Why Your Attachment Is Not An Issue

Hello, hello, hello, good afternoon, my name, welcome back to Yellow Fever Podcast, the podcast where we talk about anything and everything. My name is Brandon Chen and it's been a while, it's been about four weeks and this is actually my second time recording this episode because I suffered a massive brain fart, so hopefully it doesn't happen again. But welcome back to Yellow Fever, it's been about, let's check, how long has it been? It's been about, oh, it's been about, oh, it's about exactly a month since the last time I uploaded and for good reason I know I have to explain myself every time I miss multiple weeks at a time, which at this point I'm releasing monthly episodes, like just rely on that. But the reason why is because I've been adjusting to this program and adjusting to things that, you know, it's a little bit of a difficult adjustment, it's quite a big adjustment. Learning to be independent and autonomous, it's just not something that is like an overnight effort, you know, I've been making a long-term, conceited effort to make sure that the transition happens as smoothly as possible and that like I'm actually taking care of myself in the process. But I am back today because I was actually inspired by a text that I got from a listener and it was a really sweet message basically, telling me about like how much this person appreciated the podcast and just feeling heard, which then made me think about, you know, like this is exactly why I do what I do, like this is why I do this, you know, it's like something that do I have to do it, like absolutely not, like am I sharing a side of myself on the internet that, you know, people don't really share, yeah, like for sure. But also it's because people need to feel heard, you know, like I've been, I've been making episodes for about, I want to say almost three years, it's what 2023, yeah, it's been, it's been almost three years and I think that sometimes it's really to forget, it's really easy to forget why I do this because I've been doing it for so long and it does feel so natural to me and it does feel so comfortable to talk about these things, but it's also just nice to hear feedback because it's not something that I get a lot from this podcast and I've had comments before I've gotten messages, but this one just, it was a really long message and I woke up at like 8 a.m. and read it and I was just like, wow, like this is, this is really sweet. And originally talking, if you listened to the last episode, I was going to talk about jealousy in this episode and I was going to talk about why there is such a stigma around the word jealousy and why it's actually okay to be jealous. But the person in the message talked about my attachment episode, when I talked about attachment issues and I think that that's really interesting because it's actually something that I've been, that I think that I think has changed a little bit in my perspective and I think it's something that I've really been working on, it's something that I've really been trying to nail down and understand with my therapist why I attach myself to people the way that I do. And I figured why not give an update, you know, and it's not really going to be an update because I might be, I might not be a lot of stuff, but it'll be nice to go back and listen to the old one and listen to how my perspective has changed on a lot of things. But yeah, I think that I hope you enjoyed this episode, obviously, but most of all, I hope what I'm saying today and what you're listening to right now is something that you resonate with and I do want to give it a warning and say that my experience is not universal, it's not something that everybody deals with, it's something that some people deal with, or maybe nobody deals with, but sometimes you just need to know that somebody has dealt with stuff, you know, like sometimes that's just all you need to know. And yeah, I say we just get started right in and I think that the first thing I want to talk about is, I guess briefly what I talked about in the last attachment issues episode, talking about how I feel the need to forge really quick immediate connections with people because it's a way that I ensure that a connection stays, you know, like I'll give like an example. If I meet somebody, and this is the example I gave in the last one, but if I meet somebody and I feel like they're going to become a good friend of mine or that I want to be friends with them, the first thing I do is I'm not afraid to hop into the sort of deep conversations early or I guess just sort of long thoughtful conversations because in a way like surface level conversations I've learned are really stupid and they're really like, they're really lackluster and they don't really do anything in terms of forging a bond and when I meet somebody for the first time or meet somebody that I vibrate and feel like want to be, and I feel like I want to be friends with them, I'm going to want that bond to forge like immediately, which whether or not that's a healthy thing to do is, I mean, I could see ways that it's, I don't think there's anything wrong with that, which is something that I've come to realize in the last episode is that like a lot of the reasons why I attach myself to people the way that I do is not because I'm a bad person or because I'm doing something wrong. It usually is a product of my upbringing and just how I've dealt with love and their, how I've dealt with love and how I've dealt with attachment as a kid, but anyways, that's not important right now, but because I feel the need to forge a relationship with somebody so early on and forge a solid connection is because it is, wait, the reason or wait. Oh yeah, because I'm sorry, I'm liking, but because I feel the need to forge a connection so immediately, I think that the first thing I do is open up and be vulnerable, which is really interesting because in some ways, like, I'm pretty trustworthy if I trust people or not that I trust people, but I always, I kind of do assume well intentions when it comes to stuff like this and meeting people and like, you know, if I tell somebody something about my past, it's not going to be overly personal to the point where they are going to be able to use that against me, but it is something that you don't really just see on the surface. It is something that you do need to talk about to understand and learn about somebody on a deeper level. And I think that the reason why I feel the need to develop these connections so early and so strongly is because I felt like I never had stable love and stable affection growing up. And I think that that's a really big part of it is that, like, humans need to be loved. Like we need to feel like we're loved. We need to love people. We need to be, you know, we're inherently social people and like, even the most introverted people socialize, like they do have friends and whether or not it's a lot of friends, they have friends, you know, they have a social support and they have some kind of network that keeps them, you know, sane in a way because over the last few weeks, as I've realized that my social circle has shrunk a lot because I'm here and I'm far and I'm physically distant from all of my friends or virtually all of my friends except with the exception of like four or five people, I've realized that it's, it's scary like being away from people and it's scary to be away from people that you've loved over the last eight months or so during my first year of college because it's a connection that you form and then it's a connection that you have to learn to live apart from if that makes sense. Like the people that I've met here in my first year of college, sure I've known them for the last eight to nine months, but I've also known them in an environment where we've always been in close proximity with one another. Like I lived with my closest friends in my dorm building so obviously that's super convenient if I ever need emotional support, it's not that difficult because we're all in the same place but now as we're talking about the summer and everybody is going off and doing their own things, all of a sudden like everybody's availability becomes a little bit less or a lot less. Everyone's availability just is lowered and it's just difficult to deal with that and difficult to I guess transition from that because even when I was missing my high school friends and adjusting from being away from my high school friends, I had my college friends to do that. But now I'm in a position where I've kind of not lost but like sort of am distant away from both because I'm here doing work while everybody's probably at home also doing work. You know like everybody lives their own separate lives during the summer and it's quite the adjustment but it's made me think a lot about my attachment and how I attach to people and I think that the reason going back to why I feel the need to forge such brief immediate connections right away I work maybe way too hard to try to maintain is because I feel like I need that stable connection and as I'm learning to develop that with my college friends even in an instance where we are hundreds of miles apart I just need it's just something that people need and it's something that I didn't really have growing up and it's something that I felt like was super conditional and that leads into the notion of unconditional love and why it's so important and like sure I've had consistent I've had consistent love growing up but not really like like I have a pretty good relationship with my parents now better than I used to but it's definitely not the same when you feel like your love with your parents is so conditional and the only support system I've had since I was literally a baby is my parents like that's the only support system I've had for sure most of my closest friends I've met them within the last three years I will say three or four years and obviously I rely on my parents a lot for love and affection because that's what babies do like babies learn to just cling on to their caretakers and that's just what they do I feel like that's pretty human nature and I feel like yeah it's just something that we do and when it comes to conditional love I felt like so much of my parents validation towards me and so much of their love towards me infringed on what I was doing so obviously like I grew up in a pretty Asian immigrant household when I was younger and there were just a lot of notions of you know academic success and things like that and then it was things like that that started to get valued so so so much that the social and the emotional validation virtually became non-existent I would like to say because when you care like when you put so much emphasis on how somebody performs in school it makes you really blindsided to how the rest of their life is going and coming home to super high expectations to succeed while in school results in a lot of emotional disconnect because you it made me realize like if I don't do well in school maybe my parents won't love me as much you know like maybe it's that sort of thing or maybe if my parents knew who I really was they wouldn't love me you know like my parents the way that I put it is that like my parents love me now but if they were to know who I really am as a person maybe they wouldn't and that's a thought that's that's scary to have because then you feel like you don't have this unconditional love you don't feel like you are always going to have a support system behind you no matter what so therefore if I can't find it from my family where am I going to find it from I'm going to find it from my friends you know and I'm going to attach to my friends and I'm going to want to you know make up for what I lack from childhood and from my family and these is way to do that is to forge really quick connections with your friends and for me at least I've I've recognized this in college a lot I tend to if I click with somebody pretty early on I tend to just give my all and get super attached and this is another problem with vulnerability is that you really are making yourself an open target and I guess I guess in some sort of ways it's kind of nice to do that because then it really develops trust with somebody so if I were to open up something and then you know you're good at keeping it to yourself or you're good at you know staying around after the conversation or just like reciprocating like kind gestures or things like that that's a way to build trust for sure but it's also I also feel like I love in such a way that is so unrealistic for everybody to reciprocate because it's so much I I'd even say it myself that I I tend to not overrun myself but I guess myself too and and sort of just do all just go out of my way to do so many things for somebody just to make sure that they know that I love them and that they know that I care about them and that I am attached to them and you know like I'm I this it's like I'll show my affection in a bajillion ways and the issue part of it is that it's hard for that to be reciprocated because it's a lot of effort that I'm putting in and if I'm going to be honest people have shit to do people like my like people's lives do not revolve around me and when I don't get that reciprocated behavior which is already unrealistic to begin with I tend to be very I tend to get in my own head a lot and this is I'll okay I will say tended because I this isn't really something that I deal with anymore but I this is something that I dealt with attachment growing up is that I never felt secure in any of my relationships because I felt like my my effort which was already so out of proportion to begin with was not being reciprocated so therefore I was I was setting unrealistic expectations for not only myself but also for the other person other perspective in the relationship that it made me so scared to lose people and it made me so scared and to like lose a connection and and to make me think that I was losing a connection even though the reality was I probably wasn't and I probably was just overthinking but it's things like that it's it becomes like this like vicious cycle of attachment issues but then I haven't also developed issues of commitment because I feel like my effort my out of my blown out of proportion efforts are not being reciprocated you know and it's not like it's not super easy to deal with something like that but it's also something that I understand that is not it's not something that's necessarily wrong with me it's something that is just a product of how I grew up and my younger experiences and I think that that's really important sometimes is to sort of like take all that weight off of your shoulder and step back and think like why do I why do I behave this way and why do I think this way and most of the times you'll realize it's not something that's like that's like biologically wrong with you it's something that it's something that probably happened as you were growing up that you know during a very developmental period in our lives that you know made us become a certain way and I will say that I don't I will say that for me at least what really did help with my attachment issues was as much as as cheesy as the sounds it's it's the thing that pulled me out of it or like really helped me understand my attachment issues a little bit better and just I guess not issues but just how I attached people the thing that really made me realize and learn a lot about it and I guess sort of sort of sort of I guess ease of overthinking was finding unconditional love and I know that's like crazy to say at 19 but some of the people that I've met in college have shown me unconditional love and people who have always been there for me and people who go out of their way to make sure that I know that I that they love me and that and like know that I'm cared for and that's really nice because then it may it makes me more secure about the relationship to the point where I don't feel like I need to put in a thousand percent effort all the time because it's okay if I struggle you know like it's okay if I decide to give you know 40% a day because that person will make up the 60% you know like it's just things like that where it's like I know I feel comfortable and confident in the support that I've gone from my friends as of late that I don't feel like I need to be constantly overthinking and and and attaching myself to people so hardly but is that a result that is I mean that's a thousand percent a result of me initially putting in so much maximal effort you know what I mean like if I wanted to be attached to somebody I could that's the way that I put it and like I just put myself in these positions where I make it so hard for me to detach from somebody once I've attached them because I almost it's almost like a binding contract in a way it's almost like I like put all of this effort in and therefore if that effort isn't reciprocated then I just won't then I'll just I'll be so hurt by it but I'm just gonna keep putting in the effort until you know maybe one day it's reciprocated and it's not to say that it ever does get reciprocated it's just that you start learning and realizing little things of how people show you affection and you kind of do have to like if this makes sense you do have to kind of like overanalyze people's tendencies if it's like if it's for your own benefit right like I think it's okay to be a little like oh this person did this therefore they love me but like reasonably you know like don't do it to like there's like a level of delusion where it's like oh this person like open the door for me that means like they're in love with me but like that's not what I mean I mean I mean more so like oh this person is texting me asking if I'm eating that's a really nice thing to do or like or if I've been eating and if it's something that I know that I've been struggling I'd like that's a really nice thing to do is just take checking up on me and doing things like that and it's it's all about I've learned to really love the small things and to really love the small gestures because over time those build up and it's just like going and the small gestures are the things that usually go completely unnoticed because it's so easy to to be like to like want to do all these grand gestures and do this this this and do this but the small gestures are what are what show consistency the small gestures of like um every once in a while like asking somebody to hang out or even every once in a while going on a walk and having a deep talk like think like things that are like that simple um are really really solid ways for me that I feel like I've been able to feel more secure and feel love and feel like my attachment is okay and um it's pretty rare but once you like and I hate and it sucks that it's rare but like once you notice all of these small gestures and realize like ways in which somebody is showing you love and showing that they care about you it really does help the overthinking a little bit and it really does sort of like validate your attachment and this is the one thing that I do want to say is is a huge takeaway from what I've learned in the last few months about attachment is that it's not an issue my attachment is not a problem your attachment is not a problem you just need somebody to show you that being attached to somebody else is worth it because if you've shown all if you've been shown all your life that you attaching yourself to people has resulted mostly in fallouts or breakups or ending or like French or ending of friendships or whatever obviously you're going to see your attachment as an issue because you're not going to think like you're not going to think like oh me being attached to people is a good thing because people keep leaving me like no like you're obviously going to see that as a bad thing and that's so natural because that's how I grew up as well feeling feeling like every connection that I have with so was so unstable and so I guess not real you know like I I didn't feel like I had substance or substance substantive relationships in my life that made me think that my attachment was worth it but now as I've been meeting people who are so understanding of me and my emotions and so understanding of who I am as a person I'm starting to realize that this attachment that I give to other people is worth it because in some ways I am receiving it back and then it becomes an entire process of I guess understanding what you want out of a relationship whether that's platonic or romantic and understanding that this is what you want and this is what makes you feel safe and our bodies do a really good job of telling us when we feel safe and when and then when you feel safe just just feed off of that and I think that like especially with relationships and especially with connections with other people it's really easy to take the relationships that you have for granted because they're always there but I like to really sit back and think like what does this person do that validates me what does this person do that makes my attachment worth it that's been like the overarching question for me is like is my attachment worth it with this person and am I giving this person just enough or am I giving this person too much and they're not if I feel like I'm giving too much it's probably like I mean I guess I guess in a lot of ways you could be like oh this is like natural and like you probably are giving too much but that's just the way that you give and I guess that's true in a certain sense but call me crazy but when somebody is able to make your attachment worth it it all of a sudden makes your attachment feel like it's not overwhelming and overbearing and a lot of the times when when when you are being quote-on-quote too clingy or too overbearing it's just because people don't understand you I like like like that's gonna sound super cliche and like super cringey I guess but like people just don't understand that sometimes some people just need a little bit of extra love and a little bit of extra oomph in there just just to make themselves feel safe and that's why we go and that's why us people with attachment issues that's why we go for such like crazy gestures and such so many ways of showing people that we love them because we want that extra love back like we want to be shown that we can be loved and I think that's a that's a lot of the root of the issues for me at least is that I just want to be proved that I can be loved you know and that's something that I've learned I've been learning to accept as of late and that I'm starting to see from some people and it's really nice and it is an extremely validating feeling to hear that or to think that or even to realize that your attachment is worth it because you're attaching yourself to somebody who is willing to attach themselves back and that's like a level of vulnerability and closeness that is immeasurable and it is something that I have not had throughout my entire life and it's something that you you will learn and you will find and for all the people who resonate with my last episode with attachment issues my big message would be that you don't have a problem like it's not a problem to want to attach to people and to give so much so that you are attaching to somebody and that you are ensuring that they attach back that's not a problem that's just your body's way of telling you and your mind's way of telling you that you need you you need to feel loved and that's totally okay there's nothing wrong with that there's nothing wrong with letting yourself be vulnerable and developing a strong connection with somebody even if it doesn't even if it's not reciprocated boom that's a lesson well learned and the way that I view things is to take as many positives as possible you don't want to overthink like I mean overthinkings natural like I do it all the time but you don't want to I guess put yourself in this negative cycle of I should stop work and putting effort into things because it's never it's never going to be reciprocated no like I think it in some cases it's almost better to just keep trying because what I realized is that everybody's a little bit different everybody cares about people a little bit differently everybody shows their love to people a little bit differently and the feeling of security is actually so is is actually so cathartic and so amazing and it's something that I don't get a lot and which I mean that's part of the reason why I feel like my attachment is a problem is because I'm willing to give so much love but I've seen that love be reciprocated so little or so yeah sure you know what I mean but work for that feeling work for that feeling of validation and security that you feel when you're with somebody and you feel like okay I'm not being overwhelming I'm just being me I'm just I'm just showing my love for this person and and that's okay you know and yeah that's that's the thing that I that's like the biggest update for me and like in terms of my attachment is that like I've just learned that I am lovable and that I am able to somebody is able to attach themselves to me and people are able to show me that they love me which then in turn almost makes you like understand why you get like why you get attached to people you know and like because that the reward that comes back is so worth it and yeah I would say work for that feeling you know you're not you're not doing too much you're just fighting for what you want which for some people is a little more than others but it's not that it's not a problem it really isn't and I can assure you that but yeah if there's something I haven't addressed in this episode we're going to attachment that you would like me to address or that you would like me to talk about with you privately feel free to reach out to me on social media I'm probably the most active on Instagram but I guess you could email me if you want I guess you could DM me on Instagram I'll I check those pretty much every day you can also follow us and I won't get into that yet but yeah that was I hope you enjoyed this episode if you enjoyed this episode go ahead and follow us on any social media platform oh sorry you could follow our podcast anywhere I haven't done this out for a while but we are yellow fever on everything apple podcast Spotify podcast god I think we're even on amazon I'm not sure um but if you enjoyed this episode it would be greatly appreciated if you left a five star review on apple podcasts and leave us a review you know give us a nice little rating um I believe you can do it on Spotify too so if you can do it on Spotify that would be awesome and yeah stay tuned for more episodes um you can follow us on Instagram at official yellow fever podcast um and any other information that you want will be in the description below thank you so much for listening and until next time take care of yourself love yourself and remember you deserve to be loved you just gotta fight for it sometimes or you don't have to fight you shouldn't have to fight too hard for it but yeah you know what I mean I mean you've listened to this entire episode so I won't keep going on but have an awesome rest of your week maybe I'll see you next week maybe I'll see you next month but until then please take care of yourself thank you for listening I love you goodbye