#111 The Pillars of Trust & Trustworthiness
In today's episode, we're talking all about trust & trustworthiness. Trust is something that many people struggle with, oftentimes as a direct result of past experiences where trust has been breached. And as we'll discuss in today's conversation, trust is about so much more than honesty. My hope is that you'll walk away from today's episode with greater clarity about why you might struggle with trust, and the steps you can take to remediate this in your relationships.
In today's episode, we're talking all about trust & trustworthiness. Trust is something that many people struggle with, oftentimes as a direct result of past experiences where trust has been breached. And as we'll discuss in today's conversation, trust is about so much more than honesty. My hope is that you'll walk away from today's episode with greater clarity about why you might struggle with trust, and the steps you can take to remediate this in your relationships.
We’ll cover:
The interplay between trust and trustworthiness
The five pillars of trust
How self-trust and relational trust are connected
Building trust through small acts over time
FURTHER LINKS & RESOURCES:
Save $150 on my Higher Love break-up course with the code PHOENIX
Follow me on Youtube
Follow me on Instagram: @stephanie__rigg & @onattachment
You might also like…
Episode Transcript
[00:00:04]:
Welcome back to another episode of On Attachment. In today's episode, I'm going to be talking all about the pillars of trust and trustworthiness. So this is something that I started reflecting on and formulating in preparation for my master class on building Trust, which I ran a couple of weeks ago. And it's really stuck with me. And I think it's such an important conversation to be had because if you're like most people, you probably think of trust as comprising honesty and openness.
[00:01:03]:
And while honesty is definitely a component of trust and a really important ingredient in being able to trust someone, it's not the be all and end all. It's not the whole picture. And I think that understanding that trust is more layered than that, that there's more depth to it and more breadth to what it takes to really trust someone and what it takes for someone to demonstrate their trustworthiness. That really allows us to have a fuller picture of where and why we might struggle to trust and by extension, what we might do to start building more trust in our relationship. So I'm going to be sharing with you five pillars of trustworthiness, which is not an exhaustive list and it's not some sort of doctrine that you're going to find in a textbook. This is just something that I came up with when I was preparing for this master class that I ran. But I am hoping that it is helpful for you in reframing and broadening the way that you think about trust. The other thing I want to say in framing the discussion is that self trust and relational trust are much more parallel than we think.
[00:02:07]:
I think that a lot of people treat self trust as something mysterious and we throw our hands up and go, oh, I just have such bad self trust. I'm so indecisive. I don't really trust in myself to make a good decision. I always ask other people for their opinions and I to and fro on it incessantly. I always doubt myself. And while I understand that that can be a really overwhelming experience, I think we underestimate how many of the principles that apply in the realm of relational trust are very much influential and formative in whether and to what extent we trust ourselves. So I'll touch a little bit on that today. But I do want to say if this is a topic that you're interested in and you enjoy today's discussion, please do go and cheque out the Building Trust Masterclass.
[00:02:57]:
It's two and a half hours or thereabouts of a really deep dive on this topic on self trust and relational trust and rebuilding trust after there's been a breach of trust. So it's really in depth and has an accompanying workbook as well. So I will do my best to give you a taster of these pillars of trustworthiness in today's episode. But if you are keen to go deeper, definitely a good idea to cheque out the Masterclass, which will be linked in the show notes. Okay, so let's dive into this conversation around trust and trustworthiness. So I want to start by saying, you might have noticed I keep saying trust and trustworthiness because, again, I think oftentimes we can blame ourselves if we have so called trust issues. And we go, oh, I just need to get better at trusting. I just need to be more trusting.
[00:03:47]:
And I think it's important to recognise that often our trust issues, if we're going to call them that, are there for a reason. And it might not be a reason that originates in your current relationships, where it might be a legacy wound from a previous relationship, but it's rare that it just comes out of nowhere. So I think we really have to approach ourselves with a level of self compassion and recognise that most of the time our fears make sense and they come from somewhere. So in the past, you might have been lied to or betrayed or disappointed or let down blindsided by something. There might have been secrets kept that you were unaware of. And so you've developed certain fears around trusting in response to something that's happened to you or something that you've seen, but there's something within you that's going it is not safe to fully trust this person, to rely on them, to count on them, to take their word at face value. And so I've got to add these additional layers of protection in order to keep myself safe. And that might look like either withholding parts of yourself not being fully vulnerable, not opening yourself to someone, or it might look like probing someone or not trusting what they say.
[00:04:59]:
It might look like reading their messages or crossing boundaries around privacy because you struggle to just trust that things could be as they seem. So there's lots of tentacles to this whole trust piece. But I did just want to say that oftentimes our trust wounds make sense, and so we do want to approach ourselves with a level of compassion. The other piece is this distinction between trust and trustworthiness. It really is a dialogue, right? It's like call and response. So I trust to the extent that you demonstrate yourself to be trustworthy, and that's likely to happen in increments, or at least ideally it would. So I might trust you with this piece of myself and then you show up in a way that feels really safe and trustworthy, and then I give you a little more, and then you stay steady and you are showing me that you are worthy of trust. I e trustworthy and so as we proceed in a moment to talk about these pillars of trust and trustworthiness, I want you to think about it being a two way street.
[00:06:00]:
It's not just your responsibility to blindly trust. It is a dialogue. It is back and forth between people in a relationship, not just a romantic relationship, to be clear, but this interplay, this dialogue between trust and trustworthiness, and that we really need both of those to dance together in a way that feels really safe in order for that to build over time. So let's talk about these pillars of trustworthiness. The first one is perhaps the most obvious, as I alluded to at the beginning of this episode, that honesty, right? Honesty is a really important part of trust. So honesty to me is, can I trust your word? Is your word true? Is it reliable? Are you sharing the whole truth? Are you withholding are you concealing? Are you not being transparent with me around not only the facts of a situation, but maybe how you're feeling and anything like that? So can I trust that what you say is the truth? And I don't really need to probe or interrogate or push beyond that because you have shown me that your word is valuable and honest and reliable. So honesty, as I said, is what we mostly think about when we think of trust. And so if someone has lied to us, we might not trust them.
[00:07:19]:
And that is perfectly understandable, but it is just the tip of the iceberg, I think, when it comes to trust. And we do want to dig a little deeper to look at some of these less obvious expressions of trust and trustworthiness. So the next one is reliability. So in this context, I'm thinking of reliability as, can I count on you? Will you be there when I need you? Do I really feel like you have my back? It doesn't mean that you're perfect. It doesn't mean that you are waiting at my beck and call all the time. But can I trust that if I were ever in a moment of need, that you would show up for me in a way that really contributed to my feeling of safety? Again, this could be in a friendship. Hopefully you've got at least a couple of friends that you know you could always call and count on to be there for you. And I think that level of reliability, no matter what else is going on, is so conducive to deep trust in any relationship.
[00:08:15]:
Obviously the converse of that is unreliability flakiness maybe not prioritising the relationship enough such that you don't feel important to this person in a way that they really are there for you and care about you. Reliably okay, the third pillar of trustworthiness is integrity. So are your values and your actions in alignment? Is there this sense of wholeness? And can I really feel that you know who you are? You know what you stand for and you are committed to broadly acting in accordance with your values. So I think when there are people who you can feel into the fact that they don't really know who they are and they're really insecure and they flip flop all over the place and they go with the flow and they try and fit in. And there's no real internal angst. There's no sense of them knowing who they are and what they value in anything other than a really shallow sense. It is very hard to trust that person because you just don't know what it is you are connecting with. You don't know who the person is behind the mask.
[00:09:19]:
And so I think that having this really embodied sense of integrity and again, I think of that as alignment and knowing what your values are and acting from a place of integrity, doing what you think is right rather than what is easy or comfortable, that really helps to build trust. And again, I think this is one where it's particularly important to highlight the parallels between relational trust and self trust. Because as I've spoken to before on the show and I teach in all of my courses, a lack of self awareness and self knowledge around our values is a surefire way to erode self respect and self trust. Because when we don't know who we are, we don't know what we value, we don't know what we stand for, we don't know what our boundaries are, we don't know what our limits are. We don't know what we're okay with. And we just float around doing whatever other people want us to in an effort to seek approval or be accepted or be chosen. Very, very hard to trust ourselves from that place because there's no direction, right? There's nothing really anchored or grounded about that. And that flaky kind of energy is not very trustworthy.
[00:10:30]:
So again, both in yourself and other people, integrity and alignment is a really, really important pillar of trustworthiness. The next one is responsibility. And in this context I'm meaning responsibility like do you own your mistakes? Do you recognise your contribution to a situation? Do you own your blind spots? And do you seek to repair and make amends, proactively and find ways to make sure that certain things don't happen again or don't continue because you are committed to nurturing the relationship? So I think the absence of responsibility basically looks like avoiding hard conversations, not really owning your part, being very defensive. And I think all of those behaviours really obliterate trust because they say to someone I don't really care about your experience, or I don't have the capacity to care about your experience because I'm too concerned with my own. And while we can all do that at certain times, it's really, really destructive to trust. So I think that having the courage to be self responsible and to be proactive and to own our part to own where we've slipped up. I think this one is really important to call out. We're not talking about perfection, right, in any of this.
[00:11:45]:
We're not saying you need to have a squeaky clean track record where you've never made a mistake and you never do anything wrong and you never fall out of integrity or alignment. It's about repairing and not trying to avoid those conversations, not trying to shirk responsibility, but really owning up and owning something and saying, look, I messed up and I see where I went wrong and here's why it isn't going to happen again, because here's my plan, right? That level of self responsibility and accountability really, really helps to build trust and it also really helps to rebuild trust if there has been some sort of rupture or breach. And the final pillar of trustworthiness that I want to share with you is consistency. So are you doing all of those things consistently over time? So rather than it just being a little spurt of motivation, which I think can often happen if we've had a rupture and then we have this big conversation around it and you might come up with a plan and then things are better for a couple of weeks or even a couple of months. But then they start to slip back into old patterns. And again, we can give ourselves some grace because I think we're all guilty of this, of getting a bit complacent and lazy with the commitments that we make. But it's really important to trust that there is consistency and inconsistency makes it very hard to trust because there's no predictability, there's no safety in inconsistency. So having consistent behaviour over time and a really solid track record is going to be really helpful for building trust and rebuilding trust.
[00:13:21]:
So really making sure that whatever we're doing to build trust in a relationship is comprised of lots of little things compounding over time, because that's really how trust is built. I think we can imagine that trust would be built in big moments, but I don't think that's actually true. I think it's lots of little moments, lots of bids for connection and moments of reaching out where we feel really seen and safe and held by another person, validated by them. And over time we go, wow, I can really count on this person. Like I said at the start, it's that dialogue between trust and trustworthiness that is constantly happening, this interplay of reaching out and having someone reach back and going, ah, yes, I can trust you because I've got all of this evidence in support of that. So making sure that whatever you're doing in any relationship to demonstrate your trustworthiness is something that you are doing consistently over time, because that is really important to our sense of safety and trust. So I hope that has been helpful, as I said, in sort of widening the lens for you in terms of what you think of trust as comprising and the ingredients that go into building trust? Because I think that if we are only thinking about trust in terms of honesty, then we're missing all these other ways that we might be inadvertently unintentionally harming the trust in our relationships, or that someone we're in relationship in is proving themselves to be untrustworthy and we don't know why we can't trust them. So maybe hearing this is validating to you, that it's understandable that you struggle to trust someone if they've been really unreliable and inconsistent, but they insist they've been honest.
[00:15:05]:
We really need more than just one piece of the puzzle in order to build this overall picture of trust. The tapestry of trust is much more intricate than just honesty. So perhaps this has been validating, and you can then take that away and go, oh, okay, I now have a little bit more context for why I'm struggling to trust this person and what feedback I could give them in terms of my needs so that I could cultivate a bit more safety. We could cultivate more trust and repair or plug some of the holes in the ship to the extent that it feels like you're not quite there yet on really trusting someone. So I hope that this has been helpful. As I said, if you want to go deeper on this conversation, definitely check out the building trust masterclass, which is very much a deep dive, but otherwise, I hope that this has been helpful, and I look forward to seeing you again next time. Thanks, guys. Thanks for joining me for this episode of On Attachment.
[00:16:04]:
If you want to go deeper on all things attachment, love and relationships, you can find me on Instagram @stephanie__rigg or at stephanierigg.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 sooner.
#110 What Healthy Interdependency Looks Like & How to Cultivate It
In today's episode, we're exploring healthy interdependency. Interdependency is often cited as a key trait of secure functioning relationships, and yet many of us lack a clear picture of what healthy interdependency actually looks and feels like - especially if you have a history of insecure attachment patterns.
In today's episode, we're exploring healthy interdependency. Interdependency is often cited as a key trait of secure functioning relationships, and yet many of us lack a clear picture of what healthy interdependency actually looks and feels like - especially if you have a history of insecure attachment patterns.
We’ll cover:
The spectrum from codependency to hyper-independence
Interdependency as a healthy middle ground
How different attachment styles relate to codependency, independence and interdependence
Signs of healthy interdependency in a relationship
FURTHER LINKS & RESOURCES:
JOIN THE WAITLIST FOR MY NEW COURSE ON ANXIOUS-AVOIDANT RELATIONSHIPS
Save $150 on my Higher Love break-up course with the code PHOENIX
Follow me on Youtube
Follow me on Instagram: @stephanie__rigg & @onattachment
You might also like…
Episode Transcript
[00:00:04]:
In today's episode, we are talking all about cultivating healthy interdependency in relationships, which is really one of the hallmarks of secure relating and secure attachment. So this is an area that I think doesn't come naturally for those of us with more insecure attachment patterns as their starting point. But it really is such an important thing to have as a reference point as you're doing this work, so that you can be really aware of what would a secure couple do? How would that look? And how can we bring more of that energy of balance and mutual care and respect to whatever we are grappling within our relationship? So we're going to be looking at this spectrum of relating from codependency at one end through to hyper independence at the other, and then figuring out what this healthy middle ground of interdependence looks and feels like. And then I'm going to be giving you some more specific signs or things to work towards insofar as healthy interdependency is concerned, so that you can start to take steps towards that and cultivate that in yourself and in your relationships.
[00:01:41]:
So that is what we're talking about today. Before we dive into today's conversation, a couple of quick announcements. The first one is very exciting and I almost hesitate to actually announce it because it formally locks us into following through, but I am in the process of creating a new programme for couples around anxious avoidant relationships. So my master class on how to navigate anxious, avoidant relationships is my most popular by far has been purchased and used by almost 1000 people in the last year. And I've had it in my mind for a long time to spin that out into a fully fledged course with a view to providing that for couples to work through, to cultivate more secure patterns together. And so I'm really excited to announce that we have in the pipeline a course for couples, particularly in those anxious avoidant dynamics, and that my partner Joel, who leans more avoidant, is going to be joining me in creating and presenting that for you. So that's something that I'm very, very excited to announce. It's not ready and available yet, but it will be in the not too distant future.
[00:02:51]:
And if that's something that piques your interest and you would like to put your name on a waitlist to learn more about that when the time comes, I have put the waitlist link in the show notes and you can sign up to that which will, as always, not only allow you to get first access and all of the details, but also very discounted launch pricing. So if that interests you and you want to go deeper on the art of secure relating when you're in that anxious avoidant dynamic, I would love for you to jump on the waitlist for this new course. Okay, second quick announcement is just to share the featured review which is from the first episode I listened to. It literally pointed out feelings and triggers that I felt during my past relationships that kept me from a fulfilling, healthy relationship. I always wondered what is this feeling? And now this podcast has opened my eyes and I feel like I'll be able to concentrate my healing into becoming a better version of myself. Thank you for all your work and words. Thank you so much for your beautiful review. If that was yours, please send an email to podcast@stephanierigg.com and my team will set you up with free access to one of my masterclasses.
[00:03:57]:
Okay, let's dive into this conversation around cultivating healthy interdependency in relationships. So, as I flagged in the introduction, there's this broad spectrum that we could look at from codependency on the one end to hyper independence on the other and we can see how anxious patterns probably veer more towards codependency or certainly can do, whereas extreme avoidance tends to be in the direction of hyper independence. And it's really important to understand that neither of these being opposite extremes of a spectrum are the healthy middle which I talk so much about and what we're all trying to cultivate on this path to more secure relationships. So codependency is not something that I'm going to go into in great depth, it really is its whole own body of work. And for those who don't really know much about the origins of that body of work, it's very much in the context of addiction and the systems around addicts. So codependency being a dynamic that's often seen in those systems whereby a partner of someone with addictions tends to over function and make themselves needed by someone in order to protect the relationship and to protect themselves. And that usually is driven by very low self worth and comes with its whole own set of dynamics that can be really challenging. And of course if that is in the context of addiction, then that is its whole own kettle of fish.
[00:05:28]:
But codependency tends to be this energy of I need you to need me in order for me to feel okay. And so I over function and overgive and overextend myself and I try and take care of all of your needs so that I become indispensable to you because I don't trust that without that you would want me and this relationship wouldn't be able to stand on its own 2ft without my over functioning. But the problem with that is that it tends to facilitate and perpetuate the other side of the coin, which is the under functioning of the other partner, the under giving. So it's sort of like excessive selflessness or self sacrifice tends to feed and reinforce selfishness or self absorption on the other side. So codependency is not a balanced dynamic and it's not something that we want to be shooting for in our relationships. And yet if you are someone with more anxious attachment patterns, you can easily veer into some of those behaviours. Again, not to conflate anxious attachment and codependency, although I think certainly people with more anxious patterns would be more prone to ending up in codependent dynamics and relationships. But we can see some of the other things I've spoken about many times on the show.
[00:06:46]:
Things like over giving, over functioning, tiptoeing around someone's sensitivities, walking on eggshells, trying to insulate someone from the consequences of their own behaviour, trying to stabilise someone's emotional state, and really working hard to do all of that are all symptoms of what we might call codependency. In essence, it's by taking care of you, I am taking care of myself, that if I can make you be stable and your needs taken care of, then that will have some trickle down effect to me and I will be safe in some way. At the other end of the spectrum is hyper independence. And this is very much the classic more dismissive, avoidant pattern of I don't need anybody and we should all be responsible for our own needs and be these very discreet units and we can be in relationship with each other, but ultimately we're not responsible for each other in any way. And so I don't need anything from you and I don't expect you to want or need anything from me. I expect you to take care of yourself in large part, okay? And so this type of person tends to be very averse to the idea of someone wanting or needing things from them, can be quite almost turned off or repulsed by the idea of someone being needy. Their threshold for what neediness entails is very low and there can be a lot of almost content or disdain for the idea of people having needs and being vulnerable in that way. So I think what a lot of anxious people do is they see someone's hyper independence and they go, wow, you have such good boundaries, or you're so secure because you are so independent.
[00:08:37]:
And that tends to be a slight misconstruction of what security means because really one of the hallmarks of secure attachment is I'm comfortable relying on others and having them rely on me. I can take care of my own needs, but I don't feel the need to do that either from a place of self protection or from martyrdom, which are kind of the two flavours you might see in anxious or avoidant people. It's this sense of I'm not grasping or clutching at someone from this survival driven place of neediness and fear, but equally I'm comfortable in the idea of leaning on people and being supported and offering my support in return. So there's this really beautiful experience of balance and trust that comes with secure attachment and interdependency. So let's go through some of the signs of healthy interdependencies and things you might look out for in your relationships. Or perhaps as I share these, you might go, oh, okay, that's where we're a little off the mark and where we need to be stepping more towards in the way that we relate to each other. So the first sign that I want to offer is both persons needs matter as much as the others, so we are committed not only do I care about my needs and advocating for my needs, but I really want your needs to be met and vice versa. We both have this same mindset of elevating both of our needs to this level of high priority, right? Because we both understand and recognise that the success of our relationship depends on both of us feeling loved, cared for, respected, admired, supported and so we are really actively nurturing and nourishing those things again and it has to go both ways.
[00:10:27]:
This is very important because as soon as we've got one person who's doing that and going, oh, I'm very invested in you getting your needs met but it doesn't come back the other way, then we're back in codependency territory, right? So it has to be I care a lot about my needs and your needs and you have to care about both of our needs as well and that's what brings us into this space of interdependency rather than being one of the other expressions of either codependency or hyper independence. So this is also a departure from what I often see, which is mostly with anxiously attached people just because that's the bulk of who I work with. But people assuming that needs and this tussle of my needs versus your needs has to be a zero sum game with a winner and a loser. And that is very much an insecure mindset and way of relating to needs. Whereas healthy interdependency is we don't have to have a winner and a loser. We don't have to sacrifice one person's well being in order for the other person's well being or needs or desires or preferences to be catered to. We're both really actively invested in finding solutions that are really good for both of us, not just we're both compromising to some watered down version of what truly works. We find something that feels good for us both rather than who gets to win.
[00:11:50]:
What about me? Why should they get their way? All of those things. If you're hearing that and going, yeah, that's my internal dialogue as it is for a lot of people with more anxious, avoided and insecure patterns, that's really what we want to shift away from, because the more we're entrenched in that oppositional mentality, of course, all of these conversations, it doesn't feel safe. It doesn't feel like we can trust, because we feel like we've got to protect our interests and fiercely advocate for our position against the position or the interests of someone else. And it's almost like a debate, right? Why I should win instead of you, why I'm right and you are wrong. Interdependency is really putting that to the side and going, okay, we might have a departure in how we view this situation or how our needs interact here what would be a really great path forward that honours both of us and really elevates both of our needs to this place of really important. We both really are invested in both of us getting our needs met and how can we be creative in finding a solution from that starting point and that intention. Okay, the next sign of healthy interdependency that I want to share is you take turns being in the support role. Okay? Picking up the slack.
[00:13:08]:
When one person is stressed, the other really rises to the occasion and supports them and tunes in and goes, oh, my partner's stress. How can I support them? And you take turns in that. I think what often happens, again in more anxious, avoidant dynamics, in more codependent patterns, if we want to use that terminology, is one person is the one who's always stressed and the other person is always in the support role. And that again leads to a very imbalanced dynamic where one person is orbiting around the other and tiptoeing around them and trying to preempt their needs and try to anticipate what might be stressing them out and how to solve it, and then they get lost in the process. Right? The internal dialogue or the internal script might be like, well, what about me? Who's going to care for me? Who's going to support me? Who's going to look out for me? And I say that having thought and felt that many times myself. So I understand this deeply, but I also recognise that we have to recalibrate that and part of it. If you're the person who tends to always be in the support role, a big part of your work is learning how to receive support because it's much more comfortable. If that's always been your role to be helping, to be supporting, to be caring, it's much more vulnerable to say, hey, I could really use some support.
[00:14:26]:
I could really use some extra care and attention because I'm stressed or my capacity is low and it would feel so nourishing to my system to just feel really held and cared for. So helping Interdependency looks like tag teaming on that, right? One person picks up the slack when the other feels a little low or a little stretched or a little underresourced. It's not about perfect equality, but an overall impression of fairness, right? We're not point scoring because we both trust in the fact that the other will have our back. And so we can really go between that in this beautifully fluid, trusting way without, again, having that oppositional mentality of, it's either me or you. Either I support you or I get supported, but not both. And really, interdependency is living in the land of both. Okay? The next sign of healthy interdependency is you play to your respective strengths and you work really well as a team. So it's in a similar vein, right? You don't have to be point scoring, you don't have to be saying, I always do that, and you always do this, and comparing and competing.
[00:15:35]:
You recognise that you each have your strong suits and you really slot into those roles in a way that allows you to function really effectively as a team and recognising those strengths and really playing into them, into your complementarity as a team and going, oh, okay, we work better when we are in this together and really feeling that. So, again, it's this idea of we don't have to go one or the other. We don't have to be keeping tally or score. We don't have to feel like we're protecting our interests or looking over our shoulder. It's like, yeah, we know how to do this dance in a way where we both feel supported and successful and like, we can really be a well oiled machine from this place and feel really held and supported. Okay. And the final sign that I wanted to share with you, and I should have said this is by no means an exhaustive list, it's just a few of the things you might want to look out for. You both really want to know if something's bothering the other person.
[00:16:41]:
Okay? So there is no conflict aversion in this space. There's no sense of, do we have to talk about it or tiptoeing around it, or oh, I don't want to upset them, or I don't want them to feel bad, so I won't raise it, or I don't want them to take it the wrong way. All of that anxiety around raising a concern. There is this sense in the relationship, this culture of we absolutely, both of us, want to know if something is bothering the other, if there's an unmet need, if there's resentment building. We are both really proactive in cleaning house, so to speak, in, can we bring these things to the surface and bring them to each other? Because we want to be I think, of the visual of there being a pane of glass between us that represents our relationship. And if there are, like smudges or little things building on that pane of glass, we want to keep it clean and clear so that the energy between us is really good and we know that we work well from that space. But when things start to build up and we just ignore them or we sweep them under the rug or we turn away, we avoid that really builds up over time. And healthy, interdependency, secure, functioning couples really are so committed to the ongoing care and maintenance of their relationship such that we turn towards those things and we call it out.
[00:18:06]:
And there's enough trust in the relationship that it's not received as an attack. It's not, oh, here we go again. We have to talk about it. It's like, oh, please point out my blind spots. Please let me know where I'm missing things, because I want us to thrive. And that requires both of us to be feeling overall a sense of fairness and love and connection and support in the relationship. Now, this isn't to say that people with secure patterns in their relationship or healthy interdependency are perfectly, 100% connected and happy with each other all of the time. Of course not.
[00:18:38]:
That is unrealistic. No one is suggesting that. But there is an overall culture and climate of trust and respect and care and commitment in the relationship that allows you to approach all of these things, whether it's conflict or discussions of needs or boundaries or concerns. Desires. Preferences with a tone of openness and a prioritisation of those things as being in the interests of both of you and the relationship and really making that your joint commitment and mission to always be pruning the garden, cleaning that pane of glass and investing in the relationship. Because you both know that you benefit from the relationship thriving. So I hope that's given you a feel for what healthy interdependency looks like and how it's different from more codependent patterns or hyper independence and how you might start to make some shifts in your relationship to step off the ledge at those two extremes and make your way towards a more healthy middle ground. So if you've enjoyed this episode, as always, I'm so grateful for those of you who leave reviews or five star ratings.
[00:19:52]:
If you're listening on Spotify, it helps so much in continuing to grow the podcast, and I'm so grateful for your ongoing support. Otherwise, I look forward to seeing you again next time. Thanks, guys. 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 @stephanie__rigg or at stephanierigg.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 sooner.