How to Heal Your Attachment Wounds | Being Well Podcast, Dr. Diane Poole Heller

hello and welcome to being well i'm forrest hansen if you're new to the podcast this is where we explore the practical science of lasting well-being and if you've listened before welcome back i'm joined today as usual by dr rick hansen so dad how are you doing today really good and really looking forward to talking with today's guest yes i'm really looking forward to it today we're going to be focusing on two of our most important and most frequently tread subjects attachment wounds and traumatic experiences with a long-time therapist trainer of therapists author and expert in the fields of child and adult attachment theory and trauma resolution dr diane poole heller diane has been practicing for over 35 years and focuses on using somatic or body-based approaches to resolving the painful experiences and negative patterns that hold us back her work on adult attachment has forged a path for adults with childhood attachment injuries to develop the secure attachment skills that tend to lead to more connected and fulfilling adult relationships and her expertise in trauma healing has supported survivors and the families of highly publicized traumatic events like the columbine and boulder shootings so thanks so much for taking the time to join us today diane we really appreciate it how are you doing i'm thrilled to be here i'm so excited to be with you both well diane the feeling is mutual we're friends we've known each other for a long time i was talking with my wife jan just before we uh we're doing this today about how you and i met a long time ago at a conference and there was an immediate sort of simpatico and uh your feistiness and genuine brilliance and huge heart have just you know drawn me all the way from the very very start so i'm very glad you're here all right virtual hug there we are virtual hug so we're going to be talking about relationships and healing of relationship wounds and healing broadly in relationships drawing on relationships for resources inside that framework we'll be touching on a lot i'm sure what's called attachment theory which is your specialty and expertise you're a genuine world-class expert on this for you know like regular folks and just to kind of reset it for everybody else could you just briefly summarize this is your elevator speech you know you get to get to to the hundredth floor but no no higher no longer what is attachment what are attachment styles or patterns and why should we care okay that sounds great well first of all i was teaching trauma recovery uh dr peter levine's works medical experiencing for over 25 years and i just noticed broken connection was a common if not always present issue for people uh kind of crawling out of trauma experiences and some of them of course were like car accidents or natural disasters but many of them are around relationship where we're wounded in relationship but we also heal in relationship so i thought well i'm going to jump into the very beginning of relationship which is what's happening in utero and the first few years of life how do we build a relationship template and came upon attachment theory which just for me was like the missing link uh to understanding that mystery so attachment patterns the idea the theory is that even in utero you're sensing how your mom and dad are relating you're sensing how they're relating to you and you're starting to get a feeling for the relational world and as we even develop language we're developing attachment patterns at the same time as language so sometimes language can help define or help us understand our attachment patterns and it just gives us a chance to see when we sort of win the jackpot and we get born into a pro-social family we tend to tilt towards secure attachment and we can i can describe that a little bit later and then sometimes it's less than ideal and sometimes that's parenting sometimes that's medical procedures sometimes that's you're born in a war zone your parents were great but you know the circumstances really stressful can all impact how we embody and internalize our sense of relationship so it's it's a really rich area to explore and what i love about it the most i want to make sure i say this is when you really understand attachment your own and have compassion for other peoples if there's injury involved is that you'd stop blaming yourself and you also aren't blaming other people like projecting that on them because so often what's occurring in our current adult relationships stems quite a bit back to our early patterning which can shift depending on the relational environment so it's a very forgiving system in a way first of all secure attachment a lot of people think of healthy attachment as you know you had a roof over your head you had three meals a day um you got trips to the doctor well course is a great baseline but it's so much more than that it has to do with your parents helping you feel safe protected they're available for connection but they also as you individuate they're okay with you separating a bit there's a easy flow between connection and separation there's playfulness playfulness is a big marker for secure attachment and i think in our culture especially we all need to get out and play more i just came from a week of play in the mountains i'm so glad i was doing that so play play more that's a takeaway um and also parents that align with and have empathy to their child state they're attuned in secure attachment there's consistent responsiveness that doesn't mean you always get what you want but it means that your your parent is there and understanding and available you know a significant amount of the time not all the time because that's unrealistic but there's sort of a relational resiliency and even if there's a misattunement that happens parents model how to repair that misattunement like okay maybe you were uh not willing to get out of bed to go to school in the morning or something and your parents kind of like shoving clothes on you and pushing you out to the school bus later they might say hey i know that was a rough morning you know let's have a chat about that so there's the repair doesn't mean you have to be perfect it just helps if you recognize when things are a little out of sync and you acknowledge it right and you compassionately connect around it so it's not about being perfect we really want to get that thrown out the window right so the reason it's important to understand what secure attachment is is we want to be moving back towards that we want to find ways to support ourselves and our partners and our kids and our friends to be more in that in that relational environment so there's all these things that are easy to do if you understand what they are that's what you're trying to reveal today that strengthen an attachment bond and encourage it towards secure attachment so that's that's kind of the game plan of why i'm teaching this and why i think it's it's helpful because i think relationship is the name of the game anyway so why not have a good one i love how very early on you immediately use the word patterns which i think is such a huge part of your work in general and is also such a huge part of what we're doing on the podcast we often talk about the patterns of behavior that people internalize over time often they have their roots in childhood not always but often and our experiences the things that happen to us create different patterns of behavior and in the case whether it's like traumatically oriented or there are attachment injuries that happen in childhood these can be kind of more problematic patterns of behavior ones that make it hard for somebody to kind of get the most out of life at the very beginning you mentioned a couple of examples of potential situations that could be challenging for somebody and i was hoping that you could give a couple of practical examples here of attachment injuries and then maybe some of the patterns that those injuries could create in our adult relationships i'd love to do that that'd be great yeah so when things are there's really three different uh attachment styles that we tend to identify in the in the writing and everything and they're avoidant i'm i'm i'm going to use they use sometimes different terminology but i'm using the word avoidant uh ambivalent and disorganized and so i'll give you a little brief overview of that these are insecure forms of attachment distinct from secure yeah this is when there's been a bit of a deficit for whatever reason in the environment whether it was a parent just had unresolved issues from their childhood which you know attachments very easily passed down through the generations attachment patterning so sometimes we have to have compassion for what our parents went through as well and maybe their grandparents and all the way up and you can also have a mix of attachment styles because they're we're highly sensitive to the relational environment we're in so you might have one attachment style that relates to how your father was or when your mother was you know that kind of thing so avoidant tends to be a situation where a parent for whatever reason wasn't able to be present and sometimes it's just sort of this absent vacancy which is if you think about being an infant you're reaching out for contact right that's really scary you're 100 dependent on mom or dad and both and you're reaching out and it feels like nobody's there that's terrifying to an infant and now sometimes avoidance will happen if a parent is actively rejecting uh besides being neglectful and sometimes the other way it can set up is a parent is present but they're only present when they're teaching you a left brain skill like uh how to read how to write how to ride your bike how to um you know make change things like that so they're present but only usually for tasks or skill focus so that's something that will affect a child's attachment system usually by them sort of internalizing this feeling that nobody else is there they're kind of on their own way too early so i call it reactive autonomy they become very self-sufficient but and self-sufficiency is a good thing they develop skills out of that later in life and they can use those skills they're also very very productive uh that sort of thing but underneath it sometimes if they're still an attachment wound they might be feeling like unsupported and they can't really rely anyone out on anyone else they can't ask for needs because they won't be met they sort of have this assumption before they even ask it's not going to happen so they don't even tend to reach out and so then they often miss connection if you think about attachment as either a little bit of an over focus on separateness or a little bit of an over focus on connection if it's not secure where there's a balance we're trying to come into balance so for the avoidant helping them your save your avoidant or your partner's avoidance to really help feel that eventually relationships are nourishing and that connection is safe enough to have that's uh one of the repairs i was definitely avoidantly attached and there i had parents who are loving and decent but in different kinds of ways they were unreliable sources of empathy and attunement that sense of real rapport at a kind of an emotional level for different reasons they were busy they were preoccupied they grew up under harsh conditions themselves not abusive but economically harsh conditions during the depression and the other element was that they in different ways kept me at arms length uh i was allowed to maintain a you know kind of relationship with them as long as i didn't ask for too much also as you well know in addition to parents we can form in effect models of relationship paradigms of relationship these are attachment patterns with our peers so i skipped a grade i have a late birthday i was very young going through school and i always felt kind of on the outside so i was orbiting orbiting uh the cool kids longing to belong with them but also kind of disdaining them as well right anyway so all that kind of was where i began and so i just kind of want to make it you know personally intimate and personally real in terms of my own attachment background which implicitly of course is also a way of saying that as you again well know you're such an expert here we can heal this over time i no longer feel avoidantly attached in my important relationships i am definitely not avoidantly attached to forest for example anyway okay so i just wanted to toss that in as a personal example related to avoid an attachment and then maybe cue you up to talk about uh you know ambivalent or anxious ambivalent attachment which and i love how you put it about how people can tilt too far either toward separation or joining i definitely tilted too far towards separation as an adaptive response right these attachment styles are adaptations they're ways of being related that are um functional and okay given what we're dealing with and our own temperament walking in the door i'm so glad that you've mentioned that and all the healing that's been implied in that as well it's really beautiful yeah and it really speaks to how much healing can happen i i'm very optimistic about the degree of healing that can happen with attachment injury uh towards secure attachment and also i just want to say that kids make the smartest most resilient uh most loving response that they can to their situation and their so whatever we reacted to was really intelligent way to to try to forge connection even even when there wasn't connection and that's something that i think is really important for all of us to respect about ourselves and about our partners and our kids and everybody that we're close to because we did the best we could with what the situation was and really our parents were doing the best they could with what their situation was if you're a parent your kids are um older you can still do things that will help bridge a gap if there was something that kind of got in the way a bit i just really want to emphasize so much healing can happen i mean my mom my mom probably i probably had a little bit more disorganized attachment my mother was very loving at times but also you know had a little bit of a challenge i think brain disorder or mental illness i'm not quite sure but she would sometimes be very quick to shift from joy to violence you know so there was really a lot of unpredictability and also scary stuff again just to clarify we can form our attachment styles without any kind of trauma we can become insecurely attached without any kind of trauma i would not say i experienced trauma myself as a as a kid either with my peers or or with my parents and still the nitty-gritty of thousands and thousands of little interactive episodes beginning in utero but especially really beginning after birth can gradually accumulate uh particularly as it lands on a certain kind of temperament to develop a certain attachment style right you would you would agree with that you don't need to be traumatized to become insecurely attached not at all yeah now sometimes trauma does happen as it right it's in the mix as well but i just want to wanted to distinguish between uh trauma and insecure attachment in general if you want to think of it in broad terms for everyone it's sort of like whatever your family was comfortable with maybe they were really comfortable with exuberance and joy and maybe they were comfortable they were comfortable with sadness then that's something that you usually kind of keep in your emotional range but if say your family was uncomfortable with anger or maybe they weren't comfortable with joy sometimes a family doesn't quite know what to do with exuberance you know too much energy even though it's positive we tend to disown what sort of doesn't fit that's repeated like every time we go into that state there's sort of a not responsiveness or maybe even active rejection then we tend to just separate we tend to like put that in the background and we're just trying to create environments for ourselves and for those we care about where there's a container for all of human experience in its fullness and in an appropriate way and attach understanding attachment fits into that idea of like expanding our range of full humanness really we're talking about how do we get back to full humanness you know that's great i would say for myself feeling vulnerable and exposed being being emotionally vulnerable being rational and well-behaved that was acceptable being emotionally vulnerable and exposed whoa that usually didn't go well so then that became what i learned not to do exactly and avoid people okay insecure ambivalent okay insecure ambivalent very often this pattern arises when parents are loving and there's love there but it's a little too bit too inconsistent or unpredictable so like when the child's trying to like mol you know how kids kind of drape over you like wet noodles when they're really relaxed when they're really going into the relationship and and being the wet noodle there's too much too often it happens that the parent gets preoccupied with something else or their own attachment history wound comes up or something disrupts it so then it's like the rug gets pulled out when they start to relax into the relationship which causes anxiety so very often and sometimes anger very often what will happen is the pattern keeps happening too much of the time uh so there's like there's a inc inconsistent responsiveness so then it's you're sort of internally going well you know is my parent in a good place now are they going to be loving now are they going to stay there long enough for me to stabilize you know so instead of feeling like oh there's mom dad there's dad and yay it's more like are they where are they you know you're sort of trying to figure out uh how you can mold yourself or some do behaviors that in the past have worked to get them in a good place you're always over focused on them the other person uh to try to to regulate yourself and to try to stabilize and try to get a source of soothing and a source of safe haven and it's just too unpredictable it's there sometimes and sometimes it's not the pattern that can can evolve out of that is an expectation or a projection on other people in the world that um everything's unpredictable and that you're sort of chronically disappointed if this happened a lot and more severely you tend to be angry and frustrated a lot so there can be this feeling like i just can't be satisfied i want relationship i want relationship but coupled with that like a package deal is fear of abandonment so as soon as i let somebody in then i immediately have to deal with the feeling of like ah they're gonna leave too soon they're gonna drop me right so and then that becomes uncomfortable because in our culture especially we are not cool with clinginess you know our culture's sort of like independence day right we we need actually as a culture to get more okay with dependents because we all have independence we all have dependence and the truth of it is if we have a balance and a capacity for both of those we can be interdependent which is the truth of how it is relationally so partly what has to happen what helps if you have that particular pattern is to learn how to self-soothe how to self-regulate but also how to be mutual in your relationships and and not not always be scanning for uh how a person's slighting you they're always looking for the signal of abandonment or disappointment or negative reaction ambivalent folks are really good at reading facial clues avoidant folks aren't because they're sort of avoiding avoiding contact there's like a time lapse so they often don't see facial expression or relational cues but ambivalents see them like like hyper and neon but they misinterpret them and what i want people to understand compassionately is that there's a misinterpretation because that fear of abandonment is exaggerated so you're kind of trying to calm down an over-activated attachment system with ambivalent and you're trying to lift the brake on the avoidant attachment system so that they even allow attachment the awareness of i want to belong or i want to connect to come up and what i want to say about avoiding when that comes up i want to connect i feel longing to be with you that's an extremely excruciating vulnerable state in the beginning because everything in them saying no this isn't going to turn out good i'm going to get hurt you know and so if you can make sure that you stay present or you you you say oh i see that you're you're really present with me today i really appreciate that that's really helpful and sometimes for the avoidant when there is deep connection that's a lot and so sometimes they need a couple days to process it so they might you might have the experience if they really connect and then maybe they distance a little bit until they metabolize that and then they might come back again and again this is what i want to emphasize about not taking that personally if i understand that about my say i have an avoidant partner i understand that then i'm not thinking oh my god we were so close and he disappeared you start to understand these patterns and you can interact with them more compassionately when you feel the avoidance starting to disengage or stonewall a little bit or or shut down a little bit that can be read as rejection and if we just start to understand very often it's not rejection it's just what we're sort of dealing with internally until we get more comfortable and move more and more like rick said in the beginning towards secure attachment yeah so to kind of complete our quick um movement through these different patterns and then we can talk about kind of what to do about them a little bit more uh you referred to yourself a little bit ago as or i believe it was in terms of your relationship with your mother having more of a disorganized style that's the final one that we haven't really talked about yet would you mind kind of explaining what that looks like uh sure what happens with disorganized first of all disorganized in a way is a combination of um avoidant and ambivalent you can have disorganized tilts towards avoidant and you can disorganize it tilts towards ambivalent and you kind of disorganize it oscillates between the extremes of both of them so just just basically what disorganized means is it's not a pattern it's not as an easily formulaic pattern as the other two because what's happening is the parent is either highly chaotic which might happen if they're like addicted during your childhood or something they are often scary so it could include abuse it could include a lot of intense anger yelling kinds of things that doesn't involve physical hitting or anything like that it could and it could certainly include emotional physical or sexual abuse so what you're having is your attachment system as a kid is trying to connect right but your survival system against the trauma or the fear is trying to get the heck out of there right so you're kind of in this natural approach and then avoid now sometimes little kids you'll see in the studies they'll go up and they'll like hit their parent which is a approach but it's a defensive fight or flight you get fight or flight or freeze in a way it's a a recipe for freeze on some levels because all your attachment instinct is going this way and your trauma instinct is going this way and and you're kind of in this back and forth a little bit and it can take you into a freeze which just means you're immobilized sometimes you can't talk sometimes you can't move sometimes you're very cold so these are trauma responses that are mixed in with the attachment system so when we're trying to untangle that later safety is super important the sense of safety and um protection that's that somebody has your back and um that can be happening in the context of the relationship sometimes the therapy is helpful and the situation if it's really severe um and the thing that i think is confusing for a lot of people and when disorganized attachment is in the mix in a relationship adult relationship is that you hit a certain level of intimacy and it seems to be that's when the disorganization hits you know it's like all this fear comes up and you might even recognize my partner's a really good guy or gal they're even securely attached they're really good for me i really love being with them um but then this unexplained fear terror comes up and so that can create a lot of confusion in relationships and so pardon me what's it a fear of would you say even at the primal very young level because of the original relational patterning included a scary parent or an overly chaotic parent there's this as soon as the attachment system activates and wants to connect it it kind of remembers that it might have gotten hit or it might have had somebody cross boundaries sexually or it might have there might have been excessive yelling or maybe one parent got drunk a lot or was drugged a lot or whatever and and that is all mixed in the attachment system so when you start to connect later even though you know your partner doesn't even have any of those things or sometimes we reenact and pick a partner like our parents but but even if you have a pretty healthy partner that has to get sorted out in your own attachment system at some point um to help you fully relax into the relationship and be able to have your own autonomy and also have your own ability to connect and be intimate so i'd love to ask a little bit about how you actually work with people particularly kind of the different methods that you use in order to help them kind of disconnect from these problematic patterns build more positive ones all of that good stuff and i know that you have a really deep background in somatic work body-based work in particular you worked with peter levine for a long time you did somatic experiencing you've developed your own methodology as time has gone on like you're incredibly well-versed in this territory and i was watching a video um a second ago of you working with somebody and i would i you don't have to remember this specific video don't worry about it but you had a very funny moment with this client who was a woman and she was talking about these painful experiences that she had suffered when she was quite young with her mother and how you asked her i believe a question along the lines of like okay if your mother was here what would you want to do and the woman immediately replied i'd want to run away and then you asked her really really interesting question which is which foot would you start running with and she immediately answered i think it was her right foot you know and that kind of created a cascade into the rest of the process and the reason that i highlight this like really really tiny sliver of moment with this one person is that i think it gives real insight into what this kind of can look like so i would love it if you could speak to that kind of why you asked that question and why these body-based approaches help people deal with stuff that we feel like is up here well first of all uh trauma and early attachment getting coded into implicit memory it's they they follow the fast circuit learning which just basically skips the higher function of the brain the higher regions of the brain that that are more uh developed in a way and it goes straight from the amygdala to the reptilian brain and into implicit memory which implicit just means not conscious yet memory and uh and one of the ways to unpack implicit memory to move it to explicit which means we're aware of it right is to um either find an intervention sort of triggers that or have a person really track and be aware of their bodily sensations and their impulses to move and any emotions that come up and sometimes thoughts that come up we're just trying to take whatever the body's broadcasting as signals uh to become aware of them and very what's interesting if you're not familiar with this is that very often we're not aware of them but our body's broadcasting them anyway but we're not aware they're paying attention i mean i had a guy that i was i one intervention i use as i roll this big physio ball to where i say okay let's make this physio ball the person you care about the most in the world that you feel the safest with and they identify okay it's jim or jane or whoever and and then i say now i'm gonna wrote when you tell me it's okay i'm gonna roll this ball towards you because that's gonna trigger the attachment system right and i'm gonna do it really slowly and you just tell me to stop whenever you get any feeling inside that you want the ball to stop this person to stop you know it's that way and i did this rolled this ball one gentleman said okay roll it it's this gym let's say and he the one person he could trust in the world and i moved it like a few inches and he was in a chair i was standing up with the ball and he went like this he leaned back as far as he could and put his hands out and so i stopped the ball he didn't say stop but i stopped because that was a clear signal he was not aware he did that as in big of a movement that is he was i said because as soon as i moved the ball back he dropped his arms and moved back into normal position i said did you were you aware of what your body just did he says no what are you talking about so i said well let's try it again and this time i really want you to pay attention to what's happening in your body and he went oh my gosh i had no idea and i said what signal do you think that sends because he had never had a relationship with a woman he only had one friend in the world i said what and that's to his best friend he's doing that gesture so i said what do you think the message is that that sort of sends to people is oh it's really like stay away from me and i said yeah but he wasn't aware of any of that he had no memory of any trauma in his history because he had some pretty significant relational issues and um so that's what i mean it can be as dramatic as that or it can be just a very slight movement you know so the reason to go back to your example i love this example when you're when somebody is dealing with threat and i might say and you probably saw this and what you were watching i might say well let's put whatever was threatening and i usually take the threatening behavior not the whole parent because there's a part that they love that part of their father they love let's say the father yelled a lot or something i'll say okay well let's keep the part of the your dad that worked really well with you and you love and everything no problem with that let's just put the yelling behavior as far away from you as you need it to be and then locate it you tell me where it is and some people say i want in the corner of the room so i can watch it other people will say i want it on the edge of the ever expanding universe right as far as the way as it can possibly ever keep getting further so it doesn't matter it's just you need to locate threat when you understand how the threat response works so then i'll say okay so now i'd just like you to look at that threat and this time the threat's immobilized i'm reversing the immobilization so the client's not frozen but the threat is frozen so it can't speak it can't move it can't do anything and then i have the person imagine what is it you want to do or say and if this goes back to really early years sometimes they just can't do it and i'll say well if someone was protective with you then i'll do an exercise of installing a a protector could be i don't know it could even be something like the giant green hulk or you know the wonder wonder woman it could be silly you know kind of fanciful things or it can be like your uncle that was really protective or your dog that was really protective anything to them that boost up their ability and sometimes i have them have the protector say or do whatever they want with the person sometimes have them do it if they go to a flight response i want to run away like you mentioned the reason i ask there it is no wrong answer to this it's not like right foots better than left foot it's that you have to access your preparatory movements your rehearsal movements in the body to answer that question you have to you have to feel your body organize to run and that's what i'm trying to get to is the organizational movement that's underneath gross motor movement i don't know how people run around the room right they just feel the impulse to run and then as they're following that procedural memory that um implicit information like they'll start to feel their legs might start moving a little bit or they just start to they actually feel like they're running even though they're sitting they're not moving anywhere they're just running and then they'll say oh i'm getting really tired so yeah take a break find a rock be by a river whatever you know where do you want to run i i fill out the whole censorium so as they initiate and complete a running response or a fight response then their body moves out of threat into the completion of the threat response and they relax and then they'll naturally it's a sequence that's natural physiologically they'll move into exploratory orienting what's called which means like sometimes they'll they'll be sitting across from me and they'll their eyes will pop open and all of a sudden they're really present and all this light coming out of them right and they're in there and i go hi how are you nice to see you you know and then they start looking around and they go oh wow gosh i never saw that painting in your office before it's been there forever and i had one woman i had 100 year old pine tree out the window and she goes oh you have a lovely tree she'd been coming to me for like three months or something i said yeah we i just planted it yesterday and we're joking but the reason she could see it was she wasn't in the narrow focus of the constriction of the threat response a part of what it seems like you're doing and again i'm a non-clinician so uh let me know what you think it feels like you're moving people out of that just like you're saying that very very narrow threat response into a much wider scene of the world where from they can theoretically help themselves create a new pattern see things freshly uh respond in a different way reconceptualize what happened to them in the past whatever it might be yeah it's it's sort of like whatever you ate for breakfast yesterday you probably didn't remember but your body you trust your body to metabolize it you're not like micromanaging it you know you're not going okay i'm going to work on the toast and then i'm going to work on the eggs and i'm going to work on the orange you know you just trust your body knows how to do that your body knows how to process overwhelming life experience but it needs some help just like sometimes at thanksgiving we eat like three meals instead of one at one time you know and then we have to go for a walk because we over ate or you know we over celebrated or something if you get too much stimulus in your nervous system that's unable to process then you start getting symptoms the symptoms are actually have a job to contain the excess arousal so to reverse that process you touch into the symptom and then you you make it slow it down a little bit and you you know help certain physiological processes happen that were blocked and then it naturally releases and a person will naturally go from their threat response or their their reptilian brain or their amygdala into their prefrontal cortex and all of the sudden they'll be want and experience authentic connection with themselves and the desire to have authentic connection with another person yeah that's lovely i want to ask you about kind of some of the specifics of this because it's for starters of course it's wonderful to work with a clinician particularly a very experienced clinician like you somebody who can really help people walk through their problematic patterns get into that sense of safety which can allow them to access a new way of being like you know triple thumbs up for everybody all involved okay at the same time there are a lot of people we get a lot of uh comments questions from people who listen to the podcast who say some version of okay it's challenging for me to work with a clinician for whatever reason and we're kind of in the business of trying to help people figure out how to go through this process to the extent possible in a safe way on their own and it's all well and good to kind of tell somebody okay you move to a more spacious place you tap into the body you see things newly but a lot of people go through really challenging stuff in their life and many of these experiences that people are trying to unravel from are extremely painful you know they're very very challenging they're very traumatic and even beginning to access that material in a small way can be really hard for people um so what do you do to help resource people so they can get to that place where they can start to work with this content um is there a way that you help people kind of touch things softly or get into their body feel their body as a safe container initially before they can start working with it some of the things that are very learnable teachable and learnable are learning secure attachment skills so for instance um eye gaze right if you're traumatized or you're having a shame attack which you know we all know shame right you have a tendency to gaze avert you know that you just do not want to make eye contact it just feels way too scary you're just expecting that what you're going to see is anger or rejection or shaming or blaming or something if somebody has a strong orientation to avoidance sometimes when they're you think they're making eye contact with you they're actually looking at your chin it's a cheat if i look at your chin right now you can't tell i'm not looking at you right because eye contact often not i mean eye contact can be an issue for any attachment style but generally it is a little bit more for avoidance so we think of eye contact it's kind of a basic thing but it can be a really big deal so one of the exercises i sometimes get when a person is ready you can't do this if somebody's really dealing with a lot of shame you have to wait to process some of that before you suggest they look at you or look at another person because the shame is taking up all the room right it's not allowing it to happen in a comfortable way it's too overwhelming but one of the things i do and i think i even have a youtube on this on the internet it's um called a kind eyes exercise it's like looking out into the world and just imagining you see kind eyes you everybody can do this while they're listening if they want to uh kind eyes looking back at you and for some people that's really easy exercise and for some people they might see the face of the dalai lama or the face of a spiritual teacher or they might see their dog or a whale or they might see their best friend or their child or their partner you know whoever it is your grandmother grandfather it just to notice like out there that there's these kind eyes looking back at you that's the first part of the exercise and for me and that used to be challenging but for me now that's very heart opening i can immediately see you know people that i feel like love me you know and um uh and but the second part is can i allow that to come in can i receive that right and i've had people that could see it out there but then they notice when it starts to come back in they have like an invisible wall that blocks it right at this one client joyful little sprite of a person just beaming with enthusiasm as a body worker trauma healer person a lovely person but she said oh my gosh i just have this wall and she wasn't aware of that until we did that exercise and then as we investigated the wall she realized um what came up for her what was in that wall the wall was actually like a condensed trauma memory of her stepfather looking at her as a sort of sexually and inappropriately you know so that was just icky and so she she had this wall so we just investigated that unpack that and then she was able to let this kindness come in so as we even repair eye gaze and then she was able to like look at her partner and really be fully present in her eyes and also take in his love i mean when i was married my my husband said to me one time i love you so much but you just deflected and of course at first i was like no i don't what are you talking about i got you know kind of like pissed off and then i'm in the middle of the night i wake up and i go oh no he's right i do you know so then we talked about it the next day and i said i i don't know what to do with love i know what to do with rejection you know so i had to be really vulnerable for a long time and i made it a practice i'm just gonna stay present for his love i'm just gonna stay present for kindness i'm just as hard as it is you know and eventually it was really nice i you know became a really important thing yeah i i love what you said there just a second ago diane so i just want to like kind of flag it for people that little sentence that you have like i don't know what to do with love and i think that that's just such a great way to kind of return to some of the things that we were talking about at the very beginning of the conversation about what were the experiences or sensations that were permitted inside of your family of origin what are the experiences or sensations that were permitted by the people around you who you really like loved and cared about particularly when you were a young person and i think that it can really easily create that sensation in people of i don't know what to do with love or i don't know what to do with anger or i don't know what to do with fear or i don't know what to do with sadness you know you're like fill in the blank and i just think it's a great way to kind of simply and like a one sentence summary of just this whole territory thank you yeah i think so too i want to build on that in a certain kind of way because um it's not just i don't know what to do with love out there coming toward me it's also i don't know what to do with love inside here and me going out there yeah absolutely totally that was definitely true in my own history and much as you say further you know let's say i don't know what to do with anger coming at me or i don't know what to do with a bid for relationship coming at me let's say similarly i don't know what to do with my own anger i don't know what to do with my own hurt let's say so in effect we're talking there in part about being able to re-parent ourselves you know familiar term to you diane and um help ourselves become increasingly okay with experiencing these things within ourselves and then over time increasingly skillful about expressing them appropriately with other people including expressing love in different kinds of forms and so much can happen in the context of an adult relationship you know whether it's a really deep friendship or ideally it doesn't matter that can be a partnership or marriage or you know someone where people are really committed to bringing well-being into their life or being well as you would say um and we can really help each other you know be aware and also you know create a condition where it's okay to feel the vulnerability because usually when we're changing a pattern if it's been based on an injury it's going to be a bit uncomfortable at first you know but it was what like i think about my own experience of trying to stay present for love or or you know expressing my love more directly that was really uncomfortable at first but then it became such a source of joy so it's worth it but sometimes we need a little help to have a direction of what is it i'm what practice am i really working on you know what how do i how do i design a practice for myself in a way and so if i run through just some examples of like how you coming and goings coming and goings are really a big thing with attachment and with relationship in general so like how do you let's say if somebody's working outside the home when they come home and the other person's maybe at home how do you greet each other like it's a lot of times it happens when you've been in a relationship a long time you immediately go into tasking hey honey take out the garbage or take pick the kids up for school or what took you so long yeah why did you forget the milk of the girls why is the house such a mess exactly exactly so if you're since i had a couple that absolutely loved each other i could tell they loved each other and they was in a workshop in denmark and they were just off you know they were getting really snarky with each other and they really wanted some help with it and i said well how do you greet each other and and he said well as soon as i get to the front door i'm just like don't know what i'm going to walk into he's really tense stuff and she said well you know i've got the kids and i'm cooking dinner and i'm trying to the dog and you know all this stuff i said okay so let's just reenact that in the in the workshop and i just had i said okay this time i want you to just have a focus of as soon as i know my partner's coming i'm dropping everything if i if it's okay to do that and i'm just going to focus on them and then and then that you come together and you have this well this this um full body hug you know not like sometimes americans weak triangle hug it's really important that you belly to belly body to body hug and then you fully uh have that body to body hug and you stay in the hug until you feel each other's body regulate you hear feel each other relax and so for instance if um let's say my partner has a headache if and he mentions that then i might put my hand on i would put my hand on his head to help just soothe that instead of him putting his own hand on and maybe i have a lower back pain he would put his hand on my lower back pain so the other person is helping regulate and soothe their partner and bodies love to be with regulating other bodies let me think about in your own life right now everybody listening who do you like to be around you like to be around with somebody who can be relaxed in the relational field if you're if it's appropriate to the relationship you're comfortable physically you know it's it's a regulating energy whether it's emotional or physical and that's a major attachment attractor so sometimes when couples are getting off if you really boost their attachment signals in a secure attachment direction it really really really helps so that's just one that's coming and going and another couple's friend of mine that i love what they do is they sometimes go to bed at different times because you think about sleeping is another leaving right you're leaving each other when you go to sleep they love really really high quality chocolate so they'll buy each other these really special truffles and every night it's a different truffle and they'll put it on their pillow and they have this debriefing time where they eat the chocolate and they debrief the day and they repair any misattunements they they say oh honey i you know i know i was supposed to go with you to that thing and then this emergency happened and i couldn't go and i'm really sorry whatever they so they have all this and then one of them might go to sleep and the other one might still stay up and work a little bit and then come to bed later but they make sure they have that ritual every night and that's just an attachment that's a secure attachment skill and you could do the same thing in the morning how do you do breakfast you know do you rush off and immediately get on your computer and shut everybody else out or do you like actually connect you know and maybe make breakfast together or it's very simple but it makes a gigantic difference yeah i just really want to highlight here diane what i what i think is like living right underneath what you're saying which is just how um how delicate these patterns are how easy they are to create in particular um and maybe even more particularly how easy the the more problematic ones are to create like i think about that example that you both gave around somebody comes home from work and what's the first interaction that happens at the door and maybe even more so than that what is the feeling inside of the person as they are approaching the door what are they expecting to receive when they walk into the room and that's just a very small thing you know that's something that that's created based off of 20 30 40 little moments walking up to the door feeling some anxiety your partner responds to that anxiety in a kind of awkward way and here we are we're off to the races it doesn't really take a lot and i think back through my own life of all these little patterns that i created with other people based off of what i think were pretty objectively minor interactions where they did something a little bit funky with me maybe they just kind of weren't aware of what they were doing it could have just been a lack of of consciousness or whatever and i really internalized it as this pattern of behavior with another person that spiraled and spiraled until somebody finally like created an intervention around it like one of the ones that you're describing where you kind of move back toward connection with each other um for a lot of people that like movement toward connection can evoke a lot of emotion a lot of like painful emotion um you know sadness anger fear whatever it is as we kind of move toward the end here i'm wondering for people who are able to see that they're in some kind of a pattern maybe particularly with another person they would like to repair it but they feel that kind of emotional space as being like very uncomfortable for them what are some of the things that you do with people to help them move back into connection in that way and feel like comfortable with it to manage their emotions around it that's a great question um i'm doing a personal personally i'm actually doing a practice right now to um allow myself to maintain being in a vulnerable state and and checking my heart for open-heartedness and um and i'm sort of taking responsibility for all of my own reactivity you know so if somebody steps on my toe i'm going okay now why was that so painful so there you can you can think about usually if you have a reactivity to something sometimes it's just what's happening in the moment but often it is a double whammy or triple whammy because it ties back to something and so so sometimes i investigate for myself and i suggest people when they ask me these kinds of questions is is okay when that person let's say said something that you interpreted as rejecting or didn't include you in a party or you know you know people have different things that happen what what where what do you what story do you tell yourself about that you know because it's very it could be very different they they might have just only say that you know for whatever they might have had their own reason i had a friend recently who who excluded me a lot and i was not understanding it and then i realized that she has a very big history of pain around triangulation so she can never be in a group of three and so that meant i could never come with this other person was around so i didn't understand that so i because i always include her and everything so i was like i'm inclusive i don't have that issue as all that means it doesn't mean i'm any better just because i don't have that pain so once i understood it was for her was a sometimes like really understanding what's going on for the other person if you can uh have a conversation about it but sometimes just looking in your own process if you don't have that information is what what is this hitting in me that it's such an intense emotional reaction um and especially if you're kind of not sure what the other person meant or you know you're taking it a certain way it's a it's a it's it does require being okay with leaning into uncomfortable spaces and you want to make sure you have enough support to do that sometimes you can have a friend that explores that with you or a partner or a spouse that's willing to listen to you or kind of hold space for you and you're obviously able to reciprocate and hold space for them when things come up for them that reciprocity is also a secure attachment skill a mutuality like knowing how to have true mutuality you know in terms of supporting each other or regulating each other or you know sharing emotional vulnerability or you know um affectionate holding you know so let's let's say that a person starts to recognize that they've gotten triggered in some way or stuck or they're upset about something and what would be on their own without a therapist what would be three questions they could ask themselves in in an exploratory way they would tend to uncover and unpack um begin the process of healing and growing related to getting as we used to say back in the 70s plugged in about something that somebody else has done three questions for themselves i love that i love that i would say first of all for me sometimes i'm a little slow to really identify what i'm feeling and sometimes what you're feeling on the surface isn't the deeper feeling so i think in our culture men are conditioned to feel anger pretty easily in some cases and women are sort of subvert anger into sadness often you know so sometimes and and often with men feeling angry they're feeling angry on top but underneath it they might be feeling fear or vulnerability there's often a primary feeling and a secondary feeling and often we we feel our habitual feeling first so some the first question i would ask is okay if i sit with this sadness what else is there just if i just embrace the sadness right if i'm if i embrace the anger what else might be happening right so to kind of just be with it like welcome i think pema schroder just wrote a book called welcoming the unwelcome so welcome the experience whatever it is and see if it unpacks for you in your own you know awareness and then the other one i love is what story am i telling myself about this i think that's p a melody's insight what's the story okay this person did this i'm interpreting it as this what story am i making up about this and then i'm like into the he said she said you know how your mind can just go and and then you start making a case against the person and you know all that and you start getting into that activity i try to reign myself in when i'm running down that track but you know sometimes it takes a while and then the third question i think would be um to have sort of a competit a kindness to the pain and vulnerability that i discover in myself like what i found when my phone was excluding me this took six months for me this was not fast i was in a lot of pain and what i realized was because i wasn't raised it took a lot of unpacking and i really was looking at a blind spot for six months i was like i know there's something important here because i'm so upset but i can't see what it is so sometimes you know you do hit a blind spot i did myself and when i finally started to see it see it more clearly i was waking up with all of the self-love this experience of self-love and i thought that's the whole i've been in my family you know they were wonderful in their way but love was not exactly how i would describe the predominant experience in my family growing up so i had this big wound giant wound around self-love and and then also having my love be accepted by other people you know so um anyway all that started to unpack it took a while and i was uncomfortable and i was having dreams of being really angry which is not my normal personality i was just like all over the place okay i'm on to something this is and to actually welcome the unwelcome i like that way of thinking about it because when you're upset or in that much pain like my story you know you're onto something that's really important like i'm okay this person was a catalyst for this but i don't think they started it i think they triggered it and i have this in me and i as much as i can need to surf the wave and then of course i would fall off the surfboard and start thinking they did this and they did that and they hurt my feelings and i never want to see them again and you know i'm going to do all my stuff you know and i just get and i try to get back on track i go all right yeah okay they really aren't the problem you have to figure out what this is this is big for you and by the time i got to the other side of it i was so grateful that actually it happened because it helped me really become more connected to divine love and the love that's in generosity the love that's an appreciation the love that's in just spontaneous gratitude i mean i'm just it's such a blessing but it all started with being really bit what i felt like was a deep betrayal if i could say back to you my my quick summary my fortune cookie summary of your three questions what am i feeling deep down what is the story the familiar story that i'm telling myself here and third how can i be a friend to myself how can i give myself maybe some of what was missing when i was young and that i really believe that it will heal itself and sometimes it happens spontaneously in your own process and sometimes a friend helping you know talking to some friend about it or a spouse about it can be really helpful so just it's a beautiful way that human beings are designed to heal so what i think of you doing that for yourself and um giving yourself what what was some of what was missing if you were to imagine yourself and i'm gonna pick roughly nine years old yourself as a nine-year-old this is a question we often ask people and we think about it ourselves for us and i if you could go back in time and you know bring your wisdom and your heart to yourself as a nine-year-old girl what would you say to her i would probably say to her you're in for a rough ride because i was but you're gonna make it and it's it's actually gonna bring all sorts of wonderful outcomes eventually it's gonna be okay isn't that what we all want to hear it's gonna be okay i know it's gonna be okay you know down the road yeah this was completely lovely to do this with you today diane thanks so much for taking the time it was wonderful to talk with you i love the questions that you asked at the end and just everything that you offered everyone today um so yeah so again thank you for doing this i love being with you guys this is really a treat for me and for everyone listening so today we spoke with dr diane poole heller about what we can do to work with and repair our attachment style hopefully over time moving toward more secure forms of attachment we began the conversation with a quick overview of the four major forms of attachment and included in that why it's useful to have a sense of what your attachment style might be people use different names to refer to the different attachment styles the ones that i'm most familiar with are secure anxious avoidant and then disorganized which is sometimes also known as the fearful attachment style diane offered a great summary of this whole territory at bottom what a lot of this is about is what were the emotional experiences that were permitted or not permitted inside of your family of origin kids are big sponges and they tend to internalize the things that happen to them so if you're taught over and over again in many small ways that it's not safe to experience and express feelings of love well then you're not going to do it in adulthood if you're taught over and over again that it's inappropriate to be angry ever under any circumstances then you're going to struggle to express your anger again as an adult and this can show up as these kinds of patterns that emerge inside of our relationships and that's what we really mean by attachment style what are the patterns that you have and how do they show up for you one of the parts of this conversation that i really loved was when diane gave very specific examples from working with people about the ways in which their patterns showed up for them and then the kinds of things she did with them in order to repair those problematic patterns of behavior and she then went through a variety of practices that people can try on their own diane's approach is predominantly somatic and she explained during our conversation why that is a line that she had that i really appreciated to paraphrase it here is that your body understands how to process painful experiences but sometimes it needs a little bit of help so one of the things that we're really trying to do is to return our body to the experience of safety and from that secure base we can then go out into the world and operate more effectively with other people one principle from peter levine's work that diane alluded to is the idea that we need to complete the cycle of the things that happened to us when we were younger this doesn't mean that we need to relive our traumatic experiences but it does mean that we need to get an experience of escape and resolution around them one of the examples of this that diane gave is the idea of running away from an experience that a client had previously felt trapped by and the way that she really queued them into the fully somatic experience of this is by asking them hey which foot do you start running with and this isn't really about which foot the client starts running with it doesn't matter if it's the right foot or the left foot what matters is that they're getting into a fully embodied experience they're accessing their body and they're allowing it to complete the cycle that it wanted to complete in the moment but was unable to we then focused the end of the conversation on various ways that we can repair our attachment style through relationships she gave a really lovely example of a couple that likes to come to a resolution at the end of each day over all the little bumps and bruises that they had during that day their little practice is to put a piece of chocolate on the pillow they eat the chocolate together and they kind of talk through everything that happened during the day and we can contrast this with other patterns that couples might have that are maybe a little bit more problematic or a little bit more painful somebody's coming home at night and they start to feel anxiety before they walk in the door because they're not sure what's going to greet them there and what really struck me about this was how delicate these patterns are how easy in particular problematic ones are to form and how painful it can be to start to try to build more positive ones and what we return to over and over again in the conversation at least in my reading of it is the experience of safety allowing the body to feel fully safe allowing the mind to the extent possible to feel fully safe resting in that safety and really operating from it and allowing it to be the foundation of any new relationship that is established because when we talk about security we're really talking about safety and that's a question maybe to ask yourself do you feel safe inside of your relationships and what would it take for you to feel more safe within them so that's all for today's episode if you've been enjoying the podcast we'd really appreciate it if you would take a moment to subscribe to it through the platform of your choice where most everywhere you can find a podcast and maybe even tell a friend about it it's one of the best ways we have to reach new people also if you like the podcast maybe leave a rating and a positive review it's another great way for people to find us if you'd like to support us in other ways you can find us at patreon.com being well podcast and for the cost of just a couple cups of coffee a month you can support the show and you'll get a bunch of bonuses in return finally if you liked hearing from diane you can find a link to her website in the description of today's episode she has a number of wonderful resources there that are really dedicated to helping people repair their attachment style and overcome maybe some of those early life experiences that were particularly difficult again thanks so much for listening to being well and we'll talk with you soon

Channel: Forrest Hanson

Views: 317,215

Keywords: Mental Health, Personal Growth, Self-Help, Psychology, Forrest, Forrest Hanson, Being Well, Being Well Podcast, Rick Hanson, attachment, Attachment theory, Attachment Wounds, Diane poole heller, attachment recovery, self healing, just one thing, psychological, therapy, mindful, compassion, mindfulness, confident, confidence, resilient, calm, anxiety, anger, intimacy, intimate, forgive, forgiveness, family, meditation, trauma, rick, hanson, traumatic, trauma healing, somatic expeirencing

Id: 32JiEkRjwwg

Length: 62min 27sec (3747 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 25 2021