Thrive Well Therapy

If you’ve spent years in therapy working on your avoidant attachment, reading every book, doing the journaling, genuinely trying, and something still doesn’t quite fit, there’s something I see a lot in my work as a trauma therapist that doesn’t get talked about nearly enough.

A lot of people who’ve been labeled avoidant by a therapist, a partner, or even by themselves aren’t primarily avoidant at all.

They’re autistic. And nobody thought to look.

I go deeper into this on my YouTube channel, ThriveWellTherapy, if you want the full picture.

You don’t need to identify a feeling to start processing it. Your nervous system just needs to feel safe enough to sit with it.

If you want the full breakdown, I go deeper into this on my YouTube channel, ThriveWellTherapy.

Have you ever been told you’re intimidating and had no idea what to do with that? You’re not trying to make people uncomfortable. But you’ve watched it happen anyway, and for a long time you probably took it as evidence that something was wrong with you.

What’s usually actually happening is that your confidence is highlighting a gap between where you are and where the people around you still are. That’s especially true after leaving a high control religion or cult. Your freedom makes their stuck-ness harder to ignore. That’s not the same as you being too much.

I made a video about this, including a gut check for telling the difference between confidence that’s unfamiliar to people and behavior that’s actually the problem. Watch it here.

Most people think confidence is about being certain. It isn’t. Real confidence doesn’t push and it doesn’t demand. It comes from learning to feel safe in your own body and making decisions from that place. When you can do that, nobody can argue with it. Full video on my long-form channel.

The shame spiral is not the problem. The problem is that you cannot tell the difference between what actually happened and what you decided it means about you. Here is the tool I use with clients to separate the two. The full video is on my long-form channel.

Spilling tea in my late 30s sent me into a full shame spiral. Not because of what my uncle said. Because of what my nervous system had been trained to believe about mistakes. If you grew up in a high-control environment, this one is for you. The full video is on my long-form channel.