Beyond Anxious and Avoidant: Here's What's Actually Driving Your Desires

That thing that turns you on but you've never quite been able to explain? Or the relationship dynamic you keep recreating? Those aren't random. And they aren't fully explained by your attachment style.

This is the introduction episode for a series on attachment wounds and erotic desires. Before we get into the specific wound patterns, I'm laying the foundation — what attachment styles actually are, where they fall short, and how to understand attachment patterns beyond the standard (avoidant, anxious, disorganized or secure) boxes. We'll talk about how our childhood experiences and specific attachment wounds tend to lead to specific turn-ons. Plus, why that's good news and will help you de-shame your desires. 

In this episode:

• Why attachment styles are learned habits, not personality traits or life sentences
• How your attachment response shifts depending on who you're with, how they communicate, and the specific felt safety of that relationship
• Why the anxious/avoidant label doesn't capture the full picture — and what the deeper wounds underneath those patterns actually are
• A preview of the five developmental wounds this series explores: safety, dependency, trust, autonomy, and worth
• The core skills that underlie secure attachment — and why they're learnable, not fixed traits reserved for people who had easier childhoods
• How early unmet needs shape not just your relational patterns but your specific erotic desires — and why that connection makes complete sense once you see it

Companion resource for this series: 

Dr. R. Chris Fraley's attachment quiz at yourpersonality.net/relstructures/ — the most useful tool I've found for understanding your patterns in the context of specific relationships, not just in the abstract

The Wheel of Erotic Emotions — a visual map of common erotic emotions organized by category → laurajurgens.com/wheel

Topics: attachment styles and desire, anxious avoidant attachment, attachment wounds, childhood wounds and relationships, secure attachment skills, erotic desires, intimacy coach, somatic intimacy coach, feminist sex coach, attachment theory explained, attachment styles and sex life, desire and intimacy, how to become securely attached 

Get my free guide: Get Out of Your Head: A Starter Guide to Releasing the Pressure, Shame, and "Shoulds" Around Intimacy at https://laurajurgens.com/guide

More links:
Substack at https://laurajurgens.substack.com/

Pleasure Path Diagnostic here: https://laurajurgens.com/diagnostic/

About me, testimonials, blog, bookings: https://laurajurgens.com/

Wheel of Erotic emotions, go to: https://laurajurgens.com/wheel

Copyright notice: All content in this podcast is copyrighted and copying, scraping, data mining, or using the content to train AI is prohibited. 

Transcript

Beyond Anxious and Avoidant: Here's What's Actually Driving Your Desires

Pleasure Uprising, Episode 130 — Transcript

I'm Dr. Laura Jurgens, intimacy coach, somatic practitioner, and your guide to getting out of your head and into your body, your desire, and your real capacity for connection. This show is for people who are done performing and ready to actually feel it. Let's go.

Hello, my dears. Hi, I am glad you are here today. We're going to talk about something that comes up so much in my practice, and so much in my life, and with everybody I know. I want to just talk about attachment wounds and intimacy.

So let's think about this for a second. Something maybe turns you on that you've never been quite able to explain — maybe it surprises you, maybe it's the same thing every time, maybe you felt a vague shame about it, or a kind of boredom with it, or both. Or maybe you've avoided knowing it. Maybe you've avoided knowing what actually turns you on.

In another scenario, maybe you keep having the same dynamic in relationships — the pull towards the same sort of wrong people, or the pattern of either constantly chasing someone or constantly withdrawing, the same moment where intimacy reaches a certain depth and you either freak out or run away, right?

And you may have already heard of attachment styles. Maybe you've taken a quiz, maybe you've read a book, maybe you've self-"diagnosed," maybe you've been "diagnosed" by a partner or a friend, maybe you've spent some time convinced that you're anxiously attached or avoidantly attached, or both at the same time, which is called disorganized. And all of that is a start.

But here's what I want to offer you: attachment styles are the surface and usually misunderstood. And also they are related to that thing that turns you on — that thing you've never been able to quite explain or fully acknowledge. Underneath our attachment patterns is something much more specific and more personal and more directly connected to our erotic lives than most of us understand or expect. These things are linked.

This is the introduction episode for a series I'm going to offer you on attachment wounds and erotic and relational needs, desires, and turn-ons. We're starting here with this overview introduction episode before I dive into the specific attachment wounds, because we need you to have the foundation before we get into the specific patterns. I want to be really honest about where the standard framework for attachment styles falls short — especially the way most people are applying it in their lives — and I want to help you understand how it relates not just to your relational needs and your patterns of behavior, but also to growth and change in your life, into the goals that you have for relationship, for getting what you want in relationship. And it deeply, deeply relates to your erotic desires and your needs during sex, and what feels great for you in intimate play.

So we're going to dive into all of that, and we're going to start with what attachment styles actually are and what they're not.

What Attachment Styles Are — and What They're Not

So first, a quick orientation for anyone newer to this. Attachment theory describes psychological patterns — kind of like blueprints — for how we learned to bond with other people. They form early in childhood based on how reliably our needs were met, typically. But they can also change over the course of our lives, and we'll talk a little bit more about that.

The four main styles we encounter in mainstream attachment theory are:

Secure — comfortable with closeness and intimacy, including emotional intimacy, able to trust, able to be both intimate and independent.

Anxious — someone who tends to fear abandonment, may seek a lot of reassurance, and tends to pursue in relationships.

Avoidant — someone who, in this schematic, fears that intimacy will kind of trap them, and may value independence to the point of withdrawing in self-protection.

Disorganized — someone who craves connection and also fears it at the same time. This is often connected to early experiences where the caregiver was both a source of safety and a source of threat. Disorganized is kind of anxious plus avoidant — they can swing back and forth.

Now look, these four categories are genuinely useful as a starting point. They can give you an understanding of some patterns that you may have been living for years. They may help you understand behaviors of your own and your partner's, or your friends', or other people you're in relationship with — your parents, your siblings. But I really want to encourage you to think of them less as diagnoses or boxes to put people in, including yourself, and more like settings on a mixing board. You can be higher in some areas and lower in others, and those settings are not fixed, nor are they consistent from one partner or relationship to another. Different songs are going to have different mixing board settings, right, and those are your different relationships.

Attachment Styles Are Learned Habits, Not a Life Sentence

The way a lot of people are using attachment theory — it's gotten really mainstream, and people are applying it almost like a personality test, which is really not correct or accurate. It can really box you in and make it feel super pathological, as if you need to just manage this sort of life sentence kind of situation. And it's really not that.

Attachment styles are not personality traits. They are learned, context-dependent habits. They are habits. I want to say that again. Attachment styles are habits that you learned. You can learn them and unlearn them, and shift and change and grow.

You can become securely attached. I promise, because I did. If you ever see my results with my parents — I am like massively avoidant and anxiously attached there. But my primary relationships, my deep friendships — I'm absolutely securely attached, and I learned that with consistent support and the right work. I learned it. You can too.

A secure person can actually become anxiously attached after a really devastating relationship. An anxious person can become substantially more secure — like fully securely attached — with consistent support and the right work. A person can also be avoidant under certain circumstances, like when someone talks to them a particular way that brings out their avoidant, but they can also become secure if that communication style changes.

These patterns are formed in relationships, so they can change in relationship. None of it is a life sentence.

Why Your Attachment Style Changes Depending on Who You're With

Critically, your attachment style with one person is not your attachment style with everyone. You can be avoidant with a partner who is emotionally unavailable or extremely clingy, and function securely with a close friend who shows up consistently and respects your boundaries and your autonomy. Your nervous system is responding to the very specific conditions of each relationship.

Now, you can have tendencies — a tendency to be more anxiously attached or more avoidantly attached — and that's what most people are running into with themselves, and that is valuable and worth understanding and noticing. But there are a lot of things that can change your attachment response: the other person's emotional availability, their communication style, the felt level of safety and autonomy in the dynamic, and also, really critically, how much you have learned to manage your own tendencies and have secure attachment with yourself. Secure attachment with yourself is the foundation of secure attachment with other people.

The other thing that changes your response is whether something about someone triggers associations with people who were unsafe in your past — and that is worth noticing.

You may react to a new person as though they're someone you knew before, someone who hurt you or frightened you, when they actually haven't done that thing. Your nervous system can make associations and run old programs, and that's not about that person — it's about the wound. Or maybe they have done some of those things, but less severely than someone in the past, and you're still responding as if their behaviors were as bad as that past person's.

An example for me — and I'm going to tell you, this happened this morning, so this is not old news — there is somebody at my gym who I feel around like I am around the worst middle school bully. It's because the way that she behaves is very much like that kind of mean girl style: a lot of passive aggressive eye rolling and sarcasm, and pointed complaining about people who aren't present. My nervous system is on high alert around this person, and I have literally had to manage this on the regular. I try as hard as possible never to be right next to her, because I know my nervous system is going to get pulled back into middle school, and I'm going to spend the entire time I'm trying to lift weights actually managing my nervous system response, which is not that fun.

It happens, right? It's totally okay. It's part of being human. But it's worth knowing. I have to tell myself: hey, this is not then. I am an adult. I don't have to interact with this person, and if I do choose to interact with them, I can tell her to fuck off if I want to. There are like zero social consequences to me if I just decide not to engage. I have to walk myself through that, because my nervous system is running an old pattern.

None of this is pathologizing. You don't have to feel bad about your attachment wounds. You don't have to feel super mad at your parents about them. Now look — you may have very justifiable anger, and that is absolutely legitimate and valid. But you can also just recognize that none of us get through this life without some wounds, and they don't have to harm you forever, and they don't have to determine how you interact with the people closest to you. All of this stuff is changeable and flexible, because they're habits, not life sentences.

The Problem with Using Attachment Styles as Labels

Attachment styles have become a really trendy way for people to label themselves and each other instead of a tool for growth, and that makes me so sad. Because what I hear people saying out in the world — like when I just wander through a coffee shop — is things like "I'm avoidant, so I just need more space than he's giving me," or "I'm anxious, so I need more reassurance than I'm getting, and I need to just break up with this person."

If you label yourself or over-identify with the attachment style, it can become a reason not to do anything differently. A reason not to grow. And labeling other people — "my ex was anxious," "my ex was so avoidant" — can become a way to avoid looking at your own part in a relationship dynamic. Diagnosing your partner's attachment style, while it can be very tempting and very satisfying to our own ego, is rarely as useful as looking at the dynamic that the two of you created together. Especially if you don't want to just repeat it — you also want to look at where you have power, which means you contributed to the situation. There are always two people in a relational situation.

That doesn't mean both people are equally problematic. But: did I allow this more than I should have? Could I have had stronger limits here? Could I have taken care of myself better? What would I want to do differently next time?

Attachment styles also only capture one dimension of a person. They don't tell you anything about emotional maturity, empathy, communication habits, or where someone is on the path of managing their attachment wounds. Because some people may have anxious, avoidant, or disorganized tendencies, but they're really good at actually managing those things. They have a lot of maturity and empathy and they can own their patterns. Attachment styles also don't tell you anything about a person's capacity for secure attachment in the future. And so I think it's really important to recognize the fluidity of all this.

The Best Attachment Style Quiz for Relationship Context

If you want a sense of your attachment patterns in context — not as an abstract personality trait you're self-diagnosing, but in the context of your specific, closest relationships — the best quiz I've found is Dr. R. Chris Fraley's. I'm going to link it in the show notes. He's a professor at the University of Illinois, and it asks about attachment in relationship context, which is the only way it actually means anything.

The Childhood Wounds Underneath Your Attachment Patterns

I want to move us beyond attachment styles now, because they're very limited in how much actual information they give us. You don't have to identify with your attachment style. You can observe it, work with it, change it. But there are real childhood wounds underneath a lot of those patterns — and sometimes adult wounds too, adaptations to really dysfunctional relationships we've been in as adults.

All of us, almost everybody, has some ways that our childhood wasn't absolutely 100% perfect. Some of us get into the pain Olympics of comparing pain, and I have to encourage you not to do that. It's not really helpful. I used to do it hardcore — comparing my childhood versus other people's childhoods, trying to use it to understand myself and others. But what it was really doing was keeping me in judgment and a lack of empathy, both for myself and for others. It made me feel really other, really different from people.

What I came to realize was that actually everyone has some sort of childhood wounds. The people with the best parents in the world still have some things that, through no fault of their parents' own, just kind of hurt and never got repaired. You can have amazing parents and still have a traumatic birth, or a sibling who got cancer, or whatever. Something bad can happen to you. People have pain, and when it happens to us early in life it really does shape how we cope, our coping mechanisms, and the habits we get into for relating to other people.

Childhood wounds are things to become aware of so that we can grow beyond them and build the kinds of relationships and intimacy we actually want. They're not things to be attached to and identify with, and think of as something we have to carry in the forefront of our minds forever. But they are things we may always have to kind of manage, because they happen early in life. They tend to set a lot of the ways that we relate to ourselves and to other people.

Also — and I want to say this clearly — there are some people you will never have secure attachment with, not because there's anything broken about you, but because they just aren't capable of it. People with severe personality disorders, for example, are a really clear example of people with whom you will likely never have secure attachment. The more you build secure patterns within yourself and with people who are capable of genuinely reciprocating, the more you'll notice and trust your discernment when someone isn't capable of actually meeting you there.

And in my practice, a lot of what we work on with intimacy are the specific skills that underlie secure attachment and help soothe our core childhood wounds. They are learnable. They are not reserved for people who had perfect childhoods — and remember, there's pretty much no one who had it completely perfect.

The Five Core Skills of Secure Attachment

So let's talk about what the core skills of secure attachment are. This is not a comprehensive workshop — I'm just giving you a little overview of the terrain.

Skill 1: Emotional Regulation. The ability to calm your own body and mind when you get activated. To feel what you're feeling without immediately having to act it out or shut yourself down. To be willing and able to care for your own inner experience with compassion rather than blame, over-indulgence, or suppression. To see your feelings and emotions as messages, not emergencies.

Skill 2: Clear Communication and Interdependence — not codependence. Being able to share what you feel without attacking or blaming or having a shame meltdown. Expressing what you need directly — not hinting, hoping someone guesses, or performing helplessness or passive aggression. Listening to what someone else needs without collapsing into shame or defensiveness. Offering what is genuinely within your limits, not what you think will keep someone from leaving. And understanding that you will not always get your needs met, and being able to hold your own hand through the disappointment that reality engenders. That is survivable. It's okay that it's disappointing.

Skill 3: Kind Limits. Knowing where your own limits are and being able to feel them in your body. Using those emotions — knowing feelings are messages, not emergencies — to know where your limits are and being able to articulate them kindly. Not with ultimatums, no cold shoulders, no ghosting. Those are emotional coercion — trying to control somebody through behavior rather than communication. Respecting the limits others set without experiencing them as threats or abandonment. Knowing how to hold your own limits without panicking, and allowing others to have theirs.

Skill 4: Self-Reflection and a Growth Orientation. Being able to look at our own patterns honestly. To admit when we made a mistake or caused hurt to someone. Being able to hear how we've hurt someone without immediately making it all about our own shame and collapsing the conversation onto ourselves. Knowing that we are imperfect and still acceptable and worthy of love, that it is okay for us to make mistakes and we are still lovable.

Skill 5: Comfort with Both Closeness and Distance. Being able to genuinely be intimate and close with someone, and trust them, and also be genuinely able to be alone and be with yourself — without one having to threaten the other. Not panicking when our partner needs distance, and not abandoning yourself when they need closeness. Being able to share vulnerably and receive someone else's vulnerability, and trust that the connection holds even when you're not in contact.

Those are learnable behaviors and ways of being, which is really good news. Really good news. You can go from having very dysfunctional relational dynamics — like me, where I had no idea how to do any of that — to actually learning all of it, step by step. It is so satisfying. So wonderful.

What Attachment Theory Doesn't Tell You About Desire

So this is how we build secure attachment. But I want to expand what you're working with, because attachment styles do not capture the full picture.

Attachment styles tell you something real and useful, but they describe the surface habit patterns — anxious, avoidant, secure, disorganized, whatever — without necessarily telling you what specific early wounds are running underneath them, and how they relate to intimacy. Because it's more than just needing reassurance or space. Real developmental wounds have entire constellations of coping mechanisms around them, and we really needed those coping mechanisms. They served us well in the past. But they may be in our way now in adult relationships.

And honestly — they may also actually be pleasurable to play with in our erotic life. Both of those things can be true. We can play with some of the desires we have because they are shaped by a lot of our childhood wounds.

Two people who we would both label as anxiously attached can have completely different developmental wounds driving that pattern. One might have a deep safety wound — the world never felt safe, and anxiety is how the nervous system has coped, by constantly scanning for what could happen and trying to control the environment through worry and anticipation of disaster. Another person might have a dependency wound, where their needs were never reliably met, and anxiety is specifically about whether this particular person is going to show up to meet their needs.

Same label, different roots, different implications for intimacy, different implications for our specific relationships and our eroticism. Understanding the wound underneath gives you much more to work with than the style label does. It tells you what the body is reaching for, what the psyche and the heart is reaching for — and it can tell us what this person tends to crave in their erotic space, and why, and help people de-shame it, and understand that it is actually just part of something that is an attempt at healing, and can be very healing in the erotic space.

The same nervous system adaptations that shaped our attachment patterns actually shape our turn-ons. The same unmet needs that generated anxious or avoidant patterns are written into our erotic imaginations.

How Childhood Wounds Become Erotic Desires

We're going to talk a lot in this series about how early childhood wounds become erotic desires. And I want to first really encourage you to listen to episode five on psychological arousal and erotic emotions to understand what I mean more deeply — I go into it in a bit more detail there about what I mean by the two different pathways. I'm going to go over them briefly here, but that episode is illuminating for a lot of people.

How our wounds become erotic emotions: Research and clinical work in this area — Jack Morin's work on what he called core erotic themes, and the Somatica Institute® where I was trained, the core desires framework developed by Dr. Danielle Harel and Celeste Hirschman — all of this work consistently shows that our deepest erotic desires are shaped by early unmet needs, attachment needs. They're not random. They're not cultural conditioning alone. They're specifically shaped by what we needed and didn't fully get as children.

And there are two pathways.

Resolution — seeking in the erotic space the emotional experience that you missed. The emotional experience you craved and didn't get. If you had a safety wound, it might be feeling truly calm, truly held, truly safe, in a way that eluded you early in life. That's the resolution pathway.

Repetition with agency — and this one surprises people a lot. It's the desire to re-experience the challenging emotional experience that you did have, but with full choice and safety. And it can be profoundly healing. A lot of people are worried about this one, because it looks like — on the outside — you want something "negative" to happen to you. But this is not pathological at all. This is the desire to experience what was a scary emotion as a child, in safety, with agency, as erotic play.

Somatica calls these core desires. I call them erotic emotions — the specific feelings that your erotic system is actually seeking underneath whatever scenario, fantasy, or dynamic you're being drawn to. It's not the act. And a lot of times we don't actually even want to do the act in real life. It's the emotion we're craving. Sometimes running those things in fantasy is enough, and many of them we actually want to keep in fantasy, because we wouldn't feel safe to play with them in real life — and that's okay too.

So: Morin called these core erotic themes, Somatica calls them core desires, I tend to call them erotic emotions. It's all the same thing. I like erotic emotions as a term because it reminds us that what we're really craving is an emotional experience — not just a scenario, a position, a scene, a toy, a fantasy. The thing we could do in real life is not what we're craving. We're craving the emotional experience.

The Five Attachment Wounds: What This Series Covers

This series is going to map five developmental wounds, and how they play out specifically in eroticism and intimate relationships. We're going to identify the wound, name what's underneath the attachment behavior, and map how each one tends to shape our erotic imagination.

You may recognize yourself in one or several of them. You can even have all of them — not that many people in my experience have all of them, but some of us do, and it's totally okay to have more than one. That's often the case. Most people have some version of at least one of them.

Each wound pattern is going to get its own episode. Here's the preview:

The safety wound — is it even safe to exist? Is it safe to be in my body? Is it safe to be here at all?

The dependency wound — which can go in a couple of different directions. Are my needs welcome, or am I too much? Is needing pointless? Am I allowed to even have needs? Will my needs ever be met? It tends to go in two polar directions, and we'll talk about those.

The trust wound — is it safe to be vulnerable, or will that be used against me?

The autonomy wound — can I be fully myself? Am I allowed to even be who I am and still be loved?

The worth wound — am I loved for what I do for others, what I produce, what I earn? Or can I just be loved for who I am, unconditionally?

None of these are mutually exclusive. I carry more than one, I can promise you. Many, many other people do. And you can function fully and well and have a wonderful life with one or all of them. None of them make you broken or beyond reach. They just make you human.

Resources + What to Take with You

To review from today: attachment styles are not a personality type. They are mutable and changeable, and you can learn secure attachment. There are specific behaviors and ways of thinking that go into secure attachment, and there is more going on underneath all these labels that's really worth understanding — the wounds that actually shape us and our needs, and what we're trying to get. When we know that, we actually have more ability to get those needs met, to care for ourselves, and to celebrate our own eroticism and our playfulness and our connection with others.

The Wheel of Erotic Emotions — I have an extra resource I want to offer you that might be helpful. You'll also hear about it if you go back to episode five. It's called the Wheel of Erotic Emotions, and it's a visual map of common erotic emotions organized by general category. It's not exhaustive — there are other ones out there — but even just seeing them can help you triangulate where your own might be. It's a useful companion as you try to understand your own erotic landscape. You can download it at laurajurgens.com/wheel. Take a look, see what you think, keep it handy, and I'll see you here next time.

Hey, before you go — if you enjoyed this show, I want to invite you to check out one of my favorite things I've ever created. It's a free guide called Get Out of Your Head: a starter guide to releasing the pressure, shame, and shoulds around intimacy. It has four reflection exercises that go deeper than anything you'll find in a typical freebie, and most people feel a shift just after part one. Go grab it at laurajurgens.com/guide — the link is in the show notes. And if you're ready to find out what your specific path looks like, I'd love to talk to you. Booking info is also in the show notes. I will see you here next week.