles over minor issues to shove you away before real damage can be done.
Pattern number three, creating drama, jealousy, accusations, manufactured crises just to maintain emotional distance while staying physically present. The chaos here is the distance strategy. "Well, I saw someone's name pop up on your phone. Who was it? Well, I just have to guess. I have to wonder because, you know, I'm sure you're probably texting your ex." "No, I'm not." "Yeah, I bet you are." They just pick fights for no reason out of nowhere. It's because they feel so uncomfortable being close to you.
Pattern number four is sabotaging milestones. This is destruction right before the engagement, right before moving in, right before putting a label on the relationship, right before the birth of your first child. Massive sabotage right before the relationship would get deeper. Right before everything that is about to happen that you both want, they destroy it. Anything that increases permanence triggers the avoidant core into emergency response. The bigger the commitment, the bigger the explosion.
Now, the real truth you need to understand here is that the logical left side brain is not engaged. This person is hyper-fixated on a threat. They can't do basic common sense on themselves at all. The system hijacks their full executive functioning and is gone. When you try to point it out to them afterward, they go, "Yep, that's it. That makes sense. I I did that. You're right." But in the moment, their brain is so disregulated, it can't process what it was doing. Not because they're foolish, not because they don't care, because their system is in full survival mode. Look for confusion like this. Look for a feeling of helplessness, self-hatred, self-rage. "I don't know what I'm doing and why and I can't stop it." That confusion is usually the tell.
Now, let's talk about quiet disorganized sabotage because this one really breaks my heart. Nobody sees it happening and it's alone inside their head. The quiet version is much more about emotional abandonment of self and of partner. This is a learned helplessness at its most complete. Fear has taken over their entire system. 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, they are always afraid. They endure and they push off the inevitable, but they are always afraid of what's coming next. Usually, they immerse themselves in work, work for other people, caretaking for other people, fawning. They survive on scraps of connection, if that, they just feel trapped in their hopelessness. But they very rarely actually leave relationships. And they also never really show up emotionally. They just exist inside the relationship.
Now, when quiet, disorganized people start sabotaging, it looks like a few different things. First, mechanical productivity. It's the difference between somebody that loves you and someone who's being paid to take care of you, right? A parent and a social worker. A social worker keeps kids fed and housed and on schedule. A parent does all of that and immerses with you emotionally and connectively. Quiet, disorganized people work like social workers in their own families and in their own lives. They endlessly caretake and they don't know how to emotionally connect. In fact, they usually don't know anyone wants to connect with them. So, they try not to burden people with their love.
Pattern number two, extreme accommodation. They never really express a need. They become whoever their partner wants. Complete self-erasure. Their partner can never reciprocate love or kindness back to them because they don't know what they're reciprocating and they actually won't allow it. They just give and give and give to other people to the point of not having a personality or identity themselves.
Pattern number three, sexual disconnection. It usually just feels like maintenance. They're just taking care of someone else. They're just changing the oil in the car. Whenever they service their partner sexually, it's like they're just doing something. Their partner often will complain and say, "It feels like I'm doing something wrong to you." And they say, "Well, it's fine. Just do it." A female partner with quiet, disorganized attachment, she might have sex regularly, sometimes four times a week. But to the male partner, he said, "It feels really uncomfortable. She's just there." So, he'll often start to say no. Then she'll get confused and panicked and not understand why and say, "What am I doing wrong?" And he'll say, "It just feels weird and awkward."
Pattern number four is what we call flat affect. We call this the ice princess label. The brain learned in childhood that even showing expressions on your face when you're stressed is not safe. So, it learned to go blank and show nothing. Now, other people don't understand that. So, they just see cold indifference and disinterest and boredom and "I'm too good for you and I don't care." So, partners and kids and co-workers usually assume that you don't like them, don't want to be around them, and don't care how they feel. Others get hurt and they pull away. And the person doing this has no idea why.
Pattern number five, the freeze response. You can't resolve conflicts. You have dissociative episodes where you just shut down and close out. You can't really show up authentically because being seen means being vulnerable and being vulnerable means being hurt or destroyed. So you're not refusing to engage. Your brain freezes. It goes into dorsal vagal shutdown. You have Broca's area, the speech center of the brain, which actually can go offline for selective mutism. This is where you can't respond. Interestingly, with quiet, disorganized partners, they almost never cause the breakup. They stay sometimes for 20, even 30 years, but with zero emotional intimacy. Then they come to me at 60 or 70 years old and they say, "Adam, what have I spent my life on? I'm so unhappy and alone. What have I done wrong?" Commitment fear doesn't always look like leaving. Sometimes it looks like showing up but never really being present. Duration does not equal depth in a relationship. Sometimes commitment fear means "I will give you my body but never my heart or mind."
So many of you might be asking right now as you're watching this, is there actually hope? Is there actually hope for these people and their partners? I want to say absolutely yes. There is so much hope here. So stay tuned because I'm going to be talking about that.
Now, before I give you the pathway for hope, I want to be very honest with you about what it's like to love someone with this pattern because a partner also needs to hear this, too. And remember, I said there is hope. I have to say that because this next section, some of you might feel like there's no hope. I want to go through what it's like to be with somebody who has this. Usually being with a partner with disorganized style, it's whiplash. It's getting close, then getting pushed away, then getting pulled back and getting thrown out again. It's "I love you, but I'll never let you meet my needs or see me." Or "I love you, now I don't. Now I do, now I don't." "I've cheated on you, but I've never loved you more than I do right now." It really depends. Sometimes it's being out in the cold, frozen for the entirety of the marriage. You're distant one day, next day, identical behaviors. You're smothering them. The rules keep changing and you can never quite get it right. You never know where they're at. You can't do it right because you don't know what they need and they won't tell you. That's part of fixing this, by the way. Them learning to tell you and learning to ask and learning to express appropriately. Then you don't guess. And now you can understand what's happening instead of taking it personally.
I need you to hear something right now. And this is the part that most people miss. The push and pull and the withdrawal. This is not personal. It's not calculated. And it's not from a lack of love. It's actually from an abundance of love. They love you so much that it's ripping them apart. They're not trying to hurt you. They're trying to not be destroyed by intimacy. It's a survival response from childhood. Now, I know that's hard to hear when maybe they've cheated on you or they've been cold for 20 years and you haven't had a real conversation in months, but it's the truth. And the truth is the only thing that leads to repair.
So again, is there hope? Absolutely. But I'm going to be direct with you about the conditions. This pattern is not a life sentence. Attachment is meant to be changed. Your nervous system can learn new patterns. I've watched it happen thousands of times, but it does require the right approach, the right support, and genuine commitment from the disorganized person themselves.
Now, I'm going to be very clear about this. In a moment, I'm going to go through the process of resolving this and building secure connection together as a couple. But if there's no measurable change after 90 days of consistent, boundaried effort, that's a real conversation you need to have. And if it's 6 months of no shift, no change, nothing moving, it may be time to accept that staying is doing more harm than good to both of you. You can recover though, even after 20 years, if both people actually want to do the work. There has to be even the smallest amount of willingness on both sides. I hope that that doesn't scare you. I'm saying it because I respect you and your time. And real hope requires honesty about what you're actually looking at.
So now, let me give you the pathway. Because for the people who are willing to do the work, this is how it changes. For couples who are struggling with everything we've talked about so far, there is a six-step pathway to building a secure relationship.
Step one, absolute non-negotiable. You have to build nervous system regulation. Everything I've told you so far comes from an unstable nervous system. For every human in the relationship, partner, person with disorganized, everybody, you must regulate first. I got to say this, we are all adults. We have to take responsibility for our nervous system. You must manage your nervous system as much as you humanly can. If that means you have trauma and you need trauma work, get it done. If you need to learn to manage it through body techniques, get it done. Okay? There's a scale that I like to teach my clients. I'm going to teach it to you today. On a scale of 1 to 10, where is your stress level? With one being, "I am so calm and relaxed, I can fall asleep in a hammock." And 10 being, "Somebody please call the ambulance. I am having heart palpitations and I'm about to die." That's your nervous system. That's your stress level. One to three, calm, focused, workable. This is good. Four to six, tougher, but still workable. That's where you can start doing work. You don't have to get down to three to be able to start doing this work, but you need to be able to get yourself down to four to six and stay there consistently, especially during conversations with your partner. Now, seven, seven is where most of my clients live and they amp up fast. So, you need to get out of seven. Seven's the absolute upper level threshold. Eight, nine, or 10, you're done. Nothing productive can happen during this window. Your brain cannot process new information at that level. Your logical left side brain diminishes to fuel an emotional right side brainstorm in emotions. Your prefrontal cortex goes offline. Your amygdala is detecting threats and reroutes everything through your limbic system. And now you're deciding based on fight, flight, fawn, freeze. Do I punch my way out? Do I run screaming? Can I not get away so I have to please you? Or do I just freeze and stop the damage? Which one am I doing here today? Eight and above, you're gone. Conversation is over. This is why my team and I have a rule. Regulate before you communicate. Regulate then communicate. Breathing, body work, whatever works. You have to get it done physically. Do not have conversations if you're up. Do not continue conversations. If you go up, you pause, you breathe, you manage. We both have to stay six or below for anything else to work. So, absolute mandatory. Whatever you need to do to get that done, get it done. Okay? Even pauses during conversations are great. Take those pauses. If you need multiple conversations to finish, that's fine. Doesn't have to be one and done. But this is absolute non-negotiable for everything else that comes after.
Step two, after that, separating the two fears. Which situations trigger your abandonment fear? Which situations trigger your engulfment fear? They're two different fears. They do require different interventions and they hit in waves at different times. The abandonment fear, "You're going to leave me. I'm going to be alone." This needs moments of reassurance. The engulfment fear, "I'm trapped. I'm losing myself. I can't breathe. You're going to hurt me and I won't be able to get away." You need moments of autonomy, space, and breathing. Instead of running to the absolute extremes, learning to name the fear, even together as a couple, learning to name the fear and then state what's needed and then do it in small, specific language. Absolutely crucial. Being able to do this, I I can't overstate what this is because in childhood, they never got this. So, even the absolute smallest moments, "Hey, I'm really freaking out right now and I need to get away for an hour just to prove I can. Can you wait for me?" "Yes, I can go breathe. Please don't drive because you look freaked out. Take a walk. Absolutely. Thank you." Bolt out the door. Breathe. Manage. Come back. Your partner is calm and receptive and says, "Do you feel okay now? Are you all right? Do you need more time? Look, I have food for us. You're welcome to eat before we get back into it." Welcome, warming, receptive, calm, right? Boundaries, expectations, not abandoning, not running, screaming, not sabotaging, managing. This is an experience they've never had before. And now trust can begin to be built. That one exchange says, "I can leave when I need to without going to extremes, and you're not going to punish me or control me, and I can come back when I need to, and you're not going to attack me or engulf me. I am safe with you no matter which direction I'm going." That overwrites everything, even in small amounts.
That leads us into step three. Building trust in smaller doses. Proving intimacy won't destroy you. If you can name them, great. Now you start desensitizing through doing and feeling and experiencing intimacy and vulnerability. Intimacy and vulnerability meaning sharing things that otherwise could get you rejected. Being able to share, proving that you can repair after conflicts, proving that you can have conversations about problems, small experiences that begin adding and adding and adding that build trust. What's amazing here is this builds both bonding hormones at the same time. Vasopressin because you are facing your absolute worst fears and that person is helping you and oxytocin because that person is warmly receiving and accepting you as a member of their tribe that matters to them. These tiny deposits of evidence prove to your nervous system that love is real and safety is yours. I know that sounds dramatic, but it's real. This is biochemically proving to your brain that you won't die if you step in or out. Your partner is there for you regardless, not without boundaries, but without unsafety.
Now, step four is addressing the avoidant core. This is where you build a sense of self inside the relationship. Because right now, the disorganized person either way believes closeness means collapse and loss. Being known means being controlled. So, being together is a prison. We need something that says this: "I can be close with you and still be fully myself. I'm not collapsing and I'm not losing who I am." They also need to be able to say, "You knowing me doesn't mean controlling me. Being together doesn't mean being trapped." So for the quiet disorganized people, they need to understand that being seen does not destroy you. You can be seen without rejecting, without criticizing, without hurting. In other words, "Who am I in relationship with you? Who am I still?" That's the piece here. We need to have that.
That leads into step five, corrective experiences and core talks. As you've built a little bit of trust and identity and feeling safer and managing nervous system, you can have bigger experiences on top of the small ones. You have the real conversations about marriage, kids, working together on these things. Actually facing your real big fears. Be extremely clear about your expectations at this point. This part is huge. Disorganized people in particular carry massive fears about what the expectations are. They're afraid to ask. They assume expectations are sky-high through the roof and impossible and that they'll fail to meet them at the same time. You're unreasonable and so are they. In the absence of information, they build a monster out of your silence and then they run from that monster. They don't run from you. It's the monster they've crafted. So, you need to make your expectations very visible and clear. This is what I call the "what, why, and how often" framework. What are two things that you need to build together? Two experiences, two behaviors, something. Why are those important to the both of you? How do they serve both of you? And how much of them or how often do you need them? Clear, measurable, exact. Have clear, exact expectations in the relationship. And now no one is questioning what's happening.
And step six is to build more of that oxytocin together. Oxytocin-rich experiences where emotional intimacy is safe. I need to prepare you for this part because for quiet, disorganized people, releasing oxytocin is massive. It often overwhelms them. A lot of my quiet, disorganized female clients, they start crying when they get hugs. They cry during sex, which is so embarrassing for them. They don't know why they're crying. They're not sad tears. They're just confused by the intensity of feeling safe. It's almost like pregnancy crying to them. It's just oxytocin overwhelming a system that has never really experienced it at that volume before. It feels unsafe, but safe, but unsafe, but safe at the same moment, and it floods them. It It's very embarrassing for them. But I also tell them this. It's a good sign. It means the walls are coming down. Don't panic at this point. Don't make it weird. Just trust and be there. Just be together. Hold each other in that moment. That means that person's system is finally opening up.
Now, to get really safe, you have to build oxytocin sources outside the relationship because when you only get it with one person, actually, that increases your anxiety. The research on this is very clear. Anxiety goes up if one source of oxytocin is primary. We need a number of them. Family, friends, community. Loud, disorganized people, they hyper-obsess into one person. We have to fix that. Research again shows that makes it worse. Quiet, disorganized people get it from nobody, then you get it from one person, you're more afraid than ever because now you're afraid they're going to leave you. Building it with multiple people. That's the key. Diversify your oxytocin portfolio. And the best couples, they do repairs within about 12 hours of a conflict. Build that together as a rhythm. I'm just throwing that in there to make sure you understand how that how you can do that. Then build consistent bonding rituals together, small, repeated safe experiences. Oxytocin builds GABA, by the way, GABA, which suppresses cortisol and makes you calmer and safer over time. GABA makes it harder to even spike. The calmer you stay together, the calmer it becomes to stay together.
I had a client come to me last year, loud, disorganized. Okay, three relationships in four years, all soulmates and all ending the same way. Things would get close, really close, then he'd blow it up. Affairs, fights over nothing, disappearing for days, and every time he was haunted by one question: "Why do I keep doing this?" His nervous system was running the same pattern that we've just talked about in this video together. Intimacy got close. The alarm fired. Sabotage. Destroy every time, like clockwork. So, we started with regulating his nervous system. We got his activation down from a daily eight to a daily five. Then we separated his two fears. Abandonment on one side, engulfment on the other. He started naming them out loud to himself and to his new partner instead of acting them out. Small trust started to be built as they worked together. Tiny corrections. This proved to his brain over and over and over that closeness with her was not going to destroy him. Four months into this process, I got an email from them said, "Adam, I didn't run. She got close and I didn't run. I just stayed and it got better." That's what this work does.
In my private coaching, it's built specifically for working on patterns like this. This is not talk therapy. It's not insight. It's corrective experiences that rewire the alarm systems driving the sabotage. We identify exactly where your nervous system gets hijacked. We build the corrective experiences that prove intimacy won't destroy you. And we give you a structured pathway for secure attachment. And for people who want the most rapid transformations, the relationship mastery intensive. It's a retreat that compresses months of work into days. Immersive and intensive. The couples who walk out are not the same people who walked in. Links are in the description below.
You are not broken. You are responding exactly as someone with your attachment history should. Your nervous system learned that the people that you needed most would hurt you the most. That is not a character flaw. That's trauma. And it's not your fault. But it is your responsibility to fix. Again, not your fault, your responsibility. Those are two different things and the pattern will not change unless you do the work. Yes, you can recover even after 20 years if both people actually want to do the work. There has to be the smallest amount of willingness on both sides. And if you're single, you need to be dedicated to making this change permanent for yourself. I can tell you with certainty, having watched this pattern thousands of times, that you can recover from this. New pathways form at any age. Secure behaviors, they rewire attachment systems. I've seen explosive chaos become stable connection and I've seen invisible suffering become genuine intimacy.
So if you recognized yourself in this video or if you recognized your partner, I want to help you not with more information. You have enough information with transformation. And if you want the most accelerated version, our relationship mastery intensive retreat is for you. It's from April 23rd to the 26th in San Diego. It's a very small group. We keep it intimate so every couple gets direct coaching and we compress months of corrective experiences into days. It's the closest thing to a shortcut I've ever seen in this work. If this video has resonated with you, but you're not sure where to start, connect with me and my team on adamlainsmith.com. Tell me what you're dealing with and we'll tell you honestly whether the retreat or anything else is right for your situation or if there's an even better starting point. The link down for that is in the description below.
And if you know someone who needs this video, someone who keeps destroying every good thing in their life, someone who stays in relationships for decades but never shows up, someone whose partner is exhausted and confused and doesn't understand why nothing they do is ever enough. Send them this video. This is the most misunderstood pattern in psychology, and understanding it changes everything. If you made it this far, I know that you're serious about this. So, watch this next. It picks up exactly where we left off.