I had a wonderful conversation with Flora Ong discussing how childhood attachment theory affects our current relationships.
Flora Ong is a Dating Coach & Matchmaker specializing in love and relationships. She has set up 100’s of matches with an 85% success rate. She is a certified Health and Life Coach. Flora works with men and women, helping them identify their blocks around dating. She is also the co-host of the Redo Love podcast and is working on writing a book about dating. We discuss dating, attachment style, and what it’s like to be a matchmaker.
We review the different attachment styles, discuss how our current relationships are affected them, and how the different attachment styles show up in our nervous systems. She gives us her tips on finding and keeping love.
Show notes:
Flora Ong Website
Flora Ong Instagram
Flora Ong Attachment Quiz
Quotes:
“I was dating and making all these crazy, like doing these crazy things and making a lot of mistakes and watching myself, make them through the lens of like this life coaching thing and, you know, very consciously continuing to make them and not understanding why I couldn't really stop myself from making them.”
“One of the things that I really had to learn and continually have to learn is patience. Not just outward patients, but patients with myself. I'm an Aries. I'm a New Yorker. I'm Russian. I need everything now.”
“I was like a 16-year-old hysterical crying, on the regular, because this guy wouldn't call me back.”
"What's interesting with attachment stuff and how it's linked to self-worth is that, even though I knew he wasn't good enough for my kids, I still allowed him in my life for two and a half years.”
“If I could change the law, I would not allow people to get married before the age of 30.”
“In understanding the concept of object constancy and knowing, and feeling this felt sense that you're cared for. As a secure person, you carry that into adulthood. You have an innate sense of self-worth.”
“Anxious adults constantly need to be assured, their self worth needs to constantly be reassured by another person. And they tend to have one object, one attachment, a figure that they are attached to.”
“Sometimes when you're trying to regulate to a middle, you for whatever you're doing, you go to the extremes in order to figure out where the middle is.”
“The anxious and the avoidant attachment feed each other's view of the world and reinforce each other’s negative subconscious upbringings.”
“They did a test on these infants that were anxious and avoidant. And they both had the same level of heart rate. While the anxious child was hysterical, crying, wanting mom and the avoidant child was sitting quietly playing with a toy and not paying attention to mom. They still both had the same heart rate levels.”
“If you're dating right now and if you're married right now, go find yourself.”
“Go take some time to really find that thing you enjoy and the things that you are interested in. Go build yourself an interesting life that you can fall back on whether somebody is around or isn't.”
“For married people, I would definitely say go get your own lives. And come back together and have something to talk about. I feel like a lot of married couples get stuck in their routine and stuck in doing couples things together all the time.”