Dealing With Daddy Issues: Attachment Wounding and Becoming Securely Attached | Being Well

hey everyone welcome to being well I'm Forrest Hansen and I have been really looking forward to today's episode if you listen to a podcast like ours or if you're just a terminally online person like me you're probably familiar with the phrase daddy issues it's a phrase that's generally targeted at women particularly younger women but it can describe anyone whose adult relationships and maybe most importantly they're romantic ones are affected by the experiences they had with their father figure growing up and today we're going to be talking about what daddy issues are where they come from how we can maybe understand them in a more accurate or less judgmental way and what we can do about them so it's probably particularly appropriate that I've joined for today's episode by my father Dr Rick Hansen so Dad how are you doing today I'm good and I suddenly am realizing for us that we should do a whole episode on Sunny issues well I have to start by asking your dad a very important question this is this is a question for the culture because I know that people are wondering this do you know what a daddy is daddy wow I have an internal and I think entirely appropriate alarm system about gender language period and being careful uh but if I follow you I've heard people talk a little bit about issues with their father I'm assuming we're not in the frame of sugar daddies no but you're close you're getting closer you're getting warmer and warmer I am kind of cool occasionally I don't know so just just for you Dad a daddy in that kind of expression is generally like a sexy older man is what it's generally used to refer to but it can really refer to anybody who has what's sometimes known as Daddy energy uh like Elizabeth is a woman but most people would refer to her as having daddy energy this is my partner Elizabeth by the way for people who might not be familiar but this is a whole other episode that we're supposed to get into here I I want to avoid this one we're going to mood walk away from this topic as rapidly as possible wait well certain there's there's certain kind of terms and subcultures that actually I'm really glad I know nothing nothing that's good second how could someone like Elizabeth have daddy issues or because daddy energy daddy energy we're post the we're post-gender binary over here Dad we're really opening it up these days for starters and really true yeah I truthfully like positive and wonderful way so even though Elizabeth is a woman she has a Vibe and energy that's more authoritative more dominant more comes into a room really knows what she wants knows how to get it all of that whereas even though I'm a guy a lot of people AKA friends of mine you know who you are have referred to me as having more Bobby energy because I tend to be softer more nurturing more like ending my phrases with a question mark rather than a period does that all make sense yes and I'm glad that we've managed to walk on the thin ice without cracking too far through yet okay you're just you're so desperate to exit this part of the conversation I absolutely love that it's great space racism a thousand ships I am so glad that we took this little detour but okay anyways returning to Daddy Issues uh can I start just by asking you dad like what are daddy issues how do you think about that first I don't I guess because it's pejorative even in the framing to me I mean it's it's problematic just even in the framing um you know and to kind of broaden it out uh we grew up with caregivers uh some of them are not identified in terms of a particular gender all that said we grew up with our caregivers and we form um scripts or patterns of relating with our caregivers really understandably this is attachment Theory 101 this is social psychology 102. and then later in life we tend to keep enacting those patterns of thinking feeling and acting very important they're patterns of thinking and feeling not just acting with similar sorts of people in our adulthood and those patterns can be fairly complex they can be useful they could be problematic and we can have a learning curve about them or we cannot and so that's kind of the general territory in that territory um I think it's certainly true that many many people have issues into adulthood psychologically that um Circle a lot around painful experiences or the absence of positive experiences with their father that are really consequential and the key Point here is that what really matters is how it landed inside less what happened I think it's an aspect of mental health to be able to move back and forth between the objective and the subjective including with regard to your own childhood like I look at my childhood the subjective for me was a lot of unhappiness with my parents growing up I now am more and more clear objectively that they were well-intended loving and decent and yet partly because of my own sensitivities my own introversion it landed on me pretty hard so the point being that it's useful to be both objective about your childhood while also honoring and compassionate for how it landed on you to summarize a little bit of what you just said uh maybe a less pejorative way to think of daddy issues is as you said as a form of attachment wounding and it tends to come about when a person's relationship with their primary attachment figure in this case a father was like complicated or non-existent or difficult or idealized there are a lot of different ways that something can be kind of unhealthy and because there are a lot of different ways that something can be kind of unhealthy it's really hard to give a blanket expression of what daddy issues look like because as you're saying these scripts emerge right based off of these less than perfect healthy relationships that can then color our lighter in life relationships and importantly often are romantic ones for a variety of reasons that we might talk about a little bit later but Dad getting into that is there a common presentation that this family of issues have like what are what some of the symptomology that tends to appear for people if they have this kind of attachment wounding it's really impossible to separate parenting from community and culture because very often for example uh you have a fairly classic situation and a lot of research shows that gender typing and polarization tends to intensify certainly in heterosexual couples uh after the kids come along women tend to move more into the caregiving role fathers tend to move more into the providing role so suddenly now you've started to intensify those those differences those asymmetries and then there become related expectations and standards depending on the role right and so if you have let's say a father in America in the 21st century has a child there are a lot of cultural norms that are about that father intensifying being a provider so now the father's working longer hours the father's carrying those stresses meanwhile the mother tends to culturally be drawn more into that caregiving role she tends to get more involved with the young younger child less interested in his long stories about what the day was like at work he feels maybe increasingly let down she also feels like he's disengaged from family life so all these things are in the mix and so then you have a father who is enacting what he thinks he's supposed to do he's a more emotionally engaged dad than his dad was so he's definitely beating that standard and yet his partner is feeling like he's not available to her he's not very involved in the emotional life of the children and in this they grow up they'll talk about a dad who is absent and yet there's a lot of pressure on that dad to do the kind of things that make him absent and I'm not trying to create excuses for anybody I'm just ex I'm just situating I'm just situating parenting and family life in in its cultural milieu so that's great context for how these issues could emerge or like the social or cultural situation that people find themselves in for this kind of stuff um would you mind sharing a little bit about what like attachment wounding issues look like for a person in practice so let's say that there is a a child who grows up inside of that context and turns 16 turns 18 turns 22 they're going out into the world they're forming new relationships uh with different kinds of people and what are some of the symptoms that could arise for them based off of those circumstances that they experienced with their dad when they were younger yeah and thanks for bringing me into the particular case but the situation of it is really it's important to get okay so what's optimal what's ideal what's normal in the sense of the biological template a lot of I think of it as both loving and skillful parenting let's suppose that this girl has interactions with her father that are mostly characterized by him being emotionally available skillfully responsive committed to her well-being and emotionally regulated himself and then life goes on things happen maybe their behavior problems maybe their misunderstandings but there's enough of an underlying safety net of relational Health that issues can be repaired and that's the fundamental question can problems be repaired and this also has to do with the role of the other parent who is let's say reasonably supportive and skillful in promoting a healthy relationship of this girl with her father and then let's suppose adolescence occurs puberty uh the development of more of a you know a sexual aspect to the the girls experience of things and that's all navigated well that would lead to secure attachment all right ballpark estimates that's maybe about half the population depending on how you slice the pie now we're then we're into insecure attachment and this is material you know well I'll just summarize it for people yeah two general forms of insecure attachment was called avoidant or anxious or other terms sometimes used there's a third type of insecure attachment which is pretty uncommon it's sort of catastrophically disorganized avoidant attachment means keeping things at an optimal distance it means staying connected through distancing often as a result of parents who are dismissive although sometimes they can develop because the child is just extremely introverted and or extremely sensitive interpersonally and they just manage that by being quite distant so in that particular case personal relationships of any meaningful depth tend to be characterized by orbiting orbiting being a term in which the avoidantly attached person neither lands into full intimacy nor differentiates and individuates into full autonomy but instead orbits the attachment figures not getting too close not getting too independent the other form of insecure attachment anxious tends to be characterized by a combination of moving in and moving away often with a quality of a kind of clinging complaint Mommy Mommy I hate you don't go Daddy Daddy I hate you don't go things like that there's a kind of ambivalence basically about it there could be very subtle forms of this there can be forms of this that are enacted differentially between the mother and the father a child can be securely attached to a father and securely attached to a mother or kids can be as adults then securely attached with let's say friends where the stakes are not too high and yet if it becomes a really significant high stakes intimate relationship maybe moving toward marriage while then sometimes those old patterns you know can develop that's a great overview and uh to kind of quickly sum it up four attachment Styles more or less secure insecure avoidant insecure anxious and then this fourth style that's known as fearful which is also called disorganized or fearful avoidant and that's a combination of behaviors that can include both avoidance and anxiousness um and all of this just to give a little additional background and we're planning on doing a few more episodes oriented around attachment Theory at some point in particular how to develop a more secure your attachment style but all of this comes from the work of John Bowlby and Mary insworth this was research that was done I want to say in like that I don't know like 50 years ago something like that ballpark do you happen to know that yeah more or less coming on the heels of that like Mary Maine at UC Berkeley and others it's a very rich rich area of literature yeah and so there are a couple key points having to do with attachment Theory and how it how we just like create these patterns inside of our lives and the first point is that kids are both totally reliant on their caregivers and really egocentric kids don't really have a lot of sense of things outside of the self that's something that develops as the they age so what that means is that when things happen to them they assume that it is based on something that they did this happened to me and it is about me when we know as we age that things happen to us for all kinds of reasons that have absolutely nothing to do with us right they just have to do with the weird inner world of the person who's interacting with us or our unique circumstances or whatever else so think about this from the perspective of a young child right they're in a probably not perfectly healthy situation because how many people grow up in a perfectly healthy situation right there's all this weird stuff going on in the world around them and their assumption is that that weird stuff is due to something about them exactly so if Dad keeps on leaving it is my fault that's right I must not be lovable enough yeah it must not be lovable enough and you can just think about the ways in which that can create an internalized pattern of behavior that has some of the symptomology that you're describing well I'm so glad you took it to the internal so I want to talk a little bit about that so one uh very often again cultural type and maybe having to do in part with the biological roots of male aggressiveness fathers are often in the role of being the disciplinarian and so they're the one who brings the punishment mom's the one you go to for comfort and so then think about the kind of stuff that can get built up inside toward your father who's the one who has Stern maybe some spanking especially when you were younger he's the one who yells at you he's the one who's kind of scary like what does that do then when you become an adult you know what kind of understandable emotional memory body memory somatic memory that's fearful around male authority figures just comes up and which is then maybe managed by an internal pressure to be behave well or to always be on your toes or to be very careful not making a mistake or getting too close think of a different kind of example in which your dad is wonderful when he's around he plays with you robustly you know fathers often with young kids will play these sort of high intensity high energy games like a lot of rough and tumble Play Laughing giggling stuff like that it's a lot of fun potentially to be with a neat dad but then he's not around very much and when he comes home he's preoccupied he wants to slip away and deal with emails there's there's a lot on his mind so then you're involved maybe with this feeling of both sadness that you're not important enough or you don't matter enough for him to make that effort to to seek you we there's a there's a line from the wonderful child psychiatrist groundbreaking uh Daniel winnicott relating to the kind of peek-a-boo games and hide and seek games that children love to play a joy to be hidden a disaster not to be found we want to be sought right even just the in the military you know the notion of leave no one behind so there's this Longing To Be sought in Pursuit and then maybe sometimes behaviors to to get the attention attention seeking behaviors which Underneath It All can feel both stressful and kind of annoying like why do I have to be all pretty why do I have to dance through a bunch of Hoops why do I have to always get A's to get your attention I think that you're painting a common picture for people you know this idea of a dad that isn't abusive and is fun when they're around but they perhaps aren't around as often as the kid would like them to be and another common gendered Dynamic that emerges among parents is like you're saying that the mom's around all the time and therefore the child's experience of them is more day-to-day it's more expected it's more blah it's more just the minutia and it could be a really loving relationship but it's not exciting all of the time and when Dad happens to show up things get exciting because Dad is not always around um and that can also be a contributor to this certain kind of relationship that then again emerges later in life where the child really cares for the father really desires more closeness and connection but they never quite get as much as they wish that they could have and then you see this common pattern where as they age the child seeks to like get blood from a stone almost like replicate the relationship but change it just enough in just the right way where they wanted it to be different back then and can we get that in the here and now um and that's a patterning that often leads to people selecting similar kinds of Partners is one way that this can show up for people uh talking about the different kind of attachment Styles and just really quickly giving some descriptions of other symptomology that might appear for people for people who are more anxiously attached where maybe that was your family of issues this can lead to excessive possessiveness in your relationships some clinging some fears of being alone maybe you're somebody who requires a lot of reassurance and just to name it a common way to obtain reassurances through sex than for people who are more avoidant in nature there's more of that distrust and contempt that you were kind of referring to earlier dad maybe some discomfort with a emotional closeness another way that this can show up for people is an assumption of disappointment so those are kind of three big things that tend to show up for people a little bit more anxious a little bit more avoidant and then this kind of desire to replicate the parental relationship but to make it just a little bit different there's some there's an old line you can never get enough of what you don't really want um in other words very often people are engaged in a kind of quest to repair the wound or to get what was missing when they were young but to be able to repair it they try to replicate the original setup with the kind of person who was like their dad when they were young which almost guarantees that they won't find satisfaction they won't be able to fulfill the quest they'll never get what they really long for from that person and I think we've talked about that in a recent podcast episode doomed quests and becoming really much more mindful of all that there's another Dynamic I want to bring in which is this one of the yearning for narcissistic supplies because very often as well and again in classic classic gender typing the father very often has an instrumental role in society and so it's a father who has the greatest credibility in bestowing acknowledgment so when Dad tells you good job right on that paper or that baseball game whoa that really lands in part because as you point out it's much less common you know people tend to habituate to what's common well what mom says is common it becomes more like the wallpaper but what Dad says oh boy really Salient here and so then there can be this feeling of this whipsaw combination of being elevated to the top of the pedestal occasionally and conditionally based on performance and based on the praise of the external person who's male an adult male and without that external praise then boom you're left with feeling oh I must not be that worthy because I'm not because Dad doesn't pay any attention to me he's not giving me the praise that when I got it felt really really good that combination is really tough it leads you even as an adult to like play the slot machine because there's very reinforcement once in a while it actually pays off you do get the price and then you feel oh great but then you're going to keep seeking it and of course the solution as we talk about it is very much to taking the good to when you have the opportunity to experience something authentically healing or nourishing to you slow down to metabolize it slow down psychologically and neuropsychologically to want to weave it into the Nets of memory based in underlying changes of neural structure and function I want to talk more in just a second about the what to do part because of course that's probably why a lot of people are listening to this but I do want to give just a little bit more context here particularly historically on the whole idea of daddy issues because when we began the conversation I asked you hey what do you think about this and you sort of had a moment where you're like well I don't really love this framing because it's sort of pejorative it's got a lot of problems with it and I just want to kind of speak to that for a second most of the time when this phrase is used in the culture and particularly on the Internet it's used as a pejorative it's used to speak down particularly to younger women and there's this implication that daddy issues are a female problem and I want to flag two things the first thing that I want to flag is that it's really interesting that these issues these daddy issues are positioned as a woman's problem when they arose in that woman most often based on the behavior of a man and so we're essentially targeting women often for either what was done to them or the circumstances that they were in as you said Dad when you gave that rundown of like the circumstances that lead to these kinds of issues as opposed to anything that they've actually done in their own life or anything that they had real agency around and that for starters is just like blatantly sexist and problematic and so that's not so great and then second historically it's also just not the way that the stuff came about um the whole idea of like Daddy Issues if you broaden it out has its root and a lot of very male problems and this includes everything like the edible myth where you're killing the father and sleeping with the mother and a lot of Freud's work where he talked about something called the father complex which was based on the work of Freud and young in the early 1900s and this complex was actually specifically targeted at young men and the idea that young men had these negative feelings like like fear and Defiance and distrust that they targeted their fathers with that's why it's called the father complex then over time it got kind of lumped in with the Oedipus complex and we were Off to the Races from there and a lot of this comes out of like a very Victorian mentality where the issue is this dominating Father Figure and the struggle for power and dominance between the male child and the overbearing father but then in a more modern text what started to happen is the problem yeah the problem is still overpairing dads for sure but for a while in there particularly in like the 70s and 80s and 90s there was a lot of cultural discourse around like there are no fathers in the home anymore and you know absentee dads and deadbeat dads and all that kind of stuff and that lack of a reliable Father Figure started getting targeted as like a primary problem and then Daddy Issues kind of arose out of that so that's a little summary of the cultural context of all of this oh yeah so daddy issues you know as you pointed out are not restricted to uh girls we have the classic edible story and I think it's uh relevant that Freud's mother was closer to him in age than she was to her husband and so Freud may have had an edible complex but maybe not everybody else projected onto the rest of the population yeah for sure yeah yeah yeah so different things I've seen with boys one is the situation in which for various reasons their father's not very helpful in terms of skillful gender role socialization if you're a boy you're going to look to your father and for gender role modeling and learning ways of being that help you to be be comfortable with same gender peers which is your primary peer group up into adolescence and often through adolescence and Beyond so there could be something missing there that's consequential or something helpful there or something excessive like you've got a dad who's just on your case to be able to throw a baseball or who's telling you and shaming you because you're starting to cry because you're sort of you're sensitive that then is something to think about what did you was something missing was your father unhelpful to you um and as an adult can you then bring that to yourself so that's one example another example is where the father is just mean he's cruel he's cold he's sort of rejecting and there you are as a boy and you're wanting a kind of closeness with a male figure and it's really missing so what do you do then you might internalize that way of being and adopt it for yourself or you might seek a father figure as an adult as a mentor or a boss who would give you the kind of warmth that was missing for you when you were young and that can go well or badly right uh and also and and the internalization of that father who's cold and dismissive often goes badly because then you become cold and dismissive toward your own tender and sensitive interior yeah and you carry that pattern with you yeah I love how you're opening this up here and if the way that Daddy Issues show up in the culture for women is often framed sexually and romantically in terms of like their preferences for the kinds of men that they end up being interested in if you wanted to flip that on set a little bit I think that you could totally look at the rise of um to be perfectly Frank like various alt-right content creators or the manosphere or the red pill world as the way that Daddy Issues show up for boys people like the rotates of the world whoever it might be who are advocating for these very like strong father imagery often targeting young men who do not have a healthy family life growing up and so that's one way that those issues can show up for them yeah in ways that even sometimes are extreme in which um you know they they can blame women sure for their own lack of uh romantic Partners the other thing I just want to bring up so another kind of classic category of Father issues in a funny kind of way has to do with something that's sort of murky but really I think useful to kind of clarify which is can you let's say as a male male identified um can you claim your own power without killing your father I like this yeah yeah but metaphorically imaginatively can you um be strong and they're we we you know we live in a Mythic world and you know in our imagination we live in a Mythos of sorts and just think about Star Wars just think about the number of uh cultural stories and fables and myths that are done against the Father the whole thing yeah or the sun has to break away from the father and maybe hopefully there's some sort of death bed reconciliation you know Luke I'm your father something like that before it all ends horribly uh yeah but we're in that mode and it it's almost as if that's the only alternative you know somehow the father has to die you know and that's classic the father has to die for the son to take the throne yeah for you to step into your own power yeah and uh so I think what's really interesting is to explore the notion of being able to individuate and be your own person in parallel with in relationship with but in parallel with not behind so you're you don't have to compete with your father you don't have to beat him it's not about being better uh it's not about uh you're not stuck trying to uh struggle with his power and to prove your own power you can see so many movies that are basically about a critical father and the son endlessly trying to prove that he's good enough and the father's still being critical like to show succession right is that Shakespearean or not yeah it's so much about in the ways that are just kind of to me I can't watch it because I'm sensitive I'm like I want people to be nice what is this the way to mean people the number of conversations we've had about either movies or books Dad where you're like well before I start reading does it have a happy ending I was like well maybe it doesn't but it's still a good you're like I want the one with the happy ending thank you very much right I like characters I'd like and respect who have a moral trajectory that ends well wow other than that I'm easy to please we have covered a lot of ground here and I'm really glad that we've talked quite a bit about like the context of all of this and the ways these different issues can show up for people and all of that I would like to turn the conversation here toward more of what people can do in the here and now if they're wrestling with the remnants of these various attachment wounds again we're planning on doing a whole episode on secure attachment at some point in the near future for people who struggle with these kinds of issues do you have any general recommendations classically and based on tons of research which people will discover in the show notes when they become a patron really plug in the picture the patreon for this one dad I like that thanks I usually don't do it I should do it more because it's so phenomenal in any case thank you um one forming what's called a coherent narrative in other words being able to move back and forth between the objective and the subjective in a kind of a balanced account that doesn't um let anybody off the hook but on the other hand doesn't get attached to a sort of righteous grievance saturated complaint that can lead you to not see the whole picture of what was happening including your impact often we look at adolescence as they can't help it and I'm not letting parents off the hook and I'm also very clear that adolescents have diminished capacity and therefore they have diminished responsibility they're not yet adults I get it but on the other hand they were one of the Stars straws often that were stirring the drink you know in their family of origin and that's part of what is there is to take into account me included I've been doing a lot of taking that into account as I keep healing you know for my own childhood my own role in the matter without blaming or shaming but just looking at the impact okay so one that's really really useful second whatever was missing look for today and take it in when you find it that's give it top three Mental Health method is to look for what was missing what you longed for what would be good to grow inside and experience it and internalize it in in all kinds of ways just kind of really briefly one thing that's been helpful for me because I didn't get it with my dad was a particular kind of valuing of me there was a little gendered I would say as uh as someone who is athletic or or capable and yeah in sports and also in mountaineering situations getting validation from male athletes who are better than I am or climbers who are better than I am like pretty good Rick pretty good you're one of the best I've seen off the couch now in a long way that was meaningful for you yeah totally totally well another way to think about this in terms of like getting more of what you didn't have or looking for those reparative experiences however you want to think about them is we can actually kind of return to the model of attachment think about this because you could think about the different the four different attachment Styles as almost this like two by two Vector to to do some Rick stuff here you know you love yourself a matrix ad so I'm I'm stealing it from you here where on one axis you have how do you think of yourself do you regard yourself kind of positively or kind of negatively and then how do you think of other people do you regard others as mostly kind of positively or mostly kind of negatively if you tend to have a fairly positive way of thinking about yourself in a fairly positive way of thinking about other people that tends to be associated with secure attachment this is fantastic for us isn't this cool original credit for this I found it on the internet but I thought it was really smart so I blatantly stealing it here okay so anyways but um if you had tend to have more of a positive model of other people or you think of them more positively but you don't think very well of yourself that's something that just tends toward anxious attachment right because I can trust the other but I can't trust myself by myself and then so what's avoidant you think well of yourself but you don't think very highly of other people right I can rely on myself but I can't rely on others and if you don't really think particularly well of either well that tends toward more fearful or disorganized attachment so you've got that little two by two split right of these different ways of thinking and feeling in the world and so if you're somebody who has either a lower model of yourself but an OKAY model of other people so anxious or a lower model of others but an OKAY model of yourself that's more avoidant you can really think about how to Shore that up in the here and now right so for more anxious people with that low view of self the task becomes developing increasingly feelings of worthiness just as you are right I can trust myself I can be okay on my own I don't need other people to validate my existence I am worthy just as I am all of that and then for more avoidant people it's about you know doing what you can to work on your view of others a little bit yes other people can be trusted at least sometimes not all the times in all situations that's probably unsafe but hey certain circumstances certain people I can really rely on on them and I can test that theory in a bunch of different ways not in the kind of negative association of like being testing of other people but just in small practical ways can I trust my partner to go to the grocery store and come home and if they don't do it in a timely fashion can I have a conversation about it with them and repair that experience with them and be really open and honest about my feelings with them because a lot of the times for people who are avoidant that's one of the big problems so what do you think about all of that Dad I still think you ought to write the fourth quadrant totally original yeah it's a great idea when I ran into it I was just like mind blown I wish I could give attribution but I forget exactly where I found it but really really liked that when I first saw it I'll tell you another thing that's really yeah please go ahead and I'm gonna go full geek here all right if you take rats okay and I'm going to talk about animal research ethical issues or complications okay great so now let's talk about Generations generation one rats are sorted into two groups and the and one group is highly stressed one group is not highly stressed and then the females in each of these groups have babies those babies grow up and those babies from mothers who were highly stressed have altered epigenetic altered Expressions yeah that regulates stress so even though the second generation's second generation routes are growing up in a nice nurturing supportive unstressed environments they're still really vulnerable to stress because they acquired epigenetically some of the consequences on the stress of the stressful life of their mothers now in the second generation okay then in the second generation those uh RADS who had highly stressed mothers and who are vulnerable to stress have babies themselves if they are then enabled or allowed to do normal rat mother stuff like licking their little babies and cuddling with them and so forth that pattern that they inherited epigenetically of being vulnerable to stress is actually healed through being nurturing them very very cool research yeah whoa lots of implications I think about sometimes by there's another kind of study that's a little different if you take kids who are bullies like a fifth grade bully who often has been bullied themselves at home by an older sibling or often a father unfortunately uh so you take that fifth grade bully and you say hey I'm you are now the partner of the second grade kid or first grade kid and you're the you're the buddy and you just you just get to do stuff together it's really chill whatever you do walk around the yard you know play checkers bounce a ball that bullying fifth grader will tend to become less bullying over time because they will have healed some of the underlying causes of that bullying by being nurturing themselves so it's important to appreciate I'm not talking about running on empty exhausting yourself particularly if you're a woman in a classic socialization where you're supposed to give give give and so forth but it is actually really healing it is reparative to to give to others what was missing for you yeah as a kid totally and feel it as it flows through you on the way and it's wonderful and that's to me is quite wonderful in part because you have control over them right no matter what's actually missing in terms of what could be coming to you you have some influence over what you can express outwardly into the world totally totally we heal in community I mean it sounds a little scary stereotypical or you know a little it's not your brand foreign but no all right so all jokes aside I think it is really true though and it shows up over and over again is the value of social support and what can you do now and look social support can be limited for people there are a lot of people who don't have strong friend groups who don't have strong family groups who are in a community situation where they don't necessarily have access to a lot of people who feel like supportive and like-minded and I really get that um and at the same time there's it's just really hard to find a substitute for strong community and doing what we can in our lives to find ways to connect with other people and to use that as a mechanism even deliberately quite deliberately as a way in to repairing these old these old interpersonal wounds that we might have um I can say that personally like so many of my issues uh had to do with the impact of being in relationship with other kids growing up yeah so this wasn't like a daddy issues thing necessarily but it was a form of attachment wounding I was securely attached with my parents but I was probably a little bit less securely attached with other kids yeah I think that's probably Fair yeah and probably tended like kind of anxious with other kids just thinking about my temperament in general and it has been so reparative to consistently form stronger relationships with my peers as I have grown up and to um again engage in little experiments as we sometimes talk about on the podcast can I be open in this way and and not be destroyed you know can I be transparent with them in this way and have my emotions remain intact and like what can I get out of that experience in the here and now and as you say over and over again Dad can I go through a deliberate process of looking at that experience I'm having that's good in the moment and going hey wow I didn't explode wow it worked out wow it really did help me you know and um and really make that part of the process so it's not just the kind of um I was talking with a friend about this recently how so often what happens is when we don't get what we want it's extremely painful and when we do get what we want it's like oh okay yeah negativity bias like oh my God negativity Buys in a nutshell right like you win the trophy you're like oh that was nice and you don't place and you're like oh my God devastated for months you know and so you just gotta do something deliberately to correct that asymmetry it's totally right I think about you know watching sports these days in San Francisco 49ers are heading your boy Brock yes yes this will be published after whatever the results were of Gabe's about a month ago but yes you just think about it the Trope that's so common in sports where someone will say who's a major success uh it's gonna put it it's not that I love winning it's that I hate losing right it's not that I need to be the best it's just that I hate second place negativity bias right there I want to name a Fourth Kind of repair right so we have so we have uh forming a coherent narrative about what really happened objective and subjective second we have um taking the good internalize you know reparative experiences for what was missing okay good and we have also uh outflowing social support extending love Yeah enable others to form secure attachments with you and and be that person okay great uh I want to add very briefly in passing I do think it's also really helpful to appreciate who are you to others like here I am male tall fatherly I'm a warm person in in healthy ways how does that land on someone who may not have had that kind of experience growing up and realize that without any kind of weirdness about it without being manipulative what for you might be a minute and a half or a three-minute you know email can actually really really be helpful and certainly that's been true for me I've had people in my own life who interacted with me quite briefly in ways that were affirming or you know good seeing really really had a beneficial impact we can offer that to others yes totally love this okay fourth I was realizing Forest I find that one very reparative Act is to have an experience of being to being contact with your own parents if you can have that while they're still alive or if you can't have that while they're still alive or they're no longer alive have it in your own imagination in ways to feel authentic to you even if only it was five seconds in a row in which the curtains opened but you know they're covered over their eyes and you could see the being behind the eyes who was present and and loving actually and so if your parents are still alive it's a good idea to try to have that kind of experience of them if you haven't had it period and many people actually have not had that experience I don't mean getting into some kind of new age staring contest or getting it being weird but it's a feeling of of meeting person to person you know in a ways that almost transcend your roles and your genders perhaps yeah yeah and that kind of human relationality almost irrespective of the fact that one person is a parent and one person as a child can be really really phenomenal and of course that's not available to everyone for a wide variety of reasons um but hey if it's available then I totally think you're right and even behind their personality because you know often we get reactive around our parents personality for all kinds of reasons it's so they're looking past it past it and showing up as the adult child in a way that you're available as well for that kind of being to be in contact and if you can't have it in the real these days imagining it can be really helpful I've definitely done that as well where I just kind of looked past my parents personalities their their shells their their outer shells sometimes called their sleeves and look past the sleeve past the shell to the core of their of their being and even just imagined what I know to be true it's not like I'm trying to trick myself into something that's really not true I actually know it's true that there was an unconditional warmth of love for me through and through and even just imagining that for a person can be really really healing if if it's if it's actually not true and sometimes it's not true then what can also be very healing is imagining a parent you never had but imagining it in a very rich way maybe in the form of others in your life who are you know that kind of person potentially a teacher a mentor a grandparent an uncle and so forth or just imagining it purely and then dropping into the experience of seeing and feeling seen feeling seen and seeing as an experience that you really let into yourself that can be remarkably healing it's almost as if you can heal years of personality to personality struggle with a parent with one real experience of being to be in contact it doesn't disappear the emotional memories of that personality or personality struggle but it somehow helps you to contextualize it or to stand outside of it yeah I love that I think that it's a just the the four um the four examples that you gave of things in general that people can do to work with really any kind of attachment issue we're focusing on Parental relationship issues but man there's a lot of stuff that can come up in life and I think that those four recommendations that you gave are really generally applicable in addition to the general I do have some questions about this specific so here's what I would like to do with you Dad if you're up for it I would have returned to some of the symptoms that I mentioned earlier some specific things that a person might be dealing with related to any of these forms of attachment wounding maybe specifically focusing on the issues that a person might have had with a parental figure maybe specifically the person in the fatherly role and I'm going to say some common symptoms and I would love it if you could give just a couple of quick recommendations for the person who might be experiencing them of things that they can do these days to improve them a little bit and if you can manage it I would love it if we could stick to just like two to three minutes per one so we're going to move through these kind of briskly even though we could frankly probably do an episode on each and every one of them so does that sound good to you you bet and I am able to do Drive Time radio love it love it we're gonna we're gonna get you practicing those CNN hits dad 90 seconds tight in out cut to commercial is that okay let's get going so issue number one the person tends to struggle with fears of Abandonment or being alone they might be clingy kind of possessive jealous or just feel uncomfortable um when they're not in a relationship so they are really looking for some kind of a particularly romantic relationship as a source of self-validation one take in the good of ordinary typically pretty mild experiences of feeling seen included and sustained in relationship with other people so you start building up the emotional memory of of not being abandoned and in ways that it can that can actually give you increasing confidence that you won't be abandoned and also give you more and more of a built up sense of Refuge inside that you can turn to if other people do let you down second Choose Wisely think about whether you're reenacting this setup from childhood of being with charming people who are going to let you down or people whose idea of relationship is a mile wide but an inch deep and are going to disappoint when push comes to shove think about who you're choosing and then the last thing I'll just say especially if you're looking for a romantic relationship if they don't think you're pretty great within the first 20 to 40 minutes they probably never will and if they don't think you're pretty great for them maybe you're just not their cup of tea okay but if they don't think you're pretty great within the first 20 to 40 minutes uh they're disqualified they're dq'd and instead of trying to get blood from that stone take a breath allow The Grieving to pass through you get in touch with your inner caring committee you know that internalization of experiences that have been good with people and look for somebody else the top two qualifications for being in a relationship with somebody are that one they're a basically kind of person and two they think you're awesome hey that's the top two if they're not cross of those top two they are dq'd I mean I can just think of look back through my own relationship history uh a big chunk of my mid-20s was spent pursuing people who were like kinda into me yeah and not really into me and I just wasted so much time trying to push a boulder up a hill that was that was never just never gonna get to the top of that mountain yeah I had one last one more thing yeah please go often people who are vulnerable to feeling um abandoned uh and are anxious and kind of clingy is that they're always waiting for the for the neck for the shoe to drop to give them a reason to withdraw or they feel like a fair really mild misattunement or not really understanding or clueless disengagement by the other person is the death metal in the relationship and instead my last piece of advice for that person is try to repair in other words if there is a misunderstanding or there's a breakdown help yourself to understand the scale of it maybe it wasn't that big a deal actually maybe it doesn't mean the end of the relationship and maybe you can communicate with the other person to help them understand little things and you can also make sure you're internalizing their actual care for you I've known numerous situations where person a and person B A is saying to be you don't love me and person B is saying I actually do love you and I'm loving with you and person says Oh no you're not well actually I can see that person B is loving person B is actually acting in loving ways but person a is just committed to a complaint about person B which will eventually Drive B away and be the self-fulfilling kind of activity unfortunately that make sure that a never gets what they really need so try to repair try to repair if you can't repair then they're not qualified but try to repair great so that was issue one which we spent a little bit of time with but a lot of that was driven by me so I'll take credit for that one okay so issue number two the person needs a lot of reassurance from others they're very externally referenced and they require a lot of outside feedback to build up their own self-worth and one example of this could be somebody who tends to quickly move towards sex in their relationships and uses sex as a tool to feel loved or worthy as they are what do you think one trick pony over here taking the good of when you actually are acknowledged when those social supplies the narcissistic supplies of Praise or joining or like-mindedness uh or um esteem you know making you special or being impressed by you when that comes your way slow it down and take it in and I think it's especially important to look for uh forms of healthy approval that are not contingent on your sexuality they're about you as an overall being not whether you're attractive not whether you're good and bad but it's just simply you as an overall being and when it comes your way take it in as someone who did that practice a lot it can be helpful sometimes to explain to your friends why you're this way and um while you're asking a follow-up question so you liked what I said at work what did you like about it right to kind of explain and do your side of it though make sure you're taking in the good but sometimes you can kind of explain to others what's going on and then to flip it around what if you're with someone who needs a lot of reassurance and very often what people do is they withdraw from that pull for support that pull for reassurance when in fact that just creates an even greater hunger and insecurity related to reassurance was more effective is to authentically deliver reassurance and other forms of approval love you know commitment loyalty and so forth to that person and ask them to be sure to internalize it so that you don't get exhausted and you're not in this kind of situation where they're like a vampire always needing to consume who'd never fundamentally gets fed great and a fantastic thing to track both in terms of how other people speak to us and how we speak to other people is how often you give a comment particularly to whatever category of Pearson that it is that you are attracted to um about something other than their physical appearance or the way that they look you know other than a superficial comment um because it it uh can really you know reveal some things if you have a friend who only ever compliments you on your appearance or things like that because that can be a very superficial form of validation and it can fill up something sometimes for people that's already full when they have this other Bucket over here that is in desperate need a filling and then you have people who are the other way around for a long time I got complimented frequently um for all of these traits and absolutely none of them were are related to how I looked or how I moved through the world or how skillful I was in my relationships with other people and that for me was a real hole that took some time to get filled and I had to kind of go out of my way to deliberately fill it in ways that you're describing that good all right great what's another one issue number three issue number three Drive Time radio like you were saying uh the person has big issues with trust and related to that emotional vulnerability in particular so this could be a unwillingness to be emotionally open with others excessive fears of being cheated on or otherwise betrayed that go beyond what you would think of as being understandable or otherwise somebody who just starts to feel very uncomfortable when the rubber is meeting the road of like deep emotional connection okay great so first off validate legitimate mistrust sometimes that little bell starts ringing and we don't listen to it but we actually really should so that second appreciate the fact that you actually are vigilant and you are clear seeing and you can stick up for yourself in other words in effect join with your own defenses validate your own capacity to be like I don't know the turtle or some sea creature that can withdraw inside your bulletproof shell you know and one half of a second if you need to paradoxically then you can afford to be more open so that's actually a really useful weird kind of counter-intuitive truth if you trust your ability to take a step back you can be more comfortable taking a step forward totally excellent also when you are with people who are reliable which is the foundation of trust if they are reliable in everyday kinds of ways take that in and notice what comes up for you about a difficulty in internalizing that you're with people who are reasonably reliable uh because maybe you're afraid that if you actually let in that experience you'll lower your guard and Get Fooled Again and be betrayed so still even though that's an understandable reaction it gets in the way of the internalization of what you really need to do next be realistic in your expectations of others and explicit all right what do you what for you is the foundation of trust and what are the actual agreements very often what people do is they they think they're in a frame of agreement with other people but the other people don't think that way at all didn't really realize that it was a big deal uh to show up on time or like what's five minutes and yet maybe that's a big big deal for for a particular person or what does it mean you know I think about romantic relationships you know there you are you're sitting with your romantic partner at a dinner table and um some of the attractive walks across the room and your eyes flicker over to that person for 1.7 seconds and then come back huh I mean is that really a breach of Fidelity in your romantic relationship uh you know what is flirting actually and then you know you really try to pin that down what does that actually mean and I would say there if we're in a partnership with someone who's more insecure about certain things so A and B A is more insecure they are wanting more reassurance from b or they tend to be mistrusting what B's doing and B could understandably feel that a fair amount of that is way over the top it's too controlling it's unreasonable it's annoying but if B gets reactive about that that's going to make a feel even less trusting and could actually lead ultimately the relationship ending alternately B could sort out okay what am I fundamentally willing to do right not because I think it's reasonable but because I love my partner I have compassion for my partner I understand where this trust stuff comes from you know they had a father who was disappointing and betraying and maybe seductive and then withdrawing it was complicated you know I get it you see what I'm saying and then if you're a it's actually a skillful sometimes as well to say look I'm not trying to argue that what I'm wanting is reasonable I'm not in the frame of reasonable unreasonable should or shouldn't I'm just saying at a human level I'm this way this is what I need right now I am this way it would help me even to heal being this way if you would be extra careful when we're in company especially let's say if we're talking with a woman who's attractive and let's say a is a woman B's a man do me a favor stand a little closer to me put your arm around me for its own sake just because I'm asking for it not because it's reasonable or because I think you're a bad guy who's gonna sleep with her and just because it helps me out yeah helps me out and then it's a lot cleaner and easier yeah to get what you need from others and you're having a different kind of conversation you've changed the conversation from like an objective conversation to a subjective conversation exactly like you're saying dad like I'm not making an objective Claim about this I'm just saying that for me this is really helpful and a lot of the time people are afraid to ask because they're afraid of what the answer is going to be so they just never ask and so they kind of keep on having this idea inside of their head this almost Fantastical or kind of dreamlike notion of what the Agreements are but they've never actually been established in a clear and coherent way because there's so much fear connected to well what if they say no yes sometimes people say no I know and then you got to deal with that yeah and and part of the two is that we are observing people I mean trust is based on accurate appraisal of predictions and having fairly good predictions and expectations a key variable here is to what extent do we foreground other people inside our own minds or flip it around to what extent do other people foreground us inside their minds and make us matter or take us into account it means stunning how often What would cool down other people is completely doable when you really boil it down it's often stunningly easy to give them and so then the real question is no longer oh my gosh it's such a huge ask no it's that that other person is just not willing to be influenced by you they're just not willing to foreground you and then that becomes the real issue in the relationship and that really becomes the real conversation that's needed to have and then you sort it out and sometimes what happens is be budges good flip around the other way you start to observe someone maybe you like them a lot you'd be really attracted to them maybe you have a child with them and yet you can just see that inside their own mind they're just not prepared to give an inch or maybe they'll give an inch but they won't give two inches inside their mind because they're just not willing to give you that much room in their mind or that much power in their mind that much standing in their mind and then that becomes a real issue in the relationship but being able to see it clearly is fundamental including in terms of what you can actually trust great well I just have one more of these to add but it's a bit of a doozy and again we could spend several episodes on this issue number four the person tends to seek out one usually problematic kind of partner over and over again they might say that they're open to different types of people but in practice most of their Partners tend to have similar characteristics or tendencies that lead to similar problems in the relationship a extreme example of this could be somebody who consistently makes excuses for or tries to fix their abusive or otherwise problematic partner so that's one version but this could also show up a lot of different ways what do you think well a couple things one is to ask yourself what is it I'm actually seeking as an experience this is a point that you and I really emphasized in our book resilient in other words the the form that you're going after an older figure I physically highly attractive person someone who is also passionate about rock climbing and adventure sports whatever someone who has a little bit of edge they feel a little dangerous you know whatever it is okay that's right that's right that's right so that's a means to an end of a certain experience what's the experience you're seeking and a ask yourself how you could find that experience in safer packages more reliable packages out there in the world or B how you could start to give yourself more and more of that experience almost on your own how could you find that inside yourself that feeling of Adventure and and energy and juiciness that feeling of sexuality that feeling of of of having status or in confidence in yourself in society that you might get by hanging out with a person who's quite wealthy for example that's useful the second thing that I find really useful and this is where I'm drawing on you know 50 years now roughly of working with people the clock is ticking every day I think sometimes we put up with behaviors on our part because we're just not prepared to recognize that the clock is ticking I think about the saying from sailing that you have all the time in the world until you have no time at all and unfortunately people will clock year after year uh not really helping themselves to have what they long for and then finally they have no time at all give yourself one more shot at the kind of person that you think you have to have to have and then if you don't have that going well by a certain date like the end of the year nine months from now or you know by the summer time decide for yourself if I don't have it by then I'm going to take a different Road I'm going to walk down a different Road I'm going to implement the advice of my friends you know what I'm going to do it make sense to me and I'm going to go in a different direction and I'm going to stop chasing the hit the fix the the cheese that's just not going to be found down that tunnel what can be helpful for people here is to do some investigation of what the assumptions you are making are about the way that a relationship looks because a lot of the time like you were talking about much earlier in our conversation bad at the very beginning of it if I'm remembering correctly so we're just kind of coming full circle here where attachment issues arise because we have a model of relationship we learned a model we learned a kind of template when we were really young of what a relationship looks like maybe we were modeling it off of our relationship with our father maybe we're modeling it off of the ways that we saw our parents interact with each other and we've just internalized those assumptions in a very deep kind of way so it's very helpful to go back and to really ask ourselves deliberately wait what are my assumptions what are the processes that are running underneath the surface here for me do I think that a uh if I'm approaching this from the perspective of of myself of a man who is attracted to women do I think that a partner needs to look a certain kind of way for them to be eligible for my affection is that just an assumption that I have uh do you think that a partner needs to be a certain height a certain age make a certain amount of money all of these different things just like be honest with yourself about it like you got to start with honesty um because you're not going to get anywhere until you're actually honest with yourself about what your real preferences and desires are and until you can do that I think it's very very difficult to refresh these patterns because we're just not being authentic with ourselves about what we're really pursuing out in the world and then we can we can have a moment I'm gonna say that again and then we can have a moment where we take a step back and we go oh I actually am pursuing this thing over and over again and here's kind of why I'm doing that and based on that new level of insight we can move ourselves toward a different outcome but we need that Insight first I think a lot of the time that's deeply wise and if we could in this bonus round here um I wonder if we could each personalize it a little bit just kind of reflecting a little bit give me a question you know what have I done to help you have a good relationship with me just kind of reflecting on that as an adult I'm asking myself that it's an inner reflection oh okay and you know an inner reflection maybe for you is what have you done to help to help me have a good relationship with you but especially to help yourself help yourself you know have a good relationship and that's really worth asking and even for people listening uh what have you tried that's another thing that we could really talk about here which we didn't which is what efforts have you made you The Listener with your own parents let's say and how did that go and what have you learned from those kind of efforts maybe we'll get some grab bag questions about this what have you learned from those kind of efforts in terms of what has gone well and what has been frustrating and disappointing uh us both in terms of what your parents lack of response or unskillful response was and in terms of perhaps of what you just didn't know what to do next after they did what they did after you made some effort to to repair things with them that could be really a worthy topic um yeah and I think probably a way to work on some long-standing issues sometimes to just um do more of that situational analysis like we were kind of doing during the episode separating the subjective and the objective like you said a number of times dad to kind of piece apart what happened how it might be affecting you in the here and now and how that could understandably lead to certain kinds of Tendencies inside of your relationship and then when you see it that way it can sometimes create the space to be a little bit Kinder a little bit more compassionate to yourself about your own Tendencies and that like joining with the vulnerable Parts can be a great way to move into changing it in some kind of a lasting way like we normally need to at least in my experience we normally need to come into a kind of soft contact with ourselves before we're able to change those things um because when those parts feel like we're opposed to them they can get quite quite entrenched quite difficult to shift at least in my own experience yeah yeah I think that's a great place to end today's conversation unless you have something else that you'd like to throw in here at the end ad yeah um well for those for those of you who have adult children I can say two things on reflection are there for me one is a cop tier stuff as fast as you can while sometimes only privately seeing the whole of the situation the whole big picture inside of which cop tier stuff my like my own parents they were of a generation in which it was just Unthinkable to acknowledge their own faults or excesses or unskillfulness or personal issues uh as parents it was just not in the category and wasn't what was done yeah yeah so for me it's been really important to do that and and what the adult child does with that is kind of out of your hands but at least the part that you can do is to be really clean yourself and go to the maximum on acknowledging your part while you know also seeing yourself in in a larger system multiple factors including your co-parent etc etc second thing is to be willing to to connect with your adult child in that being to being way when it's there and available while remembering that most of the time you're never not their parent s and uh one of the things that's been important for me to do um is to keep my dad hat on you know one of the things I learned as a therapist is that you always need to keep your therapist hat on with your clients even if you run into them in the supermarket and maybe you're there in your Bermuda shorts and you haven't shaved and your hair's a mess and all the rest uh but you know you keep your therapist hat on it's people get into trouble when they take that therapist out off and similarly I think it's been useful to just kind of keep my dad hat on you know even as you and I do stuff today I had a great time talking with Rick about daddy issues a somewhat more accurate and less pejorative way to refer to Daddy Issues is as a form of attachment wounding we all have things that we want from our parental figures and when our relationship with one of those primary attachment figures is complicated non-existent difficult or otherwise unhealthy it's common for us to Port some of those issues that happened back then into our adult relationships in the here and now so that's what we talked about today what daddy issues are where they come from and what we can do about them and the key point in the early part of the conversation is that daddy issues come from a desire we all have for a healthy positive relationship with a reliable strong caregiver and a really key Point here is that it's not a person's fault if they have daddy issues or really any other kind of issue daddy issues are often used as a phrase to refer pejoratively to young women in particular and the reality is that any person of any gender identity can have any kind of issue related to any kind of attachment figure so just narrowly focusing on this one thing and particularly blaming women for something that men do to them is pretty sexist and it's just not a great way to think about this stuff altogether we then talked for a while about what these different kinds of issues can look like for people in adulthood and the reality is that daddy issues are not a a diagnosis that a clinician would ever give somebody in part because they are just this big and somewhat vague category of tendencies that could include everything from consistently seeking out a particular kind of problematic romantic partner to issues around self-worth or anxiety or trust and you know a bunch of other stuff in addition to that because again the difficulties that people have with their primary attachment figures when they're growing up are really varied and these varied issues can lead to a lot of different kinds of problems in adulthood so to try to understand things a little bit better we turned the conversation toward attachment Theory broadly and there are four different types of attachment styles that people have the first is secure you have a relatively High appraisal of yourself not irrationally high but you know you feel like you can basically trust yourself and you have a relatively High appraisal of other people then you have avoidant you have a relatively High appraisal of yourself and a relatively low appraisal of others then anxious low appraisal of Self High appraisal of others and then finally what's sometimes known as fearful or disorganized attachment where you don't have a very high appraisal of either yourself or of other people and these four different forms of attachment are a combination of Nature and nurture it seems like people pop out with a bit of an internal tendency toward one type or another I can think of myself here that I'm definitely on the anxious side of the Spectrum in terms of my own Tendencies and then in addition to those innate Tendencies a lot of things happen to us that could lead to different kinds of outcomes somebody who has a parental figure who is harshly punishing is probably going to emerge into adulthood with a separate set of issues from somebody who has a parental figure who is nurturing supportive and really present and exciting and fun and playful but isn't around very often and this recognition of the fact that different people are going to have different problems that come from different situations got us into a whole Converse station about context the ways in which daddy issues of various kinds can emerge for people the broader cultural forces that are at play that often lead to these issues and just in general thinking about this whole territory a bit more holistically which can also help us take a look at our unique issues and just get some separation some space around them where we become a bit less self-punishing for the ways in which we are and then when that punishment goes down weirdly often we become so much more ancient about our Behavior because it's like there's this part of ourselves that we've just been hitting with a hammer for years that finally has a little bit of room to breathe and you invite that part to the table in a different kind of way and we can almost invite that part to the table and go like hey what do you really need in order to not show up in these more problematic ways and that was around the time that I asked Rick what some general recommendations were that he had for people who deal with different kinds of attachment issues is and he highlighted four things that I thought were really great the first was forming a coherent Narrative of childhood being able to take a step back separate the subjective from the objective and really appreciate both what the real circumstances were and also how they landed on you then second improve your ability to take in the gut it is natural for us to have a negativity bias it is natural for us to just feel kind of okay when a good thing happens and to be devastated when a bad thing happens but hey we have to really go out of our way to push back on that tendency so if you're a more anxious person it's really important for you to go out of your way to internalize experiences of being worthy just as you are not needing to rely on others and being able to take care of yourself if you're an avoidant person really internalizing those times when people really do show up for you in positive ways or where you are able to trust somebody else or you could be emotionally vulnerable with others without being being totally devastated by it then third big recommendation social support may be a more romantic way of putting this would be finding Ways To Love Yourself through loving others and this was the example that Rick gave about the different generations of rats or mice I forget which one it was where you had Parents Who were dysregulated or in a painful environment and even if their children were brought up in a safe environment they also became dysregulated or it became easier for them to get stressed out but then if those animals were able to have children of their own and nurture them a lot of their own problems got solved they became less sensitized to stress over time and just in general I think this makes a really important point that there's no substitute for community of some kind and it's not always easy to find one but wow it is so powerful when you do and then the final piece of general advice that Rick gave was seeing the being behind the eyes being able to connect with a person beyond their role in your life and a particularly important figure to do this with is often our parental figures or our attachment figures more broadly and often we don't have the opportunity to do this in real life maybe those parental figures are not available maybe they've passed away maybe we don't have a healthy relationship with them that would allow us to move into that kind of connection maybe you're a parent and you don't have a healthy relationship with your child that allows you to connect with them whatever it is even if that real relationship isn't available to us we can still imagine it we can still go through a practice deliberately inside of ourselves where we think of the person we try to relate to them in that more being to being way rather than getting caught up in the problems of their personality and this might sound a little out there but even as like a very practical and secular person the little moments that I've had where it's felt like I was able to do this were really powerful for me and so you know if you've got any access to it at all I would really recommend it as a kind of intervention finally we close the episode with Rick giving a couple of specific examples of what people can do to deal with some common symptoms that come up as a result of different kinds of attachment wounds I've been really looking forward to doing this one for a while because I think that it's something that for starters it's so popular as a term online in particular and just like in pop culture generally and I also think that it's really misunderstood and it's misunderstood in ways that are actually really damaging for people um because these are Universal issues these are not problems that like just women have or just men have and by universalizing them we can make them more human and we can see other people for their wholeness rather than for just this little aspect of who they are if you've been enjoying the podcast we'd really appreciate it if you would take a moment to subscribe to it wherever you're listening to it now on hey if you're listening to it on audio and you would like to watch the video you can also find me on YouTube and if you'd like to support the show in other ways you can find us on patreon it's patreon.com beingwell podcast and as Rick said a couple of times throughout the episode you'll get a bunch of bonuses if you subscribe there things like transcripts and expanded show notes and ad-free versions of the episodes until next next time thanks for listening and we'll talk to you soon [Music]

Channel: Forrest Hanson

Views: 15,554

Keywords: Mental Health, Personal Growth, Self-Help, Psychology, Forrest, Forrest Hanson, Being Well, Being Well Podcast, Rick Hanson, Resilient, dealing with daddy issues, daddy issues, father complex, daddy, attachment wounding, attachment wounds, attachment injury, securely attached, insecurely attached, anxious attachment, avoidant attachment, attachment theory

Id: bWsNMUlWNNc

Length: 85min 28sec (5128 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 20 2023