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Child: Welcome to my Mommy’s podcast.
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Katie: Hello, and welcome to the Wellness Mama podcast. I’m Katie from wellnessmama.com, and this episode is all about the science of attachment theory and why it matters in our relationships with our children and adult relationships and friendships as well. I loved recording this episode, and I’m here with Eli Harwood, who is a licensed therapist and author and an educator with more than 17 years of experience helping people process relational traumas and develop secure attachment relationships with their children and their partners. She’s a mom of three herself, and she also is a houseplant mom to way too many plants, but I love her expertise in this and her approach. She gives such tangible takeaways and ways to help build secure attachments in all of our relationships, kind of bridging the gap from how those early patterns are developed in childhood, how they show up in our relationships as adults, and how to strengthen them in all categories. So let’s join and learn from Eli. Eli, welcome. Thank you so much for being here. I’m so excited for this conversation.
Eli: Thank you so much for having me. I’m so pumped for us to dig in.
Katie: Me too. And I cannot wait to delve into the science of attachment theory. Before we jump into that though, in the fun facts about you and researching for this episode, I came across the fact that you’ve had a body part eaten by a bear. And I feel like I have to hear this story. And also, are you okay?
Eli: Yes, I am okay. I’ve manipulated that story to sound a little bit more dramatic than it actually was. But what the story is, is that I had C-sections with all of my kids. And I had some grief around the fact that I didn’t get to birth through the vaginal canal and have that experience. I’m an athlete. So I think there was just this part of me that wanted to be able to do that. But all of my kids were breech.
And so when I had my twins, I had to smuggle my placentas out of the hospital. And I had a nurse who was helping me do it. She was like, we’re going to do it. She’s like, have your mom bring a cooler. I’m going to meet her in the hallway because you’re not supposed to like remove body parts from an operation room. Just like kind of makes sense. But so we, we took the body parts, we took the placentas, we put them into a cooler and it was January. And my plan was to plant a tree, to like use the placentas as like, kind of like a marker of like this incredibly powerful thing that happened in our lives that I didn’t get to experience in maybe the most earthy way I wanted to. So I was like, I’m going to put the placentas back into the earth. But it was January, so we couldn’t plant them. So we put them in our freezer. And somewhere around May, before planting time, a bear broke into our garage and raided our freezer. And didn’t just eat the placentas, like flung them around our garage to the point that it looked like something really bad had happened in my garage.
Katie: Oh my gosh, what a story. Well, that is, you probably are the only guest I’ve ever interviewed who’s had that type of experience. And what a wild one. Well, I am most excited today to dive into the science of attachment theory with you, because I would guess people have heard maybe that term floating around social media or encountered it with other parents or at least heard that word. But in researching you and your work, you, I think, explain this so well, and that there’s a lot more to understanding this than just sort of that surface level term that gets thrown around a lot. So to start off, can you kind of define what attachment theory is as the basis for this conversation?
Eli: Absolutely. So we have this beautiful body of research that started in the 1950s. And was pioneered by scientists like John Bowlby and Mary Ainsworth and Harry Harlow, and then continued through many, many, many other researchers over the years, that was looking at the question of how does the quality of our caregiving relationships in our childhood affect the way we develop, right?
So as a species, we’re relational. We rely entirely on our caregivers when we’re born. And that’s different than other mammals. You know, I don’t know if you’ve ever like gotten lost on like animal birth YouTube videos on the internet, but I have. And either you watch an elephant get born, and this like giant baby comes out and then starts walking. You know, we have deer in our backyard. So we’ve seen, you know, these brand new, like two day old baby deer, and they are already moving around in the world. Whereas the human infant is born without any capacity to take care of themselves. So there’s no baby in the history of all of humanity who crawled out of the uterus and looked up at their caregivers and thought, I can do better. I’m looking elsewhere. So we are inherently dependent on and, for better or for worse, stuck to whatever caregivers we are born into the arms of.
So these scientists have for decades and decades and decades been studying this and going, what happens when a caregiver is very warm and steady and predictable overall? And then what happens when a caregiver is very cold or distant or not engaged? And also what happens when a caregiver is kind of scary or erratic? So we have all of this incredible data that basically is the study of the parent-child relationship. That’s what it starts as.
And then over time, we see that human beings maintain close relationships from cradle to grave. That’s the phrase that Dr. Marie Johnson came up with. She was the inventor of EFT, emotionally focused therapy, which is an attachment-based way of helping couples learn how to relate to each other. So we have this unique type of relationship, and we call it close. And what that really means is there’s these people in our lives where we act differently, where we create belonging, identity, intimacy, where there’s a reliance in tender moments. And it’s different than some of our other social relationships. You know, our colleagues aren’t our attachment figures. We work together, we support each other, but it’s not the same type of relationship.
So attachment is the study of close relationships. And it begins with the study of the parent-child relationship. And then it has tentacles into close friendships, romantic partnerships. And how we, as grownups, relate to our children later on.
Katie: That makes sense. And as you were explaining that, I was thinking I can see how there could potentially be parallels between our relationship with our caregivers and childhood and the way we learn that attachment and then how that shows up in like romantic relationships and life partnerships later on in life, which I would love to delve into. But I also hear the term attachment parenting related to, I think it’s the William Sears kind of theory of attachment parenting. So can you kind of compare, contrast, are there similarities to that? I would guess some people have come across that. Is that the same thing we’re talking about or are there differences?
Eli: Thank you so much for asking that question because I think that’s created a lot of confusion for a lot of people. So Dr. William Sears has his own separate ideology and uses the word attachment to describe that ideology. But it’s not necessarily drawn from the same scientific data that I rely on and I trust. It’s mostly drawn from his observations in his clinic. So we would call that antidotal information. So it’s information, but I wouldn’t say it is as deep and wide and evaluated as the data that we have in what we would consider attachment theory research or attachment science.
His recommendations are not harmful to attachment. He recommends breastfeeding. He recommends bed sharing. He recommends baby wearing. All of those can be great choices for mamas who have that ability. But that is not what we find to be the indicator of healthy attachment. It is far more about the state of mind of the caregiver and the relational patterns. So attachment science says, if you want your child to be securely attached with you, you have to learn how to emotionally attune and emotionally regulate yourself. And be responsive and warm. It’s far more about the relational characteristics, whereas attachment parenting, Dr. William Sears says, if you want to give your child a positive attachment bond, wear them around you, keep them in your bed and make sure you breastfeed.
And the piece where that becomes problematic to me is not everybody has the luxury of breastfeeding, right? Not everybody can safely bed share without having tremendous amounts of anxiety. And there are risks related to it. It can be safe. It also can be unsafe. You have to really do some evaluating around your particular nervous system, body, habits, you know, that kind of stuff. It’s probably the one where I’m like, yeah, wear your baby around, you know, create some of that proximity. Honestly, for me, that’s part of how I survived motherhood. Like strap you on. We can get some groceries. We can go on a hike. We can do, you know, it helps keep you regulated. It also helps keep me regulated. I don’t have the life where I can just simply only attend to my child. I wasn’t born into that life. I got other stuff like most moms.
Katie: Yeah, same, especially for me, once there was more than one child. And when I had, I think at one point, four kids that were like three and under, like it was impossible to not wear a baby at some point just for pure logistics. And thankfully, I also enjoyed that and loved having the baby close. But I agree with your point and caution against anytime there’s a parenting philosophy that’s presented as the only option and that you’re failing as a parent if you’re not doing it exactly that way. I think that’s at least like worth questioning at that point.
I’ve also read though, that when, especially when children are very young, they are kind of constantly co-regulating, like their nervous system is actually dependent on their caregiver’s nervous system state and that they’re sort of learning nervous system regulation and co-regulation through that interaction with their caregivers. So I would love to delve into that a little bit and maybe some of the ways that we can support that and talk about the different patterns that can emerge in children. We’re going to do a whole second episode on how to raise emotionally safe and secure children. So we won’t go all the way in depth, but I would love to have that as a foundation before we also talk about maybe how these patterns show up in adult relationships as well.
Eli: Love it. So when we think about the human brain developing, a baby is born with a fairly functioning limbic system. And that’s the part of the brain that does all the feeling and the reacting, but a very underdeveloped prefrontal cortex, which is the part of our brain that does cognition, thinking, processing, rationalizing, making meaning, having empathy. It’s our executive functioning part of our brain. I like to think of that as human brain. It’s the part of the brain different than many other mammals. It helps us to code language, et cetera.
So when our children come into the world, we function as their prefrontal cortex. So a baby can’t think and process and communicate in logical ways. And so they rely on us to be attuned to them, which means that we recognize their cues for they’re uncomfortable, their diaper needs changing, they’re overstimulated. We need to change environments. They’re hungry. We need to feed them. They’re, they’re cold. We need to put some more layers on, right?
So we are doing the thinking for our babies because they can’t do it yet. And what we’ve found in the research is that caregivers who are skilled at this process of staying calm and being responsive, s a baby cries and the caregiver goes, oh honey, what’s wrong? And moves into proximity of the child, right? Doesn’t just leave the child on the other side of the room and say like, you’re going to have to learn this the hard way. Crying is not how we get our needs met, right? Like that, again, we’re talking about the mind of the caregiver. What’s in the mind of the caregiver.
So if the mind of the caregiver is I’m here for you, your needs matter. I’m going to attend to your needs without intense anxiety or dysregulation on my part. That leads a child’s nervous system to feel more calm because they can sense that we’re close.
So when a, especially a young infant can sense we’re close physiologically skin to skin. That’s why we do that when babies are first born. That’s why that’s become a hospital practice or being held on us or nearest where they can hear our voice, it helps their brain to say my prefrontal cortex is near. I am going to be okay. My protection is here. My parent is here. So there’s this dance between the parent and the child. I’ve my, one of my favorite researchers calls it a system, you know, that parent-child system. That’s what’s helping the child to develop is this relationship. We are relationally developing. And without the caregiver’s mind or with an insecure caregiver mind, it affects the way the child’s brain develops and the way their nervous system regulate.
Katie: That makes complete sense. And like I said, as you were explaining this, I was thinking of the terms we hear tossed around a lot right now, I feel like in adult relationships or romantic partnerships of securely attached or anxious attachment or avoidant attachment. And I’m curious if this relates to these patterns that happen in early childhood. And if so, what we can do as adults to become aware of our own patterns and to repattern if that’s helpful, or to help forge stronger, both adult relationships and relationships with our own children.
Eli: Yes, it is absolutely correlated. So the way I think of it is our early relationship experiences are like programs. They’re programming our brains for what we anticipate about the world in response, especially to our tender needs. So if I’m sad and my caregiver pooh poohs my sadness, you’re fine. Don’t be like that. Get over it, there’s a program that gets installed in my brain if that’s the pattern.
Now, I want to be clear. None of us are responding calm and secure 24-7. That’s not a thing. I have three children. Two of them are four. They’re twins. One of them is nine. His hormones are turning on. I’m a working mom. You know, bedtime can be real brutal. Like, okay, we’re done. All of us. We’re done. Everyone needs to be unconscious now, kaputs, right? That is not going to cultivate an insecure dynamic with a child. If there are moments or sections of the day that are challenging, the key is the overall pattern.
So we’re looking at in general, Is a parent able to be compassionate and responsive and grounded in themselves? So if a child is dysregulated, the parent can say, oh, you’re so sad or mad or hurt or upset or jealous and help nuance with the child, that over time creates a pattern where the child believes their needs are valid and people can help them with their needs.
And so they create this pattern that I like to call the reach and receive. I’m tender, so I reach for you. I get proximity to you, and I find that comforting and soothing and then I settle. And this is well documented in multiple different domains of research, but specifically for those of you who want to really nerd out, the strange situation protocol that was invented by Dr. Mary Ainsworth has incredible data on how each of these patterns form. So the secure pattern is reach and receive. You have that in childhood, and you don’t have any interrupting events, you know, like a big loss of a parent or a major war situation that changes the way your parents can engage you, right? Things like that. You will carry that pattern generally into adulthood. And even when you face other traumatic things, it will help you adaptively because as you face trauma, you’ll reach for safe people, and you’ll receive care from them.
The other three patterns we consider insecure. So insecure avoidant is what happens when a caregiver is unable to consistently offer care and effective soothing. And so over time, a child very early, this, this can be, this gets set pretty solidly 12 to 18 months in the relationship. A child will stop reaching for the caregiver because when they reach, maybe the caregiver says you’re fine. Or maybe the caregiver says, oh my God, you’re not fine. What am I going to do and panics. But both of those responses are adding dysregulation to the child’s body state. So they’ve learned if I’m upset, the best thing to do is avoid my feelings and avoid sharing them and distract myself, find ways to numb my body state instead of release the emotions within my body.
The second insecure pattern we call resistant or ambivalent in the developmental research. And this is what happens when kiddos have caregivers who are occasionally able to be responsive and soothing, but not so much so that a pattern is established. So what happens is that a child then gets very clingy and hypervigilant. They know that somewhere in there, there’s this experience. Where they can feel safe and secure, but they don’t know how to find it. And they don’t know why it goes away sometimes. And so, rather than reaching and receiving like the secure child, they do a real cling and they never soothe. So there’s a lot of preoccupation with their caregiver, but not a lot of rest. And they don’t, so they don’t actually feel secure in the presence of their caregiver. But they also don’t have a way to cope with the absence of their caregiver. Whereas the avoidant child has learned how to cope with the absence. And their coping skill is don’t feel, don’t show your feelings. They still have the feelings. They just implode them instead of sharing them outwardly.
And then the last insecure category, this one, like I can’t talk about it without just feeling heartbreak. This is the children who grew up in homes with caregivers who are frightening. They have frightening state of minds. So that might be that they have an abusive mentality that they inherited from their caregivers or their traumas. Or it might be that they are on methamphetamines or heroin, drugs that create extremely erratic behavior and serious addiction, or they’re schizophrenic, undiagnosed, untreated, something like that, something severe. So these little munchkins in their relationship with their caregiver, they’re stuck between the instinct to run to a caregiver when they’re in distress and the experience that they’re running towards a grizzly bear. That’s the option of support is someone who feels scary. So this we consider disorganized.
All of those other three categories, secure, avoidant, resistant, all of those kids have strategies that they’ve figured out to deal with this particular caregiver dynamic. Whereas a child who is exhibiting disorganization has no real way to cope because there’s no relationship to cope with. There’s threat all around them. There’s threat from the caregiver threat from the world. So they enter into more of a shutdown, blow-up response to their distress. They have a traumatic fight, flight, freeze, faint, fawn. As opposed to a coping strategy. They have a trauma response to their own distress.
And what I want to tell everyone, though, is we all have multiple caregivers, not all. Most of us. It’s very rare that someone says there was only one person who ever took care of me. Usually there are daycare providers or aunts or uncles or grandmas and grandpas or multiple parents. And so this idea that we are just one pattern is not true. And that’s a little bit confusing because there is a set of data. It’s a different body of data that talks about styles. And we can, in some ways, develop a style in adulthood. But what’s, I think, more accurate is that we develop patterns within specific dynamics.
So I know for myself. I grew up in a home where I had a resistant pattern with my mother and an avoidant pattern with my father. And in my romantic journey and relationships, I was with people who triggered my avoidance. I was also with people who triggered my preoccupation and my anxiety. So it depends on the dynamic. I do think some folks have such severe experiences in childhood that they do have the same pattern. But most of us, our pattern tweaks a little bit based on the other person’s pattern.
Katie: That makes sense. And I could think of so many directions we could go with this. And I have a feeling even two episodes might not be enough. We might have to bookmark to do more later on because I feel like understanding this can improve, of course, our relationship with our kids, probably also our relationships with our partners, our friends, sort of across the board, even just the step of becoming aware of our own relational patterns.
And I love that you make the distinction that it’s not like it’s a category where you fit entirely in one box. Like you are only this pattern that you can have kind of varying ones based on varying interactions during childhood. And that can show up in adult relationships differently. I also think the important point to highlight here is from what you said, even becoming aware of this, we have an ability within us to shift our relational patterns, I would guess, that there are ways to, as we’ve become aware of this, help our own nervous system, learn how to repattern, which of course will create positive ripples in our relationship with our children or our partners or our friends, kind of across the board.
So for this episode, before we switch to the next episode, talking entirely about the children’s side, any strategies for adults of becoming aware of our own patterns and potentially like, especially the downsides of particular patterns we may have and moving more toward a secure relational pattern with everyone in our life?
Eli: I’ve oversimplified it in some ways just for the ease of helping people understand it. But I think when you look at yourself and you think, when I feel scared, sad, overwhelmed, do I have a coping pattern that models reach and receive, or do I get stuck and don’t reach? Or do I do a reaching, but I actually don’t know how to settle and soothe in response to the care that people offer me?
I wrote actually my first book is a guided journal for this exact purpose because I’ve been doing this for almost 20 years with my clients. And it is, there’s a lot to it. You do have to sort of reflect on your story. And we often have stories we told ourselves about our childhood to get through our childhood. When you start recognizing you have insecure patterns, you often have to go back and rewrite some of those stories and be like, oh, maybe it wasn’t all good. Oh, it was a little tricky or like, you know, my parents, it can be true that my parents loved me and that I didn’t feel emotionally secure in relationship to them. Those two things can be true.
So I might, you know, easy, my easy blip to everybody is look at your pattern and evaluate how’s my reaching, how’s my receiving. And if any of those are off, then you want to start kind of thinking about how you can learn to do better in those things. And the most powerful thing we can do, according to the data, is to really reflect on why we struggle to reach, why we struggle to receive, and how we learned those coping patterns in our relationships. And so the guided journal really just walks you through some of those questions.
You know, things like what was affection like in your home? Was it conditional? Was it scarce? You know, what were the messages in your home about certain emotions and feelings? Were you allowed to feel scared or was being scared weakness? Were you allowed to be angry or was being angry interpreted as violence? You know, how did you learn to cope with your emotional state and to adapt to closeness in the ways that your family could handle closeness? And what would it look like to heal some of that for the purpose of having more secure relationships now?
And then I kind of go through a third section that’s like, here’s what secure dynamics look like. Here’s what it looks like to be accountable and responsive, to be playful, you know, to stop keeping score in your relationship, which is a defensive strategy, right, things like that. So there’s a lot in the book that will kind of help you break down like, what do I actually do here? And my recommendation is always, if you can do this type of work with other people who you know are caring and see you because what, what got wounded in the context of a relationship really needs caring, loving witnesses to feel fully repaired.
Katie: Yeah, I think that’s such an important point. I’ve heard someone else say that as well. It’s like what is kind of harmed in relationships also is what’s healed in relationships, which I know can feel scary. And especially like those early childhood things I feel like can be so sticky. And for me, like those are worth delving into because that will impact my relationship with my kids for their whole lives, including when they’re adults and how they’re gonna have relationships. So I’ll definitely link to your book in the show notes for you guys listening on the go. I’ve been taking notes as well. That’s always at wellnessmama.com.
Before we end this episode and then record more on how to raise emotionally secure children, any other tips for the parents in the adult side of this or kind of starting points to springboard into this work? I know you have a tremendous amount of resources available, including online, but where would you recommend people start if this is new work that they’ve never done?
Eli: Love it. Well, I want to give one very important tip, because it’s usually the thing we need in order to get started. So if you’ve developed a romantic partnership or you’re not in one at the moment, but you want to develop one, there is probably quite a bit of anxiety in your body around not getting your needs met in this relationship because you have a history in your nervous system that says, you’re probably not going to be understood here. You’re probably not going to be nurtured here or celebrated here or seen here.
So acknowledge within your body there are past experiences that are affecting the present. I don’t have to trust the past as the exact predictor of the present. I can go, okay, I’m afraid I’m not going to be seen. Okay. Okay. I’m afraid I’m not going to be seen. What’s my response to that now? So I like to tell people that in a secure dynamic, conflict is discovery. It is an opportunity to learn something about ourselves and the other person. As we start to learn to engage differently, we probably have past hurts we have to work through, whether those are past hurts in that particular relationship, or those are past hurts from just our life. But as we come to the moment to hold just enough curiosity about ourselves and the other person that we can look for the dignified interpretation of the moment instead of you don’t care about me. We learned to go, tell me what you’re thinking when you say everything’s going to be fine. We don’t need to worry about this. Are you thinking I’m overreacting or are you just trying to comfort me? And as you create curiosity, that person might say, I really just thought it would help you feel better. And you’re like, oh, you’re trying to help me. But that hits on this old wound of mine, which is that when I was a kid, anytime I had any feeling, the message I got was you’re oversensitive. And so when you say it’s going to be fine, I hear I’m oversensitive.
And so it’s like, just allow yourself to be curious because if you’ve chosen someone, if you were drawn to someone, it is likely, not always, but it is likely there is something inside of them that if you can get to the good nuggets of it, you’ll see there is less of the past in the present than you thought there was.
And the only exception I have to this is abusive dynamics. You know, if you’re caught with someone who really believes that they should get what they want, when they want it, how they want it, and they’re entitled to do whatever the heck they please towards you, if they don’t get those things, it doesn’t matter how much curiosity you put on the table. You’re going to end up in a dominated situation because that person has an internal, I would call it disease of abuse. And that’s, that’s not going to work. Nope. They’ve got to deal with that disease first, you know.
Katie: That makes sense and an important caveat. But I love bringing it, approaching it, and understanding it from that perspective. And I think that’s so wise of thinking the things we often put on our partner in a relationship or look at as a problem for them or think they need to complete in us often are the thing we’re bringing in and the lens through which we’re looking at that relationship. So I love that approach of approaching it with curiosity and actually having the conversations or asking the questions. I’ve noticed that pattern in my own life. Based on how I was raised, I often am like nervous about hard conversations. And 100% of the time, the conversations are easier than I expect them to be in my head when I just build them up. And I think that approaching it with curiosity is such important guidance. And like I said, I know you have so many resources available. I will link to a bunch of those in the show notes. And I’m really excited for our next conversation about raising happy and secure kids. But for this episode, thank you so much for the time. This has been so enlightening. I love this topic, and I’m so grateful for the wisdom you bring to it.
Eli: Thank you so much. I just love connecting with you and your curiosity and how you engage the topic. So thank you.
Katie: Well, thank you. And thank you for listening. I hope you will join me again on the next episode of the Wellness Mama podcast.
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