Sarah (0:00)

Hi, I'm Sarah, and welcome to youo Makesense. I'm a somatic experiencing practitioner and expert on trauma resolution, attachment parts work, and nervous system regulation. This podcast is a manual to understanding your human experience so that you can navigate the world with freedom, ease, empowerment, and create the life that you desire. Remember, you make sense all parts always. So in this episode, we're going to talk about the correlation and connection between polyvagal theory and attachment theory. It's something that I'm really passionate about because what I don't see happening enough is it being communicated to people that attachment is actually something that is somatic in nature, meaning you can't learn your way into a secure attachment. And the reason being is because the vehicle responsible for how we attach is actually our autonomic nervous system. And what you've learned in this podcast, and maybe other places as well, is that your autonomic nervous system is subcortical. It lives in your body. And so this vehicle, remember, as I've previously named it, creates all of your behaviors, creates your thoughts, the sensations you have, feelings you have, behaviors, perception of self, others in the world around you. So when it comes to behaviors, that means that how you relate or connect to another living being, which is what attachment is all about, that process happens through behaviors. It also happens through the sensations you have and the feelings that you feel. And then the response that you have that, that initiates a behavior of some kind. So none of that is actually happening in your cortical thinking brain. All of that is influenced by your nervous system. And this is why, if you've ever, you know, read the book Attached, which I, I, I say that a lot, and I hope no one thinks that. I think that book is terrible. It's a wonderful book, but learning about it, or you've read some of Diane Pull Heller's work, by the way, she's incredible. And I've gone through her DARE program, which is a somatic attachment training. Or you've read John Bowlby's work, maybe some of you haven't, but he's the theorist behind attachment theory. If you've read any of that and gained an understanding, it might have given you a lot of aha moments. So cognitive understanding of, oh my gosh, I get it now. This is the way that I show up in relationships, which we're going to talk about in a moment, the different attachment styles. But you get into a relational dynamic or a fight, let's say, and all that learning goes out the window, and the same habituated experience happens Again, and that is because you are doing all of this cognitive computing or cognitive learning. And then when you're in the actual dynamic, when you become disregulated, that prefrontal cortex shuts down. Because we learned that earlier on, when you're disregulated, your prefrontal cortex stops working, which means the place where language, reasoning, rationalization occurs is not available to you. And instead your nervous system takes over. And so all of that learning sort of goes out the window. And I'll find myself having these behaviors arise from the autonomic state that I'm in. And remember, if we're not in control of our nervous system, it's sort of like it flings us. If it's a vehicle, it flings us in the back seat and it takes over on cruise control. And what it says always, regardless of if we're talking about attachment or not, it says, okay, what did we need to do in the past to be safe? Let's do the same thing now. And we know it worked in the past because you're here, you're alive. So whatever strategy it had to help you survive something in the past, it's going to resource that now. And when it comes to your relationships, it's going to resource whatever it had to do in your earliest childhood experiences in order to navigate relational dynamics in your adult life. Which brings me to the next very important topic under the umbrella of this topic of polyvagal theory and attachment theory. The connection between the two is the origin of all of this. So the, the origin of how we attach or how we relate to other human beings, or not just human beings, by the way, how we relate to nature, animals, finances, purpose, your health, and so on and so forth. All of that is rooted in your earliest childhood experiences. Those early childhood experiences actually lay the blueprint for how you relate to other people. And what, what I, I want to name is that when we come into the world, there's a few important components of this. When we come into the world, none of us have the ability to self regulate. And that means that when my nervous system is in distress, I'm in my sympathetic nervous system or my dorsal vagal complex, or maybe even freeze. I can't do anything about it to different. You don't have your full autonomic nervous system fully developed yet enough of that ventral vagal complex that you can come into regulation on your own self regulate. And so that means when a baby is born, you are entirely at the mercy of the adults around you. Meaning we need the adult's nervous systems to regulate ours via co regulation. And because we have mirror neurons, nervous systems read each other. We are really relying on that process to occur for us now. You know, nobody taught our parents how to regulate their nervous systems. Nobody probably taught them how to resolve their own trauma. And that means that a lot of us might have had even really loving caregivers who did not have enough regulation in their own nervous system to meet our primary needs for regulation, for connection and attunement. So to be fully seen, known and understood, for safety and for belonging. And. And here's a fascinating study that was, you know, recently done. And recently done in research doesn't mean yesterday, but anyway, recently done that showed that your caregivers only had to do this, be attuned with you, and to help you to regulate 30% of the time in order for you to have a secure attachment, which means relationships are filled with ease for you. They only had to do that 30% of the. And I'm saying that because so many of us have what are called insecure attachment styles. I do not like the word insecure attachment styles. Those are two words because there's such a negative connotation to it. What I, you'll hear me say is adaptive attachment styles. So that means that a lot of us didn't have caregivers who could do that for us. And they may have been loving and kind and, you know, were there for us. They showed up to every parent teacher conference. They. They were at every sporting event. They cooked us dinner every night. They were. But maybe you had a caregiver who felt panic on the inside and like, they weren't safe internally, well, then you're not safe. If they're not safe, you're not safe. And so I just want to name that if you find it confusing that you have, you know, you had really a loving, in many ways idyllic childhood and yet you struggle in your relationships. This is likely, likely why I also want to name for any parent that is listening right now, and if you're saying, oh, my goodness, I had postpartum depression or I hadn't resolved my trauma when I had my kids, I was dysregulated all the time. I want us to be kind to ourselves. I wanna also just say this. You know, the parents that I work with, and I've worked with so many parents who are incredible, wonderful humans and what they do is, they say, like, I feel sick thinking about maybe the ways that I didn't give my child everything they needed. And they're so hard on themselves. And I say this every time, and I mean this fully. And I'm saying it to you listening right now. If you have kids that I wish that I had a parent like you. I wish my whole. I don't know if I'd be doing this right now if that was the case. My whole life would have been different if I had a parent who was actually committed to their own healing, who was reflective and was even willing to look at the fact that there might have been things that they were doing that weren't supportive. That actually tells us that you are a good parent. So I just want to name that your kids are so lucky to have you, and it's never too late to give them the things that they didn't get. If you have a teenager right now and you're saying, oh, I can notice some of this dysregulation showing up in them or some of these adaptive attachment patterns, we can still work on it. We can work on it till we're, you know, 90 years old. I have people in my programs. It's actually maybe one of the most inspiring things is we have people inside of our programs who are in their 80s even coming to us and saying, I want more. I'm not ready to leave this world and not feel good in my relationships or fully alive. So just want to name. It's never, ever too late, and you are doing a fantastic job. So the way that this all works now, I want to get into that connection or that correlation with you between our polyvagal theory and attachment theory and really show you the different attachment styles which some of you may have heard about before. But in this episode, we're going to be talking about it through the lens of your nervous system, because it is that your nervous system is the vehicle responsible for how you attach. You can actually not heal your attachment without addressing your nervous system, because it's the foundation of the whole thing. So this might be really illuminating for you, for some of you. And I just want to name again, if you've heard about attachment before, listen up, because this is probably going to sound really different. So we're going to go through each of the attachment styles, and I'm going to talk about the connection to the nervous system in terms of each of them. So first I want to talk about the anxious attachment style. The anxious attachment style. I want to go into the origin of this first. The origin of this. This really adaptive way of relating is when we come into the world, if we had caregivers who were sometimes on again, off again in their ability to connect with us, which could be by the way, for a variety of reason. Meaning they were sometimes really able to attune with us and meet our needs and sometimes they couldn't. Meaning, let's say, I'm going to give some examples. Let's say that you had a parent who was, who didn't feel safe on their own because they had caregivers who didn't show them that they were safe on their own. So that caregiver is going to really want to enmesh with you. And their system is saying I'm not okay on my own, I need my child in order to be safe. So the messaging there in their system is I am not okay. And remember when you're born, you don't have the ability to self regulate. So if they're not okay, you're not okay. So what your system is going to learn to do is you're gonna learn to make sure that your caregiver is okay as much as you can. Because if they're okay and regulated, you become regulated. So this become, we have an over focus on our caregiver to make sure their needs are met and make sure they're happy and make sure they're okay. Because if they're okay, I'm gonna be okay. Other thing, other ways that this, this might look is we might have a caregiver who projects onto us their feelings of not being okay. Simply put, imagine you know, a child is learning to walk. You are learning to walk and you're getting up and you're about to move your body and of course you're going to fall sometimes, right? That's a part of learning. But if your caregiver is projecting onto you their feelings of not being okay, they might say something like, don't go too far without me, you're not going to be okay. Be careful, you're not going to be okay without me. Where are you going? Because their system is saying I need you to be okay and you aren't okay without me. So the message there is I'm not okay on my own. And what occurs as we develop and grow is our whole nervous system becomes intact. And so it's very normal in the developmental process that now we have developed our ability to self regulate and we want to flex that muscle. Which is why you see children at a certain age, first they want to just be held all the time and we want to give them child that because they can't self regulate. It's very, very important that we Give a child that. Which is why having as much time as possible with our newborns that we can have is really important. I also just want to name. If you live in, you know, western society and culture, so many people don't get enough maternity or paternity leave. So if you're saying, oh no, I only got a few months, I want you to be kind to yourself about that too. So at a certain age, a child develops the full ability to, or the ability to begin self regulating. And they do things like they, you're carrying them, they say put me down. Or they're like, I want to dress myself. And then they put their pants over their head. You know, things like that. What they're trying to do is say they're realizing, I think I can, I think I might be able to be okay with me. I'm okay with, I, I can okay with connection, but also okay with me. This is very important because in our lives we want to have equal ability to self regulate as we do to co regul. So if we have a caregiver who doesn't, who's projecting onto us, we aren't okay on our own. I receive the message, I cannot self regulate. I'm not okay with me. And all of this begins to create an anxious attachment in our nervous system. My system then says, I need another person in order to be okay. I'm not okay on my own. And so the result of that is I'm gonna be over focused on the other, not myself in order to maintain safety. So I want to just give you, give you a broad strokes understanding of what this looks like in your adult life. So the, the state in your nervous system that you are going to resource or use when you have an anxious attachment style is your sympathetic nervous system. Why would that be? Well, because your sympathetic nervous system is your state of mobilizing, right? It's your state of doing, taking action. And so when you have an anxious attachment, it's all about the taking action. I need you to stay close to me in order for me to survive. So some examples of what this might look like is you get into a relationship and your system is saying, I need to make sure you don't go away, because if you go away, I'm not going to be okay. And remember the symptoms of your sympathetic nervous system. Symptoms are the sensations, the feelings, the thoughts and the behaviors, right? Those are the symptoms of the sympathetic activation. So that means that you're gonna have all the whole wide, well rounded, fully marinated experience of sympathetic. When you're here. So you're gonna notice that you're gonna have probably a lot of anxiety in a relationship. You might notice you even have some panic in a relationship. You may notice that you have your heart races a lot, you have a lot of tension in your body. Your thoughts are gonna be racing about how they might leave and how you have to make sure they don' and you're really going to probably go through the catalog of everything that you've said to them. Like, let's say you were in an argument. You're going to go back and say, like, what did I say? And did I say something I shouldn't have said? And all the thoughts are going to be about how I need to make sure you don't leave, and you may leave, and how do I stop that from happening? And the behaviors are going to match that, too. So I'm going to really want to go towards you because I need you as a source of safety. That is my autonomic response, because remember, it's your nervous system that is creating all of this. This. So let's say I have a fight with a partner and my partner tends to maybe pull away, which, by the way, that's a really common combination. Someone who's anxiously attached and avoidantly attached. My system says, I need to get you back. I will do anything to get you back, including saying, you know, I'm not even mad at all. I don't. I actually don't have that need. It doesn't really matter because needs aren't nearly as important as survival. That is the most important thing. So my system is going to do everything that it can to make sure that you get back into connection with me. And by the way, it doesn't matter how long you're in a relationship. You could be five years, 10 years. And your system is still, until this is resolved, still going to be on the lookout for how they might not be present and how they might go away. Another thing that I just want to name is that the negative connotation when it comes to an anxious attachment is that you're needy. And I just want to name that because it couldn't be further from the truth. That's not what's true. What's true is you have a very young part of yourself that is showing up in your relationships. That is what they felt in the past. Remember, we've talked about this a lot in this podcast that via neuroception, that threat detector looks out into the world and says, what does this remind me of? And if it's reminded of something when you're young, which is what happens in our romantic partnerships. Remember, your romantic partnerships mimic your childhood experiences the most. Meaning the threat detector is reminded of the childhood the most when you're here. So what that means is when I'm in a relational dynamic, it's going to trigger or, or activate very young parts of me because they're remembering their experience. So when I'm in a relational dynamic and I'm finding myself activated, a young part of me is going to be inhabiting my body. Meaning I've like traveled time back to being 8 years old or 15 years old. And now I'm re experiencing the terror of I'm not going to be okay without you, my mother, father, parent, unless you're close to me. And by the way, for a young child, that is life or death, right? If I'm 4 years old and you disappear, I'm not gonna be okay. So this is why when you're in argument, it might feel like that. It might feel overwhelming, like it's life or death, or feel like we're. Sometimes I say it can feel like we're drowning and I just need someone to make sure I don't drown. And that's the level of intensity that can be there and why that negative connotation can be present. Which again couldn't be further from the truth. Now I wanna just give you an analogy for a moment that I use a lot in terms of relationships. And when we are in connection with someone, I want you to think of it like there's a rope between the two of you. I think of it like a big cruise ship rope. And every single one of relationship starts. We're building strands of the rope. With every moment or interaction of connection that we have, like even a moment of laughter, another strand is laid. And if you've been together for quite some time, that could be a really big rope. It has so many strands. Now when a rupture or an argument happens, if we're in a. If we have an anxious attachment, it will feel like the other person dropped the whole rope, Meaning it will feel like they're going to go away forever. It's not that they dropped a few strands and we still have connection. It can feel like the rope is dropped on their end and the connection is lost. And then what I do is I certainly don't drop any of my strands because I need to maintain connection in order to survive. I will go pick up their end of the rope and then I will do everything in my power to get them to pick up the rope. Meaning I will say we have to talk about this now. If we don't talk about this now, I'm not going to be able to focus anything today. And how could you possibly just go to work when this is on my mind? And there's no way I can do anything until I know that we're okay, Right? Because of this intensity of I'm not okay on my own. And the more that we regulate our nervous systems and address our parts, the more we can begin to change this. This can also show up, by the way, with our, with our, our work, we can feel like we're really gripping. So we try to control things. We have to make sure everything's okay through control in our finances. I incessantly check my finances to make sure that they're okay and make sure things aren't going to fall apart. Because if they fall apart, I'm not going to be okay. And so on and so forth. It's all that sympathetic activation. Now I want to go through the other attachment styles with you and kind of through the same lens. We're going to walk that same path that I just gave you for an anxious attachment. I want to now look at an avoidant attachment style. So an avoidant attachment style is the result of having caregivers who were either unavailable to us, they were neglectful, so they weren't there, or they were dangerous. And remember, we don't have the ability to self regulate when we're, when we're young. And if we have a caregiver who is not there or is dangerous to us, we're in a lot of trouble. I also just want to name that. You know, this doesn't just mean that you had like abusive caregivers or really mean horrible caregivers. It could mean that you had caregivers who had to work three jobs in order to support the family, or they were immigrants and they were working so hard to give a make a life for you, but they were never there. And so the result of this is we're in a predicament because I can't regulate myself. I have needs, I have desires, and they're perpetually not being met. So if we know that they're perpetually not going to be met, our nervous system comes in beautifully and says, all right, my love, I can't change this, but what I can do is I can resource our dorsal vagal complex, that's our state of shutdown, so that I can help you to disconnect from your needs. I can disconnect you from your feelings and I can take you to this island like it's like an island in the South Pacific in the middle of nowhere, just with you and fortify in order for you to survive. So when we have this attachment style, what we're going to notice is that we really are kind of like an, like an island. We are self sufficient in a lot of ways and because we had to be early on in our lives. And so when, when this comes to being in a relationship as an adult, our nervous system doesn' have the capacity yet for intimacy and closeness and connection. Because what we've talked about previously is we, our nervous systems like what they know and the good things in life like intimacy, connection and vulnerability. They have an energetic charge to them. If our nervous system isn't used to that, they're going to overwhelm us. So if we're used to being an island by ourselves as someone's coming towards us, we're gonna say this is so much, it's too much exposure, it's too much love, it's too much connection. I'm not used to someone else's feelings coming towards me and I get really overwhelmed by that and we'll pull away and go to my island. This is a brilliant self protective response that we learned. We'll also notice if this is us that it'll be really difficult to ask for help. Like you don't even know how to ask for help because there was never anybody to help you. So remember you disconnected from having needs needs. So you're going to be very someone who is very self reliant as people might say that you're really hard to help. By the way, as I'm going through these attachment styles, we can be a combination of all of them. So if you're saying oh yeah, I relate to that one and this one and this one. That's why I certainly have had experienced all of them and was so avoidant at some points. I even drove myself to surgeries. I didn't even think that, that it might be a good idea to ask someone to do was so intolerable for me to ask for help. Even if someone said how can I help you? I would say I don't know, I don't need it, I'm fine. Or I'd be out to dinner with someone and they would say how are things going for you? And I would keep it really brief. Oh, they're good. Because it's almost like my system didn't realize you could actually benefit from somebody supporting you. I didn't know how to be supported. And that's all very reminiscent of someone with an avoidant attachment. When we have this attachment style, we're going to notice that when conflict happens, we're going to shut down because we use that dorsal vagal complex. So I shut down and pull away and disconnect, not because I don't want to be in connection, but because it feels so overwhelming to me. So the negative connotation for somebody who is avoidantly attached is that you don't care. That couldn't be further from the truth. Someone who's avoidant cares so deeply, and they are deeply desiring connection in their life and intimacy and vulnerability is that their system doesn't know how to do that. It goes to this island by ourselves because that's what we know, and that is what's been comfortable. And in terms of this rope analogy, what occurs is when we're in connection with someone and a rupture happens, Instead of it feeling like, you know, 20 of the strands dropped, we drop the whole rope because our system is saying connection isn't safe. Connection wasn't historically safe. And I don't know how to do ruptures because I never did them. And what we will do is we will run away to our island to seek refuge. And I just want to name this. The one of the most common combinations in coupleship is someone who's anxiously, anxiously attached and someone who's avoidantly attached. And so I. I think of it this way, when, when a. When two of those people come together and an argument happens, we both get activated into our nervous system, right? This. The anxious person goes into sympathetic. The avoidant person goes into dorsal. So I think of it this way. The avoidant person goes into dorsal and goes to their island, and the anxious person goes into sympathetic. And it's like they get into a speedboat and they race to the island and they park around the island and they say, I found you on your island and you are avoidant. You say, how did you find me? I'm in the middle of the South Pacific. I got to far as far away from you as I could because I'm terrified of connection. And the anxious person says, don't do that. Come over here. Come close to me. And then you dig a hole underneath the palm tree and you're like, ah, get away. And they say, why are you going away? Come closer. And it's this chicken or the egg of the more you pull away, the more I come close, the more you Come close the more I pull away. And so the beautiful thing is I want to say this isn't a wrong relationship necessarily at all. This is an opportunity for someone as the, the anxious a person to, to really learn self regulation. We're going to talk about each of the these in a moment and the avoidant person to learn co regulation. And the more that we do that, the more we can come back into connection with one another and heal the past in the process. So the next attachment style that I want to share with you is the disorganized attachment style. And so this is the result of having caregivers who are somet a source of safety and sometimes a source of danger. So sometimes they were loving to us and sometimes they harmed us or hurt us in a particular way. So examples of that are maybe you had a caregiver who was so kind, but they were an alcoholic and when they drank they were abusive verbally or physically. Or maybe they were kind and loving sometimes but they abused you or they were sexually abusive. Or maybe they gave you on again they gave you confusing messaging meaning an unwinnable messaging meaning they did things like said hey can you do this thing like I need you to do maybe like clean, clean the living room up. And then you clean the living room up. And they come in and they say why'd you do that? I didn't ask you to do that. And they give you double binding unwinnable situations over and over and over again. And so the result of all of those things, actually I want to give one more example or having a caregiver who created chaos in your home home, whether they, you know, this is very common when a caregiver has lots of their own trauma they, if they have a borderline personality disorder, it's also very common. But, but a chaotic home can create this as well. So the result of this is I learn to disconnect from my truth because I don't even know what reality is. Reality changes every other moment. Reality is confusing because sometimes they're safe and sometimes they're dangerous and, and, and, and people are the source of love, but they're also the source of my, my biggest pain. So it's a very confusing environment to grow up in. And what we will resource is our autonomic state of freeze. Now freeze is tonic immobility. So think deer in headlights. It's equal parts our sympathetic nervous system and our dorsal vagal complex. The result of this is these two equal and opposite forces. Might be I have all of this energy inside, but I feel trapped in it. So really think like a deer in headlights. And so when this comes to our adult life, this looks like deeply wanting people close. But when they get close, because historically they were a source of danger, I push them away. So I reflexively get them away. I might pick a fight. I might run away and panic. But then when they're far away, I want them back again. Because sometimes my caregivers were the source of safety. So when they're gone now I want you back. Come back. And I. And I have some of that sympathetic activation. So I feel panic that you're gone. But then when you get close again, I feel panic, and I push you away. And we oscillate between, come here, go away. Come here, go away. Come here, go away. It can also feel very confusing because our childhood reality was so confusing. I don't know who you are. Are you this safe person or are you this unkind person? So in your adult relationship, you might notice that one day you feel like, wow, I love this person. And I feel so drawn to them and attracted to them. And this is perfect in them. Right. Life partner. And then the next day you're like, this is so wrong. I got to get you away. Which can be such a confusing process. And so all of that is very reminiscent of a disorganized attachment. And, you know, the negative connotation here might be that we're chaotic or that we're all over the place. And that couldn't be further from the truth. It's that our own reality was extremely confusing. And so adult relationships can be really confusing, too. So in terms of that rope analogy, when we're in a rupture, what's going to happen is we're going to freeze and drop our rope and go into that freeze state of. I don't know how to navigate this, because I don't know if right now you're going to be safe or not. So you might find you have all this panic and energy inside, but you can't do anything about it. You're just frozen. Very common when we're here. You may also notice when you're here that you oscillate between sympathetic endorsements. Dorsal. So I want you close. Come close, Come close. Because I miss. I miss you. I miss you. I miss you. And then when you get too close, I shut down and I just go blank. I use dorsal, or I push you away, and I go back and forth and back and forth between the two. So. And. And that's something that I experienced for so Long in my life. I can tell you that it was so confusing in relationships because I would feel like different people. One day I would be like, this is my reality. I love this person, want to be with them forever. And the next day, no, this is my reality. This is totally wrong. And I'd feel panic. And what's really important is that we have an understanding of what's actually occurring because we can't change what we don't understand. The more that we can understand based on each of these brilliant adaptive attachment patterns that I just named, the more we can understand what's occurring, the more than we can we can do to change it. And that begins with harnessing the power of our nervous system, so really gaining control over it. So I'm in the driver's seat instead of my nervous system taking over on cruise control and then addressing the parts of us that are actually getting activated and reminded of their childhood and essentially reliving their childhood experience inside that relational container. Now, there are two other attachment styles lastly that I want to just name here before we come back to what do we do about all this? And the next one is a secure attachment. So a secure attachment is the result of having caregivers who were able to consistently give us regulation, attunement, connection, safety, belonging 30% of the time. Time when they were able to do that, my system learns that I am able to co regulate so I can safely connect with you. And they also taught me I can self regulate. So what this looks like in that, that, that example I gave of a child learning to walk, you're learning to walk and you look back at your parent like can I do this? And they smile at you and say, you're doing great. I'm right here if you need me. So they don't smother you like someone who has an anxious attachment would. They don't, they're not, not there like someone who is an avoidant attachment would like. If you're avoidant, it means their caregivers weren't even there. If you're disorganized, you had caregivers who were chaotic around you or harming you. With a secure attachment, they were saying, you can do this and I'm also here if you need me. And all you have to do is let me know. And so that teaches a child, I am safe with me works that muscle of I can also self regulate. In a secure attachment. A caregiver also showed the child how to navigate the rupture repair process. Meaning we disconnect and we come back into repair. It is a normal part of human relationships that we have rupture in repair occur. Disconnection and connection in a secure attachment. When a child had disconnection with a parent, it's the parent's responsibility to repair the parent's responsibility, not the child. And so the parent is coming back into connection and saying like let's say the kid's pulling the dog's tail again and again and the parent says hey, that's not okay. And then there's a consequence. The parent repairs that rupture by saying coming back from regulation into connection with them and letting the child also know that behavior isn't okay. You're not bad though. And the more that they, they do that, the more the child is able to navigate ruptures in their adult relationships with ease. That means someone who has a secure attachment. They're going to attract or be drawn to other people that have a secure attachment and they going to be able to navigate relational dynamics like I named with ease. They can equally come into connection and go away from connection and have self regulation. If you are saying I don't have that and that's a bummer, I want you to know neither did I. There's not a study on this, but I would say perhaps even the majority of people don't fully have a secure attachment. In my work in the last decade, I certainly have found that to be true. Even people with really loving parents because their parents didn't know how to do it. Now the beautiful thing is there is something called an earned secure attachment. I think we should all get a trophy when we get an earned secure attachment. It's something to be so incredibly proud of. And what this essentially means is we are creating an internal secure attachment that we never got. So if we have an anxious, avoidant or disorganized attachment, there are things we can do about this to actually change it. And here's what that requires. Number one, regulation of your nervous system. Because remember, your nervous system is the vehicle responsible for how you attach. I've got lots of programs, you can see them in the show notes that can support you in this area. But that is the foundation of it all. The next thing that we have to do is based on our specific attachment style, we have to do certain things that support us to come towards a secure attachment. Meaning you can't learn your way into this. So here are just a couple examples. If you have an anxious attachment, you're going to be really good at co regulation, connecting with others and have a Struggle with self regulation. So your work is really to focus on building your capacity to self regulate so you can show your system you are safe inside and safe with you. Now if you have an avoidant attachment style, you're going to be pretty good at self regulation, self reliant, you're not going to be so good at co regulation. So our work is to lean into showing our system it is safe to connect with others in tolerable ways. If we're disorganized, we're going to really struggle mostly with co regulation because people weren't always safe. So we want to build the muscular capacity for that. The other thing that we want to do is we must do part somatic parts work, meaning we must address the younger parts of us that are showing up in our relational dynamics. This all happens via neuroception, the threat detector. Remember, it looks for similarities. So if you're in an adult romantic relationship, it's going to say, what intel do we have on relationships? It looks to your earliest childhood. And then when you're in an adult relationship, your young parts are going to get tricky, triggered and reminded of the past. Meaning this is why you might feel scared, small, out of control, like you're not going to be okay, confused, and so on and so forth. When you're in a romantic partnership, it's because those young parts are showing up. So our work is to reparent these parts. Essentially what I'm saying is we need to be able to access our adult self, which we're going to talk about in later episodes. You do that through regulating your nervous system. And then we want to come to the aid of our young parts and give them the things they never got. The safety, attunement, connection, and so on and so forth. When you do that, you literally imprint a new childhood experience. All of those, all of those new experiences get stored in your database. And no longer is my blueprint an anxious attachment or avoidant or disorganized. My blueprint is an earned secure. And the result of this is the people that you choose in your life change. You are no longer replicating your past in the present. You are replicating the work you've done in your life now. And that is so powerful. I can tell you as somebody who for the majority of my life, I was just recapitulating, repeating my childhood experience over and over and over and over again in relationships. When I finally came to aid of my young parts, all of that stopped. And no longer was I drawn to or attracted to people who mimicked My past, I wasn't attracted to them. I didn't get into relationships with them. I was now drawn to people who gave me what I was giving me, which was safety, connection, love, attunement, and all of that. This work, work is profoundly practical. Just want you to know that there is a way towards it, and we must harness the power of our nervous system to do it. We must address our parts. And the beautiful thing, lastly, I want to say is that when you're in a relationship, that is the grounds for so much healing to occur. So just because a relationship is challenging doesn't mean that necessarily it's something that you should leave. If both people are willing to do the work inside of it, we get to heal our past in the present together. And that's such a beautiful thing. So much of the mental health space focuses on treating the symptom like our stress or anxiety or depression, rather than getting at the root cause. I created a free workbook called how to Gain Control over how youw Feel to help you change your experience at the nervous system level. Click on the link in the description to learn more. All right, we're at that time for the Q and A portion of our episode I just want to name. If you ever want to submit a question to us, whether it's video, audio recording or written question, you can look at the show notes below. Click on that link and it'll guide you through the process on how to do it. Rachel, what questions do we have today?