The Key to Successful Relationships with Dr Ann Kelley

0:04 This is Crappita Happy and I am your host, Cas Dunn. I'm a clinical and coaching psychologist. I'm mindfulness meditation teacher and of course author of the Crappita Happy books. In this show, I bring you conversations with interesting, inspiring, intelligent people who are experts in their field and who have something of value to share that will help you feel less crappy and more happy. Doctor Ann Kelly is a licensed psychologist and her partner, Sue Marriott, is a licensed clinical social worker, and together they are the co hosts of the Therapist Uncensored podcast. If you have any interest at all in improving your relationship with yourself, with your partner, with your children, with anybody in your life, then this is a must listen. Ann and Sue have written a new book which is out the end of this month.

1:04 It's called Secure, Relating Holding your own in an insecure world. And what they have done is they have taken attachment theory and explained it in the context of modern neuroscience, so, in other words, your nervous system. This is such a fresh perspective on this idea of attachment categories. It is so relatable and so incredibly relevant to each and every one of us. I think most importantly what suean Ann have aimed to do is not just to help you as an individual to create a more secure way of relating in your own world and in your own life and in your own relationships, but to create a world of individuals who are able to more securely relate. We see so much polarization, so much conflict, and if individuals were able to access the capacity to recognize what's happening within themselves and to create a more secure way of relating, then perhaps we would not see some of the problems in the world that we do today. And Kelly is not only the therapist you wish you had, she is the best friend you wish you had. You're going to love her as much as I do. I am so excited to bring you my conversation with doctor A Kelly and Kelly, such a pleasure to have you on the crap at a Heavy podcast. Thank you for being here.

2:21 I'm so excited to be here, I really am. And what we're talking about today is one of my favorite topics, which is the idea of attachment attachment relationships and how that actually relates to just ourselves and how we relate to the world and ourselves and other people. So to start with, I've talked about attachment a bit before on this podcast, but I myself have been guilty of talking about attachment in terms of categories. You know, you're an anxio, you've got an anxious attachment, you've got an avoid an attachment, and we think about it in those ways, and I think we simplify it down to these neat little categories. But of course that's not entirely accurate or helpful. And so what I would love to start with is what is a more helpful way of thinking about attachment? And you talk about secure relating as opposed to a secure attachment, could you just share with us why thinking about attachment in categories is perhaps not the most helpful, and how we can conceptualize it instead.

3:19 I love that question. I think as humans, we want to categorize, right, we want to make sense of things. So it's a really natural process to say I am this, and this is what this means. And attachment. The concept of attachment came out of research, and when we're researching people and we're trying to understand differences, we have to put you in a category in order to compare you to other individuals. So it's a natural process. But as we all know, none of us live in one category, and certainly not four boxes. Right in attachment, there's four boxes that you can be categorized in and also love.

4:00 Right now, there's part of me that really loves that social media is really caught onto attachment and you get so much information out there. The little research or distressing part of me though, is like, oh, people then will oversimplify it, yes, and then categorize themselves and everybody that I know and the partner and the exactly, and then we say, you're doing that thing right. And none of us act one way all the time. And the interesting thing is a lot of the research on adult attachment, which is different than and won't we won't get into all those boring details, but it's a different than than the childhood attachment research that we first started on, is that we also can act in different ways with different people.

4:47 Right if you have and you mentioned why we are focusing on secure relating. Secure relating is about really connecting to oneself and understanding what part part of your nervous system, what part of your protection system you're actually coming from, and then in the relationship you're in, how does that impact you? And having deep understanding, you might notice in one romantic relationship you felt confident, secure, a little ambivalent all the time, and then you're in a relationship where now your attachment system is very activated and you find yourself very preoccupied and thinking about the person and feeling a lot of insecurity. And we tend to then pathologize ourselves or the other person and think, oh, it's I'm so messed up where they are. And when you can understand kind of your nervous system and the patterns we get into, it makes so much more sense and you can have more compassion for yourself and compassion for other people.

5:52 So we my co host Sue Marriot and I have really found it much more useful to think about our attachment being on a spectrum. Yes, and the spectrum matters. It's not that we fly all over the place with each person. We generally have patterns. They're fairly predictable and there's a reason for them. But we find that to be a much more less pathologizing way to think of yourself and more accurate. And research has really really supported a lot of the recent research on attachment takes us into dimensions and not categories, and when you do that, you can have you take more time to understand what is really happening for you in the moment, as opposed to, oh, I'm preoccupied attachment, So that means I'm going to do this thing when that's not necessarily being connected to the threat, and why you're having threat in your body at the moment, and then what strategies you're using to deal with the threat.

6:51 Yes, so to break that down a little bit, you talked about your nervous system. I think even that in itself is really key because I think and we think about attachment mostly out there and we see it on social media. We think about patterns of behavior. We think about habitual ways of thinking and feeling and relating, like, oh, somebody's are the very clinging and insecure and theeds lots of reassurance or they're avoided and they shut down, they're emotionally distant, And we think about those behaviors and the surface level. But you present in your book Secure Relating how attachment is a function of biology. It's a nervous system response. And I think that in itself is probably really new news to a lot of people. So can you talk a little bit more about that, about the neurobiology that is really underpinning these attachments patterns.

7:38 And absolutely attachment comes from us as human beings, knowing we know a deep down that we need connection to survive. When we come into this world, we are not going to be able to survive unless we keep the people we love most close to us, and we have to learn. We're learning machines from the very from in you to on. We're learning machines about what keeps us safe in the particular environment and the particular system that we're born in, and we learn to communicate with those closest to us. Oftentimes it's our parents, not always, and we learn their systems, so our wiring, our nervous system actually, because it's not like we're just put into the world with a certain nervous system. We grow our nervous system from a utero on by connecting to those we love the most, and that informs us what we pay attention to, what kind of information we should take in, what kind of emotions we should express. It tells us, Oh, if I cry a lot with my mom, she tends to get so overwhelmed and anxious. It's a bad idea. And as I notice I cry too much, I lose connection and that feels really scary, and it sends information to keep my mom close. I'm going to shut down parts of my nervous system, my response the way I take an information and say tears are not so safe, I'm going to cut it off. And we really do actually have ways

9:10 and studies on the brain and information processing that if you had learned that emotions are actually threatening, that you will take in less emotional information, you will attend to it less. And if you start to feel emotions in somebody else or yourself, you have an internal threat response to it that you don't know that's not conscious. And so that's when we talk about, let's see dismissing attachment. If you've developed this idea that emotions are scary, they're not safe, they push people away, I get shamed, I'm seen as weak. I'm like, I'm not going to do that. Forget that, and we kind of shut that system down, and it really impacts our nervous system and how we relate in all relationships that are important to us as we grow older.

9:57 Yeah, yeah, yeah, So that's interesting too, just when we think about our threat response that what is the threat is the threat to the connection because we are fundamentally wide to connect and anything that might impact that ability to connect when we're very small and we don't even have words to describe it, we learn to modulate or you know, kind of modify our emotional response to preserve the connection. So you also talk a lot about this connection and these protection systems again neuro biologically and conceptualizing attachment patterns attachment styles. I know we shouldn't, we're getting out of categories, but those attachment kind of patterns that we go into as being driven from our other a connection or our protection system.

10:53 Right right, because we're both what you said, we're going to want to connect, but our nervous system is all set up to protect us first and to say, like so it's assessing if I need to protect myself, I need to connect, And that's how they're related, right, And so if I need to connect to you and I want to connect to you and my emotions overwhelm you, then my protection system goes up and we don't even know it, and our body activates in these really automatic ways to be able to stay connected to you. And we learn that in partnerships, we learn that as parents, as children, and so it's a lot of it's very important to start understanding how your particular nervous system develops over time and how it wires and how it understands emotions, and to start recognizing what makes you feel threatened and in what ways when you do feel threatened, how you act out. You mentioned, you know, we are getting away from categories, right, but that doesn't mean that we don't really want to understand through the idea of these categories, which strategies we've learned most because most of us have learned a particular way that's worked for us. Yes, right, And so we use colors as a way to kind of do pathologize it. So we talk about the continuums.

12:14 If you have learned, let's say, in another way, we've learned, Okay, my mom is there a lot for me, but she's really inconsistent, maybe she has a substance abuse problem, or she's anxious herself, And so I get a lot of feelings of connection, but I lose it a lot too, right, Like she's there, she's not there, or he's there, my father's there, not there. So what happens is I will learn my nervous system learns I need to watch real closely. I need to watch for information that the person I care about's there. And I need to also activate my emotions a lot more. I have to act. So that's where we fall in. The more preoccupied where people talk about.

12:54 We call that red means our whole nervous system is more heightenedly aware. We start to be preoccupied with any signs of loss or disappointment, or somebody coming close to you but you can't quite trust are they going to stay? So what happens is your whole nervous system actually stays on what we call more of a hyper arousal. So it really does effect when we're talking about these categories, what we're really talking about is how your nervous system responds to relationships in anything that could bring you closer to connection or throw you in protection because you think you're going to lose it. Does that make. Sense, Yeah, it makes perfect sense. I think listeners will be able to understand that as well. And so what happens then, and this is a really interesting thing about neurobiology in the nervous system, and what we're sort of understanding now in the world of psychology and neuroscience is all this stuff about how our nervous system responds to situations that we might not even be consciously aware of.

13:55 But then of course our brain comes in and overlays a story and has all sorts of reasons why we are behaving the way we are, or we think the way we do, or we're doing the things that we do. And I feel like in my experience, I don't know if it's different for you, And but with such cerebral creatures, with such analytical, intellectual kind of beings, we like to think everything through and have a logical, rational reason for everything. And I just this idea of actually relating to your body and your nervous system. It's kind of new for a lot of people, right, yes, but very cut off. It took me a long time myself to actually be able to know what was going on in my body and what was I feeling. I was very neck up kind of a person for a long time. So that's a different I think that's just important for people to understand because we go straight into our thinking mind and we can have all sorts of explanations about why we think or feel the way that we do. But it's important to understand, right that sometimes that's just our brain making a story. Yes, I love how you sure right to explain what's happening in our buddy, which we're not actually really aware of.

15:07 I love. That's one reason why I think it's so important to really dive deep into what you understand about your body, because we do. We make up stories. You know. We used to think like if, like if I shot off a loud cannon behind you right now, if I was able to do that and you started running, you would think, oh, I got scared, so I ran. But the truth is research shows your body instinctually felt that as threat, and you ran, and then you told the story that you were scared. Yes, and so we're right. We make up all these stories about what we're feeling and what's going on, but we don't even touch of what we're feeling, but we feel that. I think that's what's so important is we feel threat, but we don't it's oftentimes not even in our awareness, but we feel something and then guess what our partner or our child or somebody around us, the person of the opposite political belief is right there. And so now we're gonna tell the story. I'm feeling this because you're doing that. Yes, I feel this because you do that. And if and then we think the answers, if you would quit doing that, I would quit feeling.

16:17 This, and it I'll be fine, and well, I'll be fine. The answer is so simple. And what's so painful about that is we also do that to ourselves. I know better. How often do you tell yourself I know better than to do AB and C. I know this time when I start to fight with my husband or wife, I know, I start to raise my voice and I get dead A da da. And this time I'm gonna go talk about this topic that we've talked about a thousand times, and we fight every time. But this time, because I'm determined, I'm gonna do it differently. I'm gonna start this conversation and lo and behold, by the end of it, we're in the exact same fight. And a lot of times it's because we're not really actually attuned to the threat that's in our body and what's making us, what that threat is doing to us, and how we come across and how we send signs of threat because we're so focused on the story outside. I was mistreated, and so we'll start the story with something that completely threatens the other person. I see this a lot in couples and somebody that may have a history where they've had to really really watch their environment. They tend to be what we in a category called preoccupied or anxiously attached, sometimes embivalent, and so they've learned I've got to watch for any signs of disappointment, and I need to correct it really fast because I'm feeling this threat in my body, and the threat is somebody's gonna leave me. I can't count on you. And if your body feels that, guess what

17:47 you're going to look for. And research would really show that when your body has developed in a more upregulating, preoccupied way, you do take in more information of the of the emotions around you, and so you feel more disappointment, and so you're going to point to you know, you let me down because you didn't text me all day long and you know how much. And so what happens is is that you feel the threat in your body of disappointment and loss and hurt, but you can't really name that. So you tend to complain and then you make accusations. If you would have done this, I wouldn't feel that threat. And so as we get more in tune to oh, this threatens my body, and this is how I can tell I'm threatened. And why we talk about secure relating is you can't just change your body.

18:37 You can't say you know what, I'm not going to get activated anymore, if only if only I know the story. Now, I've learned about attachment and i know that's my attachment style and I'm just not going to do that. It doesn't work because our body activates. But if you can retell that story. I'm feeling this pressure to walk in there and tell my husband how much he disappointed me, and I can't stop myself because I'm going to feel better once I do right. And then you walk in and you accuse somebody you've let me down. It's not going to get what you need, which is the connection. And that's what's important. You need to know that they care and that they love you, and that they didn't actually call it right you or do whatever it is that you feel the complaint about. It has also something to do with their style of relating. You have to remind yourself they exist, because when you're more so secure, relating is not about feeling secure. It's about being aware of yourself, about being aware of your own threats, finding your own grounded sense in the moment. So we use the spectrum both of attachment but also in the moment.

19:47 What state are you in? Oh, I'm in that red I can feel it because I feel my pressure to walk in. I feel the pressure to stump up the stairs because my child just went up there and slammed the door, right, and so now I am compelled to run up that stairs, and of course I should, because he's disrespecting me. Right. But if you find a secure way and you go this is threatening to me. Let me find my secure self in this moment, move to what we call the green more secure stuff, and then it's going to be okay. And we have you know, it's important to develop strategies to be able to do that. Then when you walk in and say you disappointed me, you're not saying you screwed up. You're saying I find myself feeling a B or C. Can you talk to me about this? And now you haven't sent the whole threat message. What happens with couples so often or parenting is we don't even realize that we are sending through how we neurologically relate to each other. We're always connecting and we're always sending, like we call it neurowifi communication.

20:46 And if somebody maybe has an attachment style that they say, I got to shut down emotions, motions are not good. Right underneath that, there's a lot of shame about having motions. And often time somebody in a more dismissing kind of bluestyle also is like really activated by thinking they let somebody down, right, and so they look for signs of letting somebody down. So when the wife runs in and says you let me down, their protection system goes up, not their connection, and now they're defending themselves. And so if he or she can understand, oh, my wife is activated instead of this is about me, and they can understand, we can have so much deeper compassion because we can feel the threat in our own body. That was kind of a long answer, isn't it.

21:32 No? It was really good. That was such a good answer. I think that's so well explained. So I what I'm hearing is that this you know, all of this is going to really start from cultivating some self awareness, being able to you a big fan of mindfulness, and being able to just tune in to our own experience in the moment. But I want to go a little bit deeper and into this color thing. Right, So the modern attached regulation spectrum, I believe is what you have called it. And I have talked on this podcast in the past. So if somebody's listening and hasn't heard this or isn't aware of it, I've talked a bit about the window of tolerance in the past and this idea of the zone of optimal arousal and hyper and hypo, and so it sounds like this is it's kind of overlaying this window of tolerance model, isn't it, onto this what's happening in our attachment system? First of all, I really think that's just brilliant and so relevant. And so can we talk about the colors. You talked about red being going up into hyper arousal or that anxious sort of highly angry maybe activated, highly activated response, and then you talked about blue going down into hypo, right, So this is more the cut off withdrawn, dismissive kind of response, and in the green is where we can relate securely, when we can feel regulated and calm and centered, grounded in ourselves, in our body, and be able to respond with a little bit more awareness and just calm, mindful way. I've

23:07 got that right. Excellent, Yeah, tick for me, Tick for me. I've understood that perfectly. So can we talk about because what you do talk about in your book, and I love this, it's this idea that not that you are dismissive or you're preoccupied, but. Maybe you lean towards blue, or maybe you lean towards red, and having this self awareness, having this understanding of where you tend to go, you know, what tends. To activate you and where you go. I think that's so useful and so relevant. Can you talk a little bit about that, about what it means? And then I guess you know, the second part of that is and what are some things that people can do once they've noticed that, to be able to bring them back into a state in that green zone where they are able to relate more effectively.

24:00 Well, you did such a good job describing it. Let me just talk mint that. But that was really lovely and so exciting that you that it came clear enough to you because. That's oh, I've just like using that. I'm teaching that to everybody I know. I love that. That's just perfect. That means so much. Well. Yes, the reason that we chose the color colors again is to also colors we represent. We can see colors emotionally, right, we can feel them emotionally. And again this is based on early early learning, right. And by the way, it's also really important, and we talked about in the book. Our early learning comes not just from the relationship we have with our parents. It comes from the systems we were raised in. If we were raised in a very threatening system or a system that threatens our race, you know it's going to impact through epigenetics. It's going to come down. And what gets activated through our parents and our own is are we start with already a groundwork of how to keep yourself safe based on your history. And again, so how do you keep yourself safe and connected in a world and how the world treats you? And so generally our nervous system does work in kind of two directions to keep us safe. Do we run and flee because we can see the thread and we need to run or do we go more into sympathetic high arousal states. And so that's why we called that red because we can think

25:31 about it being hot, and yet our activation just we're not on and off. We don't just have an on and off switch. Right, I'm sitting here and I'm talking to you, and and we call the secure state green because we think of green as flow. It means we've stopped it maybe a light if you think of a light, and now green is going and we can flow. We can feel kind of confident that nobody's going to hopefully run the red light. You know that we can keep going. It's a flow state. And when we're in a flow state in the middle of the spectrum, we know we're there and we all get there. Fortunately, most of us can spend more time in that, and that means that we can find curiosity. It means that we feel close to ourselves and other people, right, and that it doesn't mean that we're not activated. It just means we feel connected. Still.

26:21 We can recognize it. If we start to feel threat, our body starts to get activated. We start to become more vigilant. We see the surroundings, and so we go red, which means we activate up. And again we don't go from zero to one hundred. We might go from a little red and a little you know, get a little bit different colors. And some of us, based on our history, live more in one color than the next. Right, So some of us, if we've had a lot of trauma, we might be staying in a really hyper state of arousal or a really low state of cutoff. And so the other direction is the blue, and we call blue because we think of it as cooler, a little colder, right, And so some of us kind of live a little bit more disconnected, you know, more in the head not the body, and we become aware of a body when we get really activated, but otherwise we can kind of be cool, and that's more of a parasympathetic kind of drop down down, regulating kind of way. And so the left of the continuum is blue. But again, what we love to ask people to think about is what are your strategies when you get upset in a relationship and where do you live? Because they're different things. Some of us live where we can feel the value of relationships and we're feeling comfortable with our desire to connect to other people and need other people. Some of us have been brought up to need other people as weak, ridiculous.

27:47 Being emotional is you know something that's to be degraded. And so we might actually live really far in the blue and not know it, because oftentimes the problem is if we live really far in the blue, we can think we feel really secure. So being in the green does not mean you feel secure, because sometimes if you're way over than blue, you feel so secure you kind of know better than anybody, and in fact you don't really need anybody because you're so independent, right, But to recognize that that might be if you look at your patterns in the world. Do you reach out when you're upset? Do you call a friend? Do you feel comfortable crying? Do you feel comfortable having your needs for other people that feel safe? And if the answer to that is no, way, you might realize that you kind of spend more time and live way far in the blue and you asked about strategies, and that would be if you can recognize actually feeling secure and thinking I don't need anybody is actually a sign. This is sometimes really hard for people in my office. It's actually a sign of insecurity. Yeah right, it's not if we think about attachment security. Yes, because we do need people. And the truth is your body knows better. Your body knows you need people even if your mind has told you told you that you don't.

29:05 So that's why if you live really far in the blue, you might have heart trouble. Yeah right. You know men often have been socialized in a direction to live more in the blue. Yeah, we will have heart attacks earlier, things like that, because you can be lonely but not feel lonely. You don't feel the experience of lonely because you've cut that need for other people off. But your body knows you need it, so your body is staying. We talked about that protection system. Your body's stained in more of an alarm state, but you don't even know it because you cut your awareness off to it. Yeah. That's scary, isn't it. It can be. Yeah, it's so true though. And when you were saying do I feel comfortable expressing emotions? I think it's one of those questions also, like how comfortable are you with a of the people, like being in the presence of all the people's emotions, because that can be a sign as well, kind of like just don't bring that to me, shut it down, reacting you being ridiculous.

30:01 That's so true way to put it. Yeah, I often see interesting when I see couples. It's not uncommon for couples to get together, and whether somebody's kind of already in the red and blue stage or they've kind of through through connection, we might push ourselves further and further there, right, And oftentimes it can be somebody that's living in the red is over sensitive mm hmm, right, overcritical, over sensitive, and somebody that lives more in the blue thinks they're ridiculous and things like that, and like if they would just be happy and quit complaining, our life would be so much better. It's just really it's the complaining that's the problem. It's it's not it's not my need for connection.

30:45 I don't need anything. I'm perfectly happy, And yet you have the spouse over there going we are not connected at all. That's a tricky one, isn't that? Like? Because how without port I mean, how do they make sense of that? How do they figure out who's right in that when actually both of them are probably you know, if one's up in the red, and one's up in the blue and down in the blue, and neither of them are in the green. How do they resolve that? You know? This is how soon I ended up developing our framework, honestly is sitting with individuals in those situations and wanting to help them understand the science of human relating and to have those light bulbs go on without being about their particular patterns and stuck problems. And honestly, those that kind of live more in the blue often like logic and science, that's the information that feels comfortable.

31:44 So you can come to them and say, let me help you understand the science behind this disconnected state that you're in, and you take the shame out of it, like this is your body. But then I think through deep compassion and understanding, when people start recognizing that these interactions between them is actually a desire to be close and connected. It's not a desire to be criticized or pushed away. Right, And so like the individual that is overwhelmed by emotions, they don't even recognize it an interesting way to help somebody in the blue recognize that they're actually activated by the idea of intimacy and threat because sometimes they're like, I'm fine. I would be so intimate with her or him if they would just quit complaining.

32:27 And I can say, well, are they complaining right this second, and how are you feeling? Do me a favor, turn around and look her directly in the eyes and tell me how you feel. And it's not uncommon for somebody really far in the blue will look at me. Their eyes get huge and like, what are you talking about? I don't need like it's ridiculous, I don't need to do this. This is just wo wo right, I said, no, we're actually talking about science here. I want you to pay attention. Do you feel threat? Now, go and just look her directly in the eyes and see what it feels. And they can feel the desire to run out of the room sometimes, And then I can compassionately say that, isn't you not loving her? Is it? He goes No, I said, it's really scary for you, and what you really want is to be able to have closeness. And so what I'm saying is, I think as we depathologize it, if we take the shame out of that and we make it, we help somebody understand it, that is a really a natural way of being based on their history. That's when that person gets more interested in their own history. If I walked in with that same person and said, let's talk about your childhood, tell me all the hurts you've had, You're not going to keep that person in the therapy chair very often. But when you bring the science to them and you start drawing these pictures, and that's how we developed. We started drawing these pictures and showing when you do this, when you in the middle of a fight, you walk out and don't tell your wife or your husband that you're coming back. What do they do? Right? They're texting and calling and you see this dynamic. But when you try to help them understand, all they're trained to do is

33:59 not reject, to try to calm their body down, and you can't. Those emotions are too much for you. And that's understandable. And then you can talk in a way where they can realize, oh, no, I really do want to come back. I just can't tolerate those hard emotions. Then they start, honestly, guess they start getting you've probably seen it yourself. They start getting really curious about their own fear of it and their own desire for it. Oftentimes in couples, I often need to start with somebody a little bit more carefully that's more in the blue than red, because it's often the person that lives in a more preccupied state that's brought the person into couple's therapy because they're smart enough to see the distress and to say, you know, her asking you to come or him asking you to come, is their desire to be close to you. It's not their desire to disconnect. And their partner will say yes. And so now we're appealing to the desire for connection, and we're moving away from criticizing and shame and blame, and now people can have compassion.

34:56 And what's so beautiful too, is when that starts happening and then the person that's been so disconnected gets more connected to themselves. They see their partner like you notice as you're talking about that, do you see what she's doing? And her whole body's warmed up. And so what we're becoming more aware of is trying to help them understand their own threat response in the moment and to become more caring of it and compassionate and desirous and just teaching somebody if you would just write before you close the door, say I'll be back watch them. What would that be like? You know, And these simple things that you can do. And what we talk about is trying to warm your system up if you're in the blue state, and trying to cool your system off if you're in the red. And that's what secure relating is about. It's about learning, and we talk a lot about specific strategies to learn how to bring that warmth in or cool those systems in so that the ultimate goal is connection.

35:55 And we often find I often find as couple start learning this, they a sense of humor around it and they quit going into those stories you were talking about. Yeah, yeah, yeah, you know. She's always criticizing me and he's always withdrawing, and they start telling new stories. Yeah. It's so helpful. As I'm listening to your talk, Adam, I'm thinking that this is not just intimate partner relationships. This is it right, So this is going to play out across with our friends and in the workplace, in the family. So it's really helpful whether you're in a relationship or not, to develop some understanding of what these kinds of patterns are or how your nervous system responds absolutely.

36:38 In fact, I think what's so important is that secure relating is about relating to yourself first and then any primary person close to you, whether it's your child, your boss, and it's about being able. If you're aware of your own system and you learn to relate to yourself and to other people and to send this idea that you're a safe person and communicate security, it immediately impacts the nervous system of everybody around you. Right. We had a friend who interviewed on the podcast. It was wonderful. She said that she realized she kind of lived more in the blue and she has had a teenage daughter at the time, and she realized when she came in from work she was super practical and she noticed a connection and she had really thought about warming up. We talk about warm up your system before you walk in. It's been five minutes before you go in there, and just start thinking about each person and warming them up, right, And so she walked in and instead of just kind of being in her own self, she expressed joy when she saw her child. She lit up and said, oh my, and she she said she could not believe it. She almost cried about how her daughter responded differently. Right, so instead of interpreting her daughter as just a typical adolescent who doesn't care whether she's home, she lit up and when she walked in and said, I'm so happy to see you. She said, your daughter first looked at or like she had three heads, but then but then really warmed up, and it really impacted that relationship.

38:08 Yeah, it's so true, and I think anybody listening can probably bring to mind. There are just people you have in your life who feel safe, yes to be around, and it's nice to think about. You know, we could all be more of that kind of person. Not just good for ourselves, but it's good for everybody around us to be that person who is kind of safe to be around. And you could be that person today a little bit more. Yeah, that's what it's like, trying the idea of if I've lived in a very red state most of my life, thinking all of a sudden, I've got to work really hard to have a secure attachment. That's a long road, but to say today I can engage in a more secure related way, and over time that actually does what we call that does move your nervous system. Towards the more calm because as you do it, guess what, people start responding to you better. Mm hmmm. And as they respond to your better, you go, oh wait, they do care about me. And so it's this interaction thing that can make so much of a difference. If you respond to your boss at work is really harsh in a different way with curiosity and more of a secure, connected, grounded self instead of a reactionary self, then you literally do have more empowerment in that relationship.

39:23 Yeah, I'm just wondering, and before we before you go, are you able to suggest because I know that people are listening right now and going, oh, that's my un blue like they're already categorizing. Them, are their partner? Yeah exactly, Oh god, that's my up in the road all the time. Are you able to share just a few ideas obviously where you know the secure relating I'm recommending it to every single person I know. I'll probably give out copies. But can you share with people some ideas for when you talk about warming up your system, like what does that look like? What are things people can do? Or if you kind of run a bit hot, if you lean red, like what are some really practical things that people can do just once they're aware of that, to cool that down a bit on a more just a regular basis.

40:10 Oh, such a great question. One of the things is to really develop a deeper insight about the activation your body in a non shaming way. I cannot stress that enough, in a compassionate way. Quit judging yourself. And honestly, what often happens is we either judge ourselves or we judge the other person. And so deep self compassion is one place to start. I do this for a very good reason. And by the way, you learned your strategies are very healthy. When we learn these strategies, we learn it because we want to be in our environment and the best way possible. So it's very smart. Our body learned to be either highly red or highly blue, really brilliant, right, yes, yeah, then we got to say, well, wait, do I need this in this relationship at this time. So if you're read some of the suggestions, what happens when we're activated in the red place? We tend to think this moment is going to last forever, So our body feels panicked.

41:04 Right if our child is stomped up the stairs, we react in that high activation state. Remember when we're hyper aroused, that's when the tiger's chasing us, right, So we have to run, so we think we have to act. We feel that pressure. So if you're able to go, wait, I don't have to act. Let me find my secure self. Right. So that's why we liked in the moment where am I on the spectrum like we like it to help people visualize if I want to run up those stairs, I'm pretty far out. So one of the things we suggest there is using your imagination. We have so many suggestions about how to use your imagination because our mind doesn't know the difference most of the time when we're using our imagination between the moment and what we're conjuring up in our mind. So we encourage people in the highly read moment, whether you live there or you're in that moment, to imagine. Depending on the situation, imagine thirty minutes later, or if it's a fight with a predictable fight with your spouse, instead of in the moment, I've got to work this out. It's imagine yourself two days from now, or again, your child stopped, but imagine two hours later she's asking you to share whatever it is you're eating. So if you can imagine the connection happening, but it happens, it's not the fight, it's not the rupture.

42:19 It's the need for repair. And so if we stomp up the stairs, they're not going to be in a place to repair, neither of you. So if you think I can imagine a future time having a good conversation about this, and I let myself go there, what I'm communicating to my body, Remember we're all talking to our nervous system is, oh wait, if I can imagine a future I think I could be okay, right, because if I'm highly activated, it's the threat. Oh my god. If you're in the blue. One suggestion is sometimes people in the blue go to work and they forget anybody else exists. They can be very productive, right like, because you kind of disconnect from your attachment system. Sometimes we suggest bringing pictures of the spouse, right of the family, or when you're going home, sitting in the moment and go, I wonder what whomever was in the house's day has been like.

43:11 Because what happens when we're in the blue is we get very caught up in ourselves. So you imagine the connection Another way to do it is imagine if this person that you think is so needy or whatever, imagine they disappeared on you. Not in the moment, because when you're fighting, you might want them to disappear, but if you imagine them, then you may connect to your desire for them and your need for them. And how healthy that is. Yeah, that's really useful. I remember learning once or reading ones about particularly with that the blue and the kind of a little bit more. I don't need anybody. And in relation to this threat response that we have, you know that we're either getting threatened by too much closeness or we're getting threatened by too much distance. And if we get if we're threatened by too much close business, then being away or as you say, like imagining losing them can just be enough to for the threat to disappear and for you to remember. Does that make sense?

44:11 Oh no, that's so true. It's like all of a sudden, yes, it's like, wait, I don't want to lose them. Yeah, no, no, no, yeah exactly. So then it reminds you, actually, I do need that person, because when you when they're either physically away or there, you imagine them not being there. Suddenly that threat response is not present anymore either. Right, you're not feeling like you don't feel like, oh my gosh, I'm going to get engulfed. Yeah. Yeah. One of the ways, one of the signs of living in the blue too much is that you fear the loss of self. If I get too close to somebody, I'm gonna lose my independence. So if I get too close, I'll lose my personality, I lose my charisma, I lose myself, right, because that's kind of what happened in your life when you were younger, and so there is a real fear of closeness because you fear of your own identity. So being able to remind yourself that to feel secure and to be in a secure place, we have to know that having ourselves and having other people is where the full security lies. Independence isn't Independence is a sign of disconnection.

45:17 It's not actually a sign. It's not a sign to admire in yourself, right exactly. I think that's such an important point that you made before, and I want to just highlight it that just because you feel like you don't need somebody doesn't mean that you don't need somebody. Like you're biologically wide for connection, and what is happening. I think this is important for people to understand. What's actually happened is that you have shut down your innate biological need for connection because at some point you've learned that that's not safe. And so what you said before about the flow on potential negative consequences even for your physical health, I think that's just so important. So I wanted to just reinforce that.

46:01 I'm so glad you did, and we want to just make one point because I really loved when you asked that this isn't just about relationships, it's about all primary people. Our last chapter of book is also focused on community as a whole time. And right now, you know, what we really want to stress is that when we are in a threat response, whether it's with our child, our partner, we really are in our most activated, worse selves. And when we're in our worst selves, our brain immediately goes to black and white thinking. It goes to fear, it goes to defense, and it goes to blame. And right now, we're being challenged in the world, in most parts of the world to feel a lot of threat and threats all around us. And so when we're in threat. We have to think we're right and others are wrong. Right, we have to try to put things in a more black and white way. We lose the nuance of being able to listen and hear, and honestly, that can get used against us, sometimes intentionally. Right, if I can get you in fear, you quit being your more secure self and you're more activated. And so it's really an important time for all of us to really focus on how do we find our most secure, grounded wise self. How much information do we take in that we're not then just overloading our nervous system and sending ourselves off to the ends of the spectrum. We need information, it's important.

47:31 But if we don't have curiosity, we can't connect. We can't talk to this favorite or least favorite person about something that they believe it's different than us. And we can feel our whole system activating and all we want to do is shake our fist or run. You know that that's us being activated, it's not. We have to quit telling the narrative that it's out there. So really want to stress that that's part of our goal in writing this book is not only to help us as individuals, and help us in all of our primary relationship. But I think as as a as a world connected culture, we need each other and we have to really connect to the need for one another. And we have to find our own secure grounding self, which isn't thinking we know better than anybody else or do you know what I'm saying, and that we find connection. It's so hard though, it is, isn't it.

48:24 Oh? Yeah, because I really feel like I'm right and. So hasn't done. It's I'm like grounded and balanced enough, right mind and emotionally and self aware and and but all you people. It's so true, and especially if it's hitting your morals right, like right, this is threading and how can you believe that? And the truth is, you know so wonders. You don't have to even disconnect from being right. It's like the beautiful world. And yes, like I. Really hold strongly to this and you can you tell me? And when you can really connect to what it is it's important and what they're saying, it's really funny. A lot of times, I don't think we're as disconnected as we think. I think you're right from our beliefs. It's just that we have tag things that make us believe that the other person's evil. And I think when we start actually getting underneath, and that's a sign of being in the green, is that you have curiosity, Like if you only think you're right and I'm me too, boy, I can live over there in the hyperactivated red when I get pissed off about something and you can't come and say, let's have a calm conversation because I'm like, yeah, But if I go, okay, wait, if I'm going to find my most secure self in this conversation, I have to find curiosity instead of be waiting to give my point. Adaly, that's a sign of activation, and I recognize it in myself.

49:44 I'm like, okay, I'm really having a hard time listening because I'm just waiting for them to quit talking so that I can tell them how they're wrong. Exactly exactly. I had a similar conversation with Sue Johnson. I think I had to cut it because the conversation went too long, but we had this exact conversation. Actually, in the world of social media, and everybody's got an opinion and we're just everybody's in their silos, in their echo chambers, and it is hard. But you're so right. If we actually get underneath that, and if we are able to bring more curiosity, we have more in common, then there is more that connects us than separates us. That is a fact that is so true, It really is. So I think it's a really important point. I'm glad that you mentioned that. It's a really good point to remember.

50:26 And I loved your book. I love talking to you. Thank you so much. Oh, I so enjoyed it. And you've mentioned that most of my audiences in Australia, and you mentioned you've got a lot of listeners in Australia, So if you are not already on the Therapist's Uncensored podcast, yes, then my listeners should definitely hop over and subscribe to that one as well. And where else can they find out about about you and Sue? Yeah, Therapist AND's Censored. We have a website. If you go to Therapist un Censored, our website will pop up and it will have more information about our book, about our podcast. We have a conference coming up. If somebody's a commission and is interested in some of the work that we're talking about, we're doing a conference in May.

51:10 The book comes out April thirtieth b we have a conference. This may so amazing. I'll put all of the links in the show notes. Thank you so much and for your time. It's been a pleasure. I so enjoyed it. If you enjoy this episode, please share it with a friend. Obviously, leave us a rating and review wherever you listen, and if you're not subscribed, just hit that little plus button to make sure that you never miss an episode. Come over, connect with me on Instagram, at caston Underscore XO, or at Crappy to Happy Pod, or email me hello at Kaston dot com. Thank you so much for being here. I cannot wait to catch you next week for another episode of Crappy to Habby