The Whole Parent Podcast
The Whole Parent Podcast
Attachment 101 (with @attachmentnerd Eli Harwood) #013
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This episode promises to enrich your parenting toolkit with the insightful wisdom of Eli Harwood (@attachmentnerd), a seasoned therapist and mother of three, who joins me to unravel the complexities of creating secure attachments with our kids. Together, we walk you through the transformative journey of recognizing and meeting the emotional needs of your little ones, while also acknowledging the importance of addressing our own unhealed wounds to prevent passing on insecurities.
We talk:
- "Three steps" to secure attachment
- How to identify attachment in kids
- How to connect deeply in a few minutes a day
This conversation sheds light on the symphony of synchronicity, where each shared moment of joy and curiosity lays another brick in the foundation of a lasting bond. We discuss the poignant idea of 'withness' and how being emotionally present during the highs and lows of your child's life can create a deep-seated sense of security. As we share personal experiences, we celebrate the diversity of attachment-rich play and emphasize the supportive role a community plays in extending this security beyond the immediate family.
Navigating the ebbs and flows of parenting, we close with an exploration of the potent role of conflict and vulnerability in strengthening our connections with our children.
Eli discusses how therapy work has shifted her perspective from viewing discord as a source of anxiety to seeing it as a gateway to intimacy and growth. This episode invites you to consider the ways in which we can provide our children with a legacy of secure attachment by being emotionally grounded, available, and receptive to their needs.
So, join us as we guide you through the dance of parenting, equipping you with the insights to ensure your children feel nothing but love and stability in your embrace.
And then, what are my mindsets about needs and tenderness? So if I have a mindset that says when my kid cries for a long time, they're being spoiled and selfish, my child will not have a secure experience with me because they won't be able to fully express their dysregulation without shame. If I have a mindset that says I am going to do my best to be here for you, to provide structure for you, to provide support for you. If I can hold boundaries, even though you don't want them or like them, then your children will experience security with you. Do I believe I'm worthy of love and care and support? If I don't believe that it's real hard to offer it to my kids? It's a brand new day, hey. Wake up every morning and say it's a brand new day, hey.
Speaker 2:Take a good day, make it great, ok, hello and welcome to the Whole Parent Podcast. I am so excited that you've decided to tune in today as we discuss secure attachment with the amazing Eli Harwood at Attachment Nerd on all of the social medias. Before we jump right into our conversation with Eli, I'm not going to stop us in the middle to remind you, as I normally do, to rate and review this podcast on whatever podcasting app you're listening to it on. I'm just going to do that right now, and so, if you have not taken the opportunity to do this yet, please, it would be an amazing service that you could provide to me to just go wherever you listen to this podcast Spotify, apple, even YouTube and rate and review this podcast.
Speaker 2:It helps so many other people find this podcast, other parents who are seeking information about attachment, but also or anything else related to parenting, really and so if you can do that, I would be so grateful, so so grateful, and I read every single review that we get, whether it's on Spotify, like I said, or Apple Podcast or wherever. I read all the reviews, and so it's your way to let me know what you're liking from the podcast, what you'd like to see more of and, yeah, connect with your parenting deeper. So, without further ado, I am going to welcome in to discuss Secure Attachment, how we Build it and all that other good awesome attachment. Juicy goodness, eli Harwood, so Eli introduce yourself.
Speaker 1:Who are you? I'm a mom of three little Rugrats, I'm a therapist, I'm obsessed with attachment research and I'm on a mission to try and help as many people as possible build secure connections with the people that matter most in their lives.
Speaker 2:That was so succinct and you're also apparently very, very good at talking about what you like. Three little Rugrats, but two of them are special because they're the same age.
Speaker 1:You were also a mom to terms right. Yeah, they were roommates and now they're roommates. There you go. You can read that for it.
Speaker 2:Roommates and roommates, roommates and roommates. Yes, we have a lot of dads who listen to this podcast and that's just a great dad joke. I'm such a dad joke person.
Speaker 1:I love them so much. I love giving them, I love receiving them. I'm all about the dad joke.
Speaker 2:I was going to say it's really harmful to embarrass your kids. But do you ever tell them jokes that embarrass your kids?
Speaker 1:OK, so my son is a tiny old man and so he loves dad jokes, so one of his favorite things to get for birthdays and Christmas is these terrible joke books, which for me is the equivalent of what we used to get on Laffy, taffy's and I mean I've milked those for years.
Speaker 1:Is the pirate movie rated? Yeah, all right, that just works for me. It works for him. So I haven't. But my daughters are too young to get all of the jokes yet, so we'll see what. I embarrass him in a new area of other ways, but he's like into the dad jokes for now.
Speaker 2:So dressing up in costumes in front of millions of people, he's ambivalent he's ambivalent about it.
Speaker 1:There's someone part of it that he's really into. He'll ask to watch the videos where I dress up and pretend to be a toddler. Those are his jam. He just thinks it's so funny.
Speaker 2:Oh, ok, but like dancing in public, not when you're like the honey badger Dancing in public. Ok, ok, ok.
Speaker 1:Talking much in public Super embarrassing. Too many like kisses and hugs in public, mom, mom, actually it's actually has transformed to bra Bra, bra, bra, bra. No, no, not now, man, he's not, he's almost nine.
Speaker 2:Not happening. Drop me off around the block. Drop me off around the block. You can tell me you love me there. Love me the last 50 feet.
Speaker 1:There's still an intermittent desire, Like there are still days where he's like, aren't you getting out of the car, Are you walking me to the line of the bus stop? And I'm like, oh sure, Like yesterday you were like no thanks, so it's still, we're still in and out of it. The hormones are just turning on. It'll be interesting to see what happens next.
Speaker 2:All right. Well, I guess this kind of leads us to our first question that I have for you this afternoon. For those listening this morning, most people listen to the podcast in the morning, which is cool. All right, here we go. So first question for you how can parents, but especially those parents who don't have secure attachment, who weren't ever securely attached to their caregivers, how can they build that attachment with their own?
Speaker 1:OK, I'm going to answer this in three simple blocks of information for those of you that are still ingesting your coffee and it hasn't yet quite hit your brain and you're only a little bit fuzzy still.
Speaker 2:The first is in creating I think that's just life as a parent. By the way, I don't think that that's like you know, it's like I don't think that is anything to do with coffee, that's just like parent of child.
Speaker 1:No, that's right, and there are varying degrees of fuzziness. Three blocks. There's like it's so fuzzy I can't here or see anything happening in front of me, and then there's like tired fuzzy, and then there's yeah, ok so.
Speaker 2:You know how there used to be those commercials about the 2 PM feeling. That's my 2 AM feeling. You ever get that 2 PM feeling? No, but I got that 2 AM feeling. I have a whole night long.
Speaker 1:OK, squirrel, three blocks, three blocks, three blocks. So the first is you want to create synchronicity with your kids. So what does it look like if you're an instrument and they're an instrument to find that place where you vibrate in synchronicity so that the sound is lovely, right, and that happens in different domains. So we want to be in sync with our children and their joy and their delight and their curiosity in the world. If they're studying a bug, you know, we want to allow our nervous system to enter that curious state with them. Like what is it? It's blue, what does that look like? Because that nervous system connection of I feel your vibe and you're vibing me is one of the most powerful parts to bonding, right, and we experience that with people when we don't even know them. But there's something about that repeated experience of synchronicity, like, ooh, this person is with me. I also love the word withness, like creating a withness in our child's experience of the world. So we want to be with them in those happy, curious, delightful moments. But we also want to be with them in their tender moments, right, so that they can feel that we are attuning to what it is they're feeling, and I like to describe this as taking a tiny sip of their feelings. So we don't want to chug what's going on in their dysregulated bodies when they're tender, because then now we're a tender bug and they're a tender bug and we just add a tenderness to the room in a way that will not help them feel safe, regulated and supported. Instead, we want to take just enough that they can feel. We feel them.
Speaker 1:We also don't want to do the opposite, where we guard ourselves off from what they're feeling, trying to take them out of their feelings, because then they feel dismissed and alone and isolated in that body state. So we're creating synchronicity by going oh, you're sad. I know what it's like to feel sad. I'm going to allow my body to experience a sip of your sadness so that now you can feel that I'm with you and you're experiencing this synchronicity and this whiteness. And we can do that with our facial expressions. Right, if our kid's going, oh, and I just made a sad face, then we want to respond back to them with a compassionate face. Our face should get squishy. If their face is squishy, our face should be squishy too, and there should be a sense that they're being mirrored back. Their internal state is being mirrored back on our external expressions and the way our body posture is with them. So we're doing what we can to get in sync. And the second, yeah.
Speaker 2:You know before you move on. I feel like I have a really good metaphor for this and I wonder if this would be helpful for you, but also for it. So, as you're speaking, you talked about musical instruments and resonance is what I'm hearing right, and the concept of resonance in musical instruments I grew up playing a stringed instrument for 15 years.
Speaker 2:I played the upright bass. And one of those, one of these aspects of how you know you're in tune when you're playing, for example, an A on the G string of your of your bass or on the D string when you're playing an A, is that the A string, the open A string, vibrates but it makes, like the lowest, most bass level, harmonic tone, so harmonic tone so you don't actually hear it. The note is being played much louder out on the note that you're stringing or on the note that you're plucking, but it does resonate with that. So if you have, so if you match up, you're kind of, in a way, the open string right, and so when your kid goes big and they go loud and they go big with their emotions, you're resonating with them. You're not overpowering, you're not taking over the room, you're not imposing your own emotional baggage, but you are humming a little bit just so that they know.
Speaker 1:I'm listening with you.
Speaker 2:Does that?
Speaker 1:work. In your metaphor, does this work? Well, I could get real hippie-dippy and talk about energy and like vibration, is energy right? Like the idea of like what is happening in this moment? Am I able to come in and connect enough that you can feel felt, seen, heard, understood and confident in my ability to then regulate you, support you, celebrate you whatever it is you're needing in that moment, that my calm, confident, connected self can be a scaffolding for you in your development?
Speaker 2:Yes, Well and yeah and I don't want to get too hung up here, but I feel like this is where a lot of parents go off the rails Is that they either are like I have to throw up this wall because I'm so, not you know whether they because they didn't have secure tech, because they're not, they don't have, you know, emotional training, emotional intelligence they throw up this huge wall and they say, like I can't go there with you because if I start to go there, I'll go there, Like if I start to go down the hill.
Speaker 2:I'm thinking about my brother and I just learned I just taught my nephew and my son how to ski last weekend. It was fun. It was fun, and my nephew is much older. He's like 12, 13, just turned 13, and my son is seven, and so I taught them you know twice his age. I taught them both how to ski at the same time, and my brother is skiing with my nephew, but my brother has only gone skiing once in his life. So he, so he can't slow down or stop, he has to focus on him, and so if his son starts to go, down.
Speaker 1:How can he help him?
Speaker 2:He just has to go for what. He can't help him. He just got to go fly and pass them. So I'm the one who like, because I've skied enough, I can just control my body, I can stop on a dime in the middle of a steep hill and I can pick up a kid and I can help. But but there's this fear, I think, for many parents who haven't done their work, that if they start to go at all, if they start to resonate and get synchronous in any way, they're going to go over. They don't know what will happen.
Speaker 1:It's the unknown right. So there's a coping mechanism that's happened over the years that either, whether it's dismissive or it's anxious, but there's a coping that is adaptive in an insecure environment. That that now, in a parental role where you're trying to create security, is getting in the way, which leads me to my second block. So let's go, let's move it in, let's yeah.
Speaker 1:So the second is we have to have done some work on processing our own childhood attachment experiences. So if we want to offer our children security, we have to unload our own baggage so that we aren't unconsciously handing it down to them. If I have never thought about what was my relationship like with my caregivers, with my mother and my father, with whoever parented me foster parents and I haven't reflected on that and I haven't also allowed myself to acknowledge the inherent emotional tenderness in my experiences, be they positive or negative, I will house those experiences in my nervous system and my children will feel it. I have a chapter in my new book that's coming out in the fall where I the whole chapter is titled they Will Feel what you Don't Heal.
Speaker 1:And so, even though we want to be like, ok, I don't want to do my parents did. I don't want to be like that, I'm going to give my kids something different. We can do all the steps right, we can get all the scripts, we can follow you know the whole parent and get all the things we know we need about what we should be doing, what we should be saying, what we should be doing. But if we have not released some of the insecurity, the pain, maybe the anger, the anxiety that we inherited in our childhood experiences. They just stay active and they come out sideways in our present moment and our kids will avoid the areas in us that are unhealed and unwell because they will sense that we don't know how to put on our breaks, that they can't rely on us. We're going to ski right past them or right over them Right.
Speaker 2:Right, right, right. That's so second block and for anyone who's listening.
Speaker 1:That's my first book securely attached is I created a workbook that is like here's how you do this, here's the questions, here's how you create these, cultivate these relationships with other adults in your life so that your children don't have to parent you in some way, parent you anyway, or parent you Parent.
Speaker 2:They don't have to, they don't have to raise you. Well, and it's a. It's not only a beautifully written book, it's also a design book. It's just a joy, it's a joy to go through and hold in your hand. So, so, please, yeah, I'll. I'll link up the show notes.
Speaker 1:I think I'm going to do that, okay, so so we've done synchronicity and we've done working through our stuff right and unpiling our baggage. And then block three is we have to become skilled repairers. We have to become gifted at recognizing when disconnection is happening, when rupture is happening, when misattunement is happening, and be the leaders of the that repair within the relationship with our kids. So I am having rough bedtimes these days twin four year olds, highly sensitive kid, my highly sensitive eight and a half year old wants me to read. They're all in mama mode, so everyone wants me.
Speaker 1:There's just like an intensity, yeah. And so I get off in terms of my attunement, in terms of my synchronicity, in those moments big, for multiple reasons, I'm so tired. I just want to go to bed, right, go to sleep please, right, my stuff, right, yeah. And there's an evolutionary thing happening there too, I think, which is separation and dark Children are going to go up in anxiety because they're like this is definitely the time in which I will be eaten by a tiger, so probably I should cling to you for dear life and I'm like, probably just close your eyes instead and I'm going to go into the kitchen and have a moment.
Speaker 1:So anyway, so this is a point for me in a regularity, probably daily, where I experience rupture, misattunement and disconnection with my kids and I do what I can to try and adjust the schedule and do all those things. But it's my job, when I recognize that we're off-tracked, to lean into my little sensory seeker, remy, who's been hanging off the rafters quite literally, and I've gotten like Remy, enough because I'm losing it. Yeah.
Speaker 1:It's my job to then come back and go hi, honey, I know it's really hard for you to calm down your body. I'm sorry, mama was so harsh. And she'll say, yeah, you're so harsh. And I'll say, yeah, mama was really frustrated. I asked you not to hang on the rafters. And then I got frustrated and we're ha-wah and I'm tuning. I'm noticing that the string has been wound the wrong way too tight usually for me, and I have to unwind it a little bit and a little bit and a little bit until I can sense that our vibrations are back into that space. I have a long-term plan of creating a therapy fund for my kids so that when they're like, hey, I've got some stuff going on, I'm going to therapy, great, here you are, here's some cash to help you with that, if I can.
Speaker 1:But also really to be the type of parent that doesn't burden their children with the expectation that they feel good about their childhood. They're going to feel however they want to feel about their childhood and later on they're going to have things to say to me about hey, this moment you really dropped the ball, or we really hated that you did that. Or my eight-year-old already, when I ask him certain questions we'll go oh, having a therapist for a mom, I'm like what is that?
Speaker 2:What's that for you?
Speaker 1:And he's like you're always trying to get into my business. Yeah, no, when you ask, tell me more about that, he's like everything gets attributed to my career, right, and how annoying to have a mother who's like, somehow weirdly, internet famous and in the realm of parenting and he has ideas of what that means.
Speaker 1:Anyway, but they're going to have complaints and my job that in creating security, my job is to be able to tolerate and handle that feedback from them without collapsing on myself and going I'm a terrible parent, or collapsing on them and going you have it all wrong, you're ungrateful, you missed it right. So I think if every parent can do those three things work on synchronicity, work on releasing the pain you experienced in your childhood and then get very good at saying I'm so sorry, let's try this again and I'm going to reconnect and repair, you'll do fine, your kids will do fine.
Speaker 2:Well, and I think that it's just a game of averages too, and I think that this is where a lot of parents mess this up in their head. They get in their head that it's about being synchronous 100% of the time. It's about being attuned 100% of the time. It's about never doing all of your self-work. I hear this from parents all the time, which is so. It's so funny to me, not like ha ha funny, but just like, oh, you'll learn. Funny. A lot of parents say a lot of 20-year-olds, 25-year-olds, 30-year-olds, before they're having kids, maybe they just got married, or maybe they're even waiting to get married, or they never plan on being married, but they're planning on having kids.
Speaker 2:They say things like well, I'm not ready to have kids yet because I have to do all of my work before I have kids, to which I just want to respond oh no, sweetie, you're going to do your work when you have kids, like that's, you're not healed.
Speaker 1:Yeah, you can do some of your work. And our children are heat-seeking. I'm trying not to use any word analogies these days, but they're heat-seeking beings. They will find whatever it is inside of us that we need to grow or mature or heal, and a lot of that we can't actually even uncover until we are in those spaces with them, and that is when it arises.
Speaker 2:And what's crazy. I don't know if you've read it yet, but Aliza Pressman just wrote this book Five Principles of Primes.
Speaker 1:I haven't read it. I did buy it, so I have it and I started skimming through it.
Speaker 2:OK, you have it OK. So in that she's talking about the most up-to-date research into neuroplasticity and specifically what she highlights, which is something that I'm going to have to add to my book- I'm getting back in a couple of days Myself so that I can start editing again.
Speaker 2:But one of the things that she's added to that book, or she's kind of brought to light, at least for me, is that I'm just reading her words. You know, you have these three periods of, like immense neural plasticity. The first ones in toddlerhood, the second ones in teenage, the third one they're not finding is is post. Yeah, so you have this. You have this like tremendous period of neural Adaptivity and growth.
Speaker 2:Oh, my goodness, that happens, which kind of uncovers for us why we kind of have that postpartum or perinatal like. Oh, I feel like fuzzy. It's like, no, actually you're going through like immense neural development, and so so it's not surprising that our kids like bring that out in us, because we're kind of primed to do that work in those moments, and so it's not, like you know Shafali has been saying this for years from like a spiritual, you know Metaphysical perspective, but that our kids become these mirrors, that then we can grow, but because we're, we are reflecting ourselves, our childhood self, back to ourself, um, but but now it's being, you know, in the narrow side in the research, that like, oh no, actually also like Physically, anatomically.
Speaker 1:I love this. I always use the language of saying that parenting or parenthood is its own developmental stage and the myth is that we are Developed and our children are developing and the reality is that we are co-developing in this experience together and that, and that secure Attachment from a parent child dynamic is a parent who is Adapting and learning in their own body and their own nervous system at the same time that the child is growing and changing. We're growing and changing together, right, and that feels vulnerable, I think. I think you know, at Western culture, we just we love to have the answers. We want the static Sense of like this is ours and we can have control over it, and the truth is there is no control. All right, we don't have control from the get. Go yeah with influence, right.
Speaker 2:We've some what, we've some influence, even you know, and I think that there's.
Speaker 2:There's even an aspect of like you know there's. There's also the the concept of you know what do you do, and I mean, this is, I guess, another question for you. But what do you do when you just don't find yourself resonating with your kids? I mean, this is a question that I get all the time and I'm on. You know I talk about playing with kids or the importance of, you know, creative play, or you know Therapeutic play with kids, and this is where they're gonna tell you stuff and parents will come back to me Just like I just don't like it, I just don't, I don't, I don't want to rough-ass and all my kid wants to do is rough-ass. All my kid wants to do is play Minecraft, and I don't like my doctor, I don't know how to do that. Or all my kid wants to do is this, and it's just like I can't force myself to do that. So what do you do when you're just resonating at a different frequency?
Speaker 1:Love this question because it's a part of parenthood. I don't know anyone who would say I always resonated with all my children all the time. It's part of the process. So I would say one Ask yourself the question Is this an area of growth for me? So what's in the way here? Is it just simply where? Why are different? Our personalities are different.
Speaker 1:You know, this kid came out the gate, you know, in a very different Temperament than I have. Or is there something here of I've I at some point shut myself off from a very particular Vibration of life because I didn't think I was good at it or I wasn't praised for it, or it scares me in some way? So, like, is this a place where I can grow? If it's not, if I, if you just kind of generally like, no, I just think it's not my jam, then you go oh okay, there's a lot of things about parenting that aren't our jam that we do anyway. Right, like staying up in the middle of the night not my jam, but I do it because my children need me to. So how can I make this bearable and tolerable in such a way that I can engage to some degree and I I do with myself? I'll just set little five minute timers with my kids on stuff like that. You know, because I'm not an imaginative play person. I want to play, dress up, I want to move my body. I'm like I'm more of a seeker of of action. But my kids right now are in stages where they want to just take the Barbie and the Barbie's just talking to the other Barbie or the Dinosaur, and I'm like I want to poke my eye out right now because this is so boring for me. I just I doesn't simulate me enough, and so I will say to my kids five minute timer, and that helps me go. Okay, I can do this for five minutes. I can't do this without a sense of when it will end, but I can do it for five minutes and then we come up with a plan for what we're gonna do next. So for five minutes let's do this, and then I'm gonna cook dinner and I'd love for you to help me chop celery in the kitchen or you can continue playing.
Speaker 1:Imagine I play with each other by yourselves and it's it. You know. It creates the sense for our kids that, yeah, mom plays with me sometimes, but it also doesn't create kind of this unrealistic expectation that we would engage at the volume and the duration that our children would like us to do on stuff like that and then inviting kids into other places. But my son loved Minecraft for a while and I kid you not that for me, I would watch him. He wanted me to watch him play and I would watch him and I would get motion sickness. Okay, I get motion sickness really easy, but I would literally feel nauseous. It's like son.
Speaker 1:So I had to figure out okay, what? How can I engage this part of him, this passion? He wants me to see it. How can I engage it in a way that he gets that like experience of feeling seen and Resonated by me? But he also Understands that you know I have a. I'm not gonna be able to sit there and just watch for an hour.
Speaker 1:And so I would say I want you to think about one thing you want to show me on Minecraft, one specific thing you want to show me that you do. Is it how you build this thing? Is that how you tear this thing down? I want you to pick a thing and I want, and when, what I would do when he was telling you that is, I would stay very present and I would, I would let myself and I'm not thinking I'm really going wait. Okay, so did you push control alt? Oh, okay, so what do you push if you want to tear it down? And yeah, I just like ask those questions, give him that sense and then I would. He would feel from me that like I took the time to invest and then he's like okay, thanks, mom, bye, you know. And then you know the rest of the game. Yeah, you give me like, look at this. I'm like oh, cool, fine, but he could feel I tried yeah, no, it's, yeah, and I think I think it's.
Speaker 2:You know the old adage I don't know if it's old, but the one that I use all the time is that your kids, who much rather have all of your attention Sometimes. So so just like fully focusing and just totally investing in for five minutes, I think for so many parents it feels achievable. I did this video that went viral. It was like two years ago and and I talked about Jacques Pangstaff, who is like the father of effective neuroscience, which People don't understand neuroscience and psychology or behavioral psychology, the like these things are.
Speaker 2:Like there's a wall between them academically. Like you don't, your, your neuroscientists don't look at humans, which I think people really misunderstand. Like neuroscience Primarily is studied in the brains of rats. Because you can't just like, you can't just like do something to it. Like ethics, it's like you can't. You can't just like traumatized, I mean like back in, like the day of behaviorism, right, little little Albert experience, they would like traumatized kids, just like find out what would happen. But but like you can't, you know, do something to. You know, expose an adult for for 12 hours a day to sound and then cut their brain open. Like that's, that's really really unethical and evil and so. So neuroscience is is really studied primarily in animals, but there's this guy, jacques Pangstaff, who studied it in animals but then adapted it to to humans, and one of the things that he talked about was hey, if you can give your kids nine minutes a day, but it's focused and it's intentional, and it's when they wake up, when they go to bed and and when you reconnect with them after Some sort of distance, if you can just give them those nine minutes. In those ways, kids feel securely attached.
Speaker 2:And I made this video and it went viral and people were like, thank you so much. And other people were like, how dare you say the parents only need to interact with their kids for nine minutes a day, to which I want to say no, it's. It's not that you shouldn't interact more than that, it's that if you are finding it impossible and you want something achievable, do this. And so for you, motion sickness, right, I can do Minecraft for three minutes, but I'm gonna give you those three minutes and I'm gonna invest fully and I'm gonna be fully, president, I'm gonna put my phone in the other room, whatever. That can be massively helpful, and I think the other aspect to this is both of us are in partnerships, and so where can my partner come in? My wife, my wife has this ability. I don't know where it comes from. She can almost turn her brain off and do imaginative play with my kids.
Speaker 2:My husband can do it too, and I don't understand that's amazing, you can do it, okay, so you can hold the little, she can hold the little Lego guy and be that guy for an hour. Oh, this guy's going over here. Okay, here I come and for an hour.
Speaker 2:Meanwhile she's like, I can do rough housing, but she didn't grow up rough housing Like this was just not part of her family culture, Like they just didn't do that and so, like, when she rough houses like even like being playful with me when we were dating or whatever she hurts she doesn't know the threshold of like what's cute and affectionate and what's like, oh, that's painful. So she doesn't do rough housing with my kids. That much.
Speaker 1:It's just not a good thing Totally, but I can do that. My husband doesn't wanna play dress up but we have an entire closet and like that is a go time for me, I could do that for a day, like we could just take turns dressing and changing our costume and our makeup and our earrings and doing our things, and like I could do that for a whole day. He is like never, no thanks, and so yeah, never right.
Speaker 2:So I think this is the other aspect. Right Is that secure attachment is not just one person. Secure attachment, at its best, is not only both caregivers. But how do we foster and I guess that's the next question how do we foster secure attachment or help our kids to foster secure attachment?
Speaker 1:If people outside our family.
Speaker 1:So the beauty of this is there's a couple of things I want people to hear. The data says that if a child has at least one figure in life who they can securely attach to, who they can utilize as a safe haven for their tender needs and distress and as a secure base from which to launch off of and explore the world, that they will generally develop secure mindsets, secure scripts and a secure sense of self and way of relating the world. But that's a lot on one person and that means that one person has to have, you know, enough financial stability and a great work environment and all of these things going on in the world that allows them to be regulated enough to offer that to their child. So what works best is a village right, and so when we are connecting to our children, we also want to be sending the message that they are worthy of connection and other people are going to offer them that connection as well.
Speaker 1:And you know it depends on the kid, it depends on the timing, but as they, you know, grow, you want to show your children that you have connections with other people and that they can then borrow into those connections and they can see you modeling that you have good friends, that you spend time with your chosen family or your biological family or your adopted family, whoever it is, but that they could sense, oh, close relationships abound. There are many opportunities right, as opposed to some of those scarcity or fear mindsets that insecure legacies tend to have, which is, like you know, blood is thicker than water and like nobody else, like it's us against the world, kind of vibes Like no close relationships abound. There are so many opportunities to develop like synchronous, symbiotic, playful, dynamic, rich, meaningful relationships in the world, and so I'm doing that and I'm going to model that, and as I do that, you'll begin to do the same.
Speaker 2:So I got to challenge you on that blood is thicker than water thing, because do you know what that actually comes from? Okay, so back in my background, you know your advanced training isn't therapy. My advanced training is in ancient language and dead cultures, and so blood is thicker than water is actually a statement that comes from the concept of religious affiliation and chosen family. So it's the blood of the covenant, which is the people for whom you feel secure, that you feel that you have common values with, that you feel that you are connected with inside of deep, yes, yes, way, you know. So the blood of the covenant that you have with your friends, family community is thicker than the water.
Speaker 1:Whoa. It's literally been used exact opposite way colloquially.
Speaker 2:So it's actually a phrase that means the exact opposite.
Speaker 1:You need to do a video on that and the hook needs to be to anyone who has ever had to be estranged from their biological family or lost their biological family. And then you need to do that Because that's the truth. The truth is the resonance right. So who are we resonating with? Who are the people in our life who get us, who show up for us, who support us effectively? Those are the relationships that we want to value and dive into and spend time in, and we want our kids seeing us do that. And that might be people. That might be people related to our womb experience, and am I not?
Speaker 2:I think oftentimes it's not, and I think that that's actually a good thing, you know. I think many of us have. I'm not saying that there's no value to extended family, don't hear that. But I think many of us get into this mindset of like there's a reason, evolutionarily, that teenagers want to totally separate from their parents and want nothing to do with them, and that's that don't sleep with your mother, don't sleep with your sister. You know what I mean. Like that's not gonna be good for the human species.
Speaker 2:And so it's natural to kind of establish yourself as a person distinctively outside of your parents. And so this is why you know you have kids. When you have a child of a parent who might have a really, really strong value system one way or another so the parent really focused on their career the child then doesn't want to focus, they want nothing to do with work and career. You have a parent who's very, very indoctrinated into a specific religious system, the child wants nothing to do with that religious system. You have a parent who's really into this, the child wants you know. And so, as much as we become mirrors to the what, the behaviors and the ways of relating to the world that are modeled to us. We also have many ways in which we separate, and so you know, I'm not always my best self in relation to my family members. In fact, I revert a lot of times to a person who is not the most ideal version of and most healed version of me, and so, yeah, I think that's a hopeful.
Speaker 1:I love that because I think that also plays up sort of what we talked about, that third block of repair that you know it's not about. Hey, kid, you need to follow what I say. Become who I think you should be, continue to propel my value system in the world. It's. I'm here in relationship to you and we're going to evolve together and things are going to change and you are going to reject things that matter to me.
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 1:And it's going to hurt.
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 1:And I'm going to get freaked out about it. Yes, right, but if I can continue to repair, then when we hit that rupture where you say I hate everything about you.
Speaker 1:you know therapists are the worst. I'm never going to therapy that I can have that rebound with my child to go. Hey, you know what? You've got some knowledge that a lot of people don't have. That's an interesting thing to be the child of a therapist, and I can't wait to watch what happens next and the ways that you're going to teach me by living in a way that is different than how I lived. Go get them.
Speaker 2:Yeah, no, I think yeah, and I think that that's so. You know, that takes such confidence as a parent to and self-assured, you know, just like it, the people who are like, why define my role in life as you know who, who are you? Well, I think that how we answer that question betrays so much right. And so some people you know I, they immediately go to what they do, or they immediately go to well, I'm a parent of this many kids. Or you know these are my kids, or they immediately go to well, you know this is my value system, or you know I'm part of this political party or this or that or the other.
Speaker 2:I think that what's really amazing is when you have a person who's so secure in themselves that they do what I'm me Like, and then that becomes the secure base by which your kids can attack which they will, that person who you are, without feeling deeply threatening to you.
Speaker 1:I love it and I think there's also a confidence in connection itself. So I feel I have such a strong sense of the power of that attachment and that dynamic there that I can trust as it stretches and it moves and it shifts, because I know it's there Like I trust it. I know that even if my child is in a stage or a space where they are choosing everything possible opposite of how I've lived, it's a very stretchy bond. It's okay and I'm gonna, we're gonna, we will. One of the phrases I say to my husband and I say to my kids is whatever we go through, we go through together, we'll figure it out, right, like Well, and I think that's, I mean, that's a perfect segue, but I think I mean this is and I don't, yeah, we're not gonna take the podcast completely.
Speaker 2:I have one more question for you that I really wanna ask, but I don't wanna leave this without saying this is one of the fruits of the mirrored as modeled as mirrored thing is that. So I was raised in a household and this is not to discount. I know many people who are separated or divorced from their partners and it's the best possible thing for their kids and that's really really healthy and it's and the alternative was really unhealthy. People in my family, people you know, outside of my family, for whom this was really important. I will also say that the fact that both of my wife, my wife and I both come from parents who, who are, were together for my parents were together for oh, I can't even remember the number of years I think over 40 years or close to it because then then my dad passed away and then and then my wife's parents are still together For us, the idea that in the midst of like a marital conflict, that that would be the end of the marriage, that we would separate, that we would divorce I'm not saying that it's impossible.
Speaker 2:I'm saying that that's never at the front of our mind. That's never the first result or the first. You know, this is what's gonna happen as a result, and in my mind it is impossible. I only say that it's not impossible because I'm not trying to, you know scope myself on some sort of pedestal right and that it would never be.
Speaker 2:Yeah, we're all human, but in my mind it seems impossible to me, and so because of that, I approach conflicts completely differently, and I think that's the same thing with kids. If you really truly look at this as hey, I'm gonna be there for you forever, and even if you totally reject all of my values and you don't practice the same religion, you don't support the same political parties, I'm still gonna just love the absolute mess out of you. I'm not unconditionally love you. If you approach parenting that way, you're not gonna be nearly as threatened when they rebel and when they reject, because ultimately you know that the ball's in your court.
Speaker 1:And I say conflict in a secure dynamic is an opportunity for discovery. And so what is here? What does it mean? What does it mean about me, what does it mean about you, what does it mean about us? What does it mean about the environment we're in and when we view conflict out of a trauma lens.
Speaker 1:Conflict is often viewed as the opportunity for loss or abandonment or abuse, and so and this goes back- to that second box, which is you have to unpack your own childhood and your own stuff to be able to know that about yourself.
Speaker 1:In my family, conflict was an opportunity to throw feces and in my husband's family, conflict was an opportunity to shut down and totally like super wasp vibes, we're not gonna say anything, we're just going to move on and we're not gonna avoid, and so like we both come into conflict then with the baggage of that and then if we hadn't done our work we'd be carrying that on with our kids. So when my kid is so upset that he's like you're mean mom. My son was mad the other night because I was gonna read to his sisters before him and he wrote me this note and I can't remember exactly what it said, but it was something along the line oh no I do.
Speaker 1:It said mom, you are the worst, capital, worst exclamation points on red crayon. And he delivered it up on a thing. And in my unresolved trauma state I probably would have really panicked about that right, had I not done the years and years of therapy work I did on myself. That would have activated the little girl in me. That's like you're mad at me. I broke it. I broke it. I have to fix it. But instead it's like he's tired. He's expressing himself in an eight year olds capacity for conflict. How awesome that he trusts me, that he can send me a note and says you are the worst and knows that, like, he's not gonna be penalized, he's not gonna be in harm's way, he's not gonna break our relationship. And I knew that by the next morning he'd be like mom, we'd be fine. And we talked it, we acknowledged it. But that sense of conflict is where we will discover something together. It is not a threat to our connection, it's a opportunity for our growth. I love it.
Speaker 2:So this one more metaphor before I ask you my last question, but it's the fertilizer right. So the fertilizer. For anybody who knows anything about growing things, which I know very little, but again, in my study of ancient cultures, agricultural metaphors are bound and so you have to kind of know them, but you have to like fertilizer is this invaluable resource?
Speaker 1:It's also poop that smells really bad.
Speaker 2:Yes, and it might be the thing that your relationship needs to grow. And I think sometimes I look at many relationships that fail adult relationships that fail and a lot of times why they fail is because there's no intimacy. Like the conflict there's no vulnerability. So there's no conflict, there's no growth. And so, like man, if I'm still fighting well with my kids and my partner, like that means we're still growing.
Speaker 1:Love it.
Speaker 2:Okay, so kind of getting to the I want to get to hear before we sign off. I know I can just talk all day Before we sign off. Two quick things. How do I know if my child is securely attached? Or how do I know if my child is displaying things that indicate that they may not be securely attached? How can I determine that? As a parent, I'm anxious. I'm watching attachment nerd, I'm watching whole parent and I know a secure attachment is important, but I don't know if my kids securely attach. How do I know?
Speaker 1:So, depending on the age of your child, this is going to look really different when children are really small. So like zero to 18 months. The gold standard of assessing this is what does your child do in response to distress? And I don't mean exhaustion, hunger, I mean like, straight up, I'm scared, I'm panicked. Something is activating my urge to find safety.
Speaker 1:So in those moments does your child run to you, cling to you and find relief in being close, in proximity to you? That is a secure response to distress. If a child in that age does not run towards you but instead tries to shut their body down and focus on distracting themselves with toys, that's a sign of avoidance. And the reason that they're avoiding you in that moment isn't because they don't have an attachment to you. It's because they have learned that the most effective way to regulate themselves is not to activate you, because you might dismiss them or you might add anxiety to the moment for them. And so that's they're coping.
Speaker 1:My kind of life A child who seeks you out, cleans to you but doesn't soothe. So they protest, you pick them up and they're angry at you, angry because you don't reliably show up for them. That's why they sense that you can and you have, and they've tasted the goodness of those moments when you have, but you are intermittently available at such a volume you talked about averages at such a volume and this has to be a pretty high volume that they don't know whether or not this is the last time they're going to get that type of support and attention from you, and so they're going to stay in distress we call it protest in the research in order to maintain contact with you and your attention as long as they possibly can, because they have a sense that it won't last.
Speaker 2:And this is something that they're doing over like cause. I think all of us have had the experience of picking up a kid who doesn't want to be picked up, but this is something that they're doing in response to distress, over and over and over. Again. It's not anger. It's not anger it's not.
Speaker 1:Hey, you can't have the popsicle. That's not distress. It's like I'm scared. I'm legit scared, like a stranger came into the room and they looked nefarious and I'm like where's my dad, where's my mom? That level of distress. So it's really important because and again, that's why I said, it's not being tired, it's not being hungry Our kids push up against us and protest and have tantrums and get angry at us. That is not a sign of insecure attachment.
Speaker 1:So the real yes, there's, an expression of all states of regulation and dysregulation. As kids get older it's a little trickier to see, because they become more competent at keeping themselves safe, so they are less reliant in those moments on our arms as shelter from the oncoming danger, whatever that would be incoming danger. So what we're really looking for is our behavior. Am I emotionally grounded? Am I able to contain my emotional reactions and support my child when they are in theirs? Am I emotionally available, right, and this you know? Am I present in such a way that my children can tell that I actually really do want to be there for them in these moments of tenderness and joy? Am I emotionally receptive when they bring their feelings? Am I able to allow my nervous system to take that sip so that they can feel that they've been felt by me, that their inner state has entered my inner state and they are now connected to me in this emotional moment?
Speaker 1:And then, what are my mindsets about needs and tenderness? So if I have a mindset that says when my kid cries for a long time, they're being spoiled and selfish, my child will not have a secure experience with me because they won't be able to fully express their dysregulation without shame. If I have a mindset that says I am going to do my best to be here for you, to provide structure for you, to provide support for you. If I can hold boundaries, even though you don't want them or like them, then your children will experience security with you. Do I believe I'm worthy of love and care and support If I don't believe that it's real hard to offer it to my kids, right? No?
Speaker 2:Man, yeah, that's the challenge over here at the whole parent house. To be honest, right there, you just nailed it right, which is one of my constant things. So in my book, right now at least, I have a quote at the beginning of each chapter, and I only have one quote. That's for me. But I had to have my own quote, which is you cannot give to your kids, you cannot give to yourself. And that's really, and maybe somebody has said that before- Well, all things have been said before.
Speaker 1:All things have been said before. In some way, shape or form, we're not co-opting somebody.
Speaker 2:Yes, yeah, but I mean that's, I think that's such a struggle for so many of us in our you know, and this kind of gets back to the very first question of how do we do these things when we haven't received them, but it sounds like our attachment relationships with our kids actually can heal us too. That we're not. You know, our job with our kids is not for them to heal us, but it's a very beautiful my approach.
Speaker 1:Our attachments with our children provide an incredibly ripe opportunity to heal, our attachment ones. And it is not our children who heal us, it's ourselves and it's the other caring, safe witnesses in our life grown-ups, partners, community members, family members, therapists, and the experience between us and them. Right, it's that in between that is healing, and it is not our children offering us the kind of love we never felt from our parents. That doesn't work like that. Right, it is. But it is us recognizing, through our parental role, that there are places that are unresolved in our hearts and our bodies and our minds and our inner scripts, and then actively doing the work to get care for ourselves. And the more care we get for ourselves, the more instinctive it is to give that care to our kids, the more sturdy it is.
Speaker 2:That's a beautiful place. That's a beautiful place for us to kind of wrap this and just to say if people want your assistance and how they can care, you know, receive that care and learn to seek out that care, those therapeutic relationships for themselves. Heal their attachment wounds. Get your book, learn more from you. Hear all the podcasts that you're on. If you're not on enough, you need to be on more. This is fantastic. How can they find you?
Speaker 1:Yes, well the easiest one-stop shop would be to go to attachmentnerdcom and you can kind of link to all the things there Books, courses, classes I have a membership, all the things that would potentially meet your needs. And there's a link there also for attachmentlabscom, which is a group of coaches and therapists that I have brought under my wing and have trained up over the years. Honestly, some of them have been with me for almost a decade to offer support to anyone who is wanting to learn more secure patterns and to heal the past. And then, if you already have a therapist, go grab my book, because you can just take that bad dog right into therapy and say can we work through this together? I designed it for that exact purpose, because a lot of therapists know a little about attachment and want to help their clients but have not been as strangely obsessed as I have. So I feel like I could just put that in a workbook and hand it out.
Speaker 2:That's awesome. So they can get all this at attachmentnerdcom, which will be linked in the show notes, as well as a link to your book, eli, thank you so much for being on the whole parent podcast. It has truly been a delight.
Speaker 1:Thank you for having me Love this.
Speaker 2:Friends. That is our episode for today. Thank you so much again to Eli, who was so gracious with her time spending a long time with us talking about attachment. It is what she is so passionate about. As I said before, you can find her information in the show notes, links to her book and also her website. But if you're looking for more information about whole parent, if you're looking for information about the membership or recent courses that we've had, you can also find that in the show notes. We just did an awesome workshop not too long ago. Please go overhead to my stand store link and you will find all the amazing information as well as a link to my email. My email is the best place to get. That was my little guy walking in the back. My link to my email is the place to get all of these amazing insights about the things that are happening. This is so funny. He just keeps blocking in behind me Insights into the things that are happening.
Speaker 2:I send out an email every single Thursday that is just packed full of parenting information. It's like a blog post that's delivered right to your email inbox and it also lets you know what the podcast topic was for that week, often Upcoming workshops. Like I said, that you would be able to find in that stand store link as well, and anything else related to whole parent. If you're not joined the email list yet, please go over to that stand store link. It's the first link that you'll see at the top of the show notes. Click on it, enter your name and your email and you will be signed up. It's totally free. I'm not going to just be haranguing you constantly with sales emails. If I have something going on, I might send you an email and let you know if I think it would be beneficial for you. This is really just an opportunity for you to grow as a parent. That's what I do with that email. Yeah, I'm sure you're going to absolutely love it. Until next time, this has been the Whole Parent Podcast. I'll catch you next week.
