Therapist Insights Episode 15: Mindfulness in Relationships: Healing Attachment Styles & Strengthening Love

Mindfulness is more than a calming practice—it is a gateway to emotional honesty and deeper connection. In this episode, I explore both the gifts and the risks of mindfulness: how it can strengthen self-awareness, calm anxiety, and help us witness our feelings without being swept away by them, but also how it can be misused defensively to avoid pain.

We look at how different attachment styles interact with mindfulness. For those with anxious attachment, mindfulness can be a tool of self-soothing and grounding; for those with avoidant attachment, it becomes a practice of staying present with emotions they might otherwise push away. When approached with openness, mindfulness helps us engage with our partners from a place of curiosity, compassion, and clarity.

I also share why shared core values matter in love, how couples can learn to focus on what works rather than what doesn’t, and why personal growth within a relationship is essential for long-term harmony. Ultimately, this episode reminds us that healthy love is not about perfection or control—it’s about evolving together, creating safety, and honoring the bridge between two distinct human beings.

Summary

In this episode of the Yearning Heart podcast, Jennifer Lehr delves into the insights shared by Dennis regarding mindfulness, relationships, and personal growth. She emphasizes the importance of mindfulness in therapy, how it can be used to enhance self-awareness and emotional regulation, and the potential pitfalls of using mindfulness defensively. The conversation also explores the significance of attachment styles in relationships, the necessity of growth and shared core values between partners, and the importance of focusing on what works in a relationship to foster connection and understanding.

Takeaways

Mindfulness helps strengthen the witness within us.

Being mindful allows us to notice our experiences without merging with them.

Mindfulness can be misused as a defense mechanism.

It's essential to engage with our feelings rather than avoid them.

Attachment styles influence how we use mindfulness in relationships.

Growth in relationships requires both partners to be willing to evolve.

Core values must align for a relationship to thrive.

Focusing on what works in a relationship fosters positivity.

Communication must be safe and compassionate for effective engagement.

Differentiation is key to understanding and relating to a partner.

Chapters

00:00 Exploring Mindfulness: A Deep Dive

06:06 Mindfulness Red Flags

07:11 What Do The Feelings Want?

07:43 Mindfulness and Attachment Styles

09:02 Mindfulness as a Cognitive Strength

11:37 When It is Time to Leave a Relationship

15:22 Core Values and Relationship Compatibility

16:50 I Can Only Control Myself

19:32 Engagement in the Process: Detaching from Outcomes

20:50 Focus On What Works

Keywords

mindfulness, self-awareness, relationships, attachment styles, emotional intelligence, personal growth, communication, core values, emotional connection, therapy

 Jennifer Lehr (00:00)

If you are somebody with anxious attachment style,

you would use mindfulness to calm yourself down. I'm okay, I'm right here, I feel myself breathing. Now, if you were avoidant attachment, you would use mindfulness slightly differently

you would learn to sit with those feelings that you might avoid or shut down and go, I'm having a feeling right now. It's okay. I'm safe having this feeling

Hi, I'm Jennifer Lehr Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist and the host of the Yearning Heart podcast. And today we're gonna look at therapist insights into episode 14 with Dennis. So I'm gonna be going deeper into some of the issues he brought up, some of the things he mentioned, so that you have a better understanding of those things. I wanted to start with mindfulness. Now Dennis.

has done a lot of work with mindfulness And most people know what mindfulness is. It's becoming aware of the present moment, focusing on your breath and...

Mindfulness is really helpful for many things. It gets us out of ruminating, getting caught in something over and over in our mind. It can help us relax and sleep like yoga nidra is a mindfulness practice where you slowly go through each part of the body and focus on it. And it gets you into the moment and into your body.

On the plus side, mindfulness really helps strengthen the witness. The witness is the part of ourselves that watches, that pays attention, that notices, that isn't caught in the dreams of the future or the traumas of the past. It's right here, right now, I'm a breathing, living entity and I'm aware of myself, I'm aware of my body. So that would be how I would describe

what mindfulness does to the present self. Now within that present self, there are memories that come through, hopes and dreams that come through, but they're coming through a grounded person in the moment. They aren't like you've lost yourself and you're just in the throes of the past or the dreams of tomorrow. So it's very grounded. Now,

When we're mindful, we're looking at what is happening each moment. Like if my body's tense, I would say, ⁓ I feel tension in my throat, or I feel tension in my back, or I feel tension in my shoulders. We're aware of what's going on, and there's almost a dialogue where we're mentally noticing what's happening in our thoughts, in our feelings, in our body. But we're not merged with it. We are witnessing it.

Some of the advantages.

regular mindfulness practices, whether it's yoga or breathing or meditation practices, really help activate the parasympathetic body response so that we are calmer, we are not activated and we're not so reactive.

and we begin to pick up cues. So for example, as a therapist, as a mindful therapist, if I'm sitting with someone and I notice that they keep looking down, looking down or tapping their foot or moving, I might wonder, because I'm noticing in the moment, and I may or may not, depending on the situation, bring up what is happening in your body right now. I notice you're tapping your foot.

And they might then become aware, I'm feeling anxious. That's just an example of how one could use mindfulness in a practice with other people. Though mostly we work with mindfulness within ourselves. So.

The disidentification of mindfulness So instead of, am so angry at you, I feel anger coming up in me. And it creates a little space where I'm not.

angry so much as noticing my anger.

So rather than being separated from or denying our experience, we are noticing our experience. We are becoming more aware of our actual selves. And this is really useful, not just for self-regulation, but for co-regulation.

Before I get into that, I want to talk about how mindfulness can be used defensively because while it's very positive, it can be used defensively, meaning as a shield against knowing oneself better.

We could, for instance, focus so intensely on what's happening in the moment, we're blocking out other things. We're blocking out an awareness of a memory that needs to be revisited, of a grief that is with us, that our psyche needs to engage with. So mindfulness can be used to block our deeper feelings. And I'll give you another example.

So let's suppose the grief is rising up. Let's suppose I have something happened, my dog died, something, I'm very sad. But instead of allowing that grief to have a place in my life, in my psyche, in my feeling life, I were to focus on my breathing and get rid of it. Just breathe, I'm not feeling anything. That is using mindfulness defensively.

I'm not allowing myself to feel all my feelings. So it's blocking feelings instead of noticing feelings and witnessing feelings.

And let's suppose you're in a fight with someone and you use the mindfulness to detach. Now there's a good and a bad, there's a plus and a minus there. You don't want to get caught in reacting and you don't want to rise above it and not feeling anything. If you aren't feeling anything, who's present to engage with the other person? And if you're feeling things too intensely,

you can overreact and not be really available to have an engaged conversation with the person you're dealing with.

I'm gonna give you some red flags to indicate that you could be using mindfulness defensively.

that would be.

if you feel flat or numb, meaning you're detached from your feelings to such a degree that you feel less alive.

You really quickly try to get away from your feelings and try to go somewhere else in your head. So instead of allowing the difficult memories or thoughts to come up and say, I'm having a difficult memory, I'm having a difficult thought, you get rid of them. They're banished. And in a sense, that's being avoidant with yourself. You're avoiding parts of yourself that are integral to who you are.

You wanna just notice, am I using mindfulness to avoid myself or to witness myself and work with myself? And that would be sort of the defining criteria to know how you're using mindfulness. And the reason I bring this up is not because Dennis in his other podcast I did with him, not because he was misusing mindfulness, I'm sure he wasn't, but because it can be misunderstood and can be misused. And I wanted people to be aware of that.

Another thing that you can do is, let's suppose you have a feeling come up and you're not crazy about it, I feel sad right now. And you don't just say, I feel sad right now, I feel sad, but what does the sadness want from me? The sadness wants compassion from me, it wants tenderness from me, it wants to be honored by me, it wants space to live and breathe and mature. And that is how we work with our feelings, we're mindful of them.

but we're not dismissing them. We're not getting rid of them.

If you are somebody with anxious attachment style, and that's my history, I used to have anxious attachment style, had quite a bit of anxiety, but you would use mindfulness to talk to yourself

So you would use mindfulness to calm yourself down. I'm noticing my body, I'm okay right now, even though I'm frightened. I'm okay, I'm right here, I feel myself breathing. So it's a way of an anxious attachment style using mindfulness to self-soothe. Now, if you were avoidant attachment, you would use mindfulness slightly differently or you could.

you would learn to sit with those feelings that you might avoid or shut down and go, I'm having a feeling right now. It's okay. I'm safe having this feeling because the avoidant tend to push the feelings away and the anxious attachment style, they get caught up in the feelings. Feelings are big. They can have big feelings. Whereas the avoidant is going to sort of try to stay away from knowing what they're feeling inside.

But with mindfulness practice, they could start getting more in touch with, I'm having this feeling. It's okay, it's safe to have this feeling and sort of talk themselves into having more feelings and getting to know their feeling self better.

Dennis's case, he used mindfulness as a way to make cognitive choices. so because Dennis,

in his previous relationships and then now in his current 32 year relationship, he uses his mind very strongly to stay present with his partner, to expand compassion and curiosity, to not react. And this helps his relationship because he's able to find the space, the breathing room to be compassionate.

to be curious about his partner's feelings. Why are they feeling this way? they're different than me. I don't like that, but it's okay. He even says, "get over it" He's talking to himself. Get over being upset right now. You can handle this. You can be with this situation. And so while he's got his feelings, he knows what they are. He also is holding his feelings back so that they don't.

interfere with his communication process with his partner. Now everyone does it differently, that would probably not be my way. I would bring more feelings into it. But that was his way and it works for him.

year long relationship.

I don't know Dennis well enough and I haven't talked to him long enough to know how he engages with his deep feelings of shame, which he mentioned, and fear. And both of those feelings are part of his history, part of what he's come out of, part of what he needed to manage in order to make good choices in his life.

And he even said,

If you believe you're not enough, how will you ever get enough of anything good or right in your life? And that's a great statement. So here he's moving into teaching himself, training himself, talking to himself, telling himself, I am enough, even though his shame tells him I'm not enough. And so he is actually telling his shame, you are enough. You are enough and

you're gonna get what you need in life because you're not accepting that you're not enough. You're not accepting what your family of origin taught you, which is you're not good enough and you'll never be good enough. And so he actually learned to self-talk and self-teach the part of him that had carried the shame and basically parent that part by saying, no, you are enough. Yes, you are.

Another thing that Dennis brought up in my podcast with him is that he had to leave. He left his second marriage. The first marriage he considers a, you know, just a, he made a mistake. He got married too young. It wasn't a match, but the second marriage went on for quite a while. I don't remember how long I think he said 12 years. And he ended up leaving that marriage because as he was doing his mindfulness work, he was growing.

but his partner wasn't willing to grow. Now, we are often taught, do not get divorced. You have to work it out. And yet, if you are with someone who's not growing, you may outgrow them and you may find much, much more happiness with another person. So always be aware, does this person want to grow with me? Are they willing to do what it takes for us to grow together?

or are they just going to stagnate and I'm going to be stuck dealing with someone who doesn't want to open to me, doesn't want to be curious about me. And if that's the case, yeah, if you're doing your own work and they're not, that's a fine reason to move on to another relationship.

Dennis also talked about how he and his current wife of 32 years made a commitment to do it differently. Now, obviously it's more than a decision because the behavior has to follow the decision and the ability to be vulnerable with each other has to follow the decision. But you start with the intention or decision and his intention and his partner's, his wife's intention was

was we are gonna work this out, we're gonna figure this out. And that requires, as he said, looking at the bad habits. What are we doing that's causing strife? What are we doing that's causing conflict? How do we do it differently? That takes a lot of mental engagement, willpower, because we're wired, we're hardwired and it's easy.

to fall back into our patterns. We have to change our patterns to change our relationship. And that involves learning to understand what's going on inside, learning to communicate what's going on inside non-defensively, learning to be curious about and listen to what our partner is feeling, thinking, believing. It's a really big endeavor, which is why so many people don't survive long-term relationships. They haven't built that part of themselves.

And he mentions having a safe place to communicate, creating a safe place to communicate. If your relational space isn't safe, what do you think's going to happen? You're going to be defensive. You're going to hide. You're going to yell and scream. It has to be safe. And safe means it's filled with kindness.

with compassion, with empathy. Now, when you get triggered, when I get triggered, that can go away. You forget that the person in front of you is someone you love and you think, I have to defend myself. They're not hearing me. that kind of thing. And that is a problem. You have to remember, I feel hurt right now because this reminds me of when I was three and my father screamed at me and.

Nobody ever listened to me and you have to think, you have to talk to those old wounds and say, hey, I know you're there. I know you've been wounded, but we're going to do this differently with this person and he has wounds too. And we're going to try to communicate our hearts and our feelings and our wounds so that we understand each other and we can move through this impasse.

Another thing that came up in this podcast is core values. Now, core values are really important. And I brought up an example, I'll re-bring it up. Let's suppose someone's core values are fairly hedonistic. I'm gonna go out and party and have a good time, and that's the purpose of my life. And someone else's core value is I wanna be in service, I'm gonna join the Peace Corps, I wanna help the poor people, whatever that, however you look at that.

Those two core values do not work that well together because the purpose of each person's life is at odds. they're hitting each other at odds. And you want to be with someone who shares enough of your core values, whether it's raising children or being creative together or.

traveling together, I mean, there's many, many, many different core values, but there has to be some harmony in the core values for your lives to work together. And that's why it's so important to talk to each other before you make a commitment about what's really important to each of you. And notice what turns the other person on. What turns them on in terms of how they live their life? Do they want to go out every night to expensive dinners?

Do they want to stay home and read in front of the TV? I mean, all that stuff is really important and that's where we get into core values.

So another thing Dennis mentions.

He mentions this idea of I can't control what someone else is doing, but I can control my reactions. And you can see right there is where the birth of his mindfulness came from. He realized at some point in his life that things were gonna happen that were upsetting to him that he had no control over, but he did have control over himself. And so he learned to focus on his breathing.

breathe so that I don't get out of control, so that I don't try to make this person conform to my desires and wishes, so that I have a handle on myself. And that is a great start to have that ability in a relationship. Anyone who can have the ability to say,

you get to be you, I have to work on myself. That's extremely helpful piece of a relationship, building a relationship.

Dennis also talks about being highly involved in the process. He calls it the creative process, but it's actually the process of engaging, of living, of whatever you're involved in, but detaching from the results. And he talked about how him and his wife, and I don't know how they did this, but they looked at 95 houses before they bought one together.

I could see that becoming frustrating. But he said, I decided to stay involved in the process. He probably told himself, yes, I can look at another house. Yes, I can be patient. And he didn't attach to any of the houses he looked at. It was like a journey, a trip. We're traveling. We're gonna look at all these things. And at some point, somewhere, it'll click.

And having that attitude allowed him, on house 10 to not say, this is it. I'm done looking at houses. We have to pick one. Because that would have just brought strife and they they wouldn't have gotten to the house that made them both happy. That they both could collaborate with, that they both could collaborate in and make their home.

He also, he can be a little harsh on himself. He said, if they don't agree with me and let's get back, we'll go back to the 95 house example, "get over it" to himself. He says that, meaning don't have a hissy fit because you're not getting your way. And he's actually setting a boundary up with himself that he is going to not, make a big fuss over something that isn't.

how he thinks it should be. He's gonna allow that to be, which is gracious and generous and.

He's not controlling. He's not saying it has to be my way. So helpful in a relationship.

I brought up this idea and this comes from Emotionally Focused Therapy for Couples, which I have training in, that

The attachment is so important, our attachment to others, the emotional intimate attachment is a driving force in our lives that we yearn to feel special and seen and acknowledged and have our partner be available emotionally and physically and in every way. And I said, well, you are detaching and yet we are dealing with a theory of attachment.

And what came out of that is that he is attached to the person he loves, but he's not attached to the outer things, which house they get, what car they buy, where they go on vacation, more of that. He lets go of the things that don't have to do with honoring the connection with the person he loves. That is how we use attachment. We attach to the person we love, but they don't have to do it our way.

They're separate, different individuals. And we have to come to terms with, we may not always get to do it our way. We actually have to compromise. Sometimes we do it my way, sometimes we do it your way, sometimes we do it our way.

He also talks about embellishing what works instead of focusing on what doesn't work. Because in every relationship, there will be things that don't work and things that do work. If you focus on what doesn't work, you are making it bigger. Now, if it's a game changer, deal breaker, focus on what doesn't work. But if you're trying to make a relationship work, focus on what works. You may have to do

repair in the area that doesn't work. But when we focus on what works, we're sitting in a positive place. When we focus on what doesn't work, we are often creating our own

unavoidable because what doesn't work is so big, the relationship is not salvageable. If, however, what doesn't work is smaller and what works is pretty good,

Focus on what works. It's a great way to stay connected and not be attached to everything being merged or perfect because we come into these relationships often undefined, undifferentiated, meaning we think the person should be our exact mirror. Our partners will never be our exact mirror unless we're both unformed babies. when we grow up, we have differences. We are not exact.

What we have to learn is not that our partners are our exact mirror, but we can build a bridge between two completely different people with different preferences, different needs, different histories, different wounds. That's called differentiation. When we're merged and the person we are merged with doesn't do what we think they should do, doesn't match our expectation, we are left

disappointed, angry, hurt, and that is an emotional roller coaster. That is not the purpose of a relationship to be merged. The purpose is to grow up into your own individual self and understand how to relate to this very different person who triggers us, who isn't perfect, who does things that are annoying, that kind of thing.

So I'm sure there was much more that could be talked about from the episode with Dennis in the Yearning Heart podcast. But I think I covered some of the main points that I thought would be helpful to the listener to define some of what we talked about in that episode. I'm Jennifer Lehr, I'm your host. If you found this helpful or enjoyed it, please share, like, subscribe.

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so that I can get my work out into the world. And thank you so much for listening. I also have an app called WeConcile that is out on both the Apple app and Google Play stores. And I'd love if you would try that. I also love feedback on anything I do. Always so helpful. Thank you so much.