Podcast Summary

Podcast: Focus on the Family with Jim Daly
Episode: Best of 2025: How Love Styles Can Help You Grow Closer as a Couple (Part 2 of 2)
Date: December 31, 2025
Panel: Jim Daly (Host), John Fuller (Co-host), Mylan & Kay Yerkovich (Authors, “How We Love”), Mark & Amy Cameron (Therapists, successors of the Yerkoviches’ ministry)

Episode Overview

This “Best of 2025” episode continues exploring how different love styles, rooted in childhood experiences, affect adult relationships—especially marriage. The panel explains how recognizing your own and your spouse’s “attachment imprint,” working through conflict, and developing skills for repair and comfort can help couples move toward secure, healthy emotional connection. The conversation combines practical strategies, therapy insights, and Christian perspectives, aiming to equip couples to experience deeper vulnerability, intimacy, and healing.

Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Understanding Your Love Style/Attachment Imprint

• The HowWeLove.com quiz helps individuals identify their attachment style—common types include avoider, pleaser, vacillator, controller, and victim (03:07).
• Attachment wounds from childhood deeply affect how we interact with our partners.
  • “If you’ve ever wondered why you think and feel the way you do, especially in relationships, the love styles concept that Mylon and Kay developed can provide some great insights for you.” (Jim Daly, 01:28)
• Scoring high in more than one style isn’t negative—it indicates areas for potential growth.

2. The Essential Role of Comfort in Relationships

• Core questions: Did you receive comfort from your parents when distressed? How was that modeled? (03:34)
  • Many adult struggles stem from not having experienced adequate comfort in childhood.
• Key point: All humans need comfort during stress; learning to comfort one another creates a secure bond.
  • “One of the hallmarks of a secure home is that we know how to manage stress well.” (Kay Yerkovich, 04:06)

3. Conflict: Rupture and Repair

• Disagreements are inevitable; what matters is how couples repair afterward (05:01).
• The “comfort circle” technique is introduced as a framework to improve conflict resolution (06:02).
  • Speaker/listener roles foster empathy and prevent reactive “facts batting.”
  • “Whatever you practice, you get good at.” (Amy Cameron, 06:46)

Modeling Conflict in Front of Kids (07:22)

• Don’t hide all conflict from children—model age-appropriate repair so they learn healthy resolution.
  • “If you don’t demonstrate that, what happens is a child grows up and goes into adulthood with no skills for how to resolve conflict because in their home they didn’t see it.” (Amy Cameron, 08:06)
  • Lighthearted strategies: asking for a “do over,” apologizing in front of kids, using humor to restart (08:15).

4. Practical Ways to Comfort Each Other (09:26)

Mylan Yerkovich describes three critical methods:

1. Listening and eye contact—noticing emotional cues (“Tell me about that tear.”)
2. Physical, non-sexual touch (“Can I hold your hand?”)
3. “Holding time”—literally holding your spouse during distress, even to heal old wounds.

“It's very important for guys to learn how to have non-sexual intimacy with their spouse.”
Mylan Yerkovich, 09:59

5. The Comfort Circle as a Reparative Experience (11:31)

• Couples can heal childhood wounds by providing each other with comfort and attachment behaviors they may have missed growing up.
• The aim is to create a coherent narrative—making sense of your story and intentionally reshaping response patterns.

“The good news is research shows that you can form a secure attachment style by earning it by doing something called creating a coherent narrative.”
Mark Cameron, 12:14

6. Not About Blaming Parents (13:26)

• The work is not about blaming, but explaining, childhood impact—so you can move forward.
  • “It's about learning how to explain what happened to us, how we became a certain way so that we can move forward in emotional health.” (Mark Cameron, 14:03)
• “Wounded people, wound people”—without intention and healing, cycles repeat.

7. Identifying and Understanding Triggers (14:45)

• Triggers are current events that evoke intense past emotions.
  • For Mylan, Kay’s silence was triggering—reminding him of anxiety in his childhood home.
  • Kay found Mylan’s persistent checking-in irritating, tracing back to her own attachment wounds.
  • Explore your “when” (not just “why”): When have I felt this before? Who did I feel that with?

    “We marry each other's histories—our whole history.” (Mylan Yerkovich, 18:15)

8. Case Study: Mark and Amy (Vacillator & Pleaser dynamics) (18:20)

• Example: Amy would be eager to engage at Mark’s arrival home, craving connection, but Mark needed transition time, leading to disappointment and reactivity.

  • Vacillators get triggered by disappointments, feeling unseen or made to wait, which often comes out as complaint or criticism (20:24).

  “Really what the criticism was, was, hey, I'm hurting. But the other person perceived that as an attack.”
  Mark Cameron, 20:42

9. The Goal: Secure Connector (21:24)

• Characteristics: emotionally intelligent, self-aware, able to verbalize feelings and needs, capable of listening for understanding, and appropriately making requests.
  • “Secure connectors can describe to their family what they're going through.” (Kay Yerkovich, 23:01)
  • Example: “Give me three feelings about your day” as a practical question to foster emotional sharing.

10. Moving Deeper: Vulnerability and Intimacy (24:25)

• Many marriages function well at a surface level (the “shallow end” of the pool), but deeper intimacy requires risk, vulnerability, and openness—especially around loss and grief.

“Going into the deep end gives you a richness that we just didn't know existed until we learned to live there.”
Kay Yerkovich, 25:19

Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Comfort:
  “Comfort is really essential… for the attachment styles that we discussed, each of us struggle to manage stress. I detached, Mylan pursued, vacillators protest. And in those ways of handling stress, we don't seek comfort.”
  (Kay Yerkovich, 04:25)

• On Modeling Repair for Children:
  “I mean, what Amy, you just said a little while ago, Kay and I do it all the time. We will say, can I have a do over?... we will actually say, I got off to a bad start right there. I really, I apologize. Let me start over again.”
  (Mylan Yerkovich, 08:17)

• On Triggers:
  “The definition of a trigger is something in the present brings back an old historical feeling... and it violently slams in... It was uninvited, okay? I didn't ask that to come in. It just jammed its way into the present.”
  (Mylan Yerkovich, 14:45)

• On Secure Connection:
  “Somebody who is securely connected is emotionally intelligent. They’re in touch with their own emotions to understand what's driving their behavior, and they can make requests.”
  (Mark Cameron, 21:24)

• On Going Deeper in Marriage:
  “The first 15 years of our marriage, there was no vulnerability... Learning to comfort each other was enormous. And what we're experiencing as we age, there's more and more loss. And if you're in the shallow end, you don't know what to do with loss. Loss needs comfort.”
  (Kay Yerkovich, 24:25)

Important Timestamps

• [03:07] – HowWeLove.com quiz to identify love styles
• [04:06] – The necessity of comfort in managing stress
• [05:01] – Explaining “rupture” and “repair” in conflict
• [06:02] – The comfort circle framework
• [07:22/08:15] – Modeling conflict repair for children
• [09:26] – Three ways couples can comfort each other
• [11:31] – The comfort circle as a reparative experience
• [14:45–18:15] – Understanding and exploring triggers
• [18:20–20:42] – Mark & Amy’s real-life vacillator/pleaser example
• [21:24] – Defining secure connectors
• [24:25–25:19] – The importance of vulnerability and moving deeper in marriage

Conclusion

This episode offers a compassionate, biblically grounded roadmap for couples who want to move from reactive patterns to intentional, healing connection. Tools like “comfort circles,” learning to identify triggers, and intentionally modeling vulnerability and repair are presented as spiritually and relationally transformative. The tone is hopeful and practical, encouraging listeners not to blame their parents or their past, but to understand and heal those imprints in Christ-centered relationship.

For more:
Resources and the “How We Love” book by Mylan & Kay Yerkovich are available at the Focus on the Family website and in the episode show notes.