And Here Begins the Journey

This is a space for exploring attachment theory with compassion and nuance—the kind people don’t always make room for. Here we’ll talk about anxious attachment, nervous system regulation, healing, and what it means to become more secure without losing yourself in the process. We’ll explore ways to come back to ourselves, reconnect with our purpose outside our relationships, and build lives that feel grounded and whole.

We’ll also talk openly about avoidant attachment—what certain behaviors can mean, how those dynamics affect us, and how to interact more effectively with avoidant partners without abandoning ourselves in the process.

I have so much to share with you, and I look forward to hearing about your own journeys toward security.

Before we begin, I thought I’d tell you a little about how I got here—and why this space is called Romancing the Fox. Because yes, people understandably ask what a fox has to do with attachment theory.

If you want to skip, you can head directly to the posts page here.

If I could go back and rebrand, you’d think I would change my blog’s name and the fox motif, but here we are, and it’s still Romancing the Fox. I went through a transformation since I started it, and now it’s come to represent that transformation for me.

Though I didn’t know it at the time, I started on a cathartic journey when I met my partner. He would challenge me in ways I couldn’t even fathom. He would mirror back to me pieces of myself I had never seen before. He would ask me to bend in ways I never thought I could.

Instead, my romantic instincts had my focus on how so very much our love story was like a rom com, and that I would write a novel called Romancing the Fox about us and the hilarious state of events that got us to where we are now. I merely had to change the first names of everyone, and it was a pretty great start to your average contemporary romance comedy novel. There is surprisingly a lot of material here, not going to lie.

Eventually, though, he was let go from our place of work and subsequently went into a 6-week shame-cycle. It stopped being a rom com and kind of became a horror movie. I was not prepared for the panic attacks and crying spells and the level of pain I went through. Or how much I had to justify my pain. It was always, “You guys aren’t even really official” or “You haven’t been together that long” or “Don’t you think you’re overreacting a bit?” I felt so alone. It felt like something was squeezing my heart within my chest. It was physical. I couldn’t breathe sometimes. And people were telling me I was overreacting?

The thing was—I wasn’t confused. I had been dreading the inevitable. He was going to be fired. I had seen it coming for about 2 months ahead of time, and I knew exactly what would happen. My partner would go into a shame spiral and would disappear from my life until he stabilized. And that’s exactly what happened.

I knew he’d come back, though. That was my one comfort. And I estimated the shame-cycle to take roughly between 4 to 12 weeks. He didn’t contact me until the day after he started his new job, 6 weeks later. Once he felt he could face me without shame, that’s when he returned.

But something happened during that time. To me. My entire world changed. I refused to suffer like that. I don’t know what it was. Maybe I was just at a point in my life when I’d decided I was done being trapped by my own emotions. Maybe I was done being at the mercy of others’ opinions—telling me I was overreacting. Maybe I was just clinging to him and was looking for something to tide me over until he returned. I don’t know. Whatever it was, it brought about a transformation that has sent me on mission to help others find their own transformation.

I started heavily researching attachment theory. Sure, I watched the videos on TikTok—well, Facebook, I’m not cool enough for TikTok, if I’m being honest. That’s when I discovered a new class of relationship experts—Relationship Coaches. I know I’ve come in hot on them (see my rant here). Some sell certainty to people who suffer in uncertainty. It seems kind, but it’s not. Kindness is teaching those same anxiously attached individuals to expand their window of tolerance—meaning, to learn how to sit in the discomfort of uncertainty. Uncertainty exists everywhere. Anxiety comes from it—we try to establish certainty to gain a sense of power back into our lives.

Let’s backtrack to those 6 weeks when my partner was in a shame cycle. I said, “I knew he’d come back, though. That was my one comfort.” I clung to that certainty. I ended up being correct, but I didn’t know for sure if he’d come back. And the harder I clung to that “certainty,” the more it would have hurt as the seasons changed and he was still gone. We need to learn that it’s okay to be uncertain. It’s okay not to have all the answers.

The reason why we struggle with uncertainty is because we have lost faith in ourselves to be able to meet the challenges that arise and survive. That is fixable. That is what relationship coaches should be teaching us. They shouldn’t be handing out blanket statements that feel good in the moment but don’t hit the deeper issue.

“Avoidants are the problem. You just need a secure partner,” they say. The truth? We can’t control our partners. We can only control ourselves. That means it’s our duty to look at ourselves honestly and compassionately and give ourselves what we’ve been asking others to give us—and not receiving. We can love, value, and regulate ourselves. We can stand up on our own two feet. We can center ourselves as the protagonist of our own stories.

That was actually something I realized around this time—the stories I wrote were always from a FMC’s point of view, but it was always about the MMC. Yeah, think about that. When I go into a relationship, my life is about him, even in my stories. Romancing the Fox was about him. It’s literally in the title. He is my slippery fox. Cute as a button but avoidant AF, excuse my internet speak. My blog was for him during that time. To explain why I was suffering in his absence. To explain why I was continuing to suffer in his absence.

I thought I could create a blog where people can get support in their relationship to an avoidant. And I absolutely stick with that. I know I need support. In fact, even with a partner, we should be co-regulating with others. We should be leaning on others. We should be asking for support from others. Not all the time, but when our partners are not available. That’s healthy. One person should not be the sole support in our lives.

I wanted to build a community that is where we hold each other up, experience things together, and share what works and what doesn’t work. But I still named it Romancing the Fox because I wanted to talk about him. I wanted to explain him. I wanted justification for the 6 tortuous weeks of silence.

As I went through the motions of my life, “performing security,” I started trying new things to regulate myself. Yoga, meditation, journaling, baking, podcasts, etc. I started looking for the best tools to self-soothe. Workbooks. Pinterest pins. I found experts on emotional dysregulation like Marsha Linehan, the founder of Dialectical Behavior Therapy. I found coping statements from Cognitive Behavioral Therapy. I found ways to navigate difficult conversations and voice my needs through Nonviolent Communication. I learned how to identify my emotions in the moment and translate what those emotions were trying to tell me. I always thought I was in tune with my feelings—I’ve always been vocal about them, ask anyone in my family—but as it turns out, I was not letting myself feel the emotions long enough to understand what they were telling me. I was too busy panicking and trying to discharge the unpleasant feelings to actually listen to them.

I learned so much during that time and continue learning every day even now. It wasn’t that I was just reading these things and nodding my head, “Yeah, that makes so much sense.” It was that I was putting them into practice in real time. I was keeping track of what worked and what wasn’t working. I still am. I’m always becoming more than I was, but it all started when I realized how stagnant I was in life. How my anxious attachment kept me in a prison. And once I took the first step toward security, I was already transformed.

Even if the name Romancing the Fox was meant to center on my avoidant partner, I decided to keep it. I keep it in the same way that Carly Simon sings,

You’re so vain. I bet you think this song is about you, don’t you, don’t you now?

The song, on the surface, sounds like it’s about him, but it’s really about how diminished she became alongside someone who was incapable of loving her the way she deserved.

Romancing the Fox is about me. It’s about ownership of my life, about how I found myself and my purpose. It’s about all of us with anxious attachment who love or have loved an avoidant. It’s how we learn to rise from the ashes of our pain and become someone else entirely. Someone who can love someone deeply and still leave when that someone consistently falls short of meeting their needs. Someone who can hold themselves when their avoidant partner needs some space and not collapse into themselves. Someone who can leverage the negatives of being with an avoidant into becoming something more of themselves.

Welcome