Tami Simon:You're Listening to Insights at the Edge. Today, My Guest Is Diane Poole Heller. Diane Poole Heller Is an Established Expert in the Field of Child and Adult Attachment Theory and Models Trauma Resolution and Integrative

That's not an intentional thing for the Ambivalent. I want to explain why that happens in a compassionate way. Because when they were young, the only way they could get attention was either sometimes through illness or sometimes through crying. But usually at an infant level, they often had the experience of getting more contact through crying or being ill. So their pattern that if they stop crying—it's like a survival issue—they'll lose their attachment figure. So they don't understand this even themselves, but there's this fear of being abandoned if I stop my trying to engage the other person.

This is interesting because even when they start to get what they want from their partner, they'll tend to dismiss the caring behavior. They'll tend to not see it. Because they're in this physiological loop, they'll keep pressuring for something. Even though they might actually be getting good responses, they don't acknowledge them. They often negate them and keep complaining. It's like, "Okay, I want to go out to dinner," and your partner says, "Great, that's wonderful. Let's go." Then you end up at the Italian restaurant, and they start complaining because they really wanted to go to the Greek restaurant, but they didn't tell you that. So there's always this sort of it's not good enough, and partners later on can feel exasperated by that.

It's not… the Ambivalent doesn't really even understand why they're pushed to do that. It's not because they mean anything to frustrate people. But like what I did with one client, I had her imagine having everything she could possibly want relationally on a big smorgasbord, like a banquet table full of her favorite foods, and her favorite emotional treats, and anything she would want in her relationship. I said, "I want you to imagine just taking that into your body," just to take that in, and she was so shocked because she said, "Oh, my stomach. My whole body is constricting. It's like saying no. So, why would I say no?"

I said, "I think… Let's just try something else, but now I want you just imagine taking one percent of what's available to you." She goes, "Oh, I can do that." Her stomach relaxed. She could take it in. She started to feel satisfied. But often Ambivalents don't know how to feel satisfied because of this early patterning, so she was feeling satisfied and then she goes, "Oh, I think I want to try two percent." I'm like, "Great. Let's try two percent." So she goes and takes in two percent. She's still able to manage it. She gets up to five percent, she's able to manage it.

She's feeling fulfillment and satisfaction for almost the first time in her life, and she did not realize that she had trouble receiving, and that she was blaming her partners through life about that, and really it was her inability to receive. So as we helped her heal and make a practice of staying present when somebody does something nice for her, to notice it, stay present for it, try to take it in, or take in five percent of it. Then she started to build a capacity to receive. But she didn't even know that that was the issue. She thought all of her partners weren't doing the right thing.

So what I love about this work is it cuts through blame, and we start to be able to feel our own pattern, and not only feel the pain of it but feel the possibility of how do we move out of that? How do we help ourselves heal? What tools can we practice that will bring us more towards Secure Attachment? That's really what I'm hoping to really expand on in the book.

TS: I think you do a very good job of that. Just, finally, introducing Disorganized Attachment, that pattern.

DPH: Yes, that's a tough one. That's a tough one. Disorganized happens when a parent has been scary enough over childhood, in the early on. Where a child's threat response is on. They're hyper-vigilant. They're scared. They're feeling a lot of fear or anger in response to the way the parent's treating them. And that's interesting because it could be the parent actually doing something like yelling, being physically, sexually, or emotionally abusive, anything like that. Hitting, of course. You know, not having good boundaries. Maybe having an ongoing addiction where there's a lot of chaos in the family.

So those are some things that would be actively coming from the parents that would set up this dynamic, where the threat response is shutting down the attachment system, and the attachment system and the threat response are in a ... Because when we're in threat, we very often are not in the part of the brain that's interested in connecting, which is the medial prefrontal cortex. We're in our reptilian brain, which is about the threat response, and we're activating our sympathetic nervous system reactions of fight or flight, or we're shutting down completely into a freeze with over parasympathetic, and that creates a lot of turmoil.

Another way that Disorganized can get set up is if the parents themselves have a trauma history, which many of us do, that's unresolved, and maybe their behavior is kind and consistent and reasonable and everything most the time. But they're emanating a feeling of fear or terror from their own unresolved trauma. A baby can't attach to fear and anger. It will disattach or disconnect, or it'll disorganize the attachment system, is where that word comes from.

So what we're trying to do, and like when I'm trying to work with people, is to help them separate out people that they feel relatively safe with, sort of their ally oasis, so they can give their attachment system a safe place to land. So, I might have them talk about all the people they feel they can trust, or they feel that soothe them or that being around them feels safe, and that might be you as a therapist, or you as a partner, or wherever you can start with that. Sometimes, it's with people's pets.

Then to start to feel what an attachment would feel like when it's not interrupted by the threat response. Then we have to work with the threat response, and I would say, "Okay, what behavior of your mother or father was disturbing to you?" I take one parent at a time. Let's say it was yelling, and say the father happened to yell a lot. I would have them put the father as far away from them as they need them to be, and maybe mute the father or put him in a soundproof booth or something, so that they have distance. Because very often when people experience stress, they feel like it's right in their face. So, they're overcome by it. So giving distance is the first part of that.

Then silencing and making the threatening behavior of the father, you immobilize that. Basically, you can say things like, "He can't do or say anything that's disturbing right now. He's this far away, and he's immobilized." Then you can ask them, "Now that the threatening behavior is immobilized, what do you want to do or say about that?" Because you're trying to move them from passive reactions like collapse or dissociation, into active responses like finding their voice, saying, "I hate it when you do that," or, "Stop being so loud," or, "Go to an anger management class."

Or maybe they want to push him away, like making a boundary, or they want to glare at him when he's in that behavior. I always separate the behavior from the parent, because I don't like to demonize parents. Usually we have love for our parents, so I said, "The love isn't the problem. Let's look at the behaviors that really were hurtful to you. And let's see if we can calm and complete that threat response." So this movement from passive responses, like collapse or dissociation, to active response is very empowering. It really helps people feel like they have strength and they can do something about it, and they're doing it in the safety of your relationship, whether you're a therapist or a partner or a friend.

Then they can move through the threat sequence and complete the threat response, and this may need to happen over and over again, depending on how many triggers there are. But the attachment system and the threat response are in a counter. They're at cross purposes. So, I'm trying to untangle those two systems and have the person feel the positive part of both of those survival systems in a way that they can complete both.

And of course, because Disorganized has so much threat in it, they very often are highly dysregulated. So they might have sudden shifts of emotional states. They might be easily triggered into hypervigilance. They might dissociate easily. But depending on how you unpack that, that's why it's so complicated. It could show itself in so many different variations. But if you understand trauma work and you understand attachment work, I think they're a marriage made in heaven. Then you can address both those parts of things for people and help them learn how to better self-regulate, how to collect co-regulate or interactively regulate with their partner.

If you get two Disorganized people together in a relationship, you just need to make sure they aren't both triggered at the same time. They need to take turns on dealing with the difficulties, because when you get two Disorganized together, both triggered, that's a recipe for suffering.

TS: Now, I want to ask you a personal question, and I'm going to be vulnerable myself in asking the question, setting it up. Which is, I myself discovered in my adult relational life that, unfortunately, I resonate quite a lot with the Avoidant patterning, and it's been a huge journey to be in a relationship that's characterized by Secure Attachment. It's a journey that really has been a big part of the last two decades of my life. So my personal question for you, is what's your relationship blueprint pattern, and how have you worked with it, whatever you have discovered that it is?

DPH: Well, you can have a mix of attachment styles, and I think that I was dealing a bit with, a lot actually, with Disorganized/Avoidant, because Disorganized involves both the Insecure Attachment styles. So you can lean towards an oscillation between ... Disorganizing might flip back and forth between Avoidant and Ambivalent, or you can have a Disorganized pattern that's mostly Ambivalent or a Disorganized pattern that's mostly Avoidant. So I would say my journey involves Disorganized with mostly Avoidant, because when I get really stressed, I tend to isolate, and I forget who my friends are, or the people that are close to me. It's like they don't exist all of a sudden. I have to make a list on my refrigerator or put pictures around or something to remind myself that I have resources, because I just go into this isolation reaction first.

So I have Disorganized largely because there was a lot of stress with one of my parents originally, that was quite frightening ongoingly in my upbringing. So, I was alternately loved by this person but also afraid of them, and that took me a while to sort out. And especially doing the "Kind Eyes" exercise, the reason I love that one so much is I really had to work with that to be able to even see people's eyes and detect how they were looking at me, because I would always first see this angry, hateful look. That took me a while to peel that back.

So I had some traumatic experiences that were pretty severe when I was a child, and that were relationally-based, even outside the family. So I had a lot of terror to work through. I was working very hard, and thanks to Peter Levine and his work, actually helped me a lot re-regulate my nervous system and become very relationally oriented and really interested in connections. In the beginning, I think I was really healing from relationships that were very dangerous, actually. So, that was a long journey. I've been working on it really hard my entire incarnation, and I'm 65 next month.

TS: Yes, I think that's part of what I wanted to bring forward because you mentioned how your book, The Power of Attachment, what you really want to help people with, is learning these skills of Secure Attachment and moving in that direction in their life. And of course, I desperately want that as well, to give that gift to other people in the world, and I want to make sure people have a sense, though, of what the journey's like, what's required, the depth of inner work that's required, and I wonder if you can speak to that both the promise but also what this actually asks of us.

DPH: Well, I think it starts with a curiosity, almost like a candle being lit, like seeking and curiosity of what happened to us, being able to have support and our own intention to heal from it. I do a lot of spiritual work as well as psychotherapy kinds of things. And eventually, learning how to disidentify from a lot of what those patterns were, and to open to the healthier version, to find more capacity for connection. I don't want to say it's an easy journey, but it's incredibly fulfilling, and it's so worth it once we get ... I think we get so much back when we allow ourselves to go through this process.

And really disidentifying from the idea that something's wrong with me or you, like something's wrong with us personally, or that there's something wrong with the world. That we start to transcend and understand this amazing capacity for healing that we have, and how to have an intelligent relationship to suffering. I think this is a really important point. Because there is suffering. There's no way around the fact that on this human journey we're going to bump into some pretty tough stuff. I think this is a very tough planet to be on. It's tough to be human. I don't know what the other choices were, but we all made the choice to do this one.

It's hard. Life is challenging. Maybe sometimes it's really great, but there's also lots of challenges. So I don't want to sound Pollyanna about this, because I don't feel that way at all. How do we find these helpers along the way? And then how do we also build the inner strength to confront things in ourselves that we could potentially disidentify from, and find this reservoir of resiliency and capacity and expansiveness and openness? And then sometimes we lose it, and then how do we start again?

It's constantly, I think, falling down and picking oneself up. I think relationships, our deep relationships, whether they're partners or as a parent or deep friendship. I think that's really like being in the trenches. Because I think relationships challenge this part of ourselves in a really direct way for most of us, if we didn't have the jackpot of starting out with Secure Attachment and feeling basic trust and seeing relationships and expecting relationships to be nourishing and yummy and delicious, and knowing how to respond to our partners in a way that just deepens love.

A lot of us didn't start out from that point of experience, so we make a lot of mistakes, and then how do we come back? And how do we excavate what might work better, or find that part of ourselves that's not wounded? I mean, we have the wounded part, but we have the unwounded part, that we access more and more as we do this deep exploration.

TS: How do we disidentify, Diane, but make sure that we're not avoiding the journey we actually need to make through the old pattern?

DPH: Well, in my process, and seriously, I just dumped into a vat of pain for a while, and I'm just trying to figure out, "Well, okay, what is this about?" I'm trying to stay with the experience and not disconnect from it, and that means I'm not avoiding it. Because to be open to the whole experience of life: the pain, the joy, the sadness, the anguish, the expansion, the constriction, and to get guidance when we need it. I'm a big believer in having a lot of mentors and therapists and spiritual teachers in my life. I think that's hugely beneficial to me.

Then also having a commitment to ourselves to try to be—it's mindfulness. I guess I'm talking about mindfulness—to really be with our experience as it unpacks. The pain sometimes is as valuable as the breakthrough because you're metabolizing something. You're metabolizing your history, digesting it, assimilating what you can use, eliminating what you don't need anymore. And I think that, in a way, is a very digestive metaphor for disidentification. But I have to go in and down and in the muck, and then eventually surface or get a hand up to see things more clearly, by the addition of someone else's more pure presence.

Fortunately, I mean, your whole orientation in the world and mission is to expose people to all these different possibilities, spiritually and in healing. I feel like we live in a time, that's relatively recent, where there's been so much available in terms of being able to communicate spiritual work and healing possibilities and even what I'm offering in the attachment work. We can get that information out there, and we can partake of it. We can use it. But I think having somebody, a person, whoever that is, whether it's a partner or a professional person or a personal relationship, just really helps a lot.

I think it helps us move through pain more quickly and more efficiently, in a way, to find ourselves in a more spacious possibility. I mean, it has been a really rich journey. There's a hidden gift in trauma, because as you process it and you metabolize it, then it opens up into tremendous creativity and vision and different spiritual dimensions. So it's worth it, except that ... I don't like to say that to people in the very beginning because it almost feels like you're not honoring how hard it is, because it is hard. There are times it's devastating.

TS: Do you have a sense when it comes to re-patterning an attachment blueprint, how long that takes in general? Once again, just trying to give people a framework.

DPH: I think the more you take to heart the particular Secure Attachment skills, like some of them I offer in the book. You can make each one of those a practice. For me, I've made it a real practice that if somebody reaches out to me whether it's email, voicemail, whatever, that I respond as much as I can within 24 hours, and I have a lot of people in my life. So that's a pretty major commitment. I also have a staff that helps with some of the things that aren't specific to me, of course. But I really practice my responsiveness, and it's funny because sometimes I'll write an email, and then I go back to the beginning and I say more about connection. Then I try to emphasize connection.

And I really have made a practice about repair. When I feel like something's off, I try to drum up the courage to address it, and maybe not always immediately. Maybe I have to grind on it for a while, but those types of things help. Even how I look at someone, like I've been greeting someone. I make sure I'm not looking in their file, or I'm not tied up on my cell phone. I look at them. I greet them. I shake their hand or hug them, whatever the relationship allows, and I look at them directly, and I drum up as much presence as I can.

These are things I've learned from the attachment study. But also, like who do we want to be in the world? And how do we want to connect? And how do we want to honor every individual ,because we're all interconnected? In a way, we're all seeing ourselves. We're all the same thing from some perspective. But how do we not get into this us-versus-them polarization, that it's so easy to trigger if you're coming from fear or hatred or anger, and how do we get into an all-of-us, interconnected perspective? I think Secure Attachment really helps that. It helps brain integration. It helps us access love and compassion. It helps us move into that global citizen kind of space, like a more cooperative versus competitive or collaborative. We become collaborators with people in our lives, and you're not going to do this perfectly every day. I mean, we're going to do the best we can. But as you make it practices, it gets easier.

TS: One of the sections of the book The Power of Attachment that I really liked, towards the beginning you were talking about ways that we can increase Secure Attachment, and about how whatever Insecure Attachment we might have, might have been transmitted generationally through our parents' own history. You offer an exercise, a visualization practice we could do to help heal our parents, to help heal our mom and heal our dad in whatever their attachment trauma might be. Can you share a little bit about how we could do that for our parents, at whatever age they are, or even if they've passed on?

DPH: Yes, I love this exercise. It's one of my favorites too. I usually call it "Reversing Role Reversal" because one of the things that happens in childhood that creates Insecure Attachment is that often children are relied on to fulfill parents' needs, or they become surrogate spouses in some cases, and that ideally our parents are parents, and it's an asymmetrical relationship that our parents are mostly there for us. Then of course, as we get older, we're there for our parents.

But in this exercise, first, what I usually do with somebody, if I was doing therapy with them is I would have them go into their own attachment wound and then see what they didn't get, and then try to create a corrective experience where they're actually getting that need met, like maybe they didn't feel listened to, or they never felt seen. Then I'd say, "Well, okay, is there somebody in your life that you feel really gets you now? Or if you could imagine someone being like that, what qualities would they have? How would they be acting with you?" Because they're creating the antidote, or maybe they're feeling it coming from me, because I certainly would be trying to hear and see them.

But then as they feel that need met, then I'll sometimes... because then they have a base in themselves. They're not operating from wound. I'll often invite them to go, "I wonder ... I mean, you're sort of an expert on your mom at this point. You spent many, many years with her and saw her in many different circumstances. Let me just start with Mom. I wonder if you can just see your mother and just imagine what does she need? What is missing for her? What unmet need is there, that she might be behaving from or experiencing her life from that vantage point?"

And very often, people see it very quickly. They go, "Oh my gosh. My mom needed support for autonomy. My father and their marriage had completely controlled her. She never had any time to herself, and she had six kids. My mom really needed... I mean, if she was born today, she'd be a CEO of a company. She was so competent, but she was trapped in this older-era lifestyle, and it didn't really fit for her." I say, "Okay, so just imagine what that would be like." I had one client say, "Oh, I'd love her to have a book club with Mary Tyler Moore." Remember My Girl? I'm dating myself now.

TS: Yes.

DPH: It's this autonomous young woman. Then I think the other one was Mary Tyler Moore when she was in that show where she worked for the news station, and she was an independent woman. She wasn't in a relationship. So she was just, "I just wish she could have those opportunities." So, she's imagining her mother in this book club with all these women from media that would represent having autonomy and choice, not necessarily that she wouldn't have chosen also to be married and be a mother. Nothing wrong with that. But that she would have had this wish fulfilled.

As she felt that with her mother, she started just feeling like, "Oh my gosh. I can just see my mother happy. And as she's happy, I can see her being more caring towards me." Because you're moving, in the imagination at least, the mother toward Secure Attachment having her own needs met, and then she's of course much more fulfilled, and can be a much more loving and available and present parent. So it's healing the generation. In this particular case, the person was a parent themselves, and we started to work with her as a mother and her daughter and repairing that Insecure attachment that had come Generationally. So, we're doing three generations at once.

But I really do believe what you said, that even if your parent's not alive anymore, I feel like you can heal ancestrally and start to break that generational transmission, which many of us have more capacity to do these days, because we have so many resources that simply didn't exist if you go back 80 to 90 years.

TS: Diane, I want to call our conversation, "We are designed for connection," and-

DPH: I agree.

TS: ... that's a quote from what you said earlier in this hour together. As we end, you've mentioned a few things that might help that person who's feeling somewhat disconnected in some way. One of the things you mentioned in The Power of Attachment book that I thought was great was, "Is there anybody that's reaching out to you that you could respond to? Maybe someone who's reached out for a repair and you haven't been there for that, or reached out for connection?" What are your other suggestions for the person who's listening right now who's thinking, "God, I wish I felt more connected to the people in my world"?

DPH: Well, there's some simple things actually, like even how you greet a friend, or let's say a partner when you're first meeting up after you haven't seen each other. Like can you give a full-body hug? Belly-to-belly, not the triangle hug, but a lot of times people do, and they just tap each other on the shoulder, but they're looking like a tent instead of really connected. If it's your partner, then it would be even a closer hug, and can you stay in that hug until you can actually feel each other regulate each other? Can you stay in that connection and then support the other person?

Stan Tatkin has a lovely YouTube on that. It's called "The Welcome Home Hug" on the internet, and having rituals for connection like, how do you greet people? If you're living with someone, how do you get up in the morning? How do you connect in the morning? How do you do rituals where you have connection at night? I have friends that they have this pattern of each of them finding these really special truffles. Every night they'll put this very special truffle, that they hunt down during the day, on each of their partner's pillow, and they don't always go to bed at the same time, but they have this appreciation.

They always try to have a little debriefing pillow talk before they go to sleep. Just little things that you know that you can rely on, traditions that you set up in everyday living, and of course, holidays. But really, everyday living. When you see friends, do you light up? Are you welcoming? Are you a welcoming person? I mean, are you a friendly person? Are you somebody that people can feel they can feel with, they can be present with? If you're not in a space where you have time for somebody, then you can just be direct about that and go, "Oh gosh. I'm really busy. I'd love to talk to you on the phone, but I'm going to have to do it tomorrow, or next month or whenever."

Can you be responsive but also have boundaries when you need them, because sometimes we aren't available. We need to be clear about when we're going to show up again. If you have a difficulty or conflict with somebody, it's good not to argue too much to more than 15 minutes because it starts to lay all that anger and resentment or whatever emotions are going on into long-term memory. So, we need to learn to argue or have conflict in shorter periods of time, like not more than 20 minutes. So, "Okay, let's table this. We're going to come back to it in an hour. We're going to come back to it after you go take a walk and enjoy the sunset, or we're going to go to a movie, and then we're going to come back to it, but we need to take a break."

So, we don't, from