Tracy Crossley is a Behavioral Relationship Expert with a BA and Masters in Psychology and is currently working towards her PHD. She is also an Author and Podcast Host, who specializes in treating individuals with unhealthy LIFE and relationship patterns. Tracy helps clients transform, impostor syndrome, insecure attachment, negative belief systems, breaking the cycle of narcissistic damage, destructive self-talk, and more. With a background in psychology, an innate emotional intuition, which draws from her own personal experience. Tracy shows her clients how to PERMANENTLY change the repetition of the unhealthy, unhappy and unfulfilled cycles personally and professionally.
Tracy’s popular weekly mental health podcast, Overcome Insecure Attachment offers listeners a different perspective when it comes to breaking the cycle of unhealthy behaviors that keep them stuck repeating pain-inducing actions on auto-pilot. The podcast addresses folks who want to deal with their emotional baggage and get unstuck, happy, and have a clear mindset.
Each Thursday at 9amPT/NoonET she also hosts a Facebook/Youtube Live on Overcoming Insecure Attachment.
FWM: You have been helping clients transform. Tell us about your background.
I have an eclectic background. I was an entrepreneur as a child, but already a bit of a workaholic as a teenager. At one point I had two jobs when I was 16. I did a brief stint in fashion design school, and then years later completed my bachelors and masters in psychology. I trained as a coach in the ontological style of coaching which is mind, body, spirit; I followed it up with training from a different instructor in transformative coaching. I also served in corporate management for years with stints in owning my own business. In my work, I found I have an innate skill for taking complex emotions and simplifying them, not just in how I speak, but in recognizing/pinpointing the pain in others and having a solution. People feel I am their twin or I able to say what they feel. They feel seen and heard.
FWM: How are you helping clients with the imposter syndrome, insecure attachment, and negative belief systems?
I help them to see themselves, most people with these issues are focused on other people but not what is actually occurring inside of themselves. There are four steps to freedom, love and happiness. I help them out of victimhood (as these issues can make you feel like a victim of circumstances or others), to take responsibility, break patterns that are hard to see and keep them in these cycles and to have a sense of well-being. When you feel good you make better choices, you care about yourself in a deeper connected manner and I do this through a process that starts with getting into your body (most of us are a “head” and our body serves the purpose of carrying it around), feeling, locating old events, and emotionally risky action. That is the short version, but people have a lot of resistance to change and it is getting past the intellectualizing and into emotionalizing inside. It is how true confidence and happiness are born, plus it is emotional freedom from these belief systems.
FWM: Why do people trust you?
Because I am them, I am not pretending to be a guru or act as though I am superior. Usually when people do that they are deeply insecure anyways. I am authentic, I tell it like it is and was for me, I practice what I preach. I have no issue with sharing challenges I have had or am overcoming now. Being real and having a solution on how to get there free of these painful states is huge, because most people think they will feel anxious or alone forever.
FWM: Tell us about your new book, Overcoming Insecure Attachment! 8 Proven Steps to Recognizing Anxious and Avoidant Attachment Styles and Building Healthier, Happier Relationships (Ulysses Press)
The original title was Deal With It! We’re all f**ked up; 8 ways to happiness no matter wtf is going on. The publisher changed the title. The reason I mention it is that it covers a lot of ground, a lot more than insecure attachment. It digs deep and is a how to manual for people. In other words most self help books give great ideas but not a lot of how-to. And in this book it is about recognizing your patterns of behavior and giving you the how-to on how to change it. The book takes people from awareness to insecure attachment and Karpman’s drama triangle to how patterns/beliefs work and then how to feel your feelings, not your reactions to your narrative or perspective—but the deeper motivating feelings. From there you are prepped on how to walk through the 8 steps to change your life.
FWM: Share a few of your success stories.
Here are a couple stories two of my coaches recently submitted to me. In their own words:
Colleen:
My husband and I separated after 18 years of marriage. Early on our marriage settled into a routine that provided the security I had been longing for. There was no physical intimacy after the first few years; we lived our lives as friends who loved and respected one another. I felt lonely and unwanted. I tried for years to talk about our issues and went to counseling alone and together. We were both avoidant and anxious; our conversations never progressed beyond a certain point. I finally decided to move out after so many years of dissatisfaction.
Jan and I met 8 weeks later.
I thought the instant attraction was due to his intense blue eyes and thoughtful expression. In retrospect it probably had more to do with his stoic, aloofness which is very similar to my father’s countenance and even my mother in some ways.
We had physical chemistry; I felt wanted for the first time in many years. I became consumed with my thoughts and fantasies of our relationship. His communication was very inconsistent which threw me into a tailspin of self doubt. I worked so hard to prove to him that I was special and to convince him of how lucky he was to be the object of my affection. Sometimes he seemed to feel as intensely as I did but other times he would go dark. I took all of his behavior personally.
I shared with him the difficulties of my past relationships and he responded with the sympathy I had always craved. I bounced between being a victim and the hero in my stories. I listened as he shared his history, but more often than not I interpreted the details through my fantasy of who I wanted him to be.
After a year, Jan broke up with me. I was shocked, but at the same time, I’d been waiting for it all along. I could barely function at work and would come home, going right to bed. After a month without communication I began to pursue him again. At the same time I started working with Tracy. I began to understand my attachment. I saw how hard I was trying to control the context of our relationship. I realized how terrified I was of abandonment and rejection. As I learned to feel my feelings I shared them with Jan. I was afraid because I had so many assumptions about how he would react.
He NEVER reacted the way I thought he would.
I had less and less fear about what he would think. I noticed he started sharing more about himself. The more I tended to and cared for myself the more relaxed he seemed to be. If I didn’t get a text from him, I no longer made mental lists of all the negative things about him. Instead, I asked myself what I needed or wanted from him at that moment. I was able to recognize the ways he showed love and care, even though it was different from how I thought he should do that. Now I see him for who he is… rather than who I want him to be.
All along, he has been the more authentic one in the relationship. Over the past two years, we both have grown and continue to change. Our growth has taken time, patience and courage. We have been together now for 3.5 years. It is still a work in progress but I no longer live in fear of being rejected or abandoned. I trust myself and I am able to trust him. I recently went through a health crisis and he was there for me 100%. We laugh a lot, and can get annoyed with each other, but we still have great sex (not quite as often).
Legan:
When I arrived on Tracy’s virtual doorstep I was one foot in my marriage and one foot in an attachment to someone else who was..wait for it…. shocker…also in another relationship!
I was running on anxiety and listening to Tracy’s podcast trying to get a grip on my love life. Intimacy always seemed elusive. I would think I had it with people, and then once they were interested in me “poof” it was gone. Almost overnight there would be no more “specialness” and in its place would be a feeling of looming disappointment and claustrophobia. If being attracted to unavailable people was a sport I would have been in the Olympics.
You would have never known it by looking at me though. I attended church every Sunday; I was a counselor, and my husband of 14 years checked all the boxes of characteristics for the right husband, but behind closed doors I had been threatening a divorce from day one.
I felt deeply ashamed of this part of me that never felt satisfied with who or what I had in my life and that I was always fantasizing about other people. I was extremely lonely, trapped, and hopeless while banking on someone new to save me. When my ex-husband and I separated and my relationship with my attachment started to emulate into an actual relationship I was coming out of my skin on a daily basis with anxiety.
Mick was so different from anyone I allowed myself to date.
I mean I could fantasize about someone like him, but not actually date. But here I was, with this adorable man that I enjoyed immensely, and all I wanted to do was end it. I felt so out of control, and the only thing I knew how to do in those situations was for me to leave. I quickly realized that I had absolutely no clue about how to be in a relationship. I knew how to start one and end one, but not actually be in one. With Mick (my current attachment) as my case study I decided that I couldn’t repeat the last 14 years. Something had to change and that something was ME!
So I opened myself up like I never had before.
I started taking responsibility and I implemented tool after tool that I learned from working with Tracy and it completely transformed every area of my life. Specifically my relationship with my now adorable husband Mick. As my courage grew, his courage grew, as my connection to myself grew, my connection to him grew, and we now share a life together where no one threatens to leave and no one wants to be anywhere else.
I wake up every morning and feel extremely grateful that I finally realized I was the one that needed to change. That I was the problem. And that I was the solution.
FWM: Tell us about your podcast, Overcoming Insecure Attachment. What can we expect in the upcoming months?
I talk about emotional issues that most people even those who would not define themselves as insecurely attached end up relating to…and I cannot say I have y content scheduled out that far in advance, but some topics are the fear of happiness (yes people are afraid to be happy), why make-up sex is b.s., how many people relate to the universe, god or whatever their beliefs are in the same way they did to their parent as a child and of course insecure attachment and relationships/dating.
FWM: What has been your proudest moment?
There’s been a lot in terms of seeing people transform their lives. Many moments are when people move on from dysfunction and end up in a healthy relationship getting married. Happy people and knowing I got to participate in them getting there is pretty damn cool. Finishing the writing of my book…I have always written, but a book required a whole lotta something else in terms of writing something I could be proud of and recently giving myself a pat on the back for having a successful business. It is still about helping people, but building something that supports people (the people who help me on the team) is awesome!! They get what I do and want to do it too.
FWM: Share your best advice to overcome insecure attachment.
It is not a one step process, because most people may take reading this as great info but to apply it is a whole other world. One of the best ways is to find your truth inside—your true motivation (intrinsic vs extrinsic) in trying to solve the emptiness of attachment, this requires digging deep to know. And when you do to speak your truth, be the one who cares about you and your own feelings (no one who is insecurely attached does care, otherwise they would not be in that situation) without blame. Hard to do, as vulnerability is never easy…it is about getting into treating yourself like you matter and shifting the focus off others. Treating yourself like you matter is an inside job not going to the gym or pedicures, it is about doing the tough stuff that you avoid. Most people do not match their words and actions….do what you say, so you can learn to trust yourself.
