This post contains affiliate links. If you purchase through my links, I may earn a small commission at no extra cost to you.
Introduction
If you’ve come here directly from my article, Anxious Hearts: Why You Keep Texting Your Ex at 2am — And How to Stop, you’ve peeled back a little bit of why we behave the way we do, but now we’re on the way to doing something about it. Understanding is only a fraction of the work we need to do to overcome. The first step to healing attachment is self-awareness with compassion. That’s learning to see yourself honestly, realistically, and without guilt or shame.
This can be achieved via a multitude of channels, as mentioned in my previous article. We’ll do a deep-dive into each of them in subsequent articles, but for now, I want to start with something you can literally start with today: yoga. It’s not just yoga, though. It’s an entire complex of emotionally corrective experiences that goes a bit deeper than the traditional rhetoric of “yoga helps regulate your nervous system.”
It’s often recommended by trauma specialists, somatic therapists, holistic therapists, even doctors. It can be just as simple as soothing the nervous system, but it can serve a much larger purpose. It can help us build self-awareness, compassion, self-love, and inner peace at the same time as soothing our nervous systems and reducing our overall daily stress. It can re-teach us how to speak and feel about ourselves when paired with the correct ingredients.
I’m going to break down what no one explained about yoga. After all the research I’ve done in Attachment Theory, Polyvagal Theory, and an assortment of nervous system, somatic, breathing, and trauma research, I realized that I had accidentally stumbled upon a mechanism of change that went under the radar until it had already taken root.
I actually started out with yoga after my avoidant partner was fired from our workplace and he went into a 6-week shame spiral. I’ve talked about it in several articles, so I won’t repeat myself too much, but it was painful. I cried all the time. I felt a panic I didn’t know what to do with. I was depressed. It was Christmas time and around my birthday, my favorite time of the year, and I couldn’t enjoy the festive season. It was a struggle. I was desperate to feel better. And yoga kept coming up in advice.
I finally became desperate enough to try it.
Trying It Out
Now, I know I’ve talked about her before, but I’m never not going to. Yoga with Kassandra on YouTube was transformative for me. No, I’m not getting paid for saying this nor am I affiliated with her in any way. She doesn’t even know I exist. But I did take her 10- to 15-minute yoga classes, once in the morning and once before bed, every single day—and I was pretty surprised by the results.
Yoga allows us to connect our minds to our bodies. It helps us slow down enough to notice the sensations in our limbs, slow our thoughts down. The various poses are meant for releasing and relaxing. They are often known to activate the parasympathetic nervous system to calm us and take us out of the Red and Yellow nervous system states (you can read more about the Polyvagal Theory states here). Some of them feel like we’re being actively held—like Balasana Wide-legged Child’s Pose. I cannot stress how much I love this pose. On the hardest days of my avoidant partner’s shame spiral, I wished I could just be in this pose the whole time.
I want to make a point here, though. It’s not just about the restorative benefits of the poses themselves. There is another component that I think I stumbled on quite accidently, and it’s exactly why I am so specific on which yoga instructor I chose. I can’t speak for the experience with any other yoga instructor on YouTube because I can’t speak for the prosody in the way each instructor speaks and the environment they create.
Prosody & Felt Safety
I would say most therapists, coaches, and holistic practitioners try to use a soothing, calming voice that is, simply put, monotonous, but prosody is specifically the lyrical quality of speech that cues us of this person’s safety. According to Stephen Porges, vocal prosody is how much our pitch rises and falls when we speak. The variability in our pitch is what gives it that singsong quality that babies respond to despite not understanding the words being spoken. That’s essentially why “baby talk” to a baby doesn’t affect their ability to learn words—because we’re really conveying bonding, soothing, and safety regardless of the words or nonsense we’re saying.
What that really tells us is that our bodies are receptive to tone before the words someone is saying to us. Let me put this into perspective. Imagine a husband tells his wife he needs thirty minutes to decompress after work. His words are simple, but she experiences them as rejection. The conflict that follows isn’t created by the words themselves but by the meaning each nervous system assigns to them. This is why felt safety matters more than intellectual understanding.
And we learn felt safety the same way we learned everything else as children. That’s why telling a baby they are safe doesn’t make them feel safe. They experience safety. For a child, that’s being soothed when they are distressed and when a mom bonds with them with eye contact, relaxed and warm facial expressions, and prosody. That’s how they learn Mom is a safe person.
For adults, we learn people are safe in similar ways. If our parents soothed us predictably and consistently as children, we are more likely to develop the ability to soothe ourselves and trust that support will be available when we need it. If they did not, then we have learned to minimize or dismiss our distress or to seek someone out to soothe us with escalating behaviors until we feel safe again.
To feel safe again, though, regardless, we need cues of safety from others. A visible warmth radiating off them, prosodic voices, unconditional acceptance. If we are suffering from attachment wounds, regardless of whether we are avoidant, anxious, or fearfully avoidant, we have probably rarely experienced someone as completely safe.
My sister was my refuge growing up. She was my heroine, my best friend, my confidant, my surrogate mother, everything. She was my safe person. Until I started having several emotionally corrective experiences with my avoidant partner. I’m aware of the irony, here. However, when I’d admit to liking video game music or that I can’t go alone to new places because of my anxiety, I braced myself for rejection and scorn. Because my sister—and everyone in my family—would treat my social anxiety as something I just needed to grow out of or that if music wasn’t lyrically poetic and meaningful, it was junk. So when he accepted these things I’d been taught to feel ashamed of—as just a normal part of life—I was thrown for a loop. That was the first time I understood what an emotionally corrective experience actually felt like.
Rewriting the Old Narrative
This experiential correction is exactly what allows us to rewrite the old core beliefs that limited our growth into nourishing ones that promote growth. You can experience this in a multitude of different ways with various people. One way is to expose yourself to someone who speaks to you exactly how you want to speak to yourself. This safe person or place, whether a therapist, YouTuber, a Podcaster, a particular Audiobook, or somewhere else in your life, should model what healthy self-talk feels like. They should make you feel unequivocally accepted exactly as you are. Flaws and all.
Kassandra from Yoga with Kassandra was that person for me.
She has all three of the necessary ingredients to create repeated, predictable, and consistent emotionally corrective experiences.
- She has a calming, down-regulative routine to help guide us into a state of safety or the Green State.
- She has a prosodic voice that cues us into feeling safe with her and allows us to co-regulate with her.
- She models the healthy self-talk our parents should have taught us.
With repeated exposure to these three ingredients, many of us will begin to incorporate her voice and her cues of safety into our own internal voices. It doesn’t happen overnight. It doesn’t even happen in a week. But over a period of a few months, I went from “God, I can’t even do this right” to “This is the best I can do right now, and that’s enough.” Day by day, I slowly replaced my dad’s critical voice in my head with Kassandra’s compassionate one, until it’s how I talk to myself most of the time.
When I think the words, “I am enough exactly as I am,” I hear them in her voice. Or “I did my best today, and that’s enough.” Or “I am worthy of love.” It lands as much more powerful now than in the beginning. I internalized them and made them my own.
It seems like such a miniscule change, but I found that it made a huge impact on my healing. When my avoidant partner disappeared into that six-week shame spiral, I thought what I needed was reassurance from him. Looking back, what I needed first was a kinder relationship with myself. Yoga didn’t give me that overnight. It gave me something much smaller: 10-15 minutes, twice a day, with a voice that treated me like I was already enough. Eventually, I started believing it.
In Action
If you want to try it, start small. Ten minutes in the morning. Ten minutes before bed. Give it a few weeks before you decide anything about it. And if you find a voice that makes you feel like you’re already enough — hold onto it. You can also share what’s working for you in the comments or come find me in Anxious Hearts & Avoidant Souls: Compassion in Practice. I’d genuinely love to hear from you.
Further Reading:
Diane Poole Heller’s The Power of Attachment — Poole Heller is a well known clinician and teacher in attachment theory, and she is the founder of DARe, the Dynamic Attachment Re-patterning experience, which is incredibly close to what is described in this article. She uses a holistic approach to trauma and attachment wounds using somatic work and corrective experiences, and her book is often recommended by therapists.
Stephen Porges’ Polyvagal Safety: Attachment, Communication, Self-Regulation — I haven’t finished reading this just yet. However, there is a chapter called “Yoga Therapy and Polyvagal Theory: The Convergence of Traditional Wisdom and Contemporary Neuroscience for Self-Regulation and Resilience” that is excellent for the benefits of yoga on the nervous system, but it is dense and highly clinical.
Tara Brach’s Radical Acceptance and Radical Compassion — While Tara Brach’s slower, meditative style wasn’t a perfect fit for me personally, many people find her voice deeply soothing and grounding. Her work on self-compassion, mindfulness, and radical acceptance has helped countless people healing from shame and attachment wounds.
Richard Schwartz’s No Bad Parts — I’m currently reading this, and I can’t recommend it enough. Schwartz is the founder of Internal Family Systems, and his work is heavy on undoing years of shame and the inner critic. He focuses on understanding your internal ‘parts’ and learning how to relate to the inner critic with more curiosity and compassion.
Workbooks
There is an entire series, The Sounds True Inner Workbooks, by St Martin’s Essentials that is literally for this inner work, and I’m actually really excited about the one coming out in October because it’s literally for attachment specifically. These are the ones I think are most relevant:
The Internal Family Systems Workbook: A Guide to Discover Your Self and Heal Your Parts — this is written by Richard Schwartz himself, and if you use any of these workbooks, I would say this is the one. It’s not just about accepting yourself, but also getting to know yourself.
The Nervous System Workbook: Practical Exercises to Ease Anxiety, Find Safety, and Come Home to Yourself Using Polyvagal Theory – This is by Deb Dana, one of the experts in Polyvagal application in clinical work. It’s an excellent resource if you are most interested in working with your nervous system, not against it.
The Courageous Heart Workbook: Choosing to Love in Perilous Times — This one is by Tara Brach, and is excellent for developing self compassion and self love specifically as well as compassion and acceptance for others.
And then the one that comes out in October is The Attachment Workbook: Practical Exercises to Understand Your Patterns, Strengthen Connection, and Build Secure Relationships — This one is by Diane Poole Heller and is the upcoming workbook most directly aligned with attachment-focused somatic healing and corrective emotional experiences.