https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=MR8xowORgeA

Welcome everyone to another Voices with Raviky. I’m very excited for this. I’m going to be talking with Seth Allison. Seth is a practicing psychotherapist. He’s going to talk to us about attachment theory, a little bit about internal family systems theory, how these can be related to dialogical practices, wisdom cultivating practices. Seth is going to be doing two workshops for Awakening to Meaning. So Seth, it’s just wonderful to have you here. Thank you so much for coming in and talking to me. Oh, God, John, thank you so much. I’m showing up in internal family systems. You know, we say all parts welcome. I am definitely showing up with some anxiety. I’m aware of that, but also a lot of excitement. I’ve been very much looking forward to the conversation. So can I introduce myself? Please, please say a little bit more about yourself, a little bit more about how you came to be connected to your practices, how you came to see a relationship to my work. And at some point, not necessarily at the introduction, but at some point, maybe just a little bit of a foreshadowing of what people could expect in the workshops as well. Oh, oh, yeah, great. Yeah. So I have been a psychotherapist for my whole career. It was a relatively straight shot through college and grad school and was influenced initially by psychodynamic psychology. Just for readers and listeners, psychodynamic, Freud, Jung, that kind of correct. Correct. Yeah. So a psychology of the inner world and inner experience and inner dynamics. So and then actually move away from that into outer systems, family systems, theory, you know, which is kind of the manipulating of the environment around a person to produce change. And then back again to psychodynamic stuff and self-psychology with Heinz Kohut, which explored narcissism and the fragmentation of a self and really the development of a self and how we understand that. But, you know, reading original sources from Freud and, you know, psychoanalysts are famous for making up their own language. And then that has to be translated. And I found in attachment theory, the work of Susan Johnson was sort of my entry point. I found a new language and vocabulary for the experience internally that an individual is navigating, but then also how that interacts with their outer world and how that there’s this dialogue and flow that’s happening that forms profoundly forms our sense of self and other. But also can be worked with. And this is a very exciting part of it. Once we understand it, we can work with it to heal and to grow in really powerful ways. I’m getting away from my biography. I’m nerding out already a little on the theory, but anyway. Weaving them together. That’s good. So I’ve been in private practice for a long time, but we, my partner and I, my business partner, Chad Alcorn, we founded Grow Collective, which is a collective of therapists, psychologists and coaches. And our mission is to bring attachment theory and the idea of relational growth and utilizing relationships as a resource for really efficient movement towards seeing things clearly. And that’s going to tie in very much with your work of developing wisdom practices. And that our goal is not just to do that in the individual counseling room, but to begin to broaden that and have a larger impact on different systems and just bringing this into the public conversation, which is part of why I’m nervous today, because I really want this to come through for people. So I trust that you and I will do that. Yeah, for sure. Yeah. So that’s it. And I came to know your work through somebody that I was working with, who was just changed profoundly by waking up from the meeting crisis. And he kept kind of saying, this is, you know, this is, this is my conversion experience. And I began to listen. And then through mutual connections, you and I end up sitting here. And, you know, this is a, it’s a great step for me to get to talk about this more instead of just really using it as a clinician to maybe move into teacher a little bit, which is fun. That’s, that’s really wonderful. Because I mean, I’m of course, very interested in the therapeutic aspects of attachment theory and who Johnson’s pairing it with emotion-focused therapy, the work of Les Greenberg and others. Yes. And I did some EFT workshops with Greenberg. Oh, you did. That’s great. Yeah, I’ve tried to get quite a bit of training, participant sort of observation and training in quite a few of these modalities. So I understand, at least I went through Jungian therapy, I want to understand things from the inside. But although I’m interested- So I also, I would add to that, sorry, I interrupted you, but I also have been through my own Jungian therapy. In fact, I’m still after 10 years in it. And so it’s, I’ve appreciated your integration of Jungian thought and practice. That’s been very important for my development as well. Well, thank you for saying that. Yeah. I am particularly interested, though, in what you said about broadening this beyond the therapeutic context into, you know, the cultivation of wisdom, meaning in life, something analogous to what philosophical counseling does, where it’s not trying to deal with sort of neurosis broadly construed, but with confusion or existential dilemma, which are also can cause considerable suffering, even though there’s no neurosis or significant pathology at work. And of course, there’s gray areas with existential counseling. And I’m not here to plant a flag. I’m just, I’m said, I’m more interested in, in that sense, the more broadly philosophical love of wisdom, possibilities that we can explore around attachment theory. I’m particularly interested in about how attachment theory might help us to deal with the kinds of projections and misplaced connections or misplaced identifications that are taking place in practices like dialectic and to deal with this when people are engaged in deep dialogue, about dialogical practice. And I think attachment theory is a good way for people to become aware of how they attach to other people. So maybe, maybe what we could do is begin with what attachment theory is and why it’s not in the Buddhist sense of the word, which people might hear. That’s very important. Right. Right. Yeah, I would love to. And so once I get going, you may need to interrupt if you want to maybe ask clarifying questions, that would be great. But when I’m explaining attachment theory, I like to start with an image. And the image is an infant in a crib. And the infant wakes up in the middle of the night. And we would say the infant is hungry. We’d use the word hungry. But I want to kind of with our listeners and with you kind of start with, but what, what really is the experience of the infant? How would you, the infant doesn’t have a concept of hunger. It doesn’t have a concept of emptiness. It doesn’t know what to do. It doesn’t have emptiness. It doesn’t know what to do with that feeling, but it is experiencing something. And you want to take a shot at it? What would you say the infant is experiencing? I mean, for me, this is very hard about trying to get before conceptuality. But that’s right. There’s something like, you know, I’m trying to get something very more primordial, something like distress, disconnectedness. Good. Good. But see, even there, we’re still in the conceptual. The, the, the somatic is where the answer is. It’s pain. It’s pain. The infant is experiencing pain. I don’t know, I actually don’t know if the infant even knows where it’s experiencing the pain. Right. It might be unlocalized. That’s what you’re saying. Yeah. Right. Right. So the first step in understanding attachment is to feel it in the body. It’s a somatic experience. The second step of attachment is to symbolize outwardly. Notice it’s not to speak, but to symbolize an inner experience outwardly to, to, uh, some body to some person. And, uh, an infant does that instinctively by crying. So there is a movement from internal somatic experience to an external signal, a symbolized, um, projection of this pain. And the third step of understanding attachment theory is there is a human being whose nervous system, um, is actually responding. There’s an alert that goes off in the parent. This is the emotional physical bond that we call an attachment. Um, for those that are parents, uh, you know, if you wake up and you hear a child crying and in distress, but you were unable to get through the locked door, your nervous system would begin to escalate very quickly. Yes. Yes. Um, your body is responding to this distress. There’s an imperative biologically to respond. Um, so we have a co-regulating system. This is important, important to understand attachment, feel it in the body, symbolize it. Somebody is there to come in and pick up the baby to discern what that cry means. Either they need to be changed or they’re hungry. And then in a timely way, respond to that by feeding the baby. And in that response, if it’s accurate, uh, and it’s attuned, we get step four, which is the infant system returns to a baseline. There’s a return to normalcy in the system. The pain is soothed. Um, and the infant then resumes, and this is very important. It resumes its developmentally normal expected activity, which in this case, if we’re lucky, is it goes back to sleep. Um, so- Is there an idea that the child is also beginning to learn from this process? Because- Yes. Yeah, exactly, John. Because the- Yeah. So the mother is beginning to supply a structure of intelligibility for the child and being, you’re getting to reflect back to the child. It’s sort of, right, it’s relationship to the environment and things. So there’s also- Bingo. Yeah, okay. Okay. Yeah, bingo. So I, to me, what makes sense in talking about it, and for all the parents listening, they can get panicky when we talk about attachment because there’s this fear that I’ve done it wrong. But boy, if you do this right 75, 80% of the time, which most of us are responding to babies more like 95% of the time, um, you have a human being that grows up, and this is the very important thing when we talk about secure attachment. They grow up, they don’t just believe that other people are safe. They believe that their body, when it experiences things, can be responded to and soothed by a relationship, by another human being. So they grow up with a faith, not just in people, but a faith in their signals internally, that they can trust that data and they can symbolize that data. It’ll make sense and somebody will help them with it. That’s where we begin with how attachment ideally works. Does that track? So yeah, I’m trying to get those two together. So the person gets a sense of sort of trust. Correct. Trust in themselves and also trust that their body is producing signals that are accurate and will be received, something like that. What’s the nature of the trust of the body? That’s what’s a little bit unclear to me. Yeah, so that’s what I think is part of the contribution in our dialogue today, is to help people understand that what is trickling down from academia, right now in more popular psychology, is the idea of what’s your attachment style? Are you avoidant? Are you secure? Are you anxious? I think those things are largely limiting and kind of unhelpful, actually. A more robust understanding of attachment is that it is essentially kind of starting from a place of information processing. Okay, we’ll back that more. Good. Yeah, so the idea is that data, sensory data specifically, which is coming internally. In the infant example, there’s internal sensory data, but sensory data also comes externally. But the brain is performing processing functions with data. And the way that Patricia Crittenden here, I was going to show this to you. This book, I think you would love this if you haven’t seen it. It’s an expansion of her model, the dynamic maturational model. Absolutely fantastic. And it builds on an understanding of information processing through cognitive psychology. So data comes through sequentially. This happens, and then this happens. And when this happens, I feel this. And when I feel this, this happens. And data comes through in terms of intensity. So the intensity of this pain is registering. And then when I signal, somebody responds to that. And then I feel better. This is the dynamic that eventually leads to the formation of a sense of self. When intensity goes up, can I be responded to and have it come down? What are the things I do to make that happen? What are the strategies I use when I find myself in a state of over arousal or danger signals? John Bowlby, the father of attachment theory, suggested we create working models that are flexible and grow over time. But these models are a model of us in relationship to attachment figures. Probably getting ahead, you want to slow me down a little bit? I just wanted to ask. So, I mean, this sounds a lot like it could be integrated with sort of predictive processing framework in which you’re getting generative models of what can be expected. That’s exactly right. Attachment theory based in an evolutionary psychology of it is about predicting danger, essentially. And that attachment, one way to kind of access the idea of it, the significance of it, is that because we cannot stay in gestation for as long as we really need to, we come out of the womb. Yeah, very immature. Very immature. And the only way we survive, it’s not a breast that we attach to, it’s a person. So emotional, physiological bonding is actually the key driver of our species survival. So is it part of attachment also the other that you said earlier, the mother is instinctively wired or the father, right? Instinctively wired to commit, to make this being super salient, central, to commit to them very long term. I mean, that’s also, right? That is a huge part of why our species survives. So there’s the attachment from attachment figure, mom, dad, kind of going downward towards the kid. This is not like adult attachment. We have a mutual transactional analysis would say we have the adult part and we have the child part. Sometimes I’m the adult and sometimes I’m the kid and we’re co-regulating each other. And I want to talk a lot about adult attachment. But to understand that, we have to start with this. The parent has this imperative to care for that child. The child, there are two functions that a parent serves in attachment theory for a child. One, Bowlby talked about a secure base and the other he talked about a safe haven. So when there’s a danger in the environment or attachment figure is unavailable, there’s arousal in the system. And then there is hopefully a way to reconnect to a parent and to retreat to a safe haven where I can then feel restored and comforted. My system goes back to baseline. And then I have a secure base and then when I secure base picture like something solid that isn’t going to move when you push off of it, a trampoline gives. But a secure base you launch from fully. So I know that I can do my developmental activity. Maybe that’s exploring the world. Maybe it’s going and adventuring or just getting my homework done. I can do that and I can take optimal maximal risk taking behaviors. LW I want to put a pin on that because I think this is really important. Because for me, this is where attachment is one of the first places not maybe the most important, but one of the first places where attachment theory gets us into significant cultural critique because we have the idea that attachment is to be dependent and codependent and to be an adult is to be autonomous. And you have what’s been called the attachment paradox. I don’t know if that’s the correct name for it, but the evidence that when we have secure attachment relationships, we actually are functioning optimally in the world. LW Correct. That is a huge part thank you for honing in on that because that’s what we’re going to talk about a lot with attachment as it impacts wisdom practice is that the cultural and it’s very western, individualistic and it’s extremely detrimental understanding of what attachment means. It does not mean dependence. It is a healthy reliance on what is our most and that I always end up back at the word efficient, but it is our most natural coping strategy and it is the quickest way back to baseline so that we can then go perform optimally. And you’re right, the research is overwhelming that people who report feeling a sense of security with their partners or with their parents perform better. They maximize potential across domains. And the reason for that is that when we feel insecure, so I want to come back to the strange situation test and talk about that. But when we feel insecure, what that means essentially is we can’t, we’ve lost touch with our safe haven. We’re not sure about our secure base. There are things, sensory things happening in our body saying we’re not okay. Well, the evolution of our system brings us to a point where that stuff trumps other cognitive processes. It just blows them away. So when we feel distress, our brains and our systems now become dedicated to dealing with that distress. We cannot bring full flow. I think flow and attachment are very interesting. I want to talk to you about that for sure. Could I ask you this point? Because another thing, here’s the four ECOG scientists and me wanted to say, and I’ve been doing a lot of work this year on the cognitive science of home. Because it seems to me that we don’t just attach to a person sort of isolated in time and space, we attach to a person within an entire system of the environment, which we call home. And home has layers to it. There’s your room and then your house and your city, your country. So is there talk in the attachment literature? I’m thinking about something analogous to Ericsson’s basic trust. We have a sense of being at home. We can find, and the Stoics talked about trying to cultivate this no matter where you were, that you could find being at home, that secure base no matter where you were. You could be Cosmos Polos, Cosmopolitan. Is there any discussion of attachment towards sort of the world or the environment that is an extension? I get that it’s going to focus initially on other people, the agapic relationship. But is there anything in, because this of course, the reason I’m asking this is this relates to the work I do in the meeting crisis where many people are feeling not that they don’t have shelter, but that they’re homeless, they’re domiciled, they don’t feel like they belong, they don’t know how to find a place of a base, a home base, and we use that word, from which they can properly orient in the world. Is this a useful connection or am I just waving my hands? Like, yes. It is both you are waving your hands, but I think because your system is sensing that there’s something very important here and the attachment theory absolutely speaks to it. So one of the ways that we could get there is that, again, attachment theory roots itself in relationship. But actually it is about data processing and it is about felt senses of homeostasis and disruption. And so to be in a state of security is what the Stoics are talking. Yes. The state of being at home and safe and free in one’s attention to move into focus freely, to practice the discipline of attention, like to get into a state of security. Wonderful connection. Again, that’s great because that also challenges when people hear attachment, they hear fixation. And what you’re saying is attachment is actually the affordance of the ability to properly discipline attention. Did I hear you correctly? Correct. 100% correct. Yes. Yes. I mean, we know through all our practices that attention is not an easy discipline. And that if your system is a little hijacked, so maybe we could pause here. I know we’re both excited about this, but I think for the conversation to be rooted in understanding attachment theory, the strange situation test will really help us ground. Ainsworth, yes. Yeah, great. Yes, Ainsworth. So to explain this, this is a test that’s been replicated probably thousands of times. I just want to emphasize that to everybody. Attachment theory is not woo-woo fluff. I mean, it’s up there. It’s up there with measurements of G, up there with big five personality, robustly replicated, reliably predictive, therapeutically powerful. Like I say, if I have to get three measures from somebody, I want a measure of G, I want the measure of rationality, I want their attachment style. I guess I want four, and I want personality. Those are the gems. And attachment is one of them for sure. Exceptionally reliable. And that’s what excites me so much about it is that it gets at what the psychoanalysts were trying to get at. But it’s done in the laboratory and it’s right there. So let me paint this. This is a test, a way of assessing, actually learning about attachment and how it works. So picture just a room with some toys in it, and there is a lab, a tech who’s probably a therapist in training, and let’s say a mother or a father, but a caregiver and a child, probably one years old, moving into being a toddler. They come into the room. It is a strange place. The kid has never been there before. The mother is instructed to get down on the floor and the therapist in the room and the mother and the child begin to play with toys. And at a certain point, the mom is instructed to get up and to leave the room without saying goodbye and to close the door. And then we see what happens. And there are very limited set of responses. And so we see that the mom is trying to get up and leave the room. And there are very limited set of responses. So the first one, we’ll talk about what is classified as a secure response. And this is when it was originally done, it was about 80% of kids. I think it is a lot less than that now. And by the way, most of these studies western white population. So there are some, yes, right. But what we found in a secure child, a lot of people hear that and they think, oh, the kid was fine. You just, they kept on playing, right? No, no, that kid gets up, goes to the door, is crying and reaching at the door. The therapist comes over with toys to try and distract them and say, come back and play. The kid will have nothing to do with it. They cannot be soothed. So there we have like the internal upheaval, right? And no cannot do the developmental task of play. Nope, it just can’t do it. Stranger can’t soothe them. Mom will say, mom comes back in. What does the child do? Do you recall? This is just so crucial for understanding adult attachment. The child reaches up to the right. That makes a reach, right? And the mother responds by reaching back and picking up. Here we have the, I’m going to help regulate your body. I’m going to help soothe what’s disturbed. And the mom’s, you know, gets the gentle voice. Oh, it’s okay. And physical touch. And pretty soon, not right away, but pretty soon we see the back to baseline. And then what happens next? They get back on the floor and they cautiously at first start playing with the toys. They resume the developmental task, but what they’re also checking. Yeah. Are you still here? So, okay, you’re still here. I was once explained that when they get to that place, the checking, they explore, they check and they periodically return back to the mom, like a home base. A hundred percent right. And the mom is like the orienting, like almost like a compass, the orienting point in the room. That’s right there. That’s the image of a secure base. So you don’t see I’m overly dependent on mom. So let me explain the other two. Yes. There are actually three other ones. So the next child gets up just like the first one cries, is very upset, goes to the door, cannot be sued. Mom comes back in child reaches mom picks up, but this time as mom tries to comfort the child, the child does not calm down. Yeah. They do not start returning to baseline. They go up. And as they ramp up in their intensity, we watch mom begin to get overwhelmed. Yes. And we have this anxious feedback loop of the baby’s emotions are overwhelming the mother and the mother cannot soothe. We call this anxious attachment. Right. Right. Or preoccupied is a better word. The child becomes preoccupied with it, with achieving soothing. And they don’t return to exploring the room or playing or anything like that. That’s the kid who won’t leave mom’s lap. Yeah. Yeah. So there we have the image people think of unhealthy dependence. Right. We have some a kid that can’t explore because they’re too scared. They’re too preoccupied. And a lot of times people wonder, well, what, how did they get that way? A lot of times what you have is kind of the slot machine principle of a random ratio of responsiveness. So you might have a depressed parent who isn’t really responding to some of the more subtle cues. Or they might, or in the big five, they might be high in neuroticism, high in negative affect. And so they can’t properly, they’re easily overwhelmed by negative affect being stimulated by the outside or something like that. That too. So some kids with that parent will learn to caretaker the parent. Yeah. But the, the kid who’s anxious and getting ramped up, one way to think of it is behaviorally, they’ve learned to turn the volume up to get a response. But once they go past a tipping point, they can’t stop turning the volume. That leads. Why is that? I mean, I just, I want to zero in on that a little bit. So the information processing, because the system is being governed by an attempt to return to homeostasis, presumably that’s the inner teleology, the biological. Right. That’s right. Yes. And so why, why would it like, it sounds like somehow there’s an error signal is not properly. Okay. Yeah, that’s great. There’s a distortion of data. So there’s an over attending to the internal data. So in that state, right in the heightened state, there’s a movement to seek comfort. There’s a there’s anger. And there’s fear. And the anger signal is getting overattended to. Oh, it’s kind of super salient for the child. Correct. Correct. So, so we crittend in again, building on Ainsworth, when they when she looks at the preoccupied, and she calls them strategies, they the there’s the state of being anxious. And the attention, whereas the other kid that we’re about to talk about, he’s distorted, he’s going to distort in a different way. But the anxious kid, they’re not tracking a linear process, they can’t sequence data. They’re simply processing on this vertical axis of intensity. So their only reference point in that moment is internal. That’s interesting. That’s like, you know, how Piaget talks about with conservation problems, that the children are only paying attention to one variable. And they’re not paying attention to the relationship between variables. Yes, that’s right. Yeah, yeah, that’s exactly right. So learning theory, yeah, really theory. Yeah. So the let’s get to that other kid, because it’ll help to juxtapose. Yeah. The third child, when mom gets up to leave, doesn’t cry, right? They don’t get up and go to the door. They actually don’t show on their body, a whole lot of distress. And in our culture, we’d look at that kid and say, Oh, that kid’s security. I know. No, no, that’s not the normal response. What what we know now is that if you have that kid being monitored, yeah, I know this for research, that you look at the screens, and you wouldn’t know which kid is which. Yeah, can you believe that? That they’re, their system hyper aroused, but they have shut it down. They’ve, they have dissociated and disconnected from the data internally. So here we have a kid that has learned already at one to, to not attend to the internal data. And what is he attending to instead? He focuses on the toys. He doesn’t shift his vision from what is externally right in front of him. And this is the, this is the source of compulsive behavior. I’m going to focus and distract from all the data in here. And that leads to, you can imagine in the pursuit of wisdom or seeing accurately the problems that you’d have if you are excluding an entire set of data that’s internal. So both of the children are, are like, they’re focusing on one thing to the exclusion of the other, right? That’s correct. One, one is becoming absorbed in the inner data and the other is trying to dissociate from the inner data and tries to absorb in the external flow of information. Is that, is that? You got it. Yeah. And the secure kid in the middle, which Crittenden does ABC instead of the secure avoidant, she just says, well, the B kids, the B people in the middle, they just, they can process both. Yeah. They can attend to both external sequence and internal intensity. So that’s, that’s the very beginning of a profound participation in relationality by being able to process these two in their, in their, in how they belong together and how they work together and how they fit together. And that, you know, how is that, why does, why does the attachment to anybody play into this? Well, because that attending and using and synthesizing data, all of that is learned in the diad with the attachment. Right. Right. It is what the parent is attending to or not attending to, reflecting back or not reflecting back, responding to or not responding to that affects what the infant’s going to attend to. So, so, um, you, so, so just to, to, to illustrate that a little bit. Oh, by the way, there’s a, there is a fourth observed behavior, which is a sad one, which is the disorganized experience. Yeah. I was going to ask you about that. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Just moving. My instinct is to seek safety with you, but actually you’re abusive and not safe. And I, you watch it a kind of profound ambivalence and it’s really hard to watch, um, where a body is moving towards, but then pausing. Yeah. And you get like, my partner has a cat like that. She wants to be picked up and when you pick her up, she’s like, it’s like, uh, no matter what you do, right. There’s, it takes a long time. Yeah. I have to earn her trust. And that’s right. So, so I’m interested in stuff. I, I know you want to go on, but, um, see, you know, when I’ve taught, when I’ve been taught this and what I teach it, like an intro psych, yeah, I use the standard labels, which come down from academia. And I mean, and one of my colleagues is Jeff McDonald. Uh, right. And he, you know, and he’s, you know, one of the world authority, he says, if you want to understand romantic relationships, attachment theory is the way, the truth and the life quoting the gospel. And about, you know, if you have an anxious attachment style, this will show up in your romantic relationships that way. Is that Fisher’s work? I can’t remember, but one of the strong prediction relations is between these sort of standard categorizations and how people show up in their romantic or friendship relationship. But I sense there’s a bit of, you want to, you find that limiting in some way. Well, um, I think it’s, it, it, it’s an entry point for people as they pursue, you know, what does it mean for me in relationships to be somebody who skews towards an anxious attachment style? Yeah, I, I, I came to that myself. I was in, I’m in a wonderful relationship. Um, but I, we came to a stress point and, um, yeah. And I, um, yeah, I came to the realization that I have an attached, an anxious attachment style. Yeah. And then that was, that was very helpful, um, in a lot of work. It opens up the possibility of awareness. And then you have, um, options of how to work with the anxiety. Um, and that, um, you know, where, where it is ego shall be, you know, Freud was talking about this a hundred years ago. Um, the, so to shift to adult attachment, where I think I’d like to move this to. Yeah. Well, I already, I already did that a bit, towards romantic relationship. Yeah. I think, I think that’s where the, the, the workshop’s going to focus. Of course. Um, I, this stuff is hugely relevant for parenting and hugely relevant in the mental health field for early intervention. Even, you know, infant, uh, infant mother dyads doing this work early on could, I mean, could, yeah, could change the world. Um, but you know, we don’t catch that. We, we catch it later and people who come to my office usually are coming because they’re in distress relationally. Yeah. And, um, so rather than thinking of it as I have an anxious attachment style, which is this definitive statement of, I am an anxiously attached person, which is not true. Um, actually a lot of the time you’re experiencing a very secure sense of attachment, but you get into an acute situation where there’s a spike in intensity. And we might say there’s an experience of disruption in the bond that my sense of, so, uh, Sue Johnson talks about, uh, she calls it a R E, uh, are you available? Are you responsive and are you emotionally engaged? Yeah. And if you’re with your partner and suddenly you feel, and this is the spike in intensity that your body will feel, which is saying danger is near. So this is cognitive processing. When it’s a spike in intensity, what that means is where is the danger? Where is it in proximity to me? The congruent, the, uh, what’s happening in order is about when is the danger going to happen? Can I predict when it’s going to happen? So if I’m in a fight with my partner and suddenly they’re looking at me like I am this terrible asshole, um, and I begin to feel flooded. Uh, and I go into the, uh, you know, I call it the, I’m not an asshole speech. Here are all the reasons why. And, um, and they just feel unheard of course. And so they begin to ramp in intensity. Yeah. I am not feeling secured in that moment. I have entered, uh, a state of attachment anxiety. Now the question of attachment style is how am I going to respond to that? Am I the kid on the floor who plays with toys, who’s going to minimize all those signals? Right. I’m going to pop up into my head. I’m going to go very sequential here. The 10 reasons what you’re saying doesn’t apply to me. And I’m actually an okay guy. Therefore you shouldn’t leave me. Uh, which, which doesn’t go so well. Or I drop into like the anxious kid, the hyperarousal begins to guide me and I’m not processing what they’re saying. I’m not taking any data in from them. I’m not looking at my participation in what’s happening. Everything I’m feeling is conviction and it’s telling the truth about the situation and I’ll just tell it more loudly and more intensely and I’ll hyper-focus on anger or a hyper-focus on trying to get them to understand. Um, either way I’m starting to miss the truth that’s available to me. We’re not listening in either situation. Right. Yeah. Well, you are, you’re attending to data. No, no, but what I mean, you’re not attending to all data. You’re not. Yeah. Let me, let me be more careful. Thank you for the correction. Yeah. You’re, you’re, you’re, you’re, you’re relevant. Feralization has been affectively hijacked. So you’re doing bias. You’re doing bias confirmation rather than exploration. You got it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yes. You got it. So when we’re working with folks, like, I mean, I, I, this is the other thing that I think is really helpful for people. You don’t have to be one of these. Um, actually we move through them. Uh, some of us psychopathology, we tend to see strategies that get more entrenched and are less adaptive and flexible. So in the attachment world, the definition of mental health is really simply flexibility of strategy. That I can, in a heightened situation, I can read the data and I can shift my strategy. I can reach to you when I’m upset. Uh, I don’t have to go into shutting down. But you put, you know, the mental health is, uh, optimality of relevance realization. You’re, you’re always great. Yeah. You’re always, you can, you can always make the, the framing adjustments that restore you to the best possible relevance realization in that situation. If we add an attachment frame, my strategy of finding that, of, of getting the relevance information, it can be interpersonal. Yes. Uh, and I don’t have to do that in isolation. Yes. Uh, I can engage somebody, whether it’s the person I’m feeling the rupture with, which is the hardest thing to do. Or I, I can sit in journal and do all the mindfulness and the meditation. That might take a couple hours to get to clarity. I could also call somebody I trust and be there in about five minutes. Uh, and that’s something that culturally, particularly men, we have a hard time with that. I’m passionate about trying to correct this. Um, if we can learn to be in dialogue as a way of, uh, seeking the relevant information and getting clear, um, that’s how we’re meant to do it. Uh, that that’s, that’s what works. Um, if we feel, um, if we’ve grown up in a way where, like the avoidant kid, um, we’ve, we’ve not paid attention to our internal flooding. That doesn’t mean we aren’t flooded. Yeah. We are flooded, but we’re trying to pop up and order things to manage something that’s bodily and emotional and physical. And the frontal lobe is pretty inefficient at dealing with all that. Um, so let me, let me pause there. Is this, um, is this tracking? Help me if I can articulate anything. It’s tracking what I’m, what I’m trying to get at is, um, if these strategies, sorry, let’s make it a question. Yeah. These strategies are adopted because I, I mean, I assume that in some intelligible way, they were the best thing the child could do in the, in the environment. Right. Yes. Yes. And so, I mean, it’s, this is part of my thing about the very same processes that make us adaptive, make us vulnerable to self-deception. So, yes. So, so my question is, my question is, is part of the therapy about trying to get the emotional and the affective and the motivational systems attached to other contexts in a, in a, in a, in an appropriate way? Is it, is it about kind of growing up so that, you know, because when we mean growing up, we mean that, you know, uh, John Roosen, you know, we, we, we can face broader environments and, and, and a multiplicity environments. We were talking about flexibility earlier. Well, flexibility is measured by how many environments can you go in and survive? Right. Right. Yes. Right. That’s right. So, yeah, absolutely. Right. So, so is, is this the connection then to emotion-focused therapy is emotion-focused therapy about that process of educating the emotional system. So it gets the flexibility to be able to orient in multiple different environments, other than the original one in which it formed its mal, it’s originally adaptive, but currently maladaptive patterns. Is that, is that, is that how that’s extremely, extremely well said? Yeah. A hundred percent. Okay. Um, I want to talk EFT. Yep. Last thing I’m going to say that’s a little more theoretical and then we can get into the room a little bit. Um, there’s this, there’s states of being, and then there’s strategies for what to do with it. Yes. Um, so somebody in the avoidance side of things has, uh, they have two typical strategies. Both are compulsive, meaning they’re, they’re fueled by trying to stay away from something uncomfortable down here. Yeah. So I’m compelled to keep doing that. One is compulsive caretaking. I focus on the data of the other person’s system and attending to that and what’s happening sequentially. So I can predict, uh, when they’re available or not available. And I can do things that don’t upset them and I can do things that soothe them. And that keeps them available to me. The other one is a form of compulsive performance or achievement. Um, if I do well, I’m a good boy. I don’t do the bad things, but I do this, then I get praise and I avoid punishment. And those are, those are the avoidance strategies that we see. Right. Right. Um, those strategies show up in everybody who comes into therapy and, uh, we all, of course, most of us can do that. Um, but people who are really suffering are stuck in that. They, they don’t know how to get out. And our culture can, can misreward both of them. They can miss, they can mislabel the first as, look at how compassionate that person is. And they can mislead the second is look at how ambitious and successful and hardworking that person is. The, uh, just about any field, but certainly a corporate field, um, academia. I mean, you’re generally not rewarded for emotional intelligence. You’re rewarded for compulsive performance. I mean, every single place except relationships where it often fails and leads to, um, terrible, terrible suffering. Um, so the other side of it would be what Kirtanen calls the C strategies. And these are, because I’m only sourcing my internal data. Um, what matters is, uh, are you here? If you’re, if I don’t feel like you’re available to me, I’m either going to become threatening and coercive to try and get what you to do, what I need you to do, or I’m going to feign helplessness and vulnerability to elicit guilt and sympathy. All of it is designed to keep you engaged, right? Essentially manipulative. And that’s because I only have me that I’m referencing. That’s what I found. I was falling into those two patterns that you just meet me too. Uh, and, um, part of my story, uh, that I, I choose to share because I think it’s illustrative, but I also, it’s, it’s healthy for me. Um, was that I was a therapist, um, and I’m still, but I got to that magic age of 40 and, um, began to realize that I was suffering with depression. Um, and, uh, my life, there were things deteriorating in my relationships, but, um, the depression worsened. I began to, uh, I was already in therapy, but, you know, up to two or three times a week, I was doing somatic work for, for trauma body work. Uh, in addition to the Jungian therapy medication, all of these things were saving my life. Um, I ended up, um, divorced, sadly, and on my own for the first time in my life at 41, moving away from my kids. It’s a, it was the height. It was the height. Yeah. It was the height of isolation. And I remember feeling like, okay, and this is exceptionally dark and, um, depression for me, um, well, there are, it manifests in a lot of different ways. I think in a few years, we’ll see that our categories for depression become, um, a lot more detailed than they are now. Yes, I agree with that. I think that’s an excellent prediction. Yeah. Um, and mine was, uh, very agitated and, um, uh, talk about anxious kind of dysregulation. And I related a lot to the anxious attachment stuff. Um, so anger would be present and overwhelming and then suicidal ideation would be overwhelming. Um, and, uh, there were many things that saved my life. Um, but I reached a point talking about like the dentist with bad teeth. Here I am, the therapist that, you know, barely able to get out of bed and I was missing appointments. And I, I reached a point where I either had to tell my clients what was going on, um, or I had to try and maintain some sort of fiction. And, uh, depression brought me to the point where it just, I don’t think I could have maintained the fiction. And it was more congruent with my beliefs to try and be honest and trust something would come out of that authenticity. And, uh, this is the closest thing to a conversion I’ve experienced. And I grew up in evangelicalism and came out of that. And still you and I could have a whole nother conversation on that. Um, I shared with my clients, here’s what’s going on for me. And in my depressed mind, I thought that’ll be it for my career. And, uh, and not one of them left. And in fact, this is the part that changed my work forever is they started to get better. And I, you moved into participatory knowing, right? You moved into deep participatory knowing. And when my system was allowed to enter the room with everything that was happening, but I could talk about it sequentially and have all that there, they were allowed to then do that too. Yes. Yeah. Um, mutual affordance. Yes. And we, and I didn’t start every session with self-disclosure that that isn’t what I’m saying, but what it taught me was my ego said, I have to compulsively perform as a good therapist. That’s my strategy. That’s how I’m going to be. Okay. I’m going to care, take these people so well, they’ll pay me to do it. Well, that was not working anymore. I couldn’t do it. I didn’t have the ability to do it. And instead I was flooded all the time. And I was, I might dissociate if I was trying hard to fake it. So when I showed up being a person in pain, but I was still going to be there and do my best to listen. And I’d have to tell them if I was struggling, they met me there and to a person said, this was so helpful. Um, you’re more human and something about you being more human is, is changing me. And yeah, cause you’ve moved to that deep level, the very, the, the wellsprings of the self, the very, the very, the very crux of how identity is shaping. Yeah. And that knowing knowing where your self knowledge and the knowing of the other are inter-defining. Yes, that’s magic. It feels like magic. Um, but, but it’s not. And the way I came to understand it was through attachment theory. Um, that when I was entering into a secure state by speaking out loud about what was happening internally, by bringing all of it together and being totally revealed, they were invited to do that safely in a way that I couldn’t have done, just cognitively reflecting. I, here’s what I hear you saying. And, um, it, it was integrative for them to be in the presence of a nervous system doing that work. And then as their nervous system dropped down and they were able to hold, here’s my experience and here’s this, mine started to feel better. You were reciprocally opening with each other. Totally. And that’s, that was in my training. You’re not supposed to do that. That, that, um, that’s too much presence of the person, of the therapist. It could be impinging, but what I want to be really clear about, cause part of me still worries it’s going to be perceived that way. And there’s a danger and I’ll often own with people, Hey, this is close to my experience, what you’re talking about. So I want to let you know, I could be at risk of projecting as we’re talking. So I’m going to want to slow down at certain points. And if it feels like I’m not attuned, that’s okay. Please tell me. Um, but being able to be honest about it, um, is so, um, it is changed how powerful therapy can be because I now get experientially procedural memory now of how to show up and be present in a new way, um, that invites people to be there. So that’s how one-on-one therapy can become an attachment experience. It’s not, I’m optimally gratifying of, uh, everything that you need me to be. I’m not the new parent that is, you know, perfectly attuned to you. It’s, I’m another human being in the room that’s processing all the data down here at this level. And I’m going to be with you in yours right there where you’re at. And the data from inside of me gets to be part of the therapy too. You know, I’m feeling as I’m sitting with you right now, I feel that I’m not the new parent. I feel some anxiety about how this is all sounding to people and my own kind of a compulsive, I want this to be perfect. I’m also feeling a lot of enlivening and excitement and, um, and a little bit of disorganization with that of like, oh, it’s a, it’s a little, it’s a lot. Um, but then when you respond, I see you’re moving towards the camera, um, it’s great to feel like we’re in it together. And then that anxiety calms down a little bit. Um, let me, let me pause there because I want to go into talking about couples, because it’s the same thing with couples, but what’s amazing is you’ve got the actual attachment figure in the room. It doesn’t have to be you. Uh, you’ve got, you’ve got the laboratory for the both people, uh, in a way you just can’t get individually. Um, but let me pause there. Um, that was a lot. Uh, do you want to interact with any of that? Um, yeah, I’m, I’m wanting to ask a question before we move on to, uh, is, is emotion focused therapy a way of bringing in, um, getting people like, when I’ve gone through EFT, both like in workshops and in therapy, right? One of the things it does is it gets you to, uh, stop stick, stop taking snapshots of your emotions. Oh, very good. Right. Right. And what you do is you get the, you get the whole movie and it’s not, it’s not a simplistic Disney movie. It’s, it’s some sort of deeply David Lean layered movie where there’s, right, there’s all, there’s all these emotions and they’re in various relationships and they’re, and, and, and they’re, and they’re relating to each other. And, and, and I just saw you doing that, right? I, I, right. I, I saw you doing that. I saw you, right. You weren’t simply, um, introspecting. Right. Our culture loves introspection and our culture in, in, it confuses introspection, uh, with Socratic knowledge, just like it confuses autobiography with Socratic self-knowledge. But is it, is that to your mind, is that what emotion focused therapy can do to give people the ability, uh, to find sort of the intelligibility, the musicality of their emotionality and bring it to proper, properly proportioned articulation so that there is a complex but nevertheless resonant calling to the other to like, to respond in kind. Is that, is that? Yeah, not only is that right, but that’s just really beautifully stated. Um, because it is, uh, I, musicality is, is, is perfect. Um, it’s, it’s symphonic. Um, and, and this is a challenge with adult attachment is it’s not as simple as I feel pain and I cry. Uh, but it is the same steps. What I’m feeling in my body, emotionally and physically, I’ve got to find a way to symbolize it to my partner that they can, so they can do step three, they can really get it and then respond to it in a way that does suit them. But my partners over aroused too. So we, we’ve got, um, chaos, uh, we’ve got emotional heightening ramping. So EFT, Sue Johnson is just, you know, so brilliant and she developed this by watching thousands of hours of couples, uh, in therapy and, uh, watching for what was happening between them. And so, uh, it is a lot of emotional tracking. So a couple comes in and they, we ask them to tell us about a fight, uh, and to give us a sample of what we call their dance. Um, Sue would, Sue would say, Sue says there’s all sorts of music, but there’s usually only one dance. Uh, and you, you’re doing the same moves to different themes, um, and slowly through certain EFT skills, which involve actually a lot like a parent to a child involves a lot of mirroring, a lot of presence and tracking. But I want you to go back to the two kinds of information processing, um, sequential and intensity. And a good EFT therapist is always trying to include both sets. So, right. Cause we’ve talked about the important of keeping them in relationship to each other. Right. Right. Right. So when your partner and you, you provide cues to the person, when your partner’s face looks angry and you see their eyes go like this and you hear that tone in their voice and they say, what is wrong with you? When you do da da da da da, I just don’t, I want you to pause there and I want you for a second to slow it way down. Here’s the sequence. When those cues happen, tell me what happens to your body. There’s the intensity. When this happens, what’s happening? And you see the person and a lot of people go and they, their eyes go up and there’s the kid with the toys on the floor. They’re going up. They’re not going down. And so they’re thinking about words and ways to represent, but they’re not using language. Like I feel pressure in my chest. I feel tightness in my belly, my shoulders. A lot of times they’re not even saying I feel anxious or I feel angry. So the EFT therapist has to repeat a lot. So when I hear, but it’s always integrated. So when this happens, I’m seeing that it’s uncomfortable and it looks like maybe you go up into your head a little bit and these things, you think these things, you know, but I want you to bring it back down. And again, when you see your face, when this, you give the cue. Now, remember they’re feeling it, but they don’t know how to symbolize them. So a lot of EFT is about that step one, get down into the body and into the emotions first. And once they’re starting to feel it, begin to help with the language of symbolizing. Now, the art of doing this is you have two systems that are triggering each other. And so there’s a lot of back and forth and in between. We’re employing the frontal lobe to track sequence when we have them say, okay, but with the dance, you know, she does this and then you feel this, but then you pop up and you don’t say, oh my God, I’m terrified that you see me as a bad guy and I’m going to lose you because I compulsively perform all the time and nobody’s going to want to be with me if I’m doing it wrong. I don’t say any of that. I go into defensive mode and you feel like your pain doesn’t matter to me. And the thought of being in a relationship where you don’t matter to the partner, that’s horrifying. It’s terrifying. But you don’t say, you don’t say back to me, hey, you mean the world to me and I’m terrified that maybe I don’t mean that to you. I go back and double down on why I have a right to feel the way I feel. And we just go, so interrupting that cycle is really important and then tracking that cycle. But the real healing is when you begin to integrate the emotion into that. And we have people drop down into what we call primary affect and talk about fear to each other. So I don’t know if this is a general principle, but in my experience is where people get into false normativity, they start talking about, they’ll invoke moral principles or legal or narrative. This is how people are supposed to behave and they go into this third personal and I’m guilty of that too. I’m not excluding myself from that by any means. And so there’s something also about, not only moving into the body, but I’m trying to articulate something here, but a sense of the normativity that is properly housed in the body or something like that. I’m struggling here, Seth, but do you know what I’m trying to articulate? Don’t invoke, don’t invoke. Yes, moral principles matter, legal principles matter, narrative matters. I get all that. But there’s this other thing that we have to use as our normative guide. We have to bracket that and find another compass for our orientation, another guiding normativity. It’s great. And I think a lot of people that are fans of your work, what you just said is going to be highly applicable for wisdom because cognitive science and philosophy is a lot of external referencing, a lot of symbolizing about things that exist up and out. And the idea of there’s internal referencing and data that must be included in your formulation of reality here, because it is causal. It is affecting how you’re organizing things. And so invoking moral principles, I hear a lot of, well, when you do this, it’s just not fair because I do this. Yeah. And well, of course, that’s going to lead nowhere. Because the goal of that conversation with your partner is not to establish the moral order of the universe. The goal is to reestablish a sense of connection to one another because it feels fractured right now. And one partner trying to do that. Go ahead. Well, I’d be even stronger. I would say there are times when you should try and figure out the moral order of the universe. But if you haven’t addressed the way that you displace onto discussions of the moral order of the universe, you won’t actually be properly disposed when you want to undertake the task of getting to the moral order of the universe. Because these two things are interwoven in a way of which you are ignorant and is therefore and you’re fettered in that way. That’s great. Love that. Yeah. Back to the ability to see clearly and think clearly is impacted by your inner world. I tend to skew towards the functionality of this conversation. You know, where does the rubber meet the road? I’m wanting people to have a higher quality of relationship. But really our conversation leads towards, but how do you use relationship to grow and to develop more fully as a person? And in EFT, we generally have couples coming in who are in distress, and there’s a need to heal. And there’s some guidance and teaching and learning. But a lot of the skills are about emotional expression, the integration of what’s happening in me with what’s happening between us and learning about the other person in the same way. But I’m interested also in the coaching idea of let’s seek growth together as a couple because our blind spots are revealed most clearly here between us. And so my partner actually can become the greatest source of teaching and wisdom for me. If I know how to do that, I know how to use that. That really excites me a lot. And that’s the definition of platonic friendship. It’s not deeply related without sex. It’s not, no, no, we become mutual midwives to use the Socratic metaphor of each other. That’s the essence of platonic friendship. Seth, we’re bumping up against the end of time. So I think what I want to do is if you’re open to it, I think let’s make this part one. And I think we’ve laid an excellent foundation here. And then in part two, there’s two things I want to explore with you because we’re right on the cusp of it. How do we take this into dialogical practices and wisdom? And then something that’s come up in my mind as we’re talking about this is how does this show up in relationship to religion? You know, Matt Marzano, that religion is ultimately about relationships. And of course, not only interpersonal relationships, but transpersonal relationships, primordial relationships, etc. And I think that would be, we’ve got enough, we could talk for a good chunk also on that in part two. What do you think about that as a proposal? You know, you just outlined the second half of my notes. So I would love that. Attachment theory has a lot to say about personal individual practice. And that’s counterintuitive. But there is a lot there. And religion, spirituality is dialogical. And IFS has a lot to inform there too. Want to bring the IFS? I think IFS is an attachment based theory, actually. Oh, I want to hear that then. That’s juicy. That sounds really juicy. That sounds really juicy. But thank you. Yeah, I would love to do that. Okay, well, then that’s the plan. And we’ll get a new time, hopefully soon set up. I like to give my guests the opportunity for any kind of last word they want. It doesn’t have to be summative. It doesn’t, it can be, it doesn’t have to be cumulative. It can be, it doesn’t have to be inspirational. It can be, it could be provocative, but it doesn’t have to be, etc. So what’s the last word you want to leave people with? Well, I’m struck by your phrase, we’re up against the end of time. I will say, I mean, there’s a first half of life conversation about attachment, that is so much about the evolutionary imperatives. There’s a second half of life conversation about it. That is about growth and fullness. And that is, I’m excited to pick that up again with you. I’m very excited to go further in the workshop that we’re going to do on this topic. Yeah, and there’ll be a part two to the workshop as well, where maybe we’ll, we’ll tie that. We’ll say a little bit more about it just to give people, you know, a little bit of a sense of what they might expect. Yeah, well, so at Grow Collective, I mean, we’re trying to find ways of bringing these ideas into practice. Again, not just in the therapy office, but in walking around life. And so some of the practices we want to talk about are relational, like how do I do the sort of platonic friendship idea? What are some actual ways to do that? Could we actually practice it in the workshop? I want to try and do that. The other thing is how do we do it internally? Is there a way to employ the principles of attachment theory in inner work, in a kind of relationality? Yeah, inner dialogue. Right. By the way, I picked up the Dialogical Self. You recommended it. I forget the author’s name, but really enjoying it. Me too. It just escapes me right now. I’ll bring it next time. But yeah, that’s what we’re going to do. We’re going to see if we can tie this to more pragmatic practice and actually figure out ways to do that over Zoom together. And I do want it to be in the spirit of what we’re doing. I’d like it to be more experiential and relational, less lecture-y. Yeah. Sure. Yeah, that’s excellent. So, Seth, you and I will see each other very soon and we will record part two. Maybe there’ll be a part three. This is very rich. At some point, I would like to talk to you about inter-practice. What’s the relationship between what you’re doing in your practices, in your workshop, and some of the practices that are associated with the foundation, like Dialectic and the Dialogos? It seems there’s a lot going on there. Well, I’ll actually be at the circling retreat this weekend, so I’m looking forward to exploring that integration too. Excellent. Excellent. And I want to talk about connections. I’m in conversation with somebody about Ally Work and IFS and how that relates and bring that into. Great. So, very much. Great. Oh, John, thank you so much. This is so wonderful. Thank you. Yeah, this is great, Seth. We’ll talk very soon. Thank you for watching. This YouTube and podcast series is by the Vervecki Foundation, which in addition to supporting my work, also offers courses, practices, workshops, and other projects dedicated to responding to the meaning crisis. If you would like to support this work, please consider joining our Patreon. You can find the link in the show notes.