Category: RELATIONSHIPS

How do childhood attachment patterns impact our adult relationships?

June Allen Leave a comment

In a healthy mother and baby relationship, a secure attachment is formed when they are responsive and can provide nurturing care, protection, and emotional support. Building a secure attachment is important for:

  • Babies’ brain development.
  • Learning to self soothe.
  • Feeling deserving of care.
  • Seeding self esteem.
  • The first experience of love.
  • Building confidence to communicate their needs.
  1. Anxious attachment : This attachment style happens when parents are inconsistent with care so the child does not trust if their needs are going to be met or not. This anxious attachment style shows up in adult relationships as:
  • Difficulty trusting others
  • Low self-worth.
  • Fear of abandonment.
  • Craving closeness with unavailable people.
  • Being overly dependent.
  • Requiring frequent reassurance that people care about you.
  • Being overly sensitive to a partner’s actions and moods.
  • Being highly emotional, impulsive, unpredictable and moody.
  1. Avoidant attachment: In this dynamic the parent cannot show up and the child knows that their needs are not going to be met. This leaves them feeling unloved and insignificant.  Avoidant attachment shows up in adult relationships as:
  • Compulsive self reliance.
  • Fear of closeness.
  • Disconnection from your emotions which means you’re more likely to minimise the emotions of those close to you.
  • Relationship sabotage, (i.e affairs.)
  • Preferring casual relationships (hook up’s and situationships.)
  • Emotional unavailability.
  1. Disorganised attachment: The child experiences and/or witnesses abuse and will act out/in through withdrawal and/or intense rage. Disorganised attachment shows up in relationships as:
  • Confused emotions swinging between love and hate for your partner.
  • Insensitivity, controlling and mistrust.
  • Explosive drama and/or abusive behaviour.
  • Being hard on yourself and others.
  • Refusal to take responsibility for your actions.
  • Feeling unworthy of love and fears abandonment.

Justice for your inner child involves creating a safe, nurturing, and validating environment where your inner child can flourish and thrive, free from the burdens of the past. If you found this content helpful, click here to join the email list for more healing content. 

5 reasons why black people lie!

June Allen

Most of us like to think that we are honest and talk about wanting others to be honest with us. However, the reality is that many can’t hold the truth about what they do to themselves or others as a consequence of not dealing with their pain. In todays session, I share 5 reasons black folks lie and the importance of keeping your side of the street clean.

Sacred Sista Study Circle Selection #4: Communion: The Female Search for Love. By bell hooks.

June Allen

In this session I share the 4th book selection for my next Sacred Sista Study Circle launching in October. Communion: The Female Search for Love. By bell hooks. Join me to explore an overview of the black women’s relationship with love and femininity in this powerful text by a sista author who always brings the fire. Click here for more details about the study circle. 

‘I’m stuck in negative thinking!’

Sacred Sista Assistant

Without a safe space to process, many of us have buried difficult feelings for years. Therefore, it makes sense that our negative thinking is the emotional leaking out of a difficult past. An important part of the healing process is understanding that it’s not linear. There is no golden destination and sometimes there will be moments when things just feel sh*t as the layers come off. In this week’s live, I share the 5 tools I use when this funk gets in the way. 

‘I don’t know what my needs are?’

June Allen

One of the questions that clients often find difficult to answer is what they need. If we were raised in homes that were neglectful and abusive, we shut down because it wasn’t safe to express our feelings or needs. As adults, this pattern can show up as numbness, anger and resentment in people pleasing relationships so in this session, I share a tool that can help you reconnect to your feelings along with 8 important human needs to consider as a black woman. 

Are there benefits to celibacy?

June Allen

Oooooo Gurl, you gonna need a drink and a comfortable spot for the next hour to watch this one as the Goddesses of the Round Table spill the tea on celibacy! How long is too long? How do you define it? Is it a choice or a trauma response? Does it include self pleasure? Join us as we unpack these questions with compassion, courage and lots of laughter. *Trigger Warning* we do talk on issues of abuse so if you need support after watching this you can book a 121 session with me at www.callme.juneallen.net 

Decolonising Desire is a course I’ll be delivering via the Sacred Sista Sanctuary mastermind to unpack and heal from racism in our relationships. Together, we’ll explore the following topics so you can show up confidently in your interpersonal relationships:

How racism shows up in our relationships.
How childhood shapes our capacity to love.
How to deal with sexual trauma, body shame and the fear of intimacy.
Understanding boundaries in relationships.
The art of receiving and the politics of pleasure.
Healthy dating and sacred partnerships.

Click here to to sign up.

? Family Scripts.

June Allen

Many of us are compulsively hiding from our greatness because of the unconscious scripts we internalise from our dysfunctional families. Some of mine include:

I’m not allowed to be more financially prosperous.

I’m not allowed to be emotionally healthier.

Having my own needs is selfish.

And suffering is compulsory.

Until I became conscious of these scripts, there was always fear humming in the background that I would be shamed for wanting a different life and rejected after the, ‘who do you think you are?’ conversation.

Do you relate?

In healing, we learn that whilst our parents were the portals for us to be here, they do not own the rights to our future. If your currently drifting and life feels stuck, maybe its time to explore what family contracts are unconsciously sabotaging your greatness?

Today, I will remember that I have a right to live abundantly. In this moment, I will release the family scripts that keep me in bondage and begin to write my own without apology.

3 Step Trigger Repair #healinghack

June Allen

Even if you’re not meeting up with family over the holidays, they may still be contact via zoom, phone and text etc. Therefore, its still important to be mindful about your triggers. This week I’m sharing a really simple 3 step process to help you deal with your holiday triggers.

  1. What are you feeling and is it really about the current conversation or something that reminds you of a wound in your past?
  2. What do you need? Maybe it’s being heard, understood or to feel safe.
  3. What must you do? Maybe you just need to remove yourself from the conversation by changing the subject, the company or the environment altogether!

Either way, the main focus must be on what comes alive in you when you communicate and to listen to your gut, needs and how you can restore a sense of emotional safety.

Can’t love, won’t love? ?

June Allen

Sometimes we tie ourselves in knots, trying to make sense of the reason why those who said they loved us couldn’t follow through.

Is it me?

What did I do?

Why can’t they love me ?

Sometimes we’re so desperate to be loved that we think abandoning ourselves some more will bring them closer. Truth is, this self neglect hiding as ‘love’ only feeds the shame and resentment when our needs remain unmet.

In these moments of sadness and confusion, sometimes reframing the reality helps us understand that it’s not that the other person won’t love us, it’s because they can’t.

Racism is a toxic shame based system that shuts down our ability to attach to others in a healthy way. Without healing, we can’t unpick the poison we’ve inherited or what’s been internalised in our lifetime.

Without awareness, we recycle the pain and act it out through colorism, self hate and violence inside our families and relationships.

When we commit to doing the work, we give ourselves permission to grieve the absence of love from our traumatised village and the loss of not being allowed to be ourselves.

Today, I will remember that it’s not the black man against the black woman, but African people against white terrorism.