#195: Two Simple Principles for a Healthy Nervous System

LISTEN: APPLE|SPOTIFY

Understanding and working with your nervous system is absolutely essential for building healthier relationships and developing more security within yourself. It's a foundational building block that can be genuinely life-changing.

When you develop an understanding of how your nervous system works and learn its language, something incredible happens. Those overwhelming experiences that once felt chaotic suddenly start to make sense. Not only can you understand them, but you can actually shift gears and work consciously with your system. You move from feeling like a passenger to being in the driver's seat of your own experience.

Myth-Busting: What a Healthy Nervous System Actually Looks Like

Let's start by dismantling a common misconception. A healthy nervous system is not one that stays regulated all the time. If you've been beating yourself up for getting triggered or experiencing stress responses, you can stop right now.

Experiencing stress, being triggered, and becoming activated is not only natural—it's actually desirable. Your nervous system is meant to adapt and respond, moving fluidly between sympathetic activation and a more parasympathetic state. It's designed to meet whatever the moment calls for.

The problems arise when:

• Your system is constantly wired for threat, humming at a high stress level without returning to rest

• You experience wild swings with erratic, disproportionate responses (like launching into a full-blown stress response over a simple follow-up email from your boss)

A healthy nervous system isn't one that's in rest mode all the time. It's one that responds proportionately to what's actually happening.

The Container Metaphor: Two Key Principles

Think of your nervous system as a container. There are two simple principles that guide everything:

1. Build the Container: Deliberately expose yourself to stress, pressure, and challenge to expand your capacity.

2. Fill the Container: Resource yourself with nourishing, restorative activities to maintain your wellbeing.

Principle 1: Building the Container

This is about deliberate stress exposure. Think:

• Lifting heavy weights

• Cold water exposure

• Challenging physical movement

• Public speaking

• Asking for a raise

• Having difficult conversations with friends

Essentially, anything that feels hard, pressured, or stressful that you consciously choose to engage with. The magic happens when you experience the discomfort and come out the other side thinking, "I survived that, I didn't die."

Your system learns: "Oh, that was uncomfortable, but we're still alive. We can do hard things safely."

Finding Your Sweet Spot: Uncomfortable but Safe

The best way to conceptualise the “sweet spot” is to picture three concentric circles:

• Centre circle: Comfortable and safe (no growth happens here)

• Middle circle: Uncomfortable but safe (this is your growth zone)

• Outer circle: Uncomfortable and unsafe (this can shock your system)

If you're terrified of public speaking, jumping straight to speaking in front of 100,000 people might land you in that outer circle—potentially causing a panic attack and reinforcing fear rather than building confidence.

The sweet spot is challenging enough to push you, but not so challenging that you can't do it safely.

Principle 2: Filling the Container

This is what most people associate with nervous system wellbeing—all the lovely, regulating activities:

• Quality sleep

• Nutritious food

• Sunshine and fresh air

• Time in nature

• Connecting with loved ones or pets

• Hot baths

• Whatever feels nourishing to you

Think of these as putting money in a piggy bank or marbles in a jar. These activities keep your container as full as possible, ensuring you're well-resourced and regulated.

Bringing It All Together

When you weave these two principles together—building your container's capacity while keeping it well-filled—you develop genuine stress tolerance. You move through life with resilience, trusting in your own capability and capacity.

Instead of feeling frayed at the edges constantly, you have enough in the tank to be present, experience joy, and take it all in. You're not on edge all the time because you know you can handle what comes your way.

Your Choose-Your-Own-Adventure Approach

The beauty of these principles is that there's nothing prescriptive about them. You get to fill in the blanks based on what makes sense for you, what feels good, and what feels manageable.

Consider these questions:

• What might it look like for me to challenge myself in uncomfortable but safe ways?

• How can I be more intentional about filling my container?

• What nourishing activities could I weave into my daily life?

Remember, building a healthy nervous system isn't about perfection or constant regulation. It's about expanding your capacity to meet life's inevitable challenges whilst maintaining the resources to thrive, not just survive.

This approach to nervous system health forms the foundation of secure attachment and healthier relationships. When you understand and work with your body's natural systems, you're not just healing yourself—you're creating space for deeper, more authentic connections with others.

---

FURTHER LINKS & RESOURCES:

• FREE TRAINING: How to Heal Anxious Attachment and (Finally) Feel Secure in Life & Love

• Download the FREE Anxious Attachment Starter Kit here
  

---

You might also like…

---

Episode Transcript

[00:00:04]:

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.

[00:00:23]:

And I'm really glad you're here. Foreign welcome back to another episode of On Attachment. In today's episode, we are talking about two simple principles to build a healthy, resilient, adaptable nervous system. So if you've been around here for a while, you'd know that understanding and working with the body and the nervous system is absolutely essential to my work, to my understanding of how we move through relationships and also how we heal and develop more sturdiness and security within ourselves and within our relationships. So this is really foundational. It is an absolute building block. And, you know, I've said it before many times, and I'll say it again now. For me, developing an understanding of how my nervous system worked and really learning the language of my nervous system, developing a level of literacy and fluency around working with my body and really understanding the way my body works and its role in everything.

Stephanie Rigg [00:01:27]:

Emotions, perceptions, thoughts, beliefs. It is incredibly empowering because all of a sudden, these experiences that we can have that can feel really overwhelming start to make sense. And not only can we make sense of them, but we can actually shift gears. We can consciously work with our system and feel like we're in the driver's seat of our experience rather than feeling like a passenger. And all of these things are happening to us. And that experience of stepping into agency is nothing short of life changing. And I don't think that's an exaggeration in the slightest. So I'm going to be sharing in today's episode two really simple principles that guide everything I do in terms of how I think about my own nervous system.

[00:02:08]:

And that will allow you to apply that to your own life and the daily practises you might incorporate. And what I really love about the principles that I'm going to share with you today are there's nothing prescriptive about it. You get to fill in the blanks in terms of what makes sense for you, what feels good for you, what feels manageable for you, not about me telling you you have to do these 10 things every day in order to have a healthy nervous system. So it is very much a choose your own adventure, but these guiding principles really provide you with a clear map or a framework that you can then adapt to your own life. Okay, so before we get into today's episode. A quick reminder for anyone who is in or around London that I am going to be in town in early September. I'll be teaching about the patterns of self abandonment that so many of us have carried and how building really deep and embodied self worth and self esteem allows us to rewrite and transform our lives and relationships from the inside out. So I'll be giving a talk.

[00:03:05]:

There'll then be ample opportunity for Q and A and I'll be sticking around for a little afterwards to connect with you all. There are only 70 seats available, so it's going to be nice and intimate and they are already selling quickly. So if you are interested in coming along on Saturday 13th September, I would so love to see you there. It's such a rare thing to be able to connect in person, particularly when I obviously live on the other side of the world. So it would be wonderful to connect with you in person if you're in or around London and would like to come along. Okay, so let's get into this conversation around principles for building a healthy and resilient nervous system. So I want to start by myth busting a little and just dismantling this idea that I think a lot of people have around. A healthy nervous system is one that is regulated all the time.

[00:03:51]:

And I see this a lot when people are in the process of healing and growing and then will say like, oh, I'm really mad at myself because I got triggered by something, or I'm really mad at myself because I notice that I'm still experiencing moments of sympathetic activation, you know, still experiencing stress responses. And it's just so important that we understand that experiencing stress, that being triggered, that becoming activated is not only natural, but it's actually desirable. Our nervous system is meant to adapt and respond and move between sympathetic activation and a more parasympathetic state. You know, almost, almost constant state of fluidity. Right. Our system is designed to meet the moment, whatever the moment calls for. Now where we can get into trouble is where our system is so wired for threat and stress that we're either humming at a really high level of stress all the time and never coming back into a more rested, restorative state, or we have these wild swings and roundabouts and have this very erratic, up and down stress response where we're maybe responding to a stressor in a really disproportionate way because our system is so on edge, so wired for threat. So we get an email from our boss following up on something that we forgot about and we launch into like a full blown stress response as if something very, very bad and threatening is happening.

[00:05:13]:

So it's not that we never want to experience stress or we never want to be dysregulated. That would actually not be desirable at all, because nervous system and our stress response is beautifully protective and adapted to mobilise us to deal with threats and stress and pressure. But we do want to build our capacity and maybe recalibrate our system, create enough safety so that our responses are proportionate. So a healthy nervous system is not one that is just in rest mode all the time. It's one that is meeting what the moment calls for. Okay, so I now want to move into what these two key principles are. And it's very simple. I'm just going to share what they are and then I'm going to unpack each of them in turn.

[00:05:52]:

So if you think of your nervous system as a container, this is the visual that I like to use. We want to deliberately expose ourselves to stress and, and pressure and challenge in order to build the container. So we want a bigger container. And then we want to resource ourselves, we want to rest, we want to do nourishing, restorative things to fill the container. Okay. So you can use whatever visual or metaphor you'd like. But for me, this idea of the container is really helpful. So talking first about building the container, this is the domain of, you know, deliberate stress.

[00:06:25]:

So things like lifting heavy weights, things like cold water exposure, other forms of physical movement that feel really challenging to our system and that force an adaptation. But also other things like this might be public speaking for you, it might be asking for a raise, it might be having an awkward conversation with your friend about something they've been doing that's really been disappointing you. Basically anything that feels hard, that feels like pressure, that feels like stress, that you take steps towards and allow yourself to experience the discomfort of in a way that allows you to come out the other side saying, like, I survived that thing, I didn't die. And that teaches your system, like, oh, okay, we can do that. That was uncomfortable and we're still alive. So that gets filed away in your body as like, oh, okay, I don't have to, you know, go to great lengths to avoid ever having to do those things, because I can do it safely, because I actually am strong and capable enough and competent enough to do something hard and come out the other side. So a couple of caveats here. It's really, really important that we find the sweet spot of uncomfortable but safe.

[00:07:35]:

So if we just do comfortable and safe, you can think of that as like the centre of the circle, then we're never going to grow, right? That's just like only doing the easy things. That's staying in our comfort zone. The next layer of the circle is uncomfortable but safe. And this is our sweet spot where growth happens. Okay, so what is something that's uncomfortable but not so uncomfortable that it's going to shock my system? And that's what the next layer on the circle would be, uncomfortable and unsafe. So if I am terrified of public speaking and I decide to really push myself by standing in front of a hundred thousand people, and that's just way too big of a first step, so my whole body goes into shutdown, I have a panic attack and have to run off stage crying, that's not going to be a great learning experience for me. That's not going to send my system the message of, that was hard, but we could do it. That's too much, too soon.

[00:08:23]:

Likewise, to use an example of lifting weights. If I'm lifting weights that are really light for me, I'm not going to get any stronger. If I lift a weight that is way too heavy for me, I'm going to hurt myself. So we want to find that sweet spot of this is hard enough that it's really challenging for me, but not so hard that I can't do it safely. And so that first pillar of building the container of our nervous system is all about finding this sweet spot of uncomfortable but safe. How can I challenge myself, push myself, expose myself to discomfort in really deliberate ways that will increase my capacity, that will allow me to experience my own efficacy and competence that is extremely powerful for expanding our capacity capacity to hold and navigate so many of the inevitable stresses that life will throw at us. Now, the other side of the coin is what I think a lot of people associate with nervous system wellbeing and nervous system regulation, which is all of the nice stuff. And this is equally important, right? It's not to minimise or dismiss the importance of regulating activities.

[00:09:25]:

Things like getting quality sleep and eating good food and getting sunshine and fresh air and time in nature, connecting with friends or people that you love or pets, you know, having a hot bath. All of these things are really important. And you can almost think of like putting, you know, money in a piggy bank or marbles in a jar. These are all of the things that I'm adding into my container to keep it as full as possible as much of the time. And so when we weave together these Two principles of can I build my container so that I can hold more? And can I have all of these regulating things to hand so that I can ensure that I'm well resourced, well nourished, well regulated? That's what ultimately builds our stress tolerance, and that's what allows us to move through life with this sense of resilience, with this sense of trusting in our own capability and our own capacity, but also not feeling like we're frayed at the edges all the time and that we actually have enough in the tank that we can be present, that we can experience joy, that we can take it all in and not be so on edge all the time. So my hope is that that resonates with you and inspires you to think about how you might apply that to your own life. You know, what might it look like for me to challenge my in uncomfortable but safe ways? What might it look like for me to be more intentional about filling that container, about, you know, continuously nourishing myself and allowing myself to be well resourced as I move through the world? Okay, I'm going to leave it there, guys. I really hope that this has been helpful, as always.

[00:10:56]:

For those of you who leave reviews and send kind words, all of the things, I am eternally grateful, and I look forward to seeing you again next week. Thanks, guys.

---

Keywords from Podcast Episode

healthy nervous system, resilience, adaptability, nervous system regulation, stress response, building capacity, self-worth, self-esteem, relationships, attachment, security, nervous system literacy, emotional wellbeing, stress tolerance, strengthening nervous system, public speaking, deliberate discomfort, self-abandonment, self-growth, practical tools, self-agency, restorative activities, challenging yourself, comfort zone, nervous system healing, stress management, nourishment, regulating activities, self-nourishment, agency in relationships, stress adaptation

#194: When You Don’t Feel Like a Priority in Your Relationship

LISTEN: APPLE|SPOTIFY

Do you find yourself constantly striving to earn a place in your partner's life? Always initiating contact, making plans, and feeling like everything in your relationship originates with you? If you're nodding along, you're experiencing something incredibly common amongst anxiously attached people—the painful sense of not feeling like a priority in your relationship.

This dynamic creates an exhausting cycle where you feel like you're competing for attention, working overtime to prove your worth, and never quite feeling valued or important to your partner. Today, we're diving deep into why this happens, where it comes from, and most importantly, what you can do about it.

The Roots Run Deep

To understand why you might find yourself in this pattern, it helps to look back at the origins of anxious attachment. Many anxiously attached people grew up in relational environments marked by inconsistency. The overall experience was: "It feels really good when we're connected, but I can't always rely on that connection to be there when I need it."

This inconsistency often came from parents who were distracted by demanding jobs, their own mental health struggles, marital stress, or other life pressures. As children are quick to do, you likely internalised this unavailability as being about you—creating the story that "if I were better in some way, then my parent would show up for me the way I need them to."

This leads to a survival strategy of trying to be good, performing, people-pleasing, and striving—feeling like you have to earn and prove your worth. Sound familiar?

How This Shows Up in Adult Relationships

This childhood pattern doesn't just disappear when we grow up. It follows us into our romantic relationships, creating a dynamic where:

• The relationship becomes your top priority, often to the exclusion of everything else

• You make yourself endlessly available, leaving your calendar open "just in case"

• You rearrange your entire life to accommodate your partner's needs

• You over-function whilst secretly keeping score of what you're giving versus receiving

• You build resentment when your extreme dedication isn't reciprocated

The painful irony? You end up blaming your partner for having boundaries when you have none.

The Anxious-Avoidant Dance

This dynamic becomes especially pronounced in anxious-avoidant pairings. While you're dropping everything to prioritize the relationship, your avoidant partner is likely protecting other areas of their life. They may actually pull away more when they sense pressure to match your level of relationship focus, feeling their autonomy threatened.

The more you up the ante in terms of prioritizing the relationship, the more they might resist—creating exactly the dynamic you're trying to avoid.

What You Can Do About It

1. Have the Conversation

If you're truly doing all the heavy lifting in your relationship, it's worth addressing directly. The key is approaching it without blame:

"Hey, I've been feeling like a lot of the time it's me who's reaching out or making plans, and it's starting to feel a bit imbalanced. I'm not sure if that's something you've been aware of as well, but either way, I'd really appreciate it if we could maybe rebalance the scales a little."

Take responsibility for your part while clearly expressing your needs.

2. Stop Over-Functioning and Start Prioritising Yourself

Here's a hard truth: the things that bother us most in our relationships are often the very things we're doing to ourselves. If you're complaining that your partner doesn't prioritize you, ask yourself—how good are you at prioritizing yourself?

If you're someone who consistently abandons your own needs to focus on others, you're putting enormous pressure on your relationship to provide everything for you. When your partner inevitably falls short of this impossible standard, the disappointment feels devastating.

The recalibration that needs to happen is this: Get better at actively taking care of yourself and prioritizing your own wellbeing.

This means:

• Setting boundaries that protect your time and energy

• Saying no when something doesn't work for you

• Maintaining your own interests and friendships

• Taking care of your needs instead of hoping someone else will

The Path Forward

Once you've had clear communication and started taking responsibility for how you're showing up, you'll get a much clearer picture of your relationship's true dynamic. If things still don't shift after you've stopped over-functioning, that gives you valuable information about whether this relationship is right for you.

But until you've done this inner work, it's hard to judge fairly—because a big part of the dynamic might be of your own creation.

Remember — this struggle is far more common than you might think. The pattern of not feeling like a priority touches so many people, and understanding its roots can help you approach it with self-compassion rather than self-criticism. The goal isn't to never need prioritisation from your partner—it's to build a relationship where both people are actively showing up, rather than one person desperately performing whilst the other remains passive.

---

FURTHER LINKS & RESOURCES:

• FREE TRAINING: How to Heal Anxious Attachment and (Finally) Feel Secure in Life & Love

• Download the FREE Anxious Attachment Starter Kit here
  

---

You might also like…

---

Episode Transcript

[00:00:04]:

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 about what to do when you don't feel like a priority in your relationship. So maybe you are always feeling like you're striving to get a place in your partner's life, like you're always competing for their attention, like you're the one who's always initiating contact or initiating plans, basically that everything is originating with you and your really having to earn your place. And that creates this overall impression of not feeling important or valued to your partner. And I think that this is incredibly common among anxiously attached people.

[00:01:10]:

It's certainly something that I'm fielding questions on every week, multiple times a week from students in my courses. It's so endemic and yet it's probably not one that we talk about in so many words. Enough. And so today I want to address this head on in this episode, talking about why it's such a common dynamic for anxious attachers to land in how it interfaces with some of our other wounds and patterns around unworthiness and fear of abandonment and fear of rejection and all of the protective strategies that can accompany those wounds, what it looks like in an anxious avoidant kind of pairing, and why those differing attachment styles might exacerbate this dynamic. And ultimately what you can and maybe should be focusing on. If you find yourself in a relationship where you are constantly battling to feel like a priority, you know, where is your energy best spent? Because I think oftentimes the instinct is to just keep pushing and try harder and keep striving and keep over functioning. But oftentimes that keeps us in the pattern rather than releases us from the pattern. And so I'm going to be sharing some thoughts on what to do if this is a position that you find yourself in so that you can hopefully shift into something that feels a little bit more balanced and sustainable and reciprocal.

[00:02:28]:

Before we get into today's episode, a couple of quick announcements. The first being if you are in or around London, I'm super excited to share that I am running an event there in September, on the 13th of September. You might have heard me mention this over the past couple of months, that it was, you know, a potential plan in the works. It is now confirmed and tickets are on sale. I'm going to be giving a talk on the path to secure love, so much of which is about healing our inner relationship. So if you're a podcast listener and everything I speak about here resonates with you, and you'd like to hear me speak in more depth, in person, in an intimate setting, there'll be plenty of time for Q and A and meet and greet and all of that afterwards. So I'd really love to see any of you there. If you're in or around London and would like to come along on 13th September.

[00:03:17]:

The link to purchase tickets is in the show. Notes Second quick announcement is just a reminder about my free training on how to heal anxious attachment. This training has now been attended by close to 5,000 people. In the last couple of months, it has received some amazing feedback. So if you're someone who struggles with anxious attachment and you'd like a bit of a deep dive into why you struggle the way that you do and what the path to healing looks like, my free training is a really great starting point. Okay, so let's talk about what to do when you don't feel like a priority in your partner's life or in your relationship. So, as I said, this is way more common than you might think. It is truly something that I'm answering questions on all the time.

[00:03:58]:

And so I can assure you that you are far from alone in feeling this way. Now, as I said in the introduction, I think it's really important to recognise and validate, like, where this comes from in us and why it makes so much sense that we land here in our relationships. And to do that, I want to just jump back to the origins of anxious attachment, which some of you will be familiar with, others of you might not be. But many anxiously attached people grew up in relational environments, so in a family system that was marked by inconsistency in one form or another. And so the overall impression is it feels really good when we're connected, but I can't always rely on that connection to be there when I need it. And so that's what creates in me this hypervigilance around separation. That's what creates in me all of these people pleasing behaviours, all of these ways to keep love close, because I don't trust in the safety of letting go, even temporarily. And part of that experience of inconsistency is this perception of unavailability and not feeling important enough.

[00:04:56]:

You know, children are so quick to internalise whatever's going on out there as being about them. And so for a lot of children, if parents were very distracted, if they had very demanding jobs, or if they had other stuff going on, their own, mental health issues, or the marriage was very under stress and strain, and so there were just a lot of demands on their attention. A child can sense all of that and see all of that and somehow internalise the message that if I were better in some way, then my parent would show up for me the way I need them to, they wouldn't be so misattuned to my needs, I wouldn't have to compete and strive and perform to get their attention. And so that's a really, really common picture for anxiously attached people. And obviously, you know, that's fairly generic and that can have lots of different permutations, but that overall environment of inconsistency and some perception of unavailability and the resulting strategy around trying to be good, you know, performing people, pleasing, striving, feeling like we have to earn and prove that is really, really common and that stays with us into our adult relations. And if you're sort of connecting the dots, you might notice that that similar kind of dynamic is present in a lot of your relationships or has been present in a lot of your relationships. So feeling like it's so great when we're connected and close, but I always feel like you're at risk of slipping away and then I won't know how to get you back. And I feel like I'm losing control in that way.

[00:06:25]:

So I never trust in the good times because it feels like the bad times are just lurking around the corner. And so I'm always in this mode of hyper vigilance and anticipation, waiting for bad to happen in my relationships, waiting for connection to be withdrawn, waiting for love to be taken away. And then I'm going to be left all on my own to deal with this. And I don't know how to do that. And it's going to be my fault because I tell myself the story, whether I realise it or not, that it's because I'm not good enough, that this keeps happening. And so that's a really heartbreaking story. And I think, as always, when we can connect it to what its origins often look like, we can have so much compassion for the fact that this has followed us through life, into our adult romantic relationships. But with that as the backdrop, we can start to look at this dynamic of not feeling like we're a priority and start to go like, wow, okay, maybe this isn't just about my current relationship or my current partner and whatever is going on there.

[00:07:23]:

Maybe there are some deeper layers to this which have something to do with my stuff as well. And that's not to say that there isn't real stuff going on in the relationship that might need your attention, but just to recognise that we. We are often drawn to relational dynamics that activate our wounds and that reflect back to us the stories that we carry about ourselves and about others. So in this case, the things around unworthiness, the things around not being important, the things around, like, no one ever loves me as much as I love them, no one ever tries as hard as I do, no one ever gives as much as I give. And that's so unfair. And I don't know why I can't just find someone who meets me in that. Oftentimes we actually gravitate towards relationships where that's true, rather than it being an objectively true story about everyone in the world. Right.

[00:08:13]:

And so getting really curious and taking ownership for that, and the fact that maybe this pattern is serving us in some way, even if we don't like it or we say we don't like it, getting curious around, like, what's actually going on here can be part of the process of bringing more awareness to this and ultimately shifting it. So I did say that I was going to talk about, you know, what this specifically looks like in a more anxious, avoidant dynamic. And I think it's important to acknowledge here that for anxiously attached people, the relationship will almost always be the priority, oftentimes to the exclusion of all else. And people with more anxious patterns will quite happily drop other balls to make sure that all of their attention can be on the relationship, if that's what's required. So they might make themselves available in the sense of not making other plans, even if you don't have plans with your partner, particularly in the early stages, I think this can be true, that you just leave the calendar open, so to speak, in case they want to hang out, because you're so committed to being completely available to them all the time. And that's just ranks so far ahead of anything else that you could do with your time. So you don't want to forego the opportunity to potentially see your partner. But it can also look like, you know, if your partner asks you to do something and it's actually really inconvenient for you, but you don't acknowledge that, you just rearrange everything behind the scenes to make things go smoothly for them, to accommodate them, to help them out, which, you know, there's nothing wrong with.

[00:09:37]:

Like, that can be a really beautiful trait. And there are points at which we might push back and advocate for ourselves and say, like, oh, I wish I could help out, but actually that would totally, you know, throw my day out. So I probably can't this time. What we often do is we just do all of the things because we're so committed to being, you know, endlessly adaptable and flexible and helpful and making ourselves so needed. And then when someone maybe doesn't mirror that back to us, they don't reciprocate to the same degree, we start to harbour resentment around it. We notice ourselves keeping score and going, well, I always do this, this and this, this, but you don't even do that. And that's where it really starts to brew and bubble away. And we really can see that toxic resentment building in our relationship and we so readily point the finger at someone else and say, like, it's your fault because you're not doing X, Y and Z.

[00:10:27]:

And we don't really acknowledge that maybe we overextended ourselves in the first instance, maybe we made someone a priority to such an extreme degree. And then we're blaming them for the fact that they're not reciprocating our extreme behaviour. In other words, we kind of blame them for having boundaries when we have no boundaries. And I think this will often happen in an anxious, avoidant dynamic because someone who's more avoidant is unlikely to do that. We know that avoidant folks are not likely to prioritise the relationship above all else and drop everything in their life. If anything, they might be quite protective of other areas of their life and the expectation that they are to drop everything, to just focus on the relationship might be something that they have quite an aversion to and might really push back against. And so whether you're directly or indirectly employ that they should do that, that might actually see them pull away more because they feel this need to protect their autonomy, to protect their selfhood outside of the relationship. And so you just continuing to up the ante in terms of how much you prioritise the relationship and hoping that they follow suit, might actually have the opposite effect.

[00:11:36]:

That might create in them a bit more resistance and pulling away because they feel a bit smothered or overwhelmed by the extent of that expectation. So what to do here? How best to navigate what does the path forward look like if you feel kind of chronically deprioritized by your partner now, as always, it's nuanced and it's hard for me to give a one size fits all solution. So I'm just going to throw a couple of things out there and you can be discerning and adapt that to your situation as makes sense. But the two key pieces that I want to focus on are having a conversation about it, obviously. So to the extent that you really are doing all of the heavy lifting in your relationship and maybe without your instigation, like nothing would ever happen in your relationship, you'd never see your partner, you'd never talk to them because you're the one initiating all contact. And it feels like the effort and input is really, really asymmetrical, like it's just all coming from you and you're really, really over functioning. There might be something to call out there and not in a blaming way, but just in an acknowledgment of like, hey, I've been feeling like a lot of the time it's me who's reaching out or it's me who's making plans and it's starting to feel a bit imbalance. I'm not sure if that's something you've been aware of as well, but either way I'd really appreciate it if we could maybe rebalance the scales a little there and if you could put in a bit more effort into reaching out or planning dates or whatever.

[00:13:03]:

The thing is, obviously again, this will depend on where you're at in the relationship, if it's relatively new versus if it's well established. But the same principle, basically naming it, having a direct, honest, non blaming, non accusatory conversation around it where you take responsibility and go look, partly my doing because I just always fill the gap. That's just what I do by default. But I also realise that it's making me feel a little bit resentful and things do feel a bit imbalanced. So just to flag that, I'm not going to be doing that as much anymore and I'd really appreciate it if you could kind of meet me halfway. So that might be one thing to do is just to name it and acknowledge it and have the conversation and be clear in what your needs and desires are there. The other piece, which sort of goes hand in hand is that you probably need to stop over functioning and you probably need to prioritise yourself. I was saying this to a student in my course the other day around the topic of self abandonment, but it's amazing that the things that we complain about or that really bother us or trigger us in our relationships like, you know, they're not prioritising me, or, you know, they're not taking care of me, or they're not validating my needs or whatever it might be.

[00:14:15]:

Or invariably, I can guarantee that the person saying that is doing the same thing to themselves, that they're not validating their own needs, that they're not prioritising themselves, that they're not taking care of themselves, that they're not supporting themselves. And yet we point out there over at them and say, you're the reason I'm feeling this way because you're not doing the thing that I want you to do. And again, it's not to discount the realness of the relational piece and the importance of that to our overall sense of wellbeing. But we do want to come back to what is within my direct control. Where can I really shift things and transform my relationship from the inside out? Where can I take responsibility for the way that I'm showing up, the way that I'm feeling? And I really think that the way we treat ourselves and relate to ourselves is an incredibly powerful way to do that. So if you are feeling consistently like you are not a priority in your relationship, my question for you is, how good are you at prioritising yourself and your wellbeing? Because my guess is, as we've talked about in today's episode, that if you're someone who is often in this pattern, you probably spend a lot of time focusing on other people and their needs and their convenience and how you can make their lives easier. And in the process, you probably deprioritize yourself as well. And your hope is that somehow you doing that is going to mean that they're going to do the same thing back to you and it'll all even out.

[00:15:38]:

But that isn't what usually happens. They probably happily receive all of your giving and then you get resentful. So I think the recalibration that does have to happen is that you get better at actively taking care of yourself and prioritising yourself and saying no to things if they don't actually work for you. You know, having those boundaries in place that really protect your wellbeing, rather than overextending yourself and over functioning and over giving and then getting pissed off about the fact that everyone else isn't doing the same thing and playing by the invisible script. So getting really clear and really carving that time and space to honour your own needs and to take care of those needs as best you can. But, like, the more we abandon ourselves and drop everything to just be available to the relationship. It does really put a lot of pressure on the relationship to provide everything for us. And then we feel all the more let down, disappointed and frustrated when our partner maybe isn't showing up.

[00:16:34]:

And I think it's only once we've done those things. So I've had clear communication around it, really taken responsibility for how we're showing up, how we're treating ourselves. You know, if things still don't shift and it still feels like you're just not getting anything back from someone, well, that's going to give you a pretty clear picture on like, is this relationship right for me? But until we've done those things, it's maybe hard to judge because there might be, you know, a big part of that is of our creation. Like if we really are contributing to that over functioning, under functioning dynamic, we just won't really know until we make some of those changes and then see what the ripple effect is. So that would be my suggestion if you're in this, is to pull back a bit, maybe have a conversation about it if that feels appropriate, and then see what shifts as a result. Okay, I'm going to leave it there, guys. I really hope that this has been helpful. I did want to say if this is something that's interesting to you, I really recommend the book the Origins of youf by Vienna Farren.

[00:17:32]:

She was on the podcast a couple of years ago. She's a really wonderful marriage and family therapist. She has a really big Instagram account which is is mindful mft. I'm not affiliated with her in any way. I just love her work. And her book the Origins of you goes through five different origin wounds and one of them is the prioritisation wound. And that is pretty much everything we've been talking about today. This wound around never feeling like a priority.

[00:17:57]:

And so I think that while that is not a book about attachment specifically, I suspect it will resonate with many of you and I really, really recommend it. So maybe go check that out if you're, you know, interested in this topic and want to dive a bit deeper into it. Okay, gonna leave it there guys. Thank you so much for joining me and I will see you again soon. Thanks for joining me for this episode of On Attachment. If you want to go deeper on all things attachment, love and relationships, you can find me on Instagram at stephanyrigg or stephanyrigg.com and if you enjoyed this episode, I'd be so grateful if you could leave a review and a five star rating. It really does help so much. Thanks again for being here, and I hope to see you again soon.

---

Keywords from Podcast Episode

anxious attachment, avoidant attachment, prioritization wound, insecure attachment, emotional unavailability, relational patterns, over-functioning, under-functioning, people pleasing, self abandonment, boundaries, hypervigilance, inconsistency, self prioritization, resentment, communication skills, self worth, fear of abandonment, fear of rejection, childhood wounds, inner child healing, origin wounds, attachment dynamics, anxious-avoidant pairing, emotional safety, unmet needs, self advocacy, personal responsibility, inner healing, attachment repair, secure love, relationship coaching, autonomy, emotional labor, invisible scripts, relationship imbalance, self regulation, validation, self compassion, attachment triggers, intimacy blocks, self trust