445. The neuroscience of resonance: How to use language to strengthen attachment with your child with Sarah Peyton

Sarah Peyton (00:01):

As we do our work of learning about this stuff, learning the neurobiology and learning about the language that we can use and the way that language links to attachment and how we can begin to have this warm curiosity about our kids’ experience, their feelings and their needs, then we are becoming more securely attached.

Dr. Sarah Bren (00:28):

The way we talk to our children doesn’t just shape the conversation we’re having in that moment. Over time, those interactions can shape how our children understand themselves, what they expect from their relationships, and even how their brains and nervous systems respond to the world around them. Hi, I’m Dr. Sarah Bren, a clinical psychologist, mom of two, and the host of Securely Attached. Each week, I sit down with leading experts in psychology, neuroscience, medicine, and child development to translate complex research into practical, grounded insights that help you parent with more clarity and confidence. Joining me this week is Sarah Peyton. Sarah is a neuroscience educator, certified trainer of nonviolent communication, international speaker and teacher, and the author of four books, including Your Resident Self. For years, Sarah has been translating research on relational neuroscience into a framework for understanding how our brains and nervous systems are affected by the way we are seen, understood, and responded to by other people.

(01:30):

And I’m so excited for you to get to hear more about her work that sits at a fascinating meeting point between attachment theory, neuroscience, and nonviolent communication. In this episode, we talk about what happens in the brain and nervous system of a child when they feel truly understood, how nonviolent communication can give us a language for creating that deeper sense of connection. And Sarah explains why a behavior that barely bothers you one day can totally send you over the edge the next, and how our own attachment histories can impact us in these moments. We also talk about how to develop a greater security with your own child, even if that wasn’t something you experienced yourself when you were growing up. This conversation will give you a new way to think about the language of attachment with very practical tools for helping your child feel more deeply understood and strengthening the secure attachment bond that you’re building.

(02:35):

Hello, Sarah. Welcome to the show. Thank you so much for being here.

Sarah Peyton (02:39):

Oh, thank you so much, Sarah, for having me.

Dr. Sarah Bren (02:42):

I mean, I would love to just hear a little bit about your journey with the work that you do. So your work brings together, tell me if I’ve got this correctly, but relational neuroscience, attachment, nonviolent communication, and what you call resonance in a very unique way. And I was just wondering if we could start with how those different threads came together for you.

Sarah Peyton (03:05):

Yeah. Yeah. I had my adoptive son who was with us for. We got to adopt him when he was 15 and we got him through to age 33 and then lost him to alcoholism and the trauma of his early childhood. But when he first came to live with us, I couldn’t hug him. I was like, “I need to hug this kid. This kid badly needs to be hugged.” And I would go to hug him and my arms would just stop. It was this really funny feeling. And I was like, “This is weird.” And at the same time, I was discovering nonviolent communication, and I went to a nonviolent communication presentation by Marshall Rosenberg, and at the time he was sort of in his cognitive decline period. So he was saying the same things in the public presentation that he would say on the CD set that I had memorized.

(04:03):

And I was like, “Dang, I know this already.” So then this lady raises her hand and she says, “I’m going to take people next door and we’re going to do an empathy circle.” And I was like, “Okay, I’m going to do an empathy circle. I’ve never done an empathy circle, but I don’t want to be bored.” So I went into this room and sat down and the lady was like, “Okay, who has a problem that’s perplexing them or bothering them?” And nobody talked. And so I said, “Well, I do. I can’t hug my son.” And so they started me out with feelings and needs guesses. And in nonviolent communication, you have your observation, you have your feelings, you have your needs, you have your requests. But in an empathy circle, you’re trying to figure out what your feelings and needs are because nobody in your life before you meet nonviolent communication has ever wanted to know your feelings and needs before.

(04:59):

And they were guessing for me and I had a spontaneous trauma healing experience. It was extraordinary. I remembered being three years old and reaching out for my mother and my mother doing sort of the same frozen thing that I would do with my son and my little three-year-old self going, “Oh my God, I don’t…” The alarmed aloneness of a moment where your mom recoils from touch was so profound that it kind of had embedded itself like a fish hook in my nervous system and was saying, “No, don’t hug anybody.” Which I didn’t notice so much with other people, but I noticed a lot with my fish. I didn’t so much want to hug other people.

Dr. Sarah Bren (05:49):

Well, there’s that parent-child. Maybe it really was that the parent child part of that experience was connected to the way it got kind of coded.

Sarah Peyton (05:59):

Yeah, that’s a beautiful, beautiful observation. I think that’s true. I walked out of there going, “I can hug my son. I just didn’t feel that catch in my body anymore.” I went home and hugged him. It was the very same time that relational neuroscience was coming to fruition. The people were starting to publish studies about what relationships do to the brain, how relationships change the brain. I was very excited and I started reading everything I could get my hands on that was coming out from the world of relational neuroscience and social neurobiology. I was like, “Oh my goodness, this is the coolest thing I’ve ever seen.” That was the next deeply healing experience was because my mom had always said that she didn’t have anything to do with the way that I turned out.

(06:57):

I was always like, “Dang, I’m on my own.” And to realize, “Oh yeah, we do have an influence on each other. We really change each other’s brains,” was the second sort of deeply healing thing. I was teaching nonviolent communication in a prison at that point. I was just volunteering and teaching. The ladies who of course had been through tons of trauma were very interested in the brain and trauma and what it does to the brain and how nonviolent communication can. It’s almost like a walking neuroscience operation. Nonviolent communication is it awakens the brain and makes it work again in places where it’s been stopped by trauma. And so this is a basic story of me coming here to talk with you.

Dr. Sarah Bren (07:44):

Yes. Well, I think there are probably some steps in between, but from the prison to this day. We just had an episode with Oren J. Sopher, who is also in the world of nonviolent communication. He teaches a lot about it and he sort of explains the nuts and bolts of it. So first of all, just to orient all of our listeners, I’m going to link that episode in show notes. If you haven’t listened to that, I would really recommend listening to that in the context of this episode as well. But just to tee people up, when we’re talking about nonviolent communication and specifically you’re flagging this nuance of it that’s kind of new to me, but makes so much sense that when you practice nonviolent communication, which is a communication and relational language strategy or philosophy practice, yes, we’re teaching interpersonal effectiveness skills and communication skills and relationship skills, but you’re saying it actually is changing the neural biology. It’s changing the brain. Absolutely. And that is where I’m like, “Ooh, you got my nerd lights going off.” I’m like, “Wait, explain this.”

Sarah Peyton (09:00):

Yes. Okay. So what trauma does in the human brain is it gets embedded in the amygdala, which has no sense of time. The amygdala glues things together rather than differentiating things and being able to tell when one thing happened and when another thing happened. Instead, it’s sort of like as soon as you trespass into a particular intensely charged memory, it’s almost like you’re living in that memory again, that that memory is alive in you. You can feel the body sensations. If you felt shame in the memory, you can flush again in your regular life. Here we are with this traumatic memory, which isn’t timestamped, so it keeps coming back up whenever we get reminded of it. So those of us who are parents, for example, without even knowing it, we’re traveling in the territory of the amygdala all the time. Some days your kids are making noise and you’re fine with it.

(10:11):

And then other days, your kids are making noise and you’re like, “Shut up. No more noise. Be quiet.” And what’s creating the difference between those moments where everything’s fine and those moments where we’re reactive? It’s the amygdala. And so there’s something happening that is not yet named that makes us more upset. And it is hooked into some kind of memory where we experienced alarmed aloneness. Now, we’re humans. We’re social animals. We are so extraordinarily social that we have neurons in our skin that are devoted to sensing the body heat of other humans. We have neurons that only light up at the body temperature that is common for humans in 83 to 105. We can tell.

(11:14):

We take comfort from, we hunger for the closeness that comes with being able to tell there are other bodies around us. Our most beloved companion animals have similar ranges of body temperature and we take comfort from their presence as well. But if the sun is shining on my skin, it’s hotter than regular human body temperature. My skin’s like, “That’s not human body temperature. That’s not going to nourish me the same way.” Or if I’m sitting next to something really cold, I can feel the temperature of the cold thing like an iceberg or something and I can feel the temperature of the cold. My body’s like, “That’s not a human thing.” And we don’t even realize how extraordinarily social we are. This is the strangest well-kept secret of our modern life, is that all this information that we always get that we’re supposed to be pulling ourselves up by our bootstraps and making it all on our own and making our kids be independent is all counterproductive to our and their long-term health and wellbeing.

Dr. Sarah Bren (12:29):

Because it’s not evolutionarily. We evolved. What I’m hearing you say is there’s this very, very, very, very, very long ancient evolutionary history that our bodies hold, our physiology holds. And it’s only this very brief blip in human history that our current society has this rugged individualism kind of coda and that’s. Well, we have to learn how to navigate the social realities we live in our society. I’m thinking working parenthood and all that stuff, sending our kids to school and all those things. We aren’t evolved for that. Our bodies and our brain.

Sarah Peyton (13:11):

We aren’t evolved. I mean, sending our kids to school, they’re still with other kids and they get to feel body heat.

Dr. Sarah Bren (13:18):

We’re evolved. Okay. We still move in packs.

Sarah Peyton (13:22):

Yes.

Dr. Sarah Bren (13:23):

Okay.

Sarah Peyton (13:25):

We’re evolved to function best if we are warmly held, if we are held with affection and welcome and our voice is wanted and our presence is wanted. I mean, just think what it feels like to walk into a group, be like, “Oh, I don’t know anybody.” Then somebody goes, “Ah, Sarah.”

Dr. Sarah Bren (13:44):

Yes. It’s not just like when someone does that, you’re right. If you feel something very unique to that experience, is that resonance? How would you describe resonance or how does resonance fit into what we’re…

Sarah Peyton (13:58):

And I’m just going to bookmark that we’re. I’m trying to get back to the trauma piece, but resonance is what we need most of all. It is a sense that somebody else actually gets us. The sense that if we’re having an emotional experience, that it is comprehensible and understandable to another human. That if we are distressed, another person is like, “Oh yeah.” If we are happy, another person is like, “Woo-hoo.” If we are just gently sad, somebody else is like, “Oh, oh.” And there’s this wonderful, easy flow in accompaniment, which I’m doing non-verbally with little noises right now, but that happens also in the language that we use and the way we talk to each other. So everybody knows. I mean, there are actually seven different scientific definitions of empathy, but everybody sort of knows what empathy is, that you look at somebody else and you have a feeling for them.

(15:04):

Well, if you have a feeling for somebody else, you don’t ever have to talk to them. You can have empathy all by yourself for everybody in the world and never have a conversation. But in resonance, you have to have the conversation. So you have to go, “Oh, do I get you?” And our, “Oh, do I get you?” Is signified by our facial expression, by the tone of our voice, by the words that we use, by metaphors we use, impossible dream guesses that we use. We’ve just been looking at nonviolent communication. Feelings and needs are a fabulous way to wonder if we understand somebody else. So when we have a question mark in our voice, “Do I get you?” Then the other person gets to say, “Oh, no. No, you don’t get me.” The other day, somebody made a guess that I was despairing. I was like, “No, no, I’m resigned.”

Dr. Sarah Bren (16:05):

Subtle, but just big difference.

Sarah Peyton (16:07):

Yeah, exactly.

Dr. Sarah Bren (16:07):

But I can see how they might look the same, right? There’s a lot of subtleties to our emotional experience that. Yeah, we do have to guess sometimes.

Sarah Peyton (16:17):

Yeah. We have to guess. I mean, even though we are so extraordinarily social, we are also completely differentiated little beings bumbling around and having experiences. And so when somebody else says, “Oh, is it like this?” And you’re like, “Yeah, it’s like that.” Or you say, “No, it’s like this.” Oh, like that. Then we’re starting to feel, you can almost feel it in the play dialogue that I’m doing, that there’s this kind of clicking, this synchronization that happens between two people when somebody has a sense of being understood. And so this, of course, is the greatest gift we can give our children because this kind of wondering about whether we’re understanding does so many things. It allows the child to have deep resilience in the world, that this child then walks through the world thinking, “I am understandable. The world is predictable. I make sense. The world might be messed up, but my reaction to it makes sense.

(17:21):

I’m here. I can make friends. Other people will expect me to make sense and understand me, and I’m going to have an easy time in the world.” It’s like we’re giving our child a very highly tuned engine that has a great transmission. Whereas if, for example, what my mother did, I said, “I’m sad.” She said, “You’re not sad.” That’s giving a child a broken transmission, because then the movement between the body and the brain that gives us a sense of calm, that manages stress, that helps us really manage. What it lets us do, it’s this funny thing where we manage the speed bumps of life by outsourcing our experience of any difficulty. When we are accompanied in this way where we have a sense that other people understand us, we don’t have to work so hard. When we have a sense that nobody understands us, we have to become more and more nervous systemly insulated in order to be able to negotiate a world that now is unpredictable.

(18:43):

People won’t understand us. We don’t make sense. We have to be really careful what we say in order to be able to find belonging. And we really probably shouldn’t talk about emotions at all, which means that we don’t get to have that easy fluid filled transmission that a securely attached little kid gets to have.

Dr. Sarah Bren (19:04):

Yeah. The image that’s coming to my mind right now, maybe it’s because I was just in my garden before we started talking, but is like, okay, if a plant is putting down roots, a child is emoting in the world and each of these little roots is a bid to communicate an experience. And if the environment, if the soil, if the microbiome of the soil can reflect, okay, yes, you’re home. I see you.

(19:36):

Not necessarily resolve the feeling, just like what you’re saying, provide resonance. It’s like the root will say, “Okay, I’ll keep going in this direction,” and it puts out. But when you have an environment that does not do that, the roots don’t. They stop and they go down or they move in a different direction or they stop there, they prune, right? And so if you have a plant where the environment wasn’t hospitable to the expansion of these roots, you have a really tight, narrow plant with very little sort of root support. If there’s a storm, the plant just doesn’t have that much to hold onto under the ground, so it just can fall over. Whereas if you have this experience of rich resonance in lots of different places and ways and you build this big dynamic root system under the ground, you have all of this resilience, all of this stability that when something tough happens, you can sort of grab onto those supports and feel like you’re holding onto something, something’s holding you in place.

Sarah Peyton (20:51):

And the beautiful thing about your metaphor is that people can’t see the roots that child has, and they look at the child and they go, “Look at that independent child because they can’t see all the roots.” And so they think, “I want to make my child independent. You go do all that stuff on your own so that you’ll look like that other plant over there.” But then we’re not letting them have that root system that allows them to look like they’re independent, but actually they’re completely outsourced to community that allows them to live through life with fewer stress experiences.

Dr. Sarah Bren (21:36):

I want to pause here for a quick minute because so much of what Sarah and I are talking about in this conversation comes back to the ways that our earliest relationships can continue to shape us often long after childhood. We may understand intellectually why we react the way we do. We can recognize patterns, we want to change and be incredibly motivated to do things differently with our own children. But sometimes insight alone isn’t enough to change those patterns that have become deeply ingrained over time. And this is a big part of the work that we do at my practice, Upshur Bren Psychology Group. Our clinicians help adults understand and heal from attachment wounds, relational trauma, and difficult early experiences, not simply by looking back at what happened, but by helping you understand how those experiences may still be showing up in your nervous system, in your relationships, and in the way that you parent today.

(22:28):

Together, we can help you develop a deeper understanding of yourself, have more choice in how you respond when old patterns get activated, and create new experiences of safety and connection in the relationships that matter most to you. So if you’re listening to this conversation and recognizing some of your own history in it, or you’re thinking about patterns you want to understand or change, you don’t have to do that work alone. You can visit upshurbrend.com to learn more or schedule a free 30 minute consultation with a member of our care team. That’s upshurbren.com, U-P-S-H-U-R-B-R-E-N.com or simply click the link in the episode description. Okay, let’s get back to my conversation with Sarah Peyton.

(23:10):

You were saying that when we practice communicating in a way that sees the needs of others, is curious about the needs of others, or is curious about the needs of ourselves, honors our own needs, communicates our needs, that that is actually shaping the brain and that our interpersonal relationships and being met with resonance or meeting another person with resonance changes the structure of both of those brains.

Sarah Peyton (23:48):

Yes.

Dr. Sarah Bren (23:48):

How does it do that?

Sarah Peyton (23:50):

Well, it’s not just the brain that gets changed, it’s the brain and the body because part of what’s happening with social interaction is the vagus nerve. And the vagus nerve is responding to the kind of attachment that it has, the kind of root system that it has to help the body to compensate for missing attachment. So insecure attachment, the root system is robust and widespread and easily connects with other root systems and has that underground communication that you’re just starting to learn about this happening in between root systems implants. And the vagus nerve gets to freely operate because that’s not a system under stress. So the brain gets to have these lovely connections both to the prefrontal cortex and in some way that they have not yet actually measured to other people. And that’s the work of James A. Cohen at the University of Virginia, beautiful work on how you need to have somebody with you who knows you to be able to find hills less steep, less effortful, pain less painful when you have somebody who’s really with you.

(25:21):

He does a lot of stuff on handholding, holding your hand, then the brain changes the way that it’s absorbed, the way that it’s responding to stress. So you have these wonderful connections between the prefrontal cortex and the amygdala. You have these mysterious connections that allow outsourcing to community. And when you have a difficult experience, it’s much less likely to turn into trauma because you’re making sense to yourself as you have all the emotions that are connected with the difficult experience because you’ve made sense to everybody else all around you for so long that you’re like, “Yeah, I make sense. I’m in a car accident. I’m scared. I’m angry. I’m numb from the shock. I have flashes of grief. I’m worried about the other people. I’m worried about my kids because I need to call home.” You’re like, “Yeah, I’m having all of these experiences.” If we don’t make sense to ourselves, then we have a car accident, we’re like, “Stop. I’m just holding my breath. I mean, I’m not speaking. I’m just holding my breath.”

(26:27):

Yeah. We can’t name the emotions. We don’t make sense, so there’s nowhere to go with this really intense experience. And so it just stays in the amygdala. If it never gets talked about and the emotions don’t get named and the needs don’t get named, the experience stays in the amygdala.

Dr. Sarah Bren (26:44):

Does it stay in the amygdala and stay locked in the body?

Sarah Peyton (26:48):

Yeah. It stays locked in the body, stays in the amygdala. Absolutely.

Dr. Sarah Bren (26:53):

Because my thought is, I mean, there’s the very famous book, The Body Keeps the Score, and it talks about how when traumatic events or scary things happen to us, it’s not just the mind and the brain that makes sense of it cognitively, but the whole body, like you were talking about the nervous system, which a major player in the nervous system is the vagus nerve.

(27:22):

It doesn’t necessarily. We can say to ourself, “I’m fine. I’m fine. Nothing happened. I’m okay.” And if that is not resonant with our actual felt experience in the body, I think this happens a lot in therapy where if you’re doing talk therapy and you’re really intellectualized and you’re really in your head about it and you can narrate everything that happened, but nothing resolves the situation, the trauma around it is not resolving, the symptoms around it, the avoidance or whatever, the confusion or disorganization is not resolving. That’s a clear sign to me that the mind is getting there, the brain or the thinking, the cognitive is making sense of it, but the body is not registering any of this information. And so that discordant, those two discordant experiences where I can cognitively make sense of thing, but I do not feel safe or like I’m okay or I can’t go back and rewind and tell the whole narrative again, but experience the consolidation in my actual belt system of any of that. So that would be like a lack of self-resonance maybe.

Sarah Peyton (28:45):

Yeah. A lack of self-resonance and self-resonance is always the internalization of the resonance from others.

Dr. Sarah Bren (28:55):

Right. We can’t have self-resonance unless we have it reflected to us first by another person, just like we can’t really do much of anything on our own unless someone does it with us first.

Sarah Peyton (29:06):

Yeah. Yeah. We are so social. Exactly. Exactly. Yeah.

Dr. Sarah Bren (29:16):

So I want to take all this beautiful, rich, interesting, nerdy stuff, and I want to offer a way to. If a parent is listening and is like, “Okay, this is clicking. I think this makes a lot of sense. How do I use this to inform the way I talk to my kid or the way I manage my experience in stressful moments at home?” How do we take this and apply it to parenting?

Sarah Peyton (29:44):

Well, once we understand that we’re looking for the invisible root system and that we get to have a role in contributing to our children in such a significant way, then we can begin to Begin to notice how we usually talk to our kids. And so there are a couple different things to really keep an eye out for. One is, do we use emotion words? So this is the work of Yak Panksep. There are the seven for Yak Panksep circuits are systems of emotion and motivation. And so the big flavors of what makes life difficult are grief and the panic that comes when we’re alone and anger or rage and fear and disgust. So we get to start to notice, and just for people’s information, grief includes sadness and sorrow and grief and mourning and shame and loneliness and what I call alarmed aloneness, that state of there’s nobody there and my nervous system really wants somebody to be there.

(31:08):

It’s not fear, it’s not anger, but it’s an alarm state, alarmed aloneness. So do I use these words in my conversations with my children or do I not use emotion words at all about myself or about my kids? And so that’s question number one. And then the second question is, since we’re starting to talk about nonviolent communication, do I allow myself to create context with my kids about what needs are alive for them in having these emotions? There’s also the positive or less, the emotions that are also really important, but don’t come up so much when we’re working exactly with difficult experiences, play, emergence, the experience of becoming who we are, which yak punks have put in the same category as our sexuality, as our reproductive system and our human growth hormone all linked together to make us adults. So our becoming who we are, our emergence, and then our seeking our ability to really mobilize. I think I’ve forgotten one, two, three, four, five, six, seven. Oh, I’ve forgotten one, but it’ll come to me soon.

Dr. Sarah Bren (32:28):

Care, right?

Sarah Peyton (32:29):

Care. That’s the beautiful. Yeah. Yeah. So do we…

Dr. Sarah Bren (32:33):

I have it on a post-it on my desk.That’s how I knew. I reference it so often that I love those. You got to do an episode about affective neurobiology.

Sarah Peyton (32:44):

I’d love to. That’s great stuff. So do we use these words when we’re talking to our kids and do we then put them in context? Do we say angry? I wonder if you’re angry because you love respect. Isn’t that a nice question for a kid if they’re angry at their teacher? Do you love respect? Do you love to know that you matter, that your needs matter to another person? I remember the day. So I started using nonviolent communication with my son, not the son who died, but my birth son when he was about seven. And I remember the day he came home from school and he said, “Mom, I did not enjoy the way the headmaster spoke to me today.” I was like, “What’s fun? We can have a really good juicy conversation. What were the feelings? What were the needs? What’s the context for the emotion?” So this kind of warm curiosity about the way that our child makes sense and what they’re experiencing. Yes.

Dr. Sarah Bren (34:00):

I was going to say it’s interesting because there’s the kids that say, “Mom, I did not enjoy how the headmaster treated me today.” And you can say, “Oh man, I wonder what need wasn’t being met for you. Maybe you didn’t feel respected or there was a need to feel belonging and whatever.” And you can have that kid that comes home and just starts picking flights with everybody and is just grumpy and you might still in that moment, I could imagine, following the concepts of nonverbal communication say, “Huh, I wonder if at school today there was a time where your need for some need maybe…” I’m trying to think what I would say to a kid that’s really given you a lot of ick without giving you context because if your kid can come out right out and say to you, “This is exactly what happened and I can calmly translate for you my experience and words in a way that feels very relatable and a parent can lean into that versus the kid that’s just exploding lava everywhere and you have to say the same thing though.

Sarah Peyton (35:18):

I think these can be the same kid too.

Dr. Sarah Bren (35:20):

Oh yeah.

Sarah Peyton (35:21):

I mean, depending on how many years their parent has been trying to use nonviolent communication with them and then also depending on how upset they are.

Dr. Sarah Bren (35:30):

And how hangry they are, what their system is overloaded with. Exactly. But yes, because I have a kid who can be lava or could be the most reflective verbal kid. In both situations, I’m still going to try to respond with that guess of.

Sarah Peyton (35:52):

Beautiful.

Dr. Sarah Bren (35:53):

And not like I know, but something must be up for you.

Sarah Peyton (35:59):

Yeah.

Dr. Sarah Bren (35:59):

I wonder what it is, which is hard because it’s really easy to say that when your kid comes and says it so clearly and calmly. It’s really hard to say that. I think we have to really sift through a lot of internal noise and pressure to say that when our kid is being super icky.

Sarah Peyton (36:20):

Yeah, no kidding. No kidding.

Dr. Sarah Bren (36:22):

Because we feel like we’re supposed to actually correct the icky behavior instead of be, “Oh man, I got to join you right now.” I also feel like maybe that’s worth unpacking too for parents. How do we give ourselves permission to do this when maybe some of our learned parenting quote rules are we have to correct the behavior before we can resonate with our kid because we might accidentally reinforce the behavior.

Sarah Peyton (36:53):

Right, right. And grownups carry that out into the world and that’s what you’ll often meet in nonviolent communication practice groups where you’re upset and the other person says, “That is not a feeling. That is judgment.” You’re like, “Dang, this is not nonviolent communication empathy. This is something else.” So one of the things to know is that what we try to do when our kid is having a hard time is to stay regulated ourselves. And if nobody has ever said to us, “Well, of course it’s tricky when your kid is grumpy, do you need some acknowledgement that you have a whole host of feelings like annoyance and frustration and sadness and overwhelm and worry about whether you’re a good parent? And do you, my dear parent person, have needs for effectiveness and love and to be able to see that you’re making a difference and contribution? And do you long for your child to walk in the world with great ease and social grace?”

Dr. Sarah Bren (38:08):

Yes. Yes, I do. Thank you.

Sarah Peyton (38:15):

So then of course, once we do that with ourselves, then we can get much calmer about our kid having a hard time. Another thing that happens for me, if my kid is mad, then I kind of tend to maybe take it personally. I have to breathe through that too, that maybe I think, oh, I did something wrong or I always do something wrong or I didn’t raise this kid right. So that self-empathy stuff for the parent is just as important as the resonance and empathy for the kid.

Dr. Sarah Bren (38:45):

Might even be a precursor. You can’t really do it Until you’ve done it. You can’t do it for the kid until you kind of turn down the volume of the intensity inside of your own self. It’s like an infinity mirror. I feel like it’s like that perpetual cycle loop never ending because it’s like, okay, I can’t resonate with my kid until I’ve resonated with myself. I can’t really resonate with myself if no one resonated with me when I was a kid. And I can’t as a kid get resonance from my parents if my parents can’t self-resonate and they can’t self-resonate if they themselves weren’t resonated by. This is transgenerational. This intergenerational transmission of trauma and that is exactly it.

Sarah Peyton (39:40):

Yeah. So let’s go back to what we were talking about, about how the nervous system gets affected by the way that our parents talk to us so that we can get a sense of what it is we’re doing with our kids. Now, I may have mentioned that I said I was sad, my mom said, “You’re not sad.” That’s disorganized attachment. That comes from trauma, the child’s experience and their emotions are completely incomprehensible and unpredictable to the parent. The child lives in an unpredictable world and they never know when they’re going to be received or not. It’s completely unpredictable.

(40:19):

So that root system would be a root system that sometimes works and sometimes doesn’t, like a root system that’s unpredictable that the watering system for that root system only goes on every so often and it’s completely unpredictable when it’s going to go on and it’s completely unpredictable when it’s going to go off. So those roots are fragile, work really hard to do what they can with what they get. The plant can put out beautiful flowers from the unpredictable moments of there being enough water and can look completely drab and non-productive in those other moments. And then we have avoidant attachment where the emotions that get turned away from are both sadness, so the panic grief circuit, and also the emotion that gets turned away from is joy and happiness. An avoidantly attached parent isn’t taking time to celebrate with their kid. So the child then doesn’t have any regulation that helps them to regulate the intensities of their emotions and their energies.

(41:43):

And so they have to learn to do it themselves and gradually a thicker and thicker layer of insulation gets built in a way around the nervous system that blocks the vagus nerve from responding to the world. It’s like a secondary. There’s no way to regulate in relationship with the world. So the system isolates us and builds this insulation layer that stops us from reaching out. So this is that kind of blocked in, the roots don’t go anywhere. They’re used to being in a little box and so they don’t even know how to go beyond the boundaries of what they’ve been given.

Dr. Sarah Bren (42:28):

Right. But interestingly, when you think about a root bound plant, if you ever pull out a plant from the gardening store that’s been in a container for too long, so that would be a root system that anytime it sent out roots out, it met a wall. It circled and circled and circled and circled and circled and built up what kind of sounds like this insulated wall of root. Okay.

Sarah Peyton (42:51):

Yeah.

Dr. Sarah Bren (42:52):

It’s funny how that metaphor was really tracking.

Sarah Peyton (42:54):

I know. And then we predict that the world will not meet us, that emotions are not important, that they shouldn’t be mentioned, that the depths of meaning are not available and that we need to be instrumental, that we need to just get things done. When little kids have that feeling of being a robot or that there’s no meaning in the world, oftentimes there’s an experience of the root system not having anybody to reach for.

Dr. Sarah Bren (43:36):

That reminds me of something that one of my mentors has talked to me before about Ali Duarte. He does a lot of somatic work with kids who’ve had trauma and I was consulting on a case with him and this kid was very low energy, super hard to engage in sessions. He just kind of came in and got quiet and no matter what, he liked coming. He came every week, but there wasn’t a lot of. I was like pulling teeth to get him to hang out with me for 45 minutes. And I was talking about this with Ale and he was saying how when this kid had a tricky relationship with his mom who was doing as good as she possibly could, such good intention, but was just sort of blunted a bit from her own trauma. And there was this realization like, oh, if the mom does not delight in the child doing things, engaging, showing them stuff, it’s not just that there’s sadness and grief and I just stop trying. It’s also like, well, if you don’t delight in me showing you this, what is the point of pursuing it? And so there’s a kind of like what’s the pointness to it all.

Sarah Peyton (45:06):

What’s the pointness, yeah.

Dr. Sarah Bren (45:07):

It’s the seeking system actually that kind of turns off if it’s not met with delight and curiosity from another person.

Sarah Peyton (45:17):

Yeah. The seeking system will turn off relationally, but often stay very functional for information.

Dr. Sarah Bren (45:29):

Yes. There’s that, like you were saying, that we’re just going to do to do, but it starts to take on this sort of empty quality, this robotic quality of like, I’m going to do because I don’t know how to not do, but I don’t do because I don’t get the rewarding satisfaction and sense of self out of it anymore.

Sarah Peyton (45:49):

Yeah. Yeah. And then finally, ambivalent attachment. There’s sort of less coming into the root system, but it’s fairly predictable. It’s fairly warm, but the roots have to kind of go out and try to manage and integrate with other roots in order to get any nourishment at all. It’s like we’re more dependent on others rather than less dependent on others. And one of the really interesting things about attachment is that if you have a little kid coming from. Kids are so flexible. If you have a little kid coming from an avoidantly attached home and they get into daycare where they need to compete for attention with 11 other kids in the daycare, then there’s a tendency for human attachment style to move from avoidant attachment to ambivalent attachment because the squeaky wheel actually does get more grease. And so the kid learns to become a squeaky wheel in the school room situation.

(46:51):

So we can see these interesting changes in attachment with, especially the littler people are, the more they shift their attachment styles quite quickly in response to what’s happening in the outer world. And I remember that our 15 year old who was just a total love child, I mean, he was living on the street. He adopted us, we adopted him. My husband went downstairs into the one. We had a one bedroom house. My husband went into the unfinished basement and made a room for him downstairs in the unfinished basement, such a sweetie. And so there was just tons of love in the relationship, but he was a kid who was in trouble all the time and always getting arrested. And I was just always spending days and days in juvenile court and picking him up and dropping him off and trying to figure out what probation officer appointment we have.

(47:50):

And I remember the day he had been with us for a year and a half, so he was 16 and a half. And I remember the day that a police officer brought him home instead of taking him in. And it was like you could see it in his face. It was a year and a half because he was older. He wasn’t little guy. He was a big guy. But being in a secure environment where people are responsive and trying and the kid matters and whatever people are wondering about his needs, and I wasn’t wondering about needs yet then discovered nonviolent communication. So he wasn’t getting any context, but he was getting warmth and persistence and stability and love and he had love for us. Yeah, it was so amazing that the policeman brought him home and I looked at him and I could see it, that his face was soft instead of hard, that he looked like a loved kid instead of looking like a hoodlum kid.

Dr. Sarah Bren (48:53):

So in order to be like that there was this, in that particular experience when the environment met him with curiosity and understanding and not rigidity and brought him back to his secure base, that it was a different version of him in that moment that was driving the car.

Sarah Peyton (49:14):

Yeah. A different version of him in every moment, I think, because here he was, he was out, he was with a police officer. Just makes me still laugh to think of it, the surprise of that. Yeah, the sweetness of it.

Dr. Sarah Bren (49:30):

Yeah. But that was his system being like, “This doesn’t match what I expected.”

Sarah Peyton (49:37):

That was his system just more relaxed in the whole world. Probably smiled at the police officer.

Dr. Sarah Bren (49:42):

His system is expecting something harsher.

Sarah Peyton (49:45):

Yeah, it was in the beginning. Yeah. It was in the beginning. Yeah.

Dr. Sarah Bren (49:51):

So can we rewire? This is the question I get. So I’m not in these terms, but I get this question a lot, which is like, “I have an insecure attachment style or I didn’t get this as a kid. I want to make sure my kid doesn’t have the same experience I do.” Can we rewire our own neurophysiology to be. If we had those experiences so that we can be more available to offer resonance and this delight and attunement and seeing our kids so that they can get all that good stuff from us and take it with them?

Sarah Peyton (50:33):

Yeah. Yeah. It’s this wonderful answer because we are really formed by our attachment style. So we have our own ways of trying to manage ourselves in the world and our ease or lack of ease with talking about anger and our ease and lack of ease of talking about sorrow and happiness. And so as we do our work of learning about this stuff, learning the neurobiology and learning about the language that we can use and the way that language links to attachment and how we can begin to have this warm curiosity about our kids’ experience, their feelings and their needs, then we are becoming more securely attached and allowing our kids to become more securely attached. And while having relationships that we enjoy much more with our kids, and we get to know them much better because we have a warm curiosity about their feelings and their needs instead of telling ourselves stories about them.

(51:46):

And so we have this kind of warm, what’s called earned secure attachment that holds us and holds our kids. And so it holds us with a warm sense of humor for any ways that we’re still avoidantly attached inside of the earned secure attachment, any ways that we’re disorganizedly attached inside this earned secure attachment, any ways that which we’re ambivalently attached inside the earned secure attachment. It’s like we get to have an aura of earned secure attachment. We’re still us. We still have to struggle with the stuff we have to struggle with, but we’re able to change the way our edges interact with other edges. So if we come back to our little root ball for the avoidantly attached plant, the avoidantly attached plant still has some of that wall, but they also have ones that are coming out and compensating for and saying, “Yeah. Yeah. Oh, there’s my avoidant attachment. I didn’t want to talk about sadness, but here we are.

(52:59):

Let’s talk about the sadness.” We start to move into transparency and self-disclosure and connection and an ability to decode and read ourselves. It just becomes deeper and deeper and more and more meaningful and more and more connected with the people we meet. So it’s sort of both and in a wonderful and worky way. Yeah.

Dr. Sarah Bren (53:24):

It’s cool the way you describe it because it’s the first time I’ve really heard anyone describe the repair and the earned security in a way that allows for it to be bidirectional with your child while honoring that it’s not dependent on your child meeting your needs for attachment security, right? Yeah. There’s this asynchronous or non-bidirectional relationship between parent and child that is different from a romantic partnership or a friendship where it’s like in nonviolent communication, this is one of the things I have trouble. I always get sticky with because I’m so much about communicating your needs and in order to kind of increase the likelihood you’re going to get those needs met. And yes, I do think there’s absolutely a way to communicate your needs to your kids and that increases the likelihood that they could meet your needs, but it’s not their job to meet your need. And that is the one distinction is like…

Sarah Peyton (54:29):

It’s beautiful. Yeah.

Dr. Sarah Bren (54:31):

But in this situation, you’re working on your attachment system. Your child, in being more with your kid, they’re going to be more with you and that mutuality there, while different tiers, right? It’s still parent-child, but the withness, that shared resonance is rewiring you, it’s wiring them, and it is truly neurologically speaking bidirectional in that way without needing them to do it for you. It’s just a byproduct. Them being with you is a byproduct of you being able to do this work.

Sarah Peyton (55:13):

Yeah. Yeah. I remember the day. So I don’t know if you’ve ever read Inbal Kashtan’s beautiful book on parenting with nonviolent communication. It’s a beautiful book.

Dr. Sarah Bren (55:22):

No, that is on my list. I got to read that.

Sarah Peyton (55:26):

She talks about how when her son was three years old, they had their grandparents from Israel sleeping in the room downstairs below the kitchen and he had a truck and he was pounding on the floor and they’d gotten in late last night. They were asleep. She was worried about them sleeping and she said, “Hey little guy, are you willing to stop pounding?” And he stopped and he looked at her and he said, “I don’t want to, but I’m willing.” It’s three years old. She said, “Why are you willing if you don’t want to?” He said, “Because you don’t want me to pound.” And so there’s a way that the parents, if we let our children’s needs really matter to us, our needs begin to matter to our children. Now, I read that and I said, “It’s never going to happen in my household. It is never going to happen.

(56:21):

My kids will never say that sort of thing to me.” And then there was this one day, it must have been like three years in, I’ve been doing nonviolent communication faithfully with my kids for three years and I started to say, “Are you willing?” I always said, “Are you willing?” I tried to be really interested in whether or not they were willing. And so on the very same day, I said to my older son who was watching basketball, I said, “I hear the little guy, he’s starting to get really wound up. Will you take him some food? Because I can tell that they’re just getting out of control and they need food and I’m cooking and I can’t get down to the basement.” He said, “I don’t want to, but I’m willing.” And I was like, “Oh my God.” And then later that night, my little guy, we’re going off to bed and I say, “Hey, are you willing to turn off the turtle light before we go to bed?” And he said, “I don’t want to, but I’m willing.” I was like, “What? What? Okay, three years.”

Dr. Sarah Bren (57:23):

So start now, guys. Call us in three years. But honestly, that makes sense. It takes a long time for this stuff to start to wire, but think about. I mean, obviously it could take less time, but if you’re going to be parenting for a long time, might as well start now.

Sarah Peyton (57:48):

Yeah.

Dr. Sarah Bren (57:48):

Yes. Stick to it. If people want to learn more about the way that you practice nonviolent communication or your book, your work, how can people connect with you?

Sarah Peyton (58:01):

By finding me on the internet at www.sarahpayton.com. All kinds of recordings and classes. Also, the YouTube channel, if you just want to start by seeing what I talk about and what I bring. Yeah.

Dr. Sarah Bren (58:14):

Absolutely. We’ll link all that in the show notes too, so it’s easy to find. And thank you. This was so interesting and helpful. And your book, Your Resident Self, that could be a really good place to go check out as well. Thank you. I’m so grateful. I’ve got so much to think about now. I’m not going to look at my garden the same way again for a long time now.

Sarah Peyton (58:47):

Oh, it’s wonderful. Wonderful to get to talk with you.

Dr. Sarah Bren (58:56):

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