354. Why you keep getting triggered: Understanding insecure attachment and breaking the cycle with Jessica Baum

Jessica (00:00):

That’s secure attachment. I can go out in the world and even if people aren’t perfect, I have the inherent sense that people care about me enough that if I’m upset, they will try to repair that with me.

Dr. Sarah (00:17):

Have you ever caught yourself repeating the same patterns in relationships, getting close them, pulling away, or feeling like no matter how much love is there, something inside still doesn’t feel safe? Often this can be traced back to attachment patterns that were wired into us long before we had words to describe them. These early experiences quietly shape how we love, how we parent, and even how we care for ourselves. Hi, I’m Dr. Sarah Bren, a clinical psychologist and mom of two who specializes in child development, emotion regulation and attachment science. And I’m so excited to be joined this week by Jessica Baum. Jessica is a licensed mental health counselor, relationship expert and author of the new book, SAFE: Coming Home to Yourself and Others, which comes out today. She’s also the founder of the Relationship Institute of Palm Beach, and her work helps people move beyond simply understanding attachment theory to actually living it, earning security through compassion, embodiment and connection. In our conversation, we talk about how early relational wounds show up in adulthood, what it looks like to stop passing those patterns down to our kids and how healing happens through safe and anchored relationships. We’ll explore what it really means to heal those patterns, not by fixing ourselves, but by learning to build safety from the inside out. Whether you are a parent, a partner, or simply someone who wants to feel more at home in your own skin. This episode will help you understand how safety is built moment by moment, connection by connection.

(01:59):

Hello, Jessica Baum. Welcome. Thank you so much for having me. I’m so glad you’re here. So obviously with a podcast called Securely attached, I really love talking about attachment, especially how it shapes the way that we relate to ourselves and the people that we love. So I’m very excited about this conversation because you are, I think, also a bit of an attachment nerd.

Jessica (02:22):

Absolutely.

Dr. Sarah (02:26):

So I feel like our listeners at this point probably have a pretty good understanding of the basics about what attachment theory is, and if you’re listening and it’s like, wait, ooh, what is that again? I need a refresher. I’ll link some of our episodes in the show notes, just like the primers on attachment. But what I’m especially eager to dig in with you today, today is like, what do we actually do with this knowledge when we’ve recognized certain attachment patterns showing up in our relationship, we’re starting to maybe even understand how they became patterns in the first place and as an adaptive response to an environment that we were in. But now that environment is different and yet they’re still showing up. I feel like you do an incredible job of talking about what do we do with that now and how do we actually enact shifts in the way that we relate to ourselves and to others using our attachment systems? So I just want to throw that at you.

Jessica (03:27):

Yeah, no, I mean, and I think the whole episode could be around this one question and literally my whole book Safe is around so much of the general public has the left shifted knowledge of, okay, here are the four styles and where do I fit now that I identify it as anxiously attached or avoidant? What do I do with that? How do I heal it? Understanding attachment patterns and identifying with them help us feel like, oh my God, we’re not crazy. And that’s literally why I wrote my first book, but how to actually heal them and the science to healing them, I don’t think is that accessible out there. And that’s really what I provide through this book, but I can also explain how we do that. The science of healing embedded patterns is what the book is about. But essentially, I don’t know where to start. So I can start with infancy and how we store attachment patterns in our body and in our nervous system.

Dr. Sarah (04:26):

That might be very helpful. I know, I mean, I know your work, so many people that you are speaking to, we’re talking in the realm of relationships like romantic partnerships and things like that, all relationships really, but our audiences is parents. And I think translating some of the, so much of what people write about an attachment in the world is relationships and romantic relationships and translating some of that knowledge to parenting because most parents, many parents are in adult relationships, but they’re also in a very specific type of relationship with their child. And I get so many parents who are like, I have this attachment style. Am I going to pass it on? How do I not pass it on? Or how do I make sure I do pass it on? And I think that’s kind of what you’re potentially getting at, which is has it fixed? Is it for sure?

Jessica (05:27):

It’s definitely not fixed. And I think what you’re touching on, which is a very deep topic, which I can talk on, but it is intergenerational trauma essentially, and we’re passing down our embedded patterns, our beliefs and our nervous system. And for those of you who are listening and you’re like, wow, I’m scared that I passed this down to my kid. First of all, we can’t help that we show up to the best of our ability as parents. And second of all, the more healing you do for yourself, and we’ll talk about that, the more holding you do for yourself, the more available you become for repair with your children. So if you could just give yourself the grace that most parents are doing the best they could with what they received and you have the courage to do the healing work, you will show up and repair and build deeper and more profound relationships with your children and repair any damage or insecurities that might have started. So when we’re infants, we’re born right hemisphere to right hemisphere beings, which means we’re like sensing beings. We’re just these sensing creatures. And I talk a lot about memory in safe and explicit memory versus implicit memory, and I don’t know if you’ve talked about that at all on the podcast.

Dr. Sarah (06:47):

Give us a primer, definitely helpful to I define those terms.

Jessica (06:53):

When we think of memory, and this is one of the big points in the book, and it’s like a light bulb moment for most people who I work with. We think of a memory as a movie, like a movie scene that’s called Explicit Memory. And we do form that, but we don’t form those memories until four or five and we form a lot less of those types of memories as we form and collect implicit information.

(07:21):

So implicit information is memory through sensations. And so when we’re in womb to four and even on right now, we are taking more implicit information. What is the room like? Are we safe in the room? Are we connected? How do we feel in our body? What’s the felt sense of the experience? We have streams of this information that are constantly on being downloaded. So much more than explicit information like you and I on this computer screen talking to each other is explicit, how it feels, how the room feels, how our connection is. All of that information is implicit and that’s being stored as well.

Dr. Sarah (08:01):

And it’s unconscious. I mean, we can become consciously aware of implicit sensations as if we attune to that, but in order to have an explicit memory that you can call upon and watch back like a movie, you need to know on some level that it’s happening when it’s happening. And if you have an implicit, but these implicit memories are like, it’s like the background. We take it in and store it whether we’re aware of it or not.

Jessica (08:35):

And they’re being awakened at all times. We don’t even realize that when they’re being awakened. So when we’re an infant to early adults, we’re taking in a lot more implicit information. So the temperature of our family home, our relationship with our primary caregivers, what it’s with my brother and sister, all close relationships get embedded inside of us all and how we stay in connection. And this is the part where it’s not parent’s fault, but if my primary caregiver, let’s just say my mom, but if it’s a dad that’s or adopted parent, but the primary caregiver, if their inner world or outer world is filled with stress or they’re avoidant or they’re struggling or they’re inconsistent or they’re just trying to survive in life with, many of our parents have tried to survive in life and do the best that they can, their felt sense of I am here and attuning to you, isn’t there enough for the infant to internalize secure attachment a k, a safety so that child and that person grows up with the felt sense that I might be abandoned?

(09:47):

The world really isn’t a safe place because they have haven’t internalized enough of emotional regulation, attunement the parent being consistently emotionally available for them. So that’s what makes up the, we can go into the insecure styles from there. So if you’re listening and you’re like, oh my God, and I made, my mom had postpartum depression and she went through a divorce and all these things went on for my mom, and I’m not mad at her, but her felt sense in her inner world was probably not that stable. And so as an infant, I was internalizing that. And so that’s where the beginning stages of insecure attachment happened. It’s based on the felt sense of our parents’ sense of safety and their ability to be really with us. And that’s different for an avoidant parent than an anxious parent. I can go into that if you want me to?

Dr. Sarah (10:40):

Yeah, share a little bit about the difference.

Jessica (10:43):

So an avoidant parent, and so much of our culture is pushing towards avoidance is someone who lives more in the left hemisphere of their brain. And so many, I mean there’s statistics, I think I put it in the book like 75% of our western culture is moving towards this. And avoidant parents focus on getting tasks done. They’re there, they show up physically, they are checking all the boxes, but they don’t have the emotional ability to really connect with us deeply inside. And that emotional disconnection is felt like an abandonment for the child. And most people who suffered from this don’t even know that they’re suffering from this until they get a lot of emotional connection and they realize what they didn’t receive as a young one. Now, an anxious mother would be more of the lines of inconsistency. So this mother can attune sometimes, and I would say this is probably what I got a lot of, but at other times it’s too distressed for some reason.

(11:45):

So the baby learns, oh my god, sometimes my mom is available and sometimes my mom is not. She’s checked out or she’s anxious. Her dysregulation is so big that it’s not about me, so I’m going to leave my energetic field and I’m going to take care of her needs and I’m going to get closer to her to stay in connection. And the avoidant baby just kind of gives up on emotional connection. It’s not offered enough. Those are the two. And as we talk into the wheel of attachment, we’ll notice as those two sides extreme, the mother gets more and more anxious, maybe even violent or chaotic, we get into disorganization as the neglect of neglect increases and maybe the parent is completely detached, we get into disorganization.

(12:35):

So with one parent, we can have security, we can have moments of security, and then we can have moments of anxiety and we can even have experiences of disorganization. So as we start to look at the wheel, we can see how this all moves more in a holistic nuanced way.

Dr. Sarah (12:51):

Can I ask a quick question? I often, when I’m recording episodes with people, I’m both listening as me to you and I’m also also listening as the mom I know is listening who’s sitting here being like, okay, but sometimes I’m disconnected, sometimes I’m stuck in my head. Sometimes I’m just trying to get all the tasks done. Am I being avoided? Am I going to mess up my kid or the other mom who’s like sometimes I am really overwhelmed or I feel really anxious about an anxious attachment and being anxious aren’t the same thing, but I have a lot of anxious feelings about how my child is feeling, and then that makes me kind of get a little bit too in their space, but then I calm down and I feel better and I can tune. Kind of like you were describing this, and I know we’ll talk more about this idea of the wheel of attachment, how there’s this sort of like we move through this space all the time and is there a healthy way to move through this space that is predictive of still enough secure attachment moments that where our kid is going to be getting what they need as much as they need it?

(14:04):

Or I would imagine there’s a bit of a critical moment, a critical threshold that we can pass where we’re getting into a danger zone if we’re chronically doing this. But if we are going to do it, sometimes we are human and we come in and out of connection naturally. I guess I’m looking for what’s the reassurance and also what’s the, hey, if this is something you’re noticing, we got to start paying attention.

Jessica (14:33):

Yeah, I mean, so you’re really talking about rupture and repair and most parents don’t get it right. In fact, 33% of the time we are guessing and we are getting it right. And the other I think, what is it, 67% of the time or 66, we are rupturing repairing. And so what that means is no, no parent is perfect. No parent is expected to be perfect. We’re born with a sympathetic, like a sympathetic system. And so we cry and we reach out for help. We haven’t developed parasympathetic yet, but our parents will sit there and say, oh my God, my baby’s upset. Is she hungry? Is she tired? We will try to figure out what the baby needs. And so most of the time it’s not about perfect alignment and a perfect attunement and perfect about, I care so much about you. I care enough about you that I’m going to work hard.

(15:30):

You’re dysregulated to figure out what you need so we can get back into regulation together. And so that felt sense of I can be upset and my parent can figure it out, and we come back into connection is actually what builds in our security. It’s not about perfect parenting. It’s about the child realizing I can get upset and that matters to my parent, and they’re going to come back and they’re going to try to figure out, even if it takes a while, I’m going to inherently have the felt sense that my needs are going to get met even when I’m upset because my parent cares enough to try. So it’s not about being perfect at all, but that’s secure attachment. I can go out in the world and even if people aren’t perfect, I have the inherent sense that people care about me enough that if I’m upset, they will try to repair that with me.

(16:20):

So I think that that’s really important. If we’re getting dysregulated as parents a lot and we’re really missing the boat, then some inner healing really needs to go on in order to widen our ability to hold a state of safety and our ability to have capacity for what’s going on inside of us so that we can widen our capacity to hold what’s going inside of our child. And they’re often very mirrored when I work with parents. The more inner work they do with their own inner world and their own capacity to hold their own experiences, the more they’re able to hold the experiences of their children. And it’s beautiful work when it happens because it’s in tandem. I mean, the more work I do, the more I’m able to hold the experiences of others. It’s just a universal thing. But I think what you’re getting at is very layered when it’s our children. So it’s like, yeah, our therapists can hold deep space, but when our children are dysregulated, it can also dysregulate us and it’s our work as parents to start to understand what is really being awakened in me when this shows up in my kid. And that’s another whole layer of healing and attachment work that comes through awakening through our children and the wonderful things that they bring up for us.

Dr. Sarah (17:38):

I love that. So talk a little more. I’d love to hear more about how you describe the wheel of attachment, how that’s perhaps a bit different than how we conceptualized attachment patterns historically. And obviously some people are watching, but a lot of people are listening. So I know you have a visual that people can get, but can you just describe it?

Jessica (18:05):

Yeah, like LinkedIn, the show notes will be a downloadable visual. So if you’re trying to get this and I don’t do a good job, there are other ways to get it, but it’s not so much that it’s different than what’s out there. So it’s beyond the left hemisphere way of looking at attachment. Oh, you fit in this category. So basically it’s a circle slash square, but let’s use a square for your listeners. And the four attachment styles are secure, anxious, avoidant, and I say disorganized. Now if you’re listening, you might recognize fearful avoidant as disorganized, but the scientific word that I’m use in my book and the scientific work that I’m going to say for now is disorganized is what you think of as fearful. So at the bottom we have security on the right, we have anxious. On the left we have avoidant, and on the top we have disorganized or fearful. So what I would like you to do as a listeners, understand that with one parent alone, I’m going to use myself as an example. I had moments of security with my mom.

(19:09):

And then I could move up the right side. My mom was anxious and I had moments of anxiety with my mom. And sometimes when my mom became so anxious, I might’ve even touched disorganization. Or if my mom didn’t show up, I might have touched disorganization. And with my dad, and I talk about this openly in the book, who struggled with substance abuses when I was a kid, I didn’t have much security, but I had avoidance with him and I had such extreme neglect because of his own substance use that I tipped into disorganization on the top. So with just two parents alone and we’re looking at the wheel, I have some security, a lot of anxiety. I don’t know that I slipped too much into disorganization with my mom maybe and with my dad a lot of avoidance that slipped up into disorganization.

(19:58):

So we start to understand that in one household and with one parent, we can have different embodied experiences with that parent. With my sister and I talk about in the book with all close relationships. In our earliest experiences, I talk about doing the wheel of attachment with them because that wheel later in the book, I talk about placing that wheel over our current relationships and starting to understand where these embedded patterns are being repeated in the here and now so that we can start to heal in the here and now with more information as to the root of where this attachment pattern brilliantly started. So that is the wheel, and it took me a little while to even my mentor actually invented it, Bonnie Bannock, she wrote Heart of trauma. It took me a real while to really absorb it and understand it. So I don’t expect people to get it right away, but once you start to see it, you start to see like, oh my God, it’s all on a continuum.

(20:56):

This is all on a continuum and it’s all connected, and it’s such a more holistic way to look at our embedded patterns and to see how we developed a lot of different things in our childhood home. Very rarely are we one attachment style that is very rare, and it’s an embedded pattern with two people, and we can show up different in different relationships based on what’s going on in our inner world. They’re inner world, our collective dance together. So when I wrote anxiously attached, so many people came to me and said, I’m anxiously attached, and I get that. That’s my default too. But I have avoidance too, and whether it’s true avoidance or avoidant protectors, I needed to write this book to really explain the nuances around attachment so people can get out of the one label and start to see the complexity of all of this.

Dr. Sarah (21:48):

Yeah, I think that’s so important, and I talk about this a lot actually because I think it’s a pretty big pervasive myth about attachment and even just the name attachment style isn’t really original. Research on attachment doesn’t refer to it as one of four fixed styles, and that if you have or are this style, you are then this style really, really, we talk about attachment patterns within a dyad and it’s unique to that dyad. And then by dyad, I mean two people like a child and their mother or a child and their father or a child and their primary caregiver. But then if those patterns continue to recur over and over and become internalized by us, they get put into our blueprint. And we use that blueprint to anticipate how other people outside of that attachment relationship are going to respond to our needs. Like you were describing, the blueprint can have those patterns kind of etched on it, but that blueprint is going to get edited and edited and edited with every attachment relationship we have and any relationship where there is some level of closeness, intimacy can be is a type of an attachment relationship.

(23:15):

If there’s any sort of sense of I know you and you know me, are we safe together? So that’s friendships in early childhood. Our early peer relationships have a big impact on the blueprint in adolescence, even more so. I know so many, I’m sure you see this a lot in your practice, that people are like, I had a really great relationship with my parents. I was totally secure, safe, loving, attuned relationship with my parents, and I’m so anxiously, or I have so much avoidance. Or Where did it come from? And it’s like usually it was the peer related traumas growing up that there was these bullying or just being around really unhealthy relationships in childhood and adolescence can, that alone can shift our patterns of attachment, but it’s really the amalgamation of all these relationships.

Jessica (24:09):

Yes and no. Yes and no, absolutely, and a lot of people. So our sensational experiences and our earliest attachments tends to be the ones that are the deepest in influences the most. A lot of people, and I don’t know if your audience is going to want to hear this, will say, oh, my parents were perfect and my anxious attachment came from my first boyfriend in high school. And that’s not often the case. They’re just usually out of touch or unconscious with the reality of the connection in their primary relationships. If they have extreme avoidance and extreme anxiousness, usually, even though it might gotten woken up in adult relationship and usually it gets waken up a lot in our adult relationships, it usually very often, most often has roots earlier on and a protective avoidant strategy with even most of my clients come to me and say, well, my parents were great.

(25:08):

Cool, they probably were, but they probably might not have been as emotionally attuned to you as you needed. And so there was things that are fundamentally there. And until you’re in deep work with a therapist and you’re getting that type of attunement, and we go back to the body and the sensations and the memory, we often think, oh, it was my first boyfriend, or what happened here. Not to say the caveat is all close relationships impact us. So the other side is it’s not all or never. So our close early relationships in middle school teachers impact us first. Love, yes, those things can, they’re usually not as strong as the early connections and ways that we adapted early on. But I mean, thank God for me, at least my friends parents, teachers who are loving for me, my grandmother, the early connections that impact us so that we’re positive, we also internalized those. And in therapy, I also resource those. So yes, every single close relationship does impact us. Most people are out of touch with how the earliest experiences did lack some things and influence ’em now, and that’s just a protective strategy or just an unaware around how sensational experiences in memory are really showing up for us now, and they’re actually deeply rooted in earlier years and you’re just not making that connection yet.

Dr. Sarah (26:40):

Yeah.

(26:40):

I hope you’re enjoying this conversation. As you’ve heard Jessica and me discussing when you grew up feeling uncertain about safety or consistency, your nervous system learned to stay on alert, and that same wiring can make it harder to stay calm and impact how we respond to triggers in our relationships, partners, friends, and especially with our kids. That’s why learning to regulate your own nervous system is one of the most powerful ways to break the cycle for you and for your child. In my 90 minute on-demand video workshop, be the calm in your child’s storm, I teach you how to do exactly that. You’ll learn practical science-backed strategies to help you stay grounded and connected in the heat of the moment, even when you feel triggered yourself. These are the same tools I use every day with parents and my clinical practice to help them move from reactive to responsive and to model the safety and steadiness that their child’s nervous system needs most. You can get instant access by clicking the link in the episode description or by heading to drsarahbren.com/bethecalm. That’s drsarahbren.com/bethecalm. Okay, now let’s get back to my conversation with Jessica.

(28:08):

Talk to me a little bit if you can, about when you are working with someone who’s identifying these patterns and you’re using maybe the wheel of attachment to identify these, these early relationships. Here are the rhythms that would happen in this relationship that I’m starting to see more clearly in the way that I show up now. What’s the next step then? What are some practical strategies for not just becoming aware but doing that healing work that you’re talking about?

Jessica (28:43):

Yeah, I think this is really an important question because I think a lot of people are able to locate a lot and then they’re like, what? So through I study interpersonal neurobiology, and this is a lot of what the book gives. I think it’s important that people understand the science of healing attachment wounds because understanding the science doesn’t heal them, but it definitely keeps you grounded while you’re going through them. And so anything that was wounded in relationships, especially early relationships, needs to be healed in relationship. We can’t heal our attachment wounds alone or just by understanding that here they are, by going what I call an anchor does not have to be a therapist, but having safe space held through the ventral nervous system and through a state of safety, we start to be with what is happening to you right now. And we start to go into the body develop interoception, and we start to be with the sensational experience in the body, and we connect it to the original wound and we start to have an embodied experience of what we originally went through and as my capacity, let’s say as if I’m your anchor Sarah, and you’re going there and you’re like, oh, I can feel this tightness in my chest and the queasiness in my belly.

(30:04):

And I can say to you, I imagine you might’ve felt this before. Since we know this might be infant memory or really little girl memory, can we start to be with the tightness in your chest? Can we place a hand? I’ll place a hand over my belly. Can we start to hold the sensational experience and can we hold the truth that it’s happening right now with your daughter or your husband when he does this and this little girl inside of you beast on the experiences that are going on? Your body has felt this before. She’s either scared, she’s nervous, and if you don’t have an explicit memory, can we trust that this is implicit memory together and with my nervous system and your nervous system, can we start to be with the sensational experience in your body and build the capacity to hold more and more of it together?

(30:53):

So that’s how we would start to be with the original wound. That’s how we would start to connect it to its root, and that’s how we’d expand our window of tolerance together, and that’s how we would move it from the body up into the right hemisphere and integrate it into the left. And I think it’s so important if you’re listening and you really get that that is true, healing attachment wounds. So attachment wounds aren’t healed through just education alone. We actually need to go there together and build the capacity to be with what’s going on in our body and how our body is storing these attachment wounds.

Dr. Sarah (31:27):

Yeah, that’s really beautiful. It makes me think too, okay, attachment is a stress response. Our attachment systems are stress response systems. When I am a child in distress, my attachment system gets activated, so I seek out my caregiver to help soothe me or meet my need. We seek out attachment figures due to a change in homeostasis in our body. And when we are in homeostasis, when we are in safety regulation, we are in connection with another. Our attachment systems are actually, they’re quieter, they’re not active, not, there’s no alarm bells going off that’s saying, get me close to you. Right. We are truly in a sense of safety, what I’m hearing you describe in this interaction of an intervention in therapy with someone where they’re experiencing some type of dysregulation, distress inside of their body, a sensation that we normally want to try to turn off, and our attachment systems and the attachment patterns that we have learned to utilize a result of our attachment systems, perhaps not making that happen for us. Either we get louder and bigger and more intense so that someone will come and turn it off for us, or we just try to turn our attention and awareness completely away or shut that, shut ourselves off from that sensation because we don’t think anyone’s coming to turn it off for us. Those are the survival adaptive strategies we’ve developed to not feel the discomfort. Right?

Jessica (33:05):

Correct.

Dr. Sarah (33:05):

And so you’re describing in this session is that I’m feeling safe with you and discomfort arises, and because of those two things being true, the discomfort and the safety, which is what was not originally embedded in the system, we’re trying to expand our capacity in this moment to stay in the discomfort while knowing we are safe and we’re rewiring the system in that way. Am I getting that?

Jessica (33:39):

Yeah. Yeah. So yeah, basically you’re getting it. Yeah. I mean it’s the discomfort met with the safety. Absolutely. And then, so let’s say the discomfort is a shame or abandonment or pain. When we can go back to the body, it’s all the body and go back to the original time. Let’s say it’s just sensational. So we know you’ve experienced this before and another person can give you what you didn’t get at the original time of the wound. So if it was abandonment, you need to be met and you need to be met a lot by our nervous system who has a sense of safety because maybe your mom couldn’t meet you. Usually what happens in anchoring relationships like that is that our neuro nets open and more implicit information comes up. Our body is finally saying, oh my God, I have a person who’s in a state of safety enough for me to dip into my implicit world and bring it to them and get dysregulated and have that person hold that experience.

(34:45):

And so what we’re doing is we’re giving your nervous system, your memory system, the felt experience of what you didn’t get at the time. So then that memory becomes accompanied and as soon as the memory becomes accompanied enough. So example, I used to feel like I was always alone in this one apartment and I was like four, and I remember I did so much work, but eventually I felt my anchor with me in that apartment because we went there together and no longer does that memory live in my system as a place that I’m alone because she’s accompanied me so much in the original wound. So we always have to go back to the original wound or else we’re just going to get into these trauma bond or these situations where we’re like, my husband when he doesn’t call me from work or when my sister does this to me, we’re just going to stay in the here now and we’re going to go in circles. But through sensation and through interoception and through anchoring experiences, we can get out of what’s going on in the here and now, and we can get much deeper and we can start to heal the wounds where they live within the body.

Dr. Sarah (35:53):

So then the other thing I’m hearing you describe in this piece is, I don’t want to use too much jargon, but like an internalized object. So we internalize our attachment figures and all the felt senses that come with those attachment figures in our experiences with them for good or for bad. And when we have new corrective emotional experiences with another safe person, especially over time repeated experiences with this person, we internalize that sense of felt safety with that person. So when you say you’re going back to that apartment with this person, you’re not physically going together and walking over and finding that old apartment and walking around. You are doing it internally. It’s an internal imaginative experience where you are, it’s an internalized good object.

Jessica (36:49):

Yes.

Dr. Sarah (36:50):

Which is from object relations theory, which we don’t have to get into, but…

Jessica (36:55):

Yeah, no, I mean two things. One, I don’t just go back to, I was in this apartment actually doing some deep work and memory is like water, so it’ll go to anything that is so familiar to where the original wound was. So we don’t even need to find things When you’re in active anchoring, they just show up.

(37:14):

Through mirror neurons and through resident circuits, we know that we internalize everyone we’re close to, we internalize everything and secure babies, secure babies, secure people, internalized parents that had a relative neuroception of safety, and they walk around the world not fear of abandonment, they feel a little bit more secure inside through neuroplasticity and everything that we’re learning, we get to internalize new people. And that’s what I talk about with anchors, and that’s what I so empowering as an adult is that we get to choose who we want to internalize. Now we get to find people who have the capacity. We usually have to learn what that means. Our nervous system has to start to understand what that really means to be sitting with someone who has the capacity to hold us might be very foreign for many people, but that’s where true attachment healing starts. So earned security is when we’ve internalized enough co-regulation and enough safety from our anchors that we’ve now carry that within our system, and there very much is a science to prove that’s literally what we didn’t get as a baby. And at my middle of my life, I was able to get that as an adult because I was lucky enough to have enough secure anchoring in my life to internalize it, that now my felt sense of safety is expanded.

Dr. Sarah (38:41):

Yeah, that’s amazing. And I feel like if you’re a parent, right, it’s so hard because the parent child relationship is not completely bi-directional, an imbalanced relationship by design. Our babies are going to activate all kinds of stuff for us, and we have to work on healing that outside of that relationship. Whereas if you’re with your partner and you’re maybe at a place where you’re doing some of this work together, as you guys activate each other, hopefully you’re able to take a beat, regulate, come back and work on that together. We don’t do that with the babies, we don’t do that with our kids. And frankly, even our older kids, it can be very tempting to kind of, as they get so much more participatory in that and mutual in that relationship with us, it can be easy to sometimes slip into that type of relationship where we’re expecting a mutually co-regulatory relationship with our kids. And can we talk a little bit about how the parent-child relationship with it, when we’re thinking about attachment healing has to be slightly in a different category than all the other relationships that we have with more mutual partners?

Jessica (40:12):

Yeah, I mean, I think that, well, I’m an imago therapist. I don’t know that’s side boat, but you can heal in most relationships together if there’s a willingness on both sides and the proper support. And sometimes it requires another nervous system, but at times in a parent child relationship, you’re going to get dysregulated and your child might not be doing anything. They might just be awakening earlier wounds within you. So just as much, and I know the anxiously attached people, the first book, very romantic relationships can wake things up, but in safe, I talk about every relationship. So just as much as your husband or your work colleague, what I’m hearing you really want to focus on is the fact that your child can wake up so much of your inner work and your job isn’t to resolve it with your child.

(41:10):

Your job might be to find a safe person to start to process What is my child doing that is waking up this response in me or this activation in me, and how can I bring it to another person that can help me get it out of the dynamic that I might be stuck in with my child so that I could heal whatever is being awakened me and go back and maybe respond differently to my child? And I think that’s beautiful, and I think that a lot of people might need to do that with an anchoring person or a therapist. And I also think there is a way to do that with your child through rupture and repair. But if it’s really your own work, there has to be a level of awareness that my child isn’t doing this to me. My child is waking this up inside of me, and there’s a very different experience between how I might relate to you if I know that you’re waking something up inside of me that existed. And we know if there are sensations attached, it existed before, most likely. So once we can start to understand this as a deeper wound within me, I can now relate not only to what’s going on in my body differently, but I might not blame or be as reactive to my child, and I might need to process this in a different format.

Dr. Sarah (42:32):

I think that’s really a helpful framed place around because it’s such a unique relationship and it doesn’t follow the same set of guidelines as most other relationships.

Jessica (42:47):

I mean, I do like parent child dynamics in Imago, but you’re absolutely right. It’s not the place where you should be processing your deep early attachments. It’s more about being there for them. And then, so it’s slightly different. It’s an empowered relationship as well. So there’s some different dynamics in that way.

Dr. Sarah (43:06):

Totally. And in my work, I’ll do a lot of parent-child diadic work, and it’s very much about repairing attachment relationships in the sessions, but it’s about identifying and really distinguishing what is a me and my child moment that needs authentic repair and processing and changing and healing between me and my kid versus what you were describing. What am I placing on top of my relationship with my child, but actually has nothing really to do with them in this moment? And that comes and if I can bring that up and over and out of the interaction I’m having with the child in the moment so I can truly see my child and me as their parent versus all the stuff we project onto that relationship. But it’s not that you can’t do any healing work with a parent and child together. I think there’s lots of wonderful, beautiful ways to do that, but we have to be able to distinguish what is up for what’s on the table to heal in this moment and know where that has to go.

Jessica (44:24):

Right. I talk about this. I mean, there’s a great body of work called Conscious Parenting that really addresses this, but in safe, I address it as well. And I think the one way to get conscious of what is being awakened is to do your own inner work. And then once you start to do that, your relationship with your child does shift.

(44:45):

But it takes quite a bit of maturity and emotional awareness to understand this is coming up for me in this moment and it’s history, and I’m in this moment right now, and how do I hold my historical slash hysterical slash sensational experience that I need to tend to and how I’m responding to my child? So if you’re reactive and you find yourself stuck in these cycles, that is very normal and it takes a while to build new neuro wiring and patterning with your child. We have to go back to the original wound and we have to hold that child’s experience, but we have to hold that for a while so that we build the capacity for that part of you so that you can respond differently when that part of you gets awakened with your child.

Dr. Sarah (45:35):

Yeah, I think that’s so valuable, and I’m glad you said that. I really do think it’s important to emphasize that this is not easy. It takes a lot.

Jessica (45:47):

Yeah. I talk about, in my book, I talk about a couple, Corey and James, but so much of the implicit patterns that we have, so the generated patterns that just happen that are automatic, they happen so fast, they happen like a hundred times faster. They’re often outside of our conscious awareness.

(46:04):

And so it, it takes a long time to build the space within to change the neuro pathways, to have this additional awareness. It can take a while, but I think you need to give yourself grace. If you’re starting to work on these patterns on a good day, you might start to have this dual awareness and your response reactivity time might start to change as you start to do the work. And I think that’s the key. It’s not about perfect parenting, it’s about building this awareness, doing the work and building the capacity to maybe do it differently, but it surely doesn’t happen the second we notice it and we even, we notice that we connected to the root, we still have to do the work of holding the original wound.

Dr. Sarah (46:46):

Yeah, it’s really worth it though. It’s very worthwhile work. I’m glad that you have found ways to get more of this information out to people with your books and the work that you do. I definitely, it’s not easy. It can be very hard. It makes sense that it doesn’t come instantly, and I think it’s still very much worth it because to heal for yourself is very, very valuable and it will have a very significant trickle down effect generationally. So you’re doing it for, I don’t know, sometimes it’s like people are more open to doing that kind of work if they know they’re doing it for their kid, which in and of itself, we could probably have a whole conversation about why we want to do it for ourselves first. But…

Jessica (47:41):

Whatever gets you there.

Dr. Sarah (47:42):

Whatever gets you there.

Jessica (47:44):

Yeah.

Dr. Sarah (47:45):

How can people find out more about your work or connect with you, get your books?

Jessica (47:51):

Yeah, so I mean, if SAFE is out, I think today. So SAFE: An Attachment Informed Guide to Building More Secure Relationships. It’s like an orange coral cover. I’m everywhere. I’m on the internet. But today for your listeners, I have a beyond the label. So if they buy and click through the link, they get the wheel of attachment right in their inbox and an explanation there. And then a 40 minute conversation, if you like this conversation with my mentor Bonnie, about a knock about what it feels like in your body to go from insecurity to security. And she’s been a big anchoring, secure relationship for me, and she teaches us therapists, she’s my mentor, and I just wanted everyone to have an ability to access her. So those are the two free things that I’m giving away. If you purchase the book, I’m on Instagram, @jessicabaumLMHC.

(48:44):

I’ve been saying this on a lot of podcasts, but if you reach out to me, I will do my best to respond personally to every single person who reaches out. I did that last time with anxiously attached. I’m going to try and do it again this time, but I really want to know from you as the reader and as the listener, how you were impacted. So you can find me there. I have an international coaching company called the Conscious Relationship Group. I’ve got a bunch of people who work with attachment wounds who work with me side by side, and I have a private practice here in Palm Beach called The Relationship Institute of Palm Beach. So there’s lots of ways I feel bad for anybody else whose name Jessica Baum because I feel like I’m over the internet space. But yeah, check out the book. The book is amazing. If you really like this conversation, then this is a deep dive kind of into that. You’ll really understand attachment in a new way.

Dr. Sarah (49:36):

That’s so great. I’m so excited that this is out there. So thank you for coming on the show. It was really lovely, lovely talking with you about this.

Jessica (49:44):

Yeah, thank you. It’s so nice to be interviewed by someone who really gets it and is really passionate and there with me, so I really appreciate you.

Dr. Sarah (49:52):

Yes. Fellow attachment nerds got to represent.

Jessica (49:57):

Absolutely.

Dr. Sarah (49:58):

Okay. Have a great day.

Jessica (50:00):

Thank you.

Dr. Sarah (50:06):

Thanks so much for listening. If you are interested in learning more about attachment science, check out my free guide, the Four Pillars of Fostering Secure Attachment. In this guide, I teach you how to use the principles of attachment science to help you parent with attunement and trust by focusing on four simple things. You can work towards helping your child form a secure attachment bond, which is a predictor of so many positive aspects of mental health, including self-esteem, independence, healthier relationships with others throughout their lifespan, better academic and workplace achievement, and lower reported instances of anxiety and depression, not a small list. So to download this free guide and learn the four pillars of fostering secure attachment, go to drsarahbren.com/secure. That’s drsarahbren.com/secure. And until next time, don’t be a stranger.