← Rena Malik, MD Podcast
Rena Malik, MD Podcast
Moment: The Real Reason You Repeat the Same Relationships (It’s Not Bad Luck)
00:15:58
In this episode, Dr. Rena Malik talks with Jessica Baum about the importance of healing attachment wounds and emotional trauma through relationships. They discuss how past experiences shape adult patterns—including sexual health—and share practical advice for finding supportive spaces to foster genuine growth.
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- [00:00]
A
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B
Sort of like people trying to figure out a shortcut, right? They might be like, oh, I want to go on a retreat and take a psychedelic and really get one with my inner self and have this like major, I don't know, rebirth, whatever they want to say, right? But is there any value to something like that?
- [01:17]
C
Absolutely. I don't personally work with psychedelics. If you understand nervous system to nervous system healing, you don't need a psychedelic because you will regress in true safety. However, psychedelics can speed up the process and get you in touch with things, but they don't get you out of the work. And if not integrated and worked with, they can become like redundant. And you're not really healing, you're just going from one experience to the next. So like, yes, but I would say do them and I would do a lot of integration work after and there's a big space for them and I don't specialize in that, but I am not opposed to that. But it's never a quick fix. And I remember one of your questions. It's like in order to move something out of our body, we have to re experience it and receive what we didn't get at the original time of the wound. So if we were deeply abandoned early on and we regress, we need a nervous system to hold us. If we were shamed as a kid, we need a nervous system to accept us, right? So we have to heal these earlier experiences with disconfirming experiences in order to change our system's understanding of what to expect.
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B
So do you have to re. Experience it? Like, can you just work on healing?
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C
I come from the line that you're going to re. Experience lives in your body. If you're not, if you're sitting there saying, I don't want to experience it, it's playing in your life in so many more ways under the surface right now. Like, if you slow down right now and you tap in, those wounds are making choices for you. So you're gonna have to visit them in order to build a container, a window of tolerance for them, to understand them and to truly integrate them. So I think avoidance is a beautiful protector, but yes, I think in enough safety, your system will have its own inherent wisdom and you will meet them again and hopefully they will get what they didn't receive at the original time of the wound.
- [03:15]
B
Yeah, this seems, this seems heavy though. It seems really heavy. And I, I mean, I think it's, it's important and you have to. Right. Because as you said, like, it will just replay itself over and over again. But I feel like talking to many, many men, like, they really are skeptical and they really like need a push to understand like, how important this is. Because oftentimes they'll be like, well, I don't, like, I don't want to live in the past. I want to move forward as they want to fix this. And you know, reliving this isn't helping me in any ways.
- [03:44]
C
Yeah, I mean, if you're listening, you're reliving it anyway.
- [03:47]
B
Yeah.
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C
I was having dinner with a good friend recently, him and his wife, and he's like, I'm in a very well successful guy. He's done a lot of his work. He's like, I'm gonna fly to la. I'm gonna have a hypnotist get rid of this part of me. And I'm like, good luck with that. I'm like, so from the interpersonal neurobiology, we actually have to meet this part of you that you never want to be around. Because the fear of that part of you actually manifests situations and things. And you're kind of like repeating these patterns and things. It feels like you want a shortcut. But the truth is I don't think there is a shortcut. But I think that when, and I experienced this with men and women when they're in a really healing dynamic, an anchoring dynamic, and they start to do the work and it can, it can get really intense. But after Like a little bit. They're like, it is really intense, Intense. But my light, my inner world is shifting. I have more space in me. Things are coming to me. I'm living more fully, I feel a little bit freer. And then I'm like hanging on for dear life. And I go in and out of like kind of this healing process. But like once you get it going enough, you're kind of like, oh, like some real shifts are happening. And then you, you really need to trust your embodies inherent wisdom. Like for me, I mean, I've been working with a phenomenal therapist and I share about it in safe. And it's been like four and a half years and I'm like always healing. Right. But I went through a period there that was like white knuckling it a little. And I met like some really younger parts. And I get it, if you're listening, you're like, f. No, but it was that or repeat these patterns that like.
- [05:26]
B
Don'T serve you anymore.
- [05:27]
C
Anymore, don't serve me, almost kill me, you know, they literally, you know. So I was like, and I will have to walk the walk at some point. I mean, I signed up for it, but I feel more secure and liberated and free than I've ever felt in my whole life. And if I could just get people get a taste of what is on the other side, they might go through the portal, you know?
- [05:45]
B
Yeah, well, I think anything worth having is never easy, right? And even I tell people this about sex. It's like, if you want to have good sex, it's not just magic, it's not just natural. You have to work for it. You have to practice, to talk with your partner and, and yeah, it's supposed to be fun, but like, if you want it to be better, you gotta work at it. And if you want it to continue well into your old age, you have to put in the work.
- [06:06]
C
Yeah, I have a client, she's like, I know this is working, but every time I come to session it's like this, ugh. And then I, then I leave session and it's like flowing and better. And I. And I'm like, that is it. That's the vulnerability. There's a sense of like resistance, you know? So, yeah, I mean, I forgot that famous book, you know, how to do the work. I literally explained in this book the science of what's happening in your system as you do the work. So you're not just like, oh, this is woo woo. No, no, this is.
- [06:35]
B
So can you share a little bit of that. What's happening?
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C
Yeah, I mean, so a lot of the memory systems live in the body. And as someone holds these experiences with you, you're expanding what we call our window of tolerance. Dan Siegel came up with that word. But like your nervous system is lending its nervous system to me. And so I'm building a capacity to be with this part of myself or this earlier experience. And you're also lending your safety to me. And so it's almost like you're building your own container through someone else's lending nervous system. Exactly what you needed as a baby. Right. So these experiences that are really intense, like you start to be with them more and more and more and the actual memory changes in your brain and the neuro streams come up and neural nets open in safety and your body will share more and more information. You can hold more and more. And basically you're integrating all your embedded trauma. So it's a process. It's hard to put into words, but there's streams of information that like we can get disconnected from our body, we can become left shifted workaholics or, or we shift into our right and we start to get in touch, we slow down, we start to be with the sensations in our body. We start to kind of get them, get to the root of them. We bring them to save people and they move, they move out of the body and you know, they bring up information, they actually fully get integrated. And then when you think back at the memory, it's accompanied then and it's changed and there's just more internal space. There's just more safety in your system. You're getting what you didn't get as an infant or as a youngster. You're re getting that. So it's a, it's an internalization process.
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B
Got it. You know, I think it's interesting you mentioned a lot of these very successful people and I, I can sort of relate to that. I think that a lot of times people stay busy or they like find stuff to do because they don't want to just sit and have nothing to do. Right. And, and because then they have to deal with their emotions that maybe they don't want to.
- [08:34]
C
Oh yeah. So chapter three in the book, I talk about my workaholism. If I just slowed down just a little, like fire in my body, anxiety in my body. And so I talk about protectors. And I think that we all. I needed workaholism. Like I needed. Some people need alcohol, some people need gaming, some people need weed. Like we need these Things that we don't know how to process until we have the places and people to process them with. So we will develop a lot of protectors. Some of them can be perfectionism. Some of it can be an eating disorder. I mean, the list goes on. On what we do to cope with our world, because we don't know how to actually be with what's going. And they're brilliant. We need them. Like, we can't survive, but when the right environment and the right people show up and we slow down, we can start to be with everything that's inside, and that's when we can start to heal. And that's such an important piece of information because I just don't want people out there, like, I'm gonna heal in my apartment doing this. It's like, that's just not how healing happens. It's just happens in relationship.
- [09:42]
B
Interesting. Now, we talked a little bit about sex and trauma, but I think, how do you find outside of, like, obviously the intensity we've talked about, how do these sort of traumas or emotional histories, how do they impact sexual health? Like, people and how they show up in. In their sex lives?
- [10:00]
C
I mean, that's a vast question, But I think that people use sex for all different reasons. You know, if you've been sexually abused or things happen, I mean, you can go one extreme. You can put on a lot of weight and not want to ever get close, or you can attract environments that repeat your original sexual offender. There's a lot of shame there. I mean, sex is just a. A behavior that can be used to kind of reenact whatever wound might be underneath it.
- [10:29]
B
Do you find that people who have insecure attachments are actually doing that more often than not?
- [10:35]
C
Yeah. I mean, maybe. If you're listening, I think we've all been there. Have you ever had sex and you just felt empty and you thought the sex might make you feel better, but then, like, 10 minutes after the sex was over, you just feel empty again? It's just another protector to try to, like, calm the emptiness inside.
- [10:53]
B
Yeah, yeah. You mentioned the wheel of attachment. Explain that a little bit.
- [10:57]
C
And.
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B
And you had said you had something special for our listeners.
- [11:00]
C
Yeah. So the wheel of attachment is unique to safe and for your audience. You should have gotten a link. And if you didn't, please let me know. It's looking at attachment from a more holistic level. It'll be kind of hard for me to explain here, but on the bottom is secure. On the top is disorganized. Then there's Anxious and avoidant. But then you can see. See how with one parent, for example, you can have secure experiences, and then you can slide out the wheel and also have anxious experiences. So I'm trying to get people to understand the nuances and look at attachment. Less linear, left shifted, and see a more holistic point of like, okay, my brother, I had this kind of relationship with my brother and my mom was violent. So I slide all the way up here into disorganized. And there were wonderful moments with my mother. So I had some security in there. Because very rarely are we one attachment style. Every single early attachment style imprints us. So as you read the book, you're gonna. And there'll be a free download for your audience, but you'll be able to get this wheel and you start to track kind of the different relational attachment style experiences you had in your home. And then you can also see, like, why you keep attracting someone who is repeating this pattern or why you pushed your little sister, your clingy sister away and who reminds you of that. So the wheel is unique to this book. It's not been out there for anybody in the attachment field. It was not created by me. It was created by my mentor, Bonnie Badenock. The other free gift that we're giving your audience is a 45 minute conversation with me and Bonnie. She's like, amazing. She's the teacher of us psychotherapists. She understands interpersonal neurobiology, like, far deeper than me. And we talk about what it feels like internally to move from insecure to security together. And it's just a really special 45 minute talk that we want to give away to motivate people to do the work. And, you know, obviously it'll take a day or two to get the book or whatever. So you'll get the beyond the label. So you'll get the wheel, you'll be able to start that kind of work, and then you'll get this video. So you'll be able to kind of start to understand the process a little bit different, differently and deeper in a deeper way before you actually get the book or as you get the book.
- [13:11]
B
That's great. Thank you for that. Yeah, I really appreciate that. So as you know, you've talked about sort of doing the work. Sometimes it requires a professional. So what can people do when they're looking for a professional and how can they determine the one that's right for them?
- [13:28]
C
Yeah. So when looking for a coach or a therapist, someone who understands somatics, so things that happen in the body and how developmental trauma lives in the body. I actually created this book for you to bring to anybody who is offering help, like, as a companion, but someone who's not going to try to fix you, who's going to hold space, who's going to track your nervous system, and who understands where attachment, like, understands attach how attachment wounds live in the body. And if you get the book, I basically explain how you can do this with a friend or someone and, like, what to do, like, in a listening kind of way, because not everybody can afford to get that kind of help. And it takes time to heal these things. But if you have a secure enough anchor and you work through the book, you actually can use the book as a vehicle. And I hope that if you have a therapist, use the book. And I hope if you don't have a therapist, you use the book. But either way, I hope it gets used by many therapists and coaches out there.
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B
Yeah, I think, because, you know, even the one thing I wonder is, like, okay, even therapists, right? No one's perfect, have their own attachment styles. And so not everyone is going to be right for you. And I think also, and I say this for doctors too, like, if you see a doctor and you don't click like, please see another one. Like, I'm never going to be upset. You're never going to be upset. Like, I think in general, you have to find the right fit.
- [14:45]
C
I think so many therapists don't know how to hold this space. So I'm really hoping that the ones that are at least interested will read. And I had a great therapist, but there were friends who had the ability to help me through this too. So I'm a big believer. It's someone who has a ventral state who has the capacity to hold the space. There's a blueprint, there's a map. In the book, it does not. Not all therapists, some of them are fixing. Some of them are diagnosing you. Some of them have an agenda, Some of them don't track you. Like, some don't know how to do this work. So I'm hoping this helps. A lot of them have their pathway to helping with healing attachment wounds.
- [15:22]
B
Yeah, that's really nice. If you like that clip with Jessica Baum, make sure to check out the full episode right here.
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A
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