Secure Attachment Is Possible, You Just Need To Do These Things... - Sarah Baldwin

Let's start with what is a disconfirming experience?

So a disconfirming experience essentially means showing our nervous system that something which was once unsafe is now safe for us to experience, and it's not something that we can cognitively talk our way into. Meaning, if I tell myself that it's safe to ask for help, let's say, because I know I have loving people in my life, and cognitively and rationally speaking, I know that that's true, when we try to do that, let's say through mindset work or strictly cognitive behavioral therap theory or talk therapy, I might gain an understanding that that is connected to my cortical thinking brain, but my body doesn't understand it. And that's because our autonomic nervous systems are subcortical or live inside of our bodies. And really important to understand that our autonomic nervous systems don't actually understand a verbal language because they're not connected to our prefrontal cortex or thinking brain where language happens. So as we go to communicate to ourselves cognitively, like, oh, I'm safe to ask for help. My body can't hear. Hear that messaging at all. And so my mind might be on board, but my body's not on board. And so the result of that is my nervous system is saying, that's not safe. I don't know why you're stepping towards asking for help from a lover or partner, friend or someone that works with you. And we find ourselves feeling dysregulated or our nervous system stops us, because historically speaking, asking for help wasn't safe. So if something wasn't historically safe for us, then our nervous system is going to try to prevent us from experiencing the same kind of harm or pain that we experienced in the past via dysregulation or the stuckness we experience. So disconfirming experiences, having an actual embodied experience, where I say we show not tell our nervous systems that that which was once dangerous is safe for us. And that's by action, not just by a verbal telling to our system. Or every single time we do that, it gets stored in this internal database or computer system that we all have. And inside of that database, lives in our midbrain, is every lived experience we've ever had. The good things, the bad things, and the traumatizing things. We don't have to remember them. They're all in there. And epigenetics shows us that also ancestral experiences are in there, too. Your caregivers, our parents and grandparents. So when we go to try to step towards something. Like, again, the example I gave of asking for help, our nervous system looks to that database. That's its data point. And it says, well, if that wasn't safe in the past, I don't think it's safe now. And it stops us in the form of dysregulation. A disconfirming experience is the embodied experience of showing our nervous system and through action that it's safe. Now. After we do that, that experience gets stored in our database as safe. So if we collect enough disconfirming experiences, it shows our nervous system that the past is actually different now. It's an incredibly important thing for us to be mobilizing towards.

So, like, if you had the experience growing up where every time you asked for what you needed from your dad or from your mom in your family system, you got yelled at, you would have interpreted that as, it's not safe for me to ask for my needs. You grow up, you could become an adult in relationship. You don't ask for your needs because your body's like, well, that shit's not safe, so don't do that. And then you have the experience of asking for what you need, and it's safe. And you get your needs met. And then your body's like, oh, that feels pretty good. And then you start to accumulate those disconfirming experiences that then rewire your system to interpret. Asking for your needs is safe. Is that roughly accurate?

Yeah, that's exactly right. And it's important to understand that way. Our autonomic nervous system, the way it works is we have this thing called neuroception. It's a internal threat detector that lives in our brainstem. And every millisecond of our lives, it looks out into the world and it's saying, is that safe, dangerous or life threatening? Is that safe, dangerous or life threatening? Every millisecond, which is quite fast, it also looks internally, which is called interoception. That's all subconscious, as it's looking out and trying to decipher if something is safe or not. Like using your voice, it immediately looks to the database that I just explained. Again, all that is subconscious. You can think of it like, reflexive. So what occurs is, until we do our work, we're going to have these reflexive, embodied responses. Because our threat detector looks to the database, it says, using your voice, it was not safe in the past, therefore it won't be safe now. What it does is it picks up on flavorings of similarities from our past to our present. So it doesn't need an exact match. It just looks for similarities. So it might be really safe for me to use my voice now with my community, which is like a family system. But it wasn't safe in my family system and my family of origin. And so even though those are really different, they have similarities. Like, it's a group of people who are supposed to love me the most, where I'm supposed to experience belonging, bringing connection. And so because of those flavorings of similarities, when we go to try to use our voice, that threat detector immediately says, not safe based on the past. And in that moment, it calls in one of what are called three autonomic states of self protection, or dysregulation, one of the three to keep us safe. And that means you might feel anxious, shut down, frozen, panicked, apathetic, disconnected, and a myriad of other things in that moment, all of that is happening reflexively. The beautiful thing is if we actually collect these disconfirming experience, I named, it changes the scale in that internal database. And the more that we do that, then our system sees well. Actually, I have a lot of new data points that shows me that this thing that was, wasn't safe is safe. And I think it's just important to name for people. A lot of times I hear people say, like, I'll do that thing when I'm ready, or when it feels really good. And I laugh because for all of us, me, you, and every other human being, it won't feel good until you have enough disconcerting experiences. It'll feel terrifying after you do it. You'll probably feel exhausted. Like, I feel like I was hit by a truck and I need to go rest and like, oh, my God, I can't believe I just did this thing. Until you collect enough of these things and eventually what happens is it's just easy. It's no longer challenging, it just happens with ease. But that process of it being terrifying, overwhelming feeling like, I don't know if I can actually do this. I don't like this. That's all a part of the process, and I think it's important for people to know that.

So a big part of the therapeutic process or coaching process sounds like collecting these disconfirming experiences from the shit you went through in your childhood, having disconfirming experiences that sort of disprove those things that maybe are linked to the abuse you experienced or the abandonment or the neglect that can so often show up in our adult relationships. And that brings me to my next question. How would you describe how our early Attachment with our caregivers, primary caregivers, parents, et cetera, influences the way that we choose partners in our adult life.

Lays the blueprint for how we experience relationship completely and wholly. What happened in our childhood is directly affects our relational dynamics in our adult lives. Attachment is completely happening on a nervous system level. It's our nervous system that is doing the attaching. So when babies are born we can't self regulate. That means that we are entirely reliant on the adults around us to be able to regulate our nervous systems. Now I have a complex trauma history and so I had a very unsafe childhood, which means that affected my attachment in a very profound way. But there's a lot of folks who had loving parents, essentially good enough parents, who were loving and kind and available, but nobody taught them how to regulate their nervous systems or address the trauma that they experienced. And especially of any generation of mine or older, we think of like our grandparents in the Great Depression and obviously before that. You just have to keep going. There's no time to feel and we have to just keep moving on and surviving. And so that means that a lot of us had parents that when they had experiences of dysregulation, their parents said, you're fine, suck it up, you're fine. What that meant for them was they had long term dysregulation in their nervous system. Let's say you had a mother, very loving, but she was anxious all the time. Why? Because her parents didn't help her learn how to self regulate. So she had low grade anxiety all the time. You were born and she just was like, oh my gosh, are you going to die? Are you okay? Are you breathing? Is everything okay? She felt like she wasn't going to be okay without you. Maybe she felt like she wasn't going to be okay without your dad. So her nervous system wasn't regulated. That means that you, when you were dysregulated, she couldn't actually help you. Even though she loved you, she couldn't actually help you, give you what you needed. And so what occurs is if her system is saying, I need you, my child, to feel safe and she's not regulated all the time. Our nervous systems learn that we aren't safe on our own, that we need to be with her in order to be okay. And we have to do whatever we can to make sure she feels better. Because if she feels good and is regulated, I will be safe. And so we become overly focused on our parent making sure they're okay. I feel like I have to Be with them all the time in order for me to be safe and to create regulation in my nervous system. So all that develops really early on. Now, the result of that is all of that information goes in that database that I talked about earlier. So inside of that internal database. And those entry points for our nervous system are basically the blueprint for how we experience relational dynamics. Now, this is you then what happened when you were a child. Is your nervous system resourced, something called your sympathetic nervous system in order for you to maintain safety. Our sympathetic nervous system is often referred to as fight or flight. But essentially this is about mobilizing. So your nervous system learned in order for me to be okay, I need to do something. And in order to make sure that you're with me. Because when you're with me, I'm safe. So I'm going to please you. I'm going to fawn and become what you want me to be. And I'm going to do whatever I can and be on the hyper alert to make sure that we're connected. Now here, back to the threat detector. I become an adult and I'm like, I really want to date. Or maybe when you're. When you were a teenager, I really am excited about dating. So your threat detector looks out into the world and it's looking for love. And it's saying, what information or intel do we have on love? And it looks to your database and what you experience with your mother and also with your father or other mother or whomever else was in the picture. Grandparent. And so what it is doing is it's subconsciously picking up on every single clue as you begin dating every tiny little detail of another person to see if it matches the blueprint that we received as a child. So let's say we had a mother. That was the way I just described. Let's say the same person had a father who was preoccupied with work, worked all the time, and was never really around. And so for my system, that made me feel in the database like I wasn't fully worthy of his love, I had to earn his love. I wasn't quite enough. So what happens is those are the two blueprints I have. I'm out there dating and I go on a date with someone and let's say that he's slightly preoccupied. Like we're at a restaurant and I'm telling a story and he looks at his phone and he like just glances away, slightly disinterested, but then comes back. What's going to happen is my threat detector is going to say, oh, that's just like my dad. Oh, that's love. Because that's the blueprint that I have on love. And in that moment, the person's going to be like, wow, they're kind of sexy. I feel attracted to them all subconscious. You're not going to know why you're doing it, but I'm going to feel drawn to that person because they emulate for me what I experienced in the past. And then what's going to transpire or occur is let's say I haven't heard back from him, been like two days, and he hasn't texted me or even doesn't have to be two days, two hours, doesn't text me back after the date. My threat detector is going to say, what information do we have on disconnection? Looks to my mom. That's not safe. And so all of a sudden, I'm re experiencing what I experienced as a child, and I'm feeling the same level of panic and disarray that I felt when I was two years old, eight years old, whatever. I'm going to go into my sympathetic nervous system again and I'm going to rehash the whole date and think like, it is because I said this or because I said this. And it doesn't mean he doesn't like me. And I don't know, did I do something wrong? Maybe I should text him. And then you write a text and delete the text and you can't think about anything else because your system is saying, I'm not safe unless I get this connection back. So literally, the people that you're attracted to are going to emulate whatever you experienced in your childhood. And the way that you show up in the relationship is going to emulate how you had to show up in your childhood to be safe until we heal. This happens to every single one of us across the board.

That's a lot to lay on people. It's funny because I went on to modern wisdom and talked about attachment and talked about something similar.

Right.

That basically our childhood attachment creates the blueprint for how we are going to date until we start to undo that. And it's one of the things I was kind of getting a chuckle along the way as you were explaining why so many women are attracted to really aloof men. Like the kind of like sort of interested, sort of checked out is like your body and your system is tuned for the person that replicates that. It's funny because a lot of guys will fall for that woman where they're Married or they're in a relationship and there's this woman that seems to spark their interest, or they're dating and they keep attracting these women that's like, we have really crazy sex and it's so amazing. But I feel like I can't have a relationship with her, but I can't get rid of her. And I'm like, I feel hooked and I feel addicted to her. And I keep attracting women like this and I don't know why. And it's like, well, that's your body, right? Your nervous system keeps attracting these women. That there's some commonality between the charge that you get with them and the nervous system charge that you got as a kid. It's funny because I think for some people it's incomprehensible. It's like, how could that possibly be true? And yet there it is, right? It happens all the time. And our nervous systems, I've said a couple of times on the show, like, our nervous system is the vessel of the unconscious. It's the brain of the unconscious, right? It's, it's where our unconscious is stored. And I think for a lot of people, people we take for granted that we conceptually know that 80% of communication is non verbal. But then people don't actually really drill down into like, well, what the does it actually mean? It means that your body is communicating and transmitting information all the time. That is part of the communication between you and another person that you are unconscious to that you're not tuned into. And so we have to start to be aware of what's our body attuned, what's it tuning into? Is it tuning into information and data? That's just replicating the past, which was not great because mom and dad were abusive or neglectful, or there's abandonment there. I'll just pause there and see. If you want to add anything into everything that I just laid out, I.

Just first want everyone listening to know this is very human. We want to be kind to ourselves about it. And by the way, when I said that how the threat detector works and works in a millisecond and it's subconscious and our nervous systems like what they know, not because they like the suffering, but because they like familiarity, because familiarity helps us to survive. This is all evolutionary speaking and very important. So that's what we're looking for. We, our system doesn't like the unknown. It likes what we can predict. And then because we know how to respond. To give an example for anyone from the time I started dating Until I went on my healing journey, every single person that I dated was extremely selfish or a narcissist. I was neglected and abused and abandoned and they had a significant other or a girlfriend I didn't know about. Even starting in middle school, you would think to yourself, how did that happen so many times? I didn't know that because it's all subconscious. The threat detector picks up on everything that is not in my conscious awareness. And the other thing that I want to also say just quickly is there's a solution to this. First thing, with our nervous systems, we have to build our capacity for the good things so the good doesn't feel good at first. First, this is really important to understand because let's say you see a friend who has this incredible guy in their life, he's just so great. He's consistent, he's steady, he can hold space for your, your friend's experience, be in his healthy, masculine, and you think to yourself from a distance, that's really attractive. I like that. But then when it comes to you, because of your own database, if you start dating and a man is that way, he's very direct, he's steady, he consistently comes towards you and is responsive. If your nervous system didn't receive that as a child at first, you're going to actually find that possibly repulsive, disgusting, annoying, unattractive, and you might push the person away. And that's because your nervous system is saying, I don't know that the good is overwhelming because there's a lot of activation or charge around that. And also, if my own caregiver did not consistently love me in this way, the people that were supposed to love me this most, the most, there must be something wrong with you. You must be pathetic. You must not be that great if you're doing that. And so a lot of times I hear people say, like, well, you just have to pick different. It's actually not physiologically possible on a nervous system level without doing the other work I'm about to, to just pick different and to be able to tolerate it. What we have to do is somatic parts work. And you can think of internal family systems or even inner child work. It's all really the same. What we have to do is get to know the younger parts of ourselves that never receive the things that they were supposed to receive and start to give them those parts disconfirming experiences. So literally, we are internally imprinting in our psyche and in our bodies and brains, new embodied experiences of what it's like to give ourselves attunement and connection and love and consistency. And when we do that over and over again, every single one of those is a disconfirming experience that gets stored in our internal database. If you do that enough, you literally create an internal secure attachment. And so now my baseline for what love is has totally changed. My baseline for what safety is and connection is totally changes. So what happens then is we do this enough. Our threat detector actually picks different. And that means that you go on a date and now you're really attracted to the person, the woman that is actually forthcoming and steady and loving and honest and safe. I want that. And you see the other woman and you actually aren't attracted at all. You're like, I don't even want it. It used to feel like a drug, but I don't need it anymore. And I just like to say that because I think a lot of times people think the right person just comes along where if I just pick different, it's not going to happen. We're actually so much more empowered in our lives than we know. And when we do this, you do pick different. That's the result. And your friends, the friends you pick are going to be different too.

Do you find that you have to almost go through a period where you're going against the grain of what your choosing mechanism, like your partner choosing mechanism is? Because I've said this to a lot of guys before. In the woman that you find yourself like intoxicated with, run. And then the woman that you're like, she might be a little boring. Just explore that a little bit. Have you found that as well? People have to go through a phase of exploring the opposite of what they would normally run towards.

Yeah. So I think there's a twofold or two part component to this work. One is what I just named. So we have to do this internal work and that you're creating what I call an internal secure attachment. The second part is you're going to build your toleration now to be slightly drawn to someone who's healthy. Right. So it doesn't mean that it's straight out the gate. You're going to be like, this is amazing. But our work is that we can tolerate it. Meaning it's not going to feel fabulous, but I can tolerate it. Something feels like a drug. That's love from survival, not love from choice. Meaning those are very young parts of us that for those young parts, we would have died if we didn't have that connection. So if you notice, it feels like a drug that's A clue. Oh, these are very young parts of me that are choosing this for survival. Now, love from choice is steady. So love from survival is like you're in a lake and you can't swim and you're like drowning and you're hoping that someone helps you not drown. Now, love from choice, which means from our adult selves, it's like just being in a boat with someone in a lake. It doesn't have big waves. And at first that can feel really boring comparatively to this other experience of I'm drowning, no, I can breathe because you just rescued me. And so we actually have to build our toleration for it. And a lot of times I think, especially with self help, I don't really love the world of self help because there's a lot of misinformation out there about following your intuition. And so many people confuse intuition with survival responses. And so we think, well, it's my intuition to leave this thing because I don't feel it. That actually might simply be a survival response of your nervous system not having the toleration to yet be with something that is really good for us. Of course, with our partner, we don't want to be naming. I'm noticing that I'm feeling repulsed by you in this moment. That's the work we want to do in our therapeutic containers. We really want to see, can I tolerate not running away? And the more that we do that, we can build our capacity to show our nervous system. This is actually safe for me. I'm actually safe to be seen this much. Not used to being seen this much. I'm not used to being loved without trying. And it makes us want to run away. So the more we build our capacity, what actually happens, and I think this is surprising for people, is that we fall madly in love. And you do get to have this beautiful, alive and electric experience. Experience. But it's from this groundedness. And so we just have to get through this phase, this chapter of getting enough embodied experiences of showing our nervous system that it's safe and not running during that process. And I think lastly, just a lot of people can tend to think, well, it's just going to be like that forever. Then I guess the options are that that thing that feels like a drug or this boring thing. And that's not true. If you actually lean in and do the work and your nervous system sees that it's safe, you'll experience love far deeper than anything that you could imagine.

Yeah, you almost have to like rewire and retrain and you have to go through a period of time where it's not that things are boring, but you're moving towards peace. Right? I think like a lot of men, I think sometimes women underestimate how much men want peace relationally because they feel at war with themselves. They feel at war sometimes with the world or in their job or, you know, maybe they are in a career that is more. More competition oriented or war oriented. And so, you know, men are often seeking peace in their relationship, but if their system has been wired differently, then they don't know how to create that. And I hear that all the time with guys of like, I just want peace in my relationship. And it's like, well, then why do you keep choosing partners that are going to battle with you? Or how come you continue to show up in a way in your relationship where you're provoking, you know, fights? And it's always that, you know, that conditioning of the nervous system underneath. I want to touch on a couple things and I want to move towards how do we develop a really secure attachment where that vibrancy of intimacy, of attraction is still there? Because I think sometimes when guys hear this kind of stuff, it's like, okay, but I don't want the boring relationship. I don't want just like ease and nothing. Like, I want heat, I want passion. I still want some fire. But I want to just contextualize a couple of things. So let's talk about avoidant attachment, anxious attachment, because everybody knows the terminology. How would you describe what's happening in somebody's body and nervous system? Who is. Who has a more anxious, attached style?

The whole vehicle responsible for how we attach so connect to other people is our autonomic nervous system. And I say this a lot. You cannot learn your way into your attachment. So you could read the book Attached. You could read Jod Bowlby's work. He's awesome. Of course, is the scientist behind attachment theory. But that learning won't change your attachment because it's all happening in your body. And your nervous system is the vehicle that's making it all happen. So if you have an anxious attachment, that's the result of having caregivers who are on again and off again in their ability to attach, connect with you. They weren't always available. So as a result of that and a few other things, we develop this anxious attachment, where my system essentially does not feel safe by myself. I need another to feel safe and regulated. So I'm going to be overly focused on whether this is in friendship or romantic partnership. On the other person, I'm going to sacrifice myself. I'm going to, let's say we're in a fight and we have a disconnection. I'm going to do whatever I can to get the connection back. The way that I like to describe attachment is imagining that if you're in relationship with someone, it's like there's a rope between the two of you. Think of it like a really big rope, like maybe a rope on a cruise ship. Every moment of connection you've had is like a strand on the rope that just got laid. So, you know, if I'm with someone for a while, it could be a very big rope. When we're in connection, it's like we're both holding the rope. But when we have a rupture or disconnection, an argument, let's say, as if some of the strands of the rope get dropped. So it might be like, you know, 20 strands. If it's a big argument, maybe 100. But I've got 10,000. If we have an anxious attachment, it feels like the whole rope has been dropped. It feels like the whole relationship could be over for my system in that moment. And then I go into a survival response. And my nervous system uses our sympathetic nervous system, which is often referred to as fight or flight because that's the state of mobilizing and doing. So. This is where anxiety, worry, frustration, fear, terror, rage, lift, racing heart. I'm laser focused on this one thing. I can't think about anything else. And I just have to get the connection back. And what I'm going to do is I need you to pick up the rope. I'm going to do anything I can to get you to pick up the rope. I'm going to say we have to talk about this now. If we don't talk about this now, things aren't going to be okay. I'll even say I apologize. Even though maybe I shouldn't actually be apologizing, but I am because I just want you to pick up the rope. I will do whatever it takes. I will sacrifice myself, I will sacrifice, maybe even my career, anything to stay in connection with you. Because this is a survival response based on my childhood. That's what it's like to have an anxious attachment. And it's of course, very exhausting. You might feel like you're on eggshells all the time. And again, I will do anything to make sure that we're in connection. Because if we're in connection, then I feel safe. Now, if you have an avoidant attachment Maybe did you want to say. So expand on that before I go.

To the avoidant, I was just going to say, I think the, the like way that I've tried to distill it down is like, I need you in order for me to feel okay. You know, I need to be in touch with you, I need to be in relationship, but I need you to like, I need you to be around and I need to know that you're okay in order for me to be okay. So I just wanted to add that caveat because it's. I found that personally to be. To be helpful.

Yeah, that's exactly what it is. And that's a really exhausting thing. Right. And I just want to name that there's a negative connotation with blue or anxiously attached, which is that you're needy. That couldn't be further from the truth. You're not needy. Your nervous system doesn't know how to self regulate fully. That's what it is yet, which we can learn. Now if you're avoidantly attached, think of this like being like an island off to yourself. And this is the result of having caregivers who were either neglectful or dangerous. When I needed to self regulate, I couldn't self regulate. I needed support to regulate my nervous system. They either were dangerous or not there. And so what my nervous system does is it says, well, I'm in trouble because the option is to be in a perpetual state of dysregulation. Or we can resource something called our dorsal vagal complex. This is our oldest state of dysregulation in our nervous system. It's 500 million years old. This, this state helps us to disconnect from our feelings, our truth, our bodies altogether. This is where association lives. So I can fully disconnect and my nervous system learns that in order to survive, I have to go it alone. I'm disconnecting from my embodied experience, my feelings, certainly my ability to connect with others. I learned to go it along. Now people who are avoidantly attached, the negative connotation is that you don't care. That couldn't be further from the truth. People who are avoidant deeply careful. But it's so overwhelming to let people close because I never experienced that in the past or when I did, it was dangerous. So for us in relationship, when I'm, you know, with someone else, and there's a very common combination of someone being anxiously attached, someone being avoidant. But I deeply want connection and closeness. But as people come close to me, and maybe you're Dating someone and they, like, have the talk with you and they want to know, be exclusive or maybe they want to move in or, you know, talk about these things. My nervous system is saying, I don't know that or that was dangerous in the past. A reflexive impulse to try to get away. And so I call this, like, going to our island. For us, it's very challenging to communicate our needs, communicate our truth. Some. Here's a simple example. If someone says to you, like, your partner's like, tell me about your day. Probably say something like, it's fine. How's your day? The reason being is because oftentimes I was very avoidant. Also had some really, I was disorganized. But I would think to myself, why am I going to tell you about my day? I already know about it. What is the benefit to telling you about my day? It's a very avoidant person thing to say because I didn't know that you could actually get something from that because I was so used to going it alone. So it's a real difficulty asking for help, leaning on someone else, letting someone close to you. And when a disconnection occurs for avoidant person, like, we drop the rope and need to leave, leave, it's a reflex, like, I have to get out. I can't talk about this. I have to get out of here. It's overwhelming for me. And not because I don't care, but because my nervous system doesn't have the capacity to be in this with the other person. So they're really opposing experiences to be anxiously attached or avoidantly attached.

And then those parts of us seek out oftentimes the confirming experience of the energetic polarity. Right. Like the anxious person. It's so funny how, like, anxious people and avoiding people find themselves together so much, you know, because it's usually reconfirming the experience that they had growing up in some capacity, like, oh, why do you need me all the time? Why are you trying to talk to me all the time? Like, get away from me, give me some space, you know, from that, you know, the guy that grew up as a boy with a mom who was like, overbearing and constantly checking in on him and a smother mother. And so, yeah, it's so interesting. Okay, so just, you know, we're not going to. To solve everyone's attachment stuff here on this, on this call, but I think it would be helpful to give some direction in terms of if you're anxious, where do you go? What do you actually start with? And any insight that you can give to the anxious partner whether they're secure or not. Because I think that's a question that I get a lot.

Yeah. So this is the place or the playground where your younger parts show up the most more than anywhere else. And that is because of the threat detector. So the threat detector again looks to the database and it says what intel do we have on love and connection? It's always going to look to your childhood. And so that means. Just want to explain this quickly. If I, I'm with my partner, I'm telling him something really important and he looks at his phone, he looks away. My threat detector says what does this remind me of? Quickly looks at the database, reminds me of when I was in middle school and I had to do everything alone and my father was never around and, and in that moment it is literally like we travel time. My nervous system is no longer seeing my loving partner who did something shitty. But you know what? He's 99% of the time like I'm making this up. Obviously it's not from my life but 99% of the time of this amazing person. But he's doing this thing and my system thinks no, this is like when I was 10 or 11. And so it's literally like I am no longer this woman that I am, I am a 10 year old. Literally that is what's happening physiologically speaking in your nervous system. And now you're responding the same way you did when you were 10. And guess what's going to happen for him. He's going to see that his hypercritical mother or father and he's going to say, well this reminds me when I was 8 years old and my mother was so hypercritical of me. And now he's not a grown man, he's 8 years old. So now we have a 10 year old and an 8 year old literally have swords out fighting each other, trying to protect themselves the way they did in their childhood. I just want to name you talked earlier about we really want to have polarity and feel this like excitement and our sexuality is fully alive and I want to feel this like fiery thing in a relationship. Well, you can only feel that if adult you both parties, the adult parts of ourselves are running the show then that will always be there for us, available for us to develop too. But if we have younger parts running the show, that's not going to be possible because you know what those younger parts are looking for. It's almost like we're all think of it like we're all orphans. Even if you had loving parents, there's things they couldn't do. So we have these like orphaned part of ourselves that are still looking to get the thing they never got. So those parts are looking more for a parent in our partner than they are looking for, you know, a lover. Because. And of course our young parts wouldn't be looking for a lover anyway, they'd be looking for safety. So if we have young parts running the show in our relational dynamics, then what's going to happen is we aren't going to feel that kind of spark and that aliveness that we really want. And so the work is we have to become the primary parent to our younger parts that live inside of us. And then I think of it like we're the primary parent and our partner is the secondary parent because we want their help, but we want to be the one that's taking care of those young parts. So if you're anxiously attached to your young parts are going to be reflexively doing everything they can to get your partner close to you and to keep them close to you, which of course we know will suffocate a relationship long term if we do that, because it's survival energy. So our work is to do a couple things. Number one, we have to build our capacity for self regulation, meaning we have to teach ourselves how to actually regulate our nervous systems. That's the work that I, it's a big part of the work that I do with individuals. And, and this is literally, it's literally like going to the gym. Our nervous systems are malleable and shapeable. That's what neuroscience shows us. So we can actually reshape our nervous systems with enough consistent neural exercises and think of that like a rep at the gym. So we want to start teaching ourselves that I can do things on my own, whether that's controlled breathing, dancing, going for a walk, being in nature, listening to music, doing yoga, creating art, anything that support. And there's lots of therapeutic tools of course too, but anything that supports you to feel more present here and good and we need to exercise that on our own. I can do things that support my nervous system to regulate. That's really the work of someone who's anxiously attached. And then creating the, what I call internal co regulation, meaning getting a sense on who is this part of me that's present in my body when this, this fight happened? Let's say, do I feel like adult me right now? Do I feel capable, able, present here? Or do I feel like something else, maybe out of control? Scared, small, etc. If you do not feel like adult you, that means that a young part is present and your work in that moment is to pause this conversation and turn towards self regulation. You can also turn towards co regulation with another person. We want to first do self regulation, but then it might be like, you know what, I'm going to sit with my dog for a minute. I'm going to watch this video of someone who's registered as safe. For me, I listen to this podcast. All of those things help bring regulation to my nervous system. And then when I'm more regulated, then we come back into connection with our partner. Repair from adult us not having those young parts be at a constant war. Now, if someone is avoidantly attached, your impulse is to run away. But what our system is really good at, self regulating and not so good at co regulating. So our work is to lean into connection with others. And by the way, the hardest connection is going to be with the people closest to you. Avoidant people. They're pretty great at connecting with strangers because there's not intimacy and vulnerability involved in that. When it comes to the people you're closest with, that's going to feel the most dangerous. We want to see like, can I start connecting with even like strangers on a walk, Can I connect a little more deeply with a friend? Can I share a little bit more with my partner? Just a little bit more tolerable steps towards deeper connection is what we're going to look for. And then when it comes to an actual rupture or an argument, your reflex is going to be to leave. Now we don't want to inhibit that. We want to let ourselves take space. But the job of someone who's avoidant is to say, I'm noticing this is happening right now and I need to take some space to regulate and I'll be back in 10 minutes, 20 minutes. Can we try to reconnect? It's the job of the avoidant person though, to come back. It's not the job of the anxious person to then go chase them. And when we can both do that, the anxious person can take tolerate taking space and learning to self regulate. The avoidant person can tolerate coming back into connection and closeness. We actually help each other heal the past and the present. And I think that's one of the most beautiful things that relationships give us.

Yeah, it's interesting because as you're talking about that, I mean the avoidant. I had to go down the avoidant pathway as well of, of healing the avoidant nature in me that, you know, when conflict would spark up, I would just vacate, you know, and shut down, you know, or I'd stay there, but I'd be shut down. I wouldn't engage. And it wasn't just in conflict, it was also just not actually bringing forward what I needed or wanted. You know, like I wouldn't talk about what it is that I would want or need in a relationship. And you know, I think I had the luxury in some ways of just, just going to find that somewhere else. It was like, well, if I'm not going to get it here and you can't read my mind of what I want and need, then I'm just going to go get that somewhere else. And that strategy, you know, did not work very well for what I wanted out of a relationship. Let's talk about secure for a moment. What can it look like? What should it look like in terms of a secure attachment? And how do we, how do we continue to foster that? Let's say people are in a relationship and maybe they feel for the most part that they, that they are secure, that things are pretty well, or maybe one of them is anxious or avoidant. What are some of the steps to, you know, continuing to co regulate within a relationship, continue to foster that secure attachment?

Well, you know, I think one of the most beautiful parts of healing is to get to a place where we feel home inside. Home is here. And for many of us, those young parts are still looking for home in another. Now that isn't to say that we're not going to create home together, but when I feel home inside, I feel safe. That means I feel safe with me. I feel at home internally, complete here internally. That then whomever I'm choosing and looking for, I don't need you, but I'm choosing you. The real recipe for long term health is for the rest of our lives to be with someone for 40 years. And it's from a place of I don't need you, but I choose you deeply. And that creates a thriving and healthy relationship. And you can only do that when you have internal safety. That's the only way. And that's really what a secure attachment is. It starts with the individual has that internal landscape and internal experience. Now that isn't to say that of course the relationship is not going to be perfect. There's going to be a lot of problems and there of course that we that come up and arise because relationships are really a place for us to evolve further into who we really are. The way that we navigate those things Is really different. Because if I feel safe inside, then when I have conflict, let's say I know that, number one, that the relationship isn't over because there's conflict, because we have so many. Like that rope that I mentioned, we have so many connection points. I know that it's not over. And it's not just cognitively knowing that. My nervous system knows it. When an argument happens, let's say in the morning before you're both going off to work, and there's just a thing that occurs, and in that moment, you feel like. Like I don't love that, and we're just not feeling fully connected. But my nervous system knows we love each other, and this is not the end of the world. And I can go about. We can say to each other, we only have two minutes. We don't have time to talk about this. Let's talk about it tonight. And then both of us can go about our day not being preoccupied with that disconnection because I have internal safety. And instead of it feeling like the relationship is over and I'm going to die, adult me is in the driver's seat. And I know we're going to be able to resolve this literally. It's like a bump in the road. Instead of feeling like this giant mountain I'm not going to be able to get over when we come into or come back into connection. The goal is that I've spent enough time really looking at, and we're really an expert in ourselves. I can look at what happened for me in that moment, and what did I feel in that moment when that disconnection happened? I want to even look at what did that remind me of? Is there a time I felt that in the past that's really important to look at? Was there a young part of me that got poked at in that, like, you know, the more we heal, those parts are still around. They're not so loud anymore. So it might be like, ooh, that pokes at this old. This old scar that I have. And, you know, it reminded me of this thing from when I was 12. And, you know, you come back together in connection and, you know, this thing that was. I don't know what's a good example was just about them saying something about your cooking and not even a terrible thing, but just you asked how was it? And they said it was amazing, I think, you know, but maybe, like, when you asked, was the fish overcooked? And they said, a little, but it's okay. That might poke at something right from my childhood. And I'm able to, in the repair, say, you know what I just noticed. It poked at this thing where I felt. You remember that old thing about me never feeling like I'm good enough? It just. Just reminded me of that again. And that's what I was feeling. And maybe going into a little more. More detail, vulnerably about what was brought up. And then our partner can hear that and empathize and reflect back, of course, that that wasn't their intention. And. And we can communicate what we actually needed, we actually need in that moment. And then they can go through the same process of expressing, how did that make them feel? What did it remind them of? What do they actually need? Then we can quickly come into a repair. And also, what's important is not habituate the same cycle of argument, because most people in relationships, that's what they're doing. There's an argument, and then they sort of brush it under the rug because they don't know how to repair, because they never saw their parents repair and they were never taught how to do it. And the result of that is then we get in the same cycle of rupture all the time. The more those grooves deepen, the more resentment comes in, and something that was quite small can become really big. But when we have a secure attachment, we're not only repairing, but we're nipping in the bud. We're saying, okay, what can we do next time to make sure that doesn't happen? And I think those things are really what we're looking for in a secure attachment, that we're not only is the relationship really amplifying our lives, helping each other grow, but we're also helping each other to heal the past and the present.

Love that. It's almost. I always think of, like, a secure relationship as us prioritizing individuality and independence and balancing that with togetherness, you know, of intimacy with the other person. And that can be, you know, it can be a challenging thing. I think the other thing is what are you as the individual and the couple? What are, you know, both parties doing to promote togetherness? You know, in a. In a time especially where it's easy to become distracted, it's easy to become dysregulated in the, you know, current state of the world. I feel like a lot of people spend too much time on social media, and then they get disrupted by some. Some that they've seen online, and then, you know, or they see it on the news and then they bring that into their. Into their relationship and all of A sudden something that happened at work or something that happened that online is infiltrating their relationship. And so there's, I think one of the things that really good relationships and really secure couples do is that they, they are able to independently regulate themselves and then they're able to, as a unit, co regulate when one person has been thrown off, you know, thrown off base. And, and it's not perfect by any means, but I think that that process normally happens within like a 28, 24 to 48 hour period. You know, I think that generally speaking, people don't let things. If you're in a secure relationship, you're not letting things fester for days and weeks on end. Whether, you know, like, you're not talking and people are sleeping in separate rooms and there's, you know, there's like daggers being thrown through the eyes as you're like walking through the kitchen. Generally that type of stuff. You're, you're not doing that. You're like, okay, let's address this problem is talk about this, you know, and you're doing that in a way that is grounded. There's so many other things that we could talk about where.

I'm trying not to open up Pandora's box, knowing that we don't have a ton of time left. But I'm going to ask the question anyway. How does everything that we've been talking about fit in with sex and connection? Because I think that the dysregulation of a nervous system can lead to all types of complications relationally. So I'll just leave that on your doorstep and you can share whatever it is that you walk.

Well, in terms of how our autonomic nervous system functions if you're dysregulated, essentially, you know, if we could just think back to when we're hunting and gathering and obviously before that. This nervous system has been around for 500 million years. Youngest part is 200 million years old. But when we're in disregulation, our nervous system essentially thinks like a lion is chasing us. If your nervous system thinks a lion is chasing you, it does not think that it is a good time to procreate. So I'm just looking at evolution here for a minute. So as a result of that is going to turn down your sex drive. So when you're dysregulated, your hormones become imbalanced, which of course affects our sex drive as well. So this is all really, you know, remember we're animals. It's all very evolutionarily speaking, or it works Evolutionarily speaking. So this is why I just want to name if you know, sometimes this happens in partnership. Your partner's super stressed out and they have been work projects going on and they just don't want to have sex. And then the other person's like, what's wrong? Why don't you want to have sex? Well, because they're in such a high level of a stress response. Their libido is totally low because of it. So our nervous system affects certainly our sex drive in a really profound way. Also just want to name in terms of our parts. We do not have our adult parts running the show. In our relational dynamics, what is going to usually happen. Meaning there's young parts that are like save me, save me, not okay. What happens is usually one person or the other someone's going to become unattracted to the other person because what they're feeling is I don't feel like I'm with this powerful man that you are. I feel like I'm with a 6 year old. I feel like I have a son because. Or I feel like I have a daughter because in all intensive purposes you kind of do on an autonomic level because that part of them is so dominant in the relationship. So we really need to work on getting in the driver's seat of our own lives. I know how to self regulate, which is what you name. And doing parts work is really important in this. The more that I can self regulate and know that I can, I can do this for me, the less reliant those parts are. And this is all very subtle and subconscious, but this is a big reason why attraction goes away. If we are with someone who is really anchored in their adult selves, where they're choosing me, but they don't need me, that is in just the way that our species works that's wildly attracted attractive, we're going to be really drawn to that person. That's interdependence. Where they want me, but they don't need me. And the more that a man can be in his healthy masculine, which I think a big part of what it means to be in your healthy masculine is that. And a woman can be in her divine feminine, which is. Which really can only happen when she feels safe because otherwise she's going to have too much masculine energy around and dominating. And I'm talking about a heterosexual relationship. But of course this polarity is in any relational dynamic there has to be this polarity of feminine and masculine energy. And I don't think, I don't think it's talked about enough that really the root of that is do you have young parts running the show or adult parts running the show? And the more that we can do this work of being able to self regulate, the more adult us can show up, be who we actually are in 2024. And when we do that, it creates really, in many ways, organic polarity in the relational dynamic. And that polarity, of course, draws us into each other and affects our sexual relationship in a really profound way.

Love that. Love that. Well, I feel like there's a good thread for us to pull on there for conversation number two. If you are open to coming back some really juicy things, I think we could get in on that topic in terms of, you know, how do we regulate that part of ourselves? Anyway, I'm really glad that we got to have this conversation and I really appreciate you and your work and the way that you just structure things and lay them out. And I think it's very applicable and very understandable for people and adjustable in a way that I think is super helpful for folks. So for everybody that's out there listening, where can they go to learn more about you and your work?

You can find me on Instagram at Sarah B. Coaching, and there's a lot of free resources there or sarahbaldencoaching.com Beautiful.

Beautiful. And for everybody that's out there listening, this is definitely the episode that you want to man it forward, share it with somebody in your life that you know will enjoy it. And maybe this is the conversation that you tune into with your partner, you send it to them and say, hey, I think this would be a great conversation for us to listen to together, to better understand what's happening within us. So thought said. Until next week, this is Connor Beaton signing off.