“When we have unresolved trauma, it can just limit our lives in a pretty major way. And when we have unresolved attachment histories, is really where our original relational blueprint comes from.”
Diane Poole Heller Ph.D. is “an internationally recognized speaker, author, and expert in the field of child and adult attachment theory as well as trauma resolution.”
Creative Mind Audio podcast episode:
The first part (about 2 min) of this audio is an intro for her online course Healing Your Attachment Wounds.
Publisher Sounds True summarizes her audio course:
“Why do we experience recurring struggles in our relationships? And why do traumatic events, such as a physical injury, emotional threat, loss of a loved one, or other life crisis, so often awaken or amplify our sense of fear, anger, isolation, or helplessness?
“From our earliest years, teaches Diane Poole Heller, we develop an attachment style that follows us through life, replaying in our intimate relationships, with our children, and at work. And traumatic events can deeply affect that core relational blueprint.”
The second part of this podcast episode is from her talk titled “Discover your attachment style to calm your nervous system” at the free Anxiety Super Conference.
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Dr Heller is a presenter at the
Biology of Trauma 3.0 Summit – Free from August 1-7, 2023
Register for free gifts including the Adult Attachment Style Mini Questionnaire by Dr Heller.
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Another presentation:
Discover your attachment style to calm your nervous system
The 4 attachment styles
How to create a secure attachment
Practical steps for creating deeper connection in your relationships
Register free for the Reset Super Conference.
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Also see multiple programs on the page Healing Trauma Resources – How To Understand And Recover.
[Image at top by Jo Coenen unsplash.com/photos/45EY6hEqUKI]
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Transcript
Hi, I’m Diane Poole Heller, and I’m a psychotherapist specializing in trauma recovery and the healing of early attachment wounds, especially as they affect our adult relationships.
I’d like to explore how we can uncover and discover and free our deepest and most true self as well as how we can connect in our relationships with more intimacy, authenticity, and a safer vulnerability.
This is a relatively big job because many of us have been pretty used to looking at our cognitions, our belief systems, our emotions, even our body sensations, even our connection to our spiritual selves.
But Dan Siegel calls learning to truly connect our biggest frontier as pioneers in really learning what is a relationship and how can we be deeply connected.
You might ask why study trauma and attachment.
Well, I think those two topics get in our way from really being the most we can be – the most expanded part of ourselves.
And when we have unresolved trauma, it can just limit our lives in a pretty major way.
And when we have unresolved attachment histories, is really where our original relational blueprint comes from.
Then these patterns that might not be serving us so well, and have a tendency to sneak into our adult relationships, especially our significant others, especially our marriage partners, especially people that we’re spending our most intimate time with.
So it’s really worthwhile to take a look at where did this come from, make it a little bit more conscious and then bring an understanding of how we can help ourselves heal and move in the direction of regaining healthy attachment patterns that benefit from the rest of our lives and all of our relationships.
So I’d like to invite you on this journey to understand where our relationship template comes from and how we can benefit from this investigation into our history and bring it into a much more productive and fun and fulfilling relationship space with people that we love.
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One of the things that happens when we have any kind of trauma or relational trauma like attachment injury, is that … one part of it is that our nervous system gets deregulated.
So if normally we’re kind of modulated, you know, we’re able to manage a certain level of stress and kind of take it in stride and, you know, move through it and maybe have a little bit of upset that it resolves sometimes.
If things are a little bit more intense, like maybe there’s a big betrayal in a relationship or there’s been an abandonment or neglect or other traumas like car accidents or surgeries, whatever our nervous system is kind of in that middle range starts to get out of balance.
And one of the ways it gets out of balance is the sympathetic nervous system.
Part of the way we regulate ourselves and our bodies biologically gets overactivated. We also have the parasympathetic that can take a deep dive like into depression or shutdown, but sympathetic will tend to take us to panic anxiety, sometimes anger or rage.
It’s sort of an extreme of an emotional state. And then that’s one of the things that we wanna learn to help our selves calm down or help our partners calm down or other people in our life to calm that sympathetic nervous system – that is something we’ll talk about throughout the discussion today in terms of how we self sooth, how we regulate ourselves, how we manage stress in general.
And one of the challenges with anxiety in particular is when we start to feel it – it’s not the most comfortable feeling, right? So we tend to… anxiety can sort of be a wave that moves through your body and just discharges or releases.
But often when we start to feel panicky or anxiety, we sort of constrict against it and then it just sort of builds on itself.
So that’s the other reason it’s important to talk about nervous system regulation and self soothing and how we can calm ourselves.
And most of us have friends that we can call up and say, Hey, I’m struggling today. And just sometimes the sound of another person’s voice, or they come over and have tea with you or whatever.
We often regulate through connection, which is really where the healing early attachment injuries comes in because it’s one of the main ways that we as humans all over whatever gender we are, whatever nationality we are, whatever race we are, whatever group we are, we regulate in connection.
And that’s one of the ways that I think that learning a little bit more about, um, our relational template, that attachment kind of brings us even when we’re little infants, how people are relating with us, how we absorb, how people are relating with each other around us, like moms and dads or dads and dads or moms and moms, just however that is the caregivers.
We’re also observing, absorbing as babies, how they’re interacting. And, um, and then also how they’re interacting personally.
So we start to create a relational template and if that’s a really healthy one, yay. We sort of win the jackpot, um, win the lottery.
And if it’s not a very pro-social family and there’s still some traumas that people are working through generationally and that affects our parenting, then sometimes we have attachment injury to manage later on.
And as we’re gonna get into, of course, those different there’s different types of attachment that we can experience in childhood, which can have some significant ripples then through our lives, in terms of how those play out in our relationships.
And I think perhaps it’s helpful way to give a little bit of context of that is to talk about secure attachment.
As you say that that’s sort of like the yay. If we’re fortunate to have that’s the one experience, but say it a bit about some of what the characteristics of secure attachment are, both in terms of how we might experience that in childhood, but also how that may them present in, in our adult life. I think that’s great place to start, uh, secure attachment.
First of all, I’ll tell you a little bit about what it is and what it isn’t. And then also that, um, we can learn it. The hopeful message here. I really wanna underline like five times is that we can learn secure attachment skills, even if we didn’t start out with secure attachment.
So when I’m describing the insecure attachment, just take all that pressure off your shoulders.
You know, be gentle with yourself and, and especially listen to what we can do to bring ourselves back to secure attachment. If we didn’t start there. But secure attachment is a little bit like winning the lottery for the relationship healthy forward way that we are gonna meet and connect with people.
Um, it certainly can be disturbed, be, be disturbed by trauma later on. But usually if you have it as a foundation, it’s a little bit easier to get back to.
So secure attachment involves… I’m gonna focus mostly on caregiving patterns with the time we have. I mean, you, your attachment styles are influenced by medical procedures when you’re young or your parent, your mom had to go to the hospital and she wasn’t there for you.
You didn’t understand that as an infant, your temperament coming in. There’s other things that influence attachment besides caregiving, but we’re only gonna talk about caregiving today, just because of the, the constraints of time. And basically, uh, secure attachment is more than having three meals a day and a roof over your head.
That used to be what I remember my mom saying to me, you have a roof over your head. What are you complaining about? Could use a little more than that, that, right. And you know, so one of the couple things, first of all, is our capacity to be. Just to show up to be there in our essential cell, you know, not be distracted, not be stuck on a phone and a device to really be present with someone is a huge gift.
So, you know, we’ve been a little challenged with that with, you know, the pandemics and all this being more isolated and having to be on devices. We were able to do this today because we’re on a device. So I’m very grateful for that. It has its uses.
But we wanna make sure we’re not having more of a relationship with our devices than we are with human beings, actually in person when we can have that happen more in a safe way, being present.
And then if you were gonna give the shortest definition of secure attachment, I would say attunement – being able to not only be present, but really aware of what’s happening in the other person, relationally, what’s happening in you as you’re being with someone and also what’s happening in the relational field between the two of you, the dynamics that are going on, maybe realizing the impact of your behavior or your empathy or your ability to be present.
Uh, the other one part of secure attachment is really highlighted, is, um, protect. Feeling safe inside your relationship bubble, whether that’s parent child or partner, partner, or colleague at work or friend, or even stranger, how you, um, create a safe space in the relational field and you’re protective of yourself.
And you’re also protective of, of any of other person in that relationship kind of container or bubble and. and you are, um, protecting your family or your, your loved ones from attacks from the outside world or judgements or things that are uncomfortable, but you’re also protecting each other, even from yourself that you are going to be a presence of safety and protection.
Um, how you do comings and goings. Like how do you wake up in the morning with your family?
Is there contact, is there joy? Is there laughter how do you go to bed at night? Maybe you and your partner have different bedtimes, but you… I have a friend that has a ritual. I love this. She and her husband love chocolate.
So they buy each other, these very special truffles. And every night they put a different truffle on their bed pillows, and then they, as they’re enjoying the truffle that they’ve given each other, they, um, are debriefing the day and cleaning up anything, relationally that might have disturbed their equanimity as a couple.
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Douglas Eby (M.A./Psychology) is author of the The Creative Mind series of sites which provide “Information and inspiration to help creative people thrive.”
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