We are all born with this need to connect and form bonds. We want secure relationships that are full of deep trust, safety, comfort, and confidence. But often our relationships are not what we imagine they would be. Enter: attachment theory. It refers to the emotional bond between people and how we give and receive love, beginning in infancy. Our attachment style informs the formation of all of our relationships. So how can we use attachment theory in our favor to deepen our bonds with those we love the most?

We get to talk to one of the experts on this subject matter. Her name is Julie Menanno. She is a licensed marriage and family therapist specializing in emotionally-focused therapy for couples mostly. But I really firmly believe that everything we’re going to talk about today can be applied to any relationship, and I think she would back me up on that one hundred percent. I found her through Instagram. Her Instagram handle is @thesecurerelationship. She actually has over 1 million followers. She provides so much insight and advice for anyone trying to understand attachment theory. She founded and runs the Bozeman Therapy and Counseling Clinic and the Secure Relationship Coaching, and she lives in Bozeman, Montana with her and her husband and her six children.

How would you define a safe and secure connection? 

I would define that as being able to go to someone and talk to them about your feelings, especially your feelings about that relationship that you’re in with this person, and feel accepted, and validated, not feel shamed. You feel like someone’s curious about how you’re feeling and you feel comforted. They might not necessarily agree with the details that got you to feeling the way you do. Sometimes people get stuck in that place going, “Well, how do I comfort someone if I don’t agree with why they feel the way they do?”). But it’s really just about, “Hey, I can acknowledge that you feel the way you do, however you got there. I felt that feeling before. It’s hard and I’m right here and it’s understandable and I can validate that sadness or anger that you’re feeling right now.” And instead of this response: “Well, you shouldn’t feel that way and here’s why.” Or “Look at the bright side” or “You’re seeing it all wrong” or getting defensive. So we need some place in our life where we feel safe sharing about our inner world with and getting comfort and support with that. 

For the sake of our listeners and those of us that may not have a complete grasp on it, can you walk through and explain what attachment is? 

Attachment theory is the theory that everybody is supposed to experience relationship fears and the desire for connection in some form one form or another. We’re wired for that, humans are just really getting really scientific with it. We’re social animals. We do not survive well in the wild on our own. We need help in cooperation, getting shelter and getting food. In order for that to happen, we need a drive to connect and be safe with our tribe. The flip side of the drive to connection and drive to safety is fear of that not happening. If you’re hungry and you have an appetite and a drive for food, then naturally you’re going to experience fear and anxiety when you don’t believe that you have access to food. So it’s kind of two sides of the same coin. 

And so the idea is we’re wired to experience fears in relationship, whether usually those fears are going to be around abandonment or emotional abandonment because our emotions are fundamentally a part of who we are as is our physical being or actually being physically abandoned. Or sometimes the fears can center around being overly controlled or a loss of self in the context of the relationship. And so part A is that we’re wired to have fears when things aren’t going well, and then we also have ways of responding and managing those fears. How do we go about getting back to connectedness or getting out of this state of fear, getting what we’re needing so we’re not afraid anymore? And people can generally be categorized based on the nature of their fears and how they manage those fears. 

Can you break down attachment styles for us? 

So we start with the childhood environment, which most people are going to start developing a way to manage their relationship fears and childhood based on the relationship environment that they grow in. Now, there are people who shift around as adults, we’re all malleable people, but I always just like to use childhood as the starting point because most people can relate to that. So we start getting feeling during childhood, we’re kind of primed to reach for comfort and connection with our emotions. And so the way that we’re responded to is going to set us up to have more or less of one fear and set us up to figure out how to manage those fears. So someone with an anxious attachment, they’re going to grow up in an environment where they can’t ever really be sure they’re going to be responded to emotionally. They might get responded to and they get enough responsiveness to know what it feels like to be responded to, but it’s not predictable. And so imagine if you have food and security. You live in a home where you get meals now and then when things are going well, but you might go two or three days without a proper meal because your parents can’t afford it. It doesn’t matter if you get the meal every now and then, you’re never going to feel safe that you’re always going to get that meal. You’re going to start becoming obsessed with food. Same thing with the anxious attachment. It’s like they know it is possible and they know not to let go of the need, but they never quite know. So they’re kind of always on alert: Are you going to be there for me now? If I go to you and I’m upset, are you going to comfort me or are you going to tell me to go to my room? And so the way this plays out later is first of all, they tend to gravitate toward people who can’t show up for them fully because we always kind of go toward what’s familiar. And so they kind of always just have this nagging sense of something not being right. Their body is in this state of hypervigilance to any sign of abandonment, even if it’s not accurate—it could be accurate, it could be not. And then the way they manage that fear is they try to close the distance. They’re constantly trying to find reassurance that you will be there for me in the future when I need you. And that might look like just clinging. It might look like lots of protesting behavior. I need to get you to see what you’re doing wrong. You looked at me in the wrong way. And that leaves me feeling like, does that mean you’re mad at me? So now I have to tell you, “Here’s how I want your face to look all the time so I don’t have to go to that scared place.” It’s any way people start to micromanage their partners in order to help themselves feeling safe. “You have to call me three times a day,” or just being aware of any sign that something isn’t going well. And then when it’s not going well, they just dive in and resolve the problem right then and there. There’s no “Let’s wait and talk about this later.”

Now we have someone who has an avoidant attachment, so they grow up in homes where there’s just very little food at all, ever. And when I say food, I’m always kind of using this analogy between emotional food and physical food. So if you grow up in a home where you’re used to not having a lot of what you need, you have to get to a place where you decide not to need it anymore. You have to cut it off. It’s like Why bother staying in the state of need? It’s a subconscious effort on your brain’s part to not have the expectation and not have to be disappointed and move forward with life. And so that’s the emotional environment. There’s not a lot of comfort ever. There’s no responsiveness ever. And so they learn to cut this part of themselves off and rely on other strengths they have for fixing problems. Sometimes people with avoidant attachment are prone to seeking any activities that help them feel some sort of emotional aliveness—addictions, work addiction, focusing on being an achiever because this gives them some sense of emotional comfort and acceptance without it being direct. So it’s reliant on yourself. You’re not relying on anyone else. You fabricate this yourself because you don’t have very much. But when you really circle it all back, it actually is a reliance on others. It’s just a really twisted way of getting there. They tend to just stop. They stop asking.

So the anxious partner is constantly asking for emotional comfort and care and not getting it, and the avoidant partner is not asking and not getting, so nobody’s getting their emotional needs met. One has decided they don’t have them. The other is constantly obsessed, and not only do they gravitate toward people who can’t show up for them, but they also push people away from them anyway. 

The gold standard would be someone with a secure attachment. They gravitate toward people who can show up for them because they grew up in homes where people showed up for them. So that’s their familiar zone. But then, nobody’s perfect. So when they do get in situations and relationships where there’s a rupture where a partner lets them down, they feel some sort of unmet attachment need, emotionally invalidated, their partner isn’t appreciating them in a moment, or just kind of dropped. They know how to communicate. They know how to, in a healthy way, get that connection back on board without it being from this place of panic: It’s the end of the world. There’s a balanced approach to communicating one’s own needs without going into “You’re the bad guy.” You blame that, kind of push them away. So while the anxious partner is getting all amped up and pushing away, the avoidant partner is not bringing it up at all. The secure partner says, “We do need to talk about this, but we’re not going to talk about it in a way that’s going to make things worse.” It’s healthy communication skills. 

And then we have this final category, which is called disorganized attachment. And I kind of like to explain taking a blender, and you pour in some anxious, and you pour in some avoidant, and you sprinkle on some trauma, usually a lot of really bad stuff that went on in childhood. And then you blend it up and then you might pour it in a glass, you might pour it on the counter. There’s no way to really explain it other than a lot of pain, a lot of unpredictability, a lot of intensity. And so everything is just big. A lot of people don’t talk about disorganized [attachment] because it is so hard to describe. One person’s disorganized is totally different from another person’s disorganized, and that person’s disorganized on one day is different from the next day. That’s the reason we call it disorganized—because it’s just really kind of all over the place. Whereas the first three, secure, anxious, and avoidant, are actually all considered organized because they’re pretty predictable. If you tell an anxious partner you’re going to call them back and five hours go by and you haven’t called back, their response is predictable. And same with avoidant. 

How do we personally figure out or discover our own attachment style? 

I don’t love those online quizzes. I don’t really put them out there myself because the real attachment inventory is a very lengthy interview-style assessment that is done by a trained professional who’s trained to ask the questions and interpret the questions. I only treat couples, and what I do is I observe. So when I see them interacting with each other for five minutes, it’s very, very clear to me 95 percent of the time. One of the ways that I know almost instantly, and this sounds kind of cliche, but it’s very true, is I say, “Okay, hi, nice to meet you. What brings you here today?” And one partner looks at the other partner and says, “Do you want to start?” 100 percent of the time, that’s the anxious partner. And what are they saying? Are you there for me? Are you engaged in this process? I want to make sure that you have space to talk. And so that’s their way of seeking reassurance. It’s also them saying, I know I have a tendency to be too much, or they have this belief, so I’m going to make sure that I give you all the space you need so I don’t have to be that “too much” person here and now. Well, what’s going to happen now? The avoidant might start saying some things. The second they say something that the anxious partner doesn’t agree with, now the anxious partner is going to take the mic. So it plays out like this over and over and over again, not always, but most of the time. And so what I like to say to people is, instead of doing the quizzes and things like that, just really think about when you get some kind of relationship trigger that just doesn’t feel right in a given moment. 

A partner says or does something, a text that comes through the way, they’re wiping down the counter, literally anything. And then try to listen to that trigger and go, What is this trigger saying to me? What’s making me uncomfortable about this? And then figure out what your urge is to do. If you have an urge to, Hey, why are you wiping the counter like that? I’ve told you a thousand times that you have to go in circles to the left because circling to the left kills the bacteria better. And if I’ve told you a thousand times and you’re still not doing it that way, that must mean you don’t care about me. If that’s the nature of your reactions, then that’s going to be a really good sign that you have an anxious attachment. You feel anxious if you get a text and all of a sudden you feel a numb flat feeling and you don’t really want to respond at all. Your urge is just to move away from the whole conversation. That’s a good sign that when something comes along that’s uncomfortable, your tendency is to just move away, shut it down, ignore it. And that’s probably not the best answer, but I think if people really, more than anything, just go in and start reading about the styles, their body will kind of tell them what they are. It resonates. But here’s the tricky part: it doesn’t really matter. At the end of the day, what matters is whether or not you have an insecure attachment style versus a secure one. Because really at the end of the day, if you have an insecure attachment style, regardless of where we categorize you, you’re not showing up in a healthy way to your feelings, and you’ve got to learn how to do that, period. 

What does secure attachment look like? What does it feel like? How can we start to practice and move in that direction? 

It’s a felt sense of ease in your body. We have to really recognize this—most of us are not trained from an early age to recognize our body’s felt sense of security, which is like the three of us are interacting right now. I know I’m feeling seen and heard and understood and appreciated, and my body just feels kind of relaxed. And if someone were starting to be super challenging or act skeptical, the three of us are going to feel that. We’re going to start going, “Oh wait, what’s going on here? Am I safe?” And that is a felt sense of insecurity. So we all are going to have those feelings come and go in our relationships. But those with secure attachment, they’re going to feel this sense of ease way more often than not. 

They’re going to feel like they’re heard, they’re understood, they can be validated. If they do need those things, they can reach to their partner and are reasonably certain their partner will be able to show up for them. When they don’t have that feeling and they do have a rupture and they feel that unease like, “Wait a minute, this doesn’t feel right. I don’t feel like I’m being validated here,” they know how to communicate that unmet need in a way that honors their own need and their partner’s need to be spoken to nicely. And so what happens is partners particularly, and really anybody—people get stuck in negative cycles where one partner brings up a concern whether directly or indirectly, and the way that they bring it up triggers the other person. And now the other person goes into their triggered place and gets protective and defensive, and they show up in a way that now triggers the first person. And you’ve got these triggers flying back and forth. That starts creating emotional damage to the relationship because people aren’t feeling safe. So what do we do to reverse that? Well, we first of all have to learn healthy communication skills. That means: How do we bring up a problem instead of, “You never listen to me.” “See, here we go again.” “Every time I bring something up, all you do is just shut down.” It might sound like, “Hey, listen, overwhelmingly, you’re here for me and I get that. And I know it can be really hard in these situations where I bring something up to you and I haven’t brought things up in the healthiest way in the past, so of course that triggers you. But I’m noticing when I start to get this invalidated feeling, I start to feel uncomfortable, and am needing to bring us back together—and can we work on that?” So that’s a very different delivery than just launching in and blaming someone. So healthy communication skills are number one, but we also have to recognize what’s happening in our body. If we don’t know what we’re needing to communicate to begin with, a lot of times we have to learn to really listen to the insecurity in our body and say, “What is this tension trying to tell me?” “Am I feeling scared?” “Am I feeling overwhelmed?” “Am I feeling?” And then be able to put that into words, the delivering person needs to be able to deliver their message in a way that’s going to make it most likely that they will be heard and they’ll come across safely. And the receiving partner needs to be open to receiving and responding in a way that is going to be safe. So it’s this constant kind of working together process where everybody’s increasing the odds. We can never guarantee that another person will respond to our communication in the way we’re hoping for. 

So each person goes into it going, I’m going to increase the odds, and if this doesn’t work, then we just have to figure out what went wrong here. What are you hearing me say? I think we might be missing each other. It comes down to communication skills and your ability to regulate your own emotions. If you aren’t able to regulate your own emotions by understanding them and soothing yourself, then you won’t be able to show up in new ways. But part of being able to regulate your own emotions is having co-regulating relationships. I mean, we are as much relational beings as we are individual beings, period. There’s no way around that. So I’m always trying to bring into a system, whether it’s a parent and child or a single parent and their best friend or whoever their support system is, even therapist and client, we’re having to do this. I’m always trying to create as much co-regulation in that system as possible. 

Hopefully this is great for anyone who wants to move into a romantic relationship. But even for those out there who want to practice this, I’m thinking about how intimate our groups are and there are so many deep relationships that have happened as a result of our groups. And with that, how our single parents can practice this with each other is very life-giving to me. I’m excited about that. 

In your practice, does anyone show up into your office automatically having a secure attachment style? How rare is that? 

Very rare. We’re all carrying around a bunch of stuff that causes some rupture in our attachment theory. Nobody’s perfect. I guess what I’m trying to say is that we shouldn’t feel bad. Most people have some issue with something, either it’s anxious or avoidant. I mean, we’re not all baked out. There’s hope for some of us. I’ve seen the most insecure people ever become secure, and yeah, it’s very possible. 

If I look at my attachment style and recognize the trauma or some of the things I didn’t have in my childhood, and I see wounds that are causing this rupture, are there things that we can do on our own outside of a relationship to start healing some of those issues? Or is it imperative that this is done with other people? 

No, I mean, we are relational with ourselves. We have a relationship with ourselves because we have the ability to choose how we respond to our own emotions, which is what we’re doing with other people. Really, at the end of the day, this is more than anything about emotional support, which is created via met attachment needs. So if you start to feel angry at your child, now you’re going to have a relationship with the angry part of you. So are you going to say to yourself, “I shouldn’t be mad. It’s ridiculous for me to be mad. I’m the parent. I need to just not be mad. I’m bad for being mad at my kid”? That is invalidating your own experience. A validating response to yourself is, “Okay, there’s a really good reason I’m angry. I’m not just angry randomly, my body is saying something’s wrong, something needs to be addressed. Let me just sit with that and kind of let that energy dissipate and try to listen to the wisdom and that anger.” When we’re not able to get up and get ready on time and get out the door on time, that’s a signal that something isn’t working here. And there’s a cost to that. The cost is stress. The cost is being late for work. There’s a legitimate reason for anger. I need to listen to that. And now I need to decide what I am going to do with that energy? How am I going to go forward from a more regulated place, and try to address this problem as opposed to just kind of reacting and yelling and screaming in the moment, or shoving it down, trying to just be patient. And then later, the straw that breaks the camel’s back happens that evening and you blow up because you’ve held all that anger. We have relationships with our own selves and specifically with our own feelings. And learning to respond to yourself emotionally in a healthy way is the precursor to secure attachment. When you grow up in a home that’s very healthy from the day you’re born, you are being emotionally regulated by your parent, your caregiver, right? They’re healthy. Your nervous systems are immature. We don’t know how to regulate ourselves, so we need to be held and fed and all of these things. And the quality of that treatment, the way the parent is relating to the baby’s emotional world, starts to help the baby know how to relate to their own emotional world, which then sets the stage for how they relate to other people’s emotional worlds and how they expect for other people to relate to their emotional world. So how you relate to your own emotional world is a huge component to all of this. That’s fantastic and absolutely you can do that work on your own. 

I have a 10-year-old son and he’s on his own time. So there are times that I can definitely be like, “We’re going to be late.” But I think one thing I’ve learned too, in that, is understanding. If it’s anger that’s coming up and you just lash out at your child because you’re going to be late, underneath that—at least for me, in my own experience there has been a lot of fear there underneath the anger. I’m afraid if I’m late to a meeting with Robert here, he’s going to think, Oh my gosh, she doesn’t have her life together. I don’t know how much longer I want to keep her around. And then the principals think I’m having to sign in my child late and he’s got a tardy on his record and this and that, and maybe that impacts court if it shows that he’s late all the time to school when he’s in my care, and there’s so much there, and so I’ve said this before, but just being able to tell yourself: This is what’s true, even if none of those things ever happen. one of the practices that I’ve really had to get in touch with myself on, because I have been the person that has invalidated myself, told myself I’m crazy for feeling a certain way, or, shouldn’t be anxious about this, or shouldn’t be reacting in that way. And at the end of the day, there’s a reason why, and that’s okay. And it’s true. And that’s all right. 

How can we build healthy attachment with our children? 

All the basics that people know: you want to provide a home with structure and reasonable amounts of predictability. That’s all the stuff that’s a given for people. But then there’s this other big piece missing that a lot of parents really don’t know how to be emotionally supportive because they didn’t learn themselves. They didn’t grow up in emotionally supportive homes. And so what you’re describing with this beautiful example is, “I’m afraid when I’m going to be late. I’m afraid of all these things that are going to happen.” That’s the impact of fear. Fear is not fear unless there’s some sort of impact of it. And you’re learning to show up for yourself and instead of saying, “Oh my gosh, get over it, don’t worry about it.” Or you’re emotionally immature if you’re afraid of these things. We learn all of these things to say to ourselves to invalidate our own experience in the service of feeling better. I mean, nobody gives advice like this if it’s not well intentioned, but how do you want to now use that to show up for your own child instead of communicating to them? You know what? You shouldn’t be mad. People don’t let anger into your life or you’re being irrational. One tardy isn’t a big deal. You want to just sit with them and go, “Okay, listen, here’s the deal. I get this is scary for you. I appreciate that you are conscientious and you don’t want to be late for school and that matters, and that’s why you’re going to do well in life. And we all get, I get scared too when I feel like something’s going to fall through the cracks. So I just want to make space for the fact that your fears are valid here. At the same time, let’s kind of look at this through a different lens. So one tardy is not the end of the world. You can kind of go into that place later where you’re kind of being more reasonable and rational, or you have this tardy, we don’t want any more of those. Let’s make a plan. Let’s come up with some sort of morning plan. So we’re not super stressed out and you’re not getting these tardies, but first you’re meeting them in their emotions, you’re joining them, you’re holding their hand, and you’re kind of just saying, “Hey, I see you. I get that you’re scared. I’ve been scared to, it feels really bad. I’m right here with you in this” instead of what we want to do (which is moving people away from their emotions). 

Or sometimes we want to go to the opposite extreme and stay in the emotions and in the trigger vent with them, but then not really get out and into a problem solving place. Let’s say a teacher was rude to your kid. Your kid comes home and says, “The teacher said something really insulting to me in front of the whole class, and I’m super embarrassed.” Getting stuck in the trigger means I can’t believe they did that. That is so rude of them. They must have had a terrible day. This is about them, not you. And just focusing on the trigger, which was what the teacher said, and whatever is going on with the teacher that’s messing with the child’s experience. So what we need to do is we need to say, “Oh my gosh, that must have felt horrible. I’m so sorry that happened to you. Was that embarrassing? Let’s put some words to that so we can talk about that energy. That must have been really painful and I’m really sorry. Is there anything I can do to help you comfort you with this? What would help you?” And then we might go into, “Sometimes teachers say things because it’s about them, not you. I don’t know what happened. Maybe there might be some truth to the fact that you did something to contribute to that that we might need to look at. But just because a teacher’s rude to you doesn’t mean that you’re bad.” So do you see what I’m saying? We’re addressing that emotional piece, and it’s so easy once you figure out how to do it. Everything sort of clicks together. I’ll give you an example of my morning. So my 13-year-old and I have been watching Gilmore Girls together. I don’t know if we’ve ever seen Gilmore Girls, but so she came in and I was in the bathroom getting ready, and she said, “I’m so sad my friend can’t go swimming with me today.” And I just kind of left that because the way she said it reminded me of something on Gilmore Girls yesterday. So I started imitating the grandma on Gilmore Girls, and I said, “Oh, Lorelai” or something like that. And so she just walked out of the room and then I was like, “Oh my gosh, I just totally left her experience. I was just trying to be silly and funny. But she actually brought something to me, which was that her friend can’t go swimming.” And in my mind as an adult, I’m like, “Oh, well go.” But I realized I missed her little world. And I called her back in and I said, “Did I leave you just now?” 

And she was like, “Yeah.” And I was like, “I’m sorry.” I go, “That really mattered to you that your friend can’t go swimming.” She was like, “Yeah, I was really sad.” And I was like, “I’m so sorry. Something you said kind of reminded me of Gilmore Girls, and I thought I’d be funny, but the timing was really off, wasn’t it?” And she was like, “Yeah.” And so what did I communicate to her? First of all, that’s a little tiny rupture. Some parents might not even see, it may not even have been the end of the world, but at least in the repair, I was able to communicate to her: “Your feelings matter to me. I picked up on the fact that you kind of got deflated. And I don’t want to be someone that just leaves you alone when you bring something to me.” It’s all these little ways of showing up emotionally that we don’t get growing up, nobody cared about our feelings. 

Sometimes stepping back into a repair mode can be more powerful than getting it right the first time. As single parents, we put so much pressure on ourselves to get it right for a lot of reasons. The eyes are watching us. The ex is trying to keep track of Are you doing this right? Are you doing that? And then there’s our own shame. So what I love about what you said is that you, even as a guru of this whole thing, still find yourself thinking, “Oh, I missed it.” And so realize that a missed opportunity to affirm somebody is actually a great opportunity to build repair, and sometimes maybe even more powerfully cement this idea of I’m here for you with you in your experience. I don’t want to miss it. And this is a priority. 

We don’t want to create ruptures, and I know that’s not, but if you think about it, what would feel better to you? When you say, “My friend can’t go swimming.” Someone saying, “Oh, I’m sorry. That’s a bummer. What else can we do?” Or, “Hey, I realize that I didn’t show up for you just now, and I just want to let you know I’m sorry about that, that I left.” I mean, the second one actually feels better. And I am glad you said that. No, we’re not looking to go and create ruptures so that we can repair them. 

Can you outline for us what healthy conflict resolution looks like in a relationship, whether it be a romantic relationship or a friendship so that we are strengthened rather than weakened? 

It’s a matter of figuring out what you were needing in that moment. You say, “Hey, I don’t want to go to dinner tomorrow night.” You guys have a plan to go to dinner the next night. And you say you don’t want to go to dinner, and your partner says, “Well, this is the third time you’ve canceled, and what’s going on with that? Now I don’t feel like I can even rely on you for anything.” So they start protesting. And now in a negative cycle, what might happen is the first partner starts calculating in their head: “I said yes 20 times, and in the last few weeks I’ve been exhausted and stressed with all this stuff going on at work, and it’s not fair. And now you’re calling me an irresponsible partner.” And now the first partner feels invalidated because they’re disappointed that you’re not going. And so now they start saying, “See, you don’t even listen to my concerns.” And they get stuck in a negative cycle. 

And so what is healthy conflict resolution? Well, there’s multiple points where we could have started to do something new and turn that negative cycle into a positive cycle. I’m always saying, “Hey, if you miss the first point, pick it up on the second one.” All is not lost. So first of all, the delivery could be different with the first partner. The delivery could be, “Hey, listen, I know this is going to be really hard. Listen, this is the third time that I’ve canceled and it breaks my heart to have to do that, but here’s what’s going on with me, and I’m concerned that if I go ahead and go tomorrow night, it’s going to back up all this stuff in the following week. And how can I make this up to you?” The delivery is done in a kind, respectful, validating way. That could be the first thing that could make it land a little more safely , by ust acknowledging the other partner’s feelings around that. But let’s say you say it in the most perfect way possible, and the other partner is still understandably triggered because they’re disappointed, right? The stigma was important to them. They’ve been looking forward to it. And so now how can they respond in a way that honors their own needs but is also safe? “Well, listen, I am going to be honest. I feel a little blindsided.” I think it’s really helpful for couples to use body language with each other, which is that pressure building up in my body. “I don’t want to say something I’m going to regret, so let me just sit with this for a minute” and don’t say anything right then and there. Or they might be able to say, “Okay, well, I just want to let you know, that’s extremely disappointing to me. I get where you’re coming from. I appreciate you sharing it with me in that way, but I am disappointed. I was really looking forward to that.” And then the next partner, instead of trying to move away from them, they’re able to stay with that disappointment. They’re able to stay with it and go, “I get it. I get that you’re disappointed. I would be disappointed too. Okay, is there anything else I can do to comfort you with that? Or do you just need some space or whatever?”

Instead of taking the mic and going into their stuff: “Well, you disappointed me last week. Remember last week when you didn’t pick up the right thing at the market? And who are you to say that I’m not the only disappointing partner here?”

You’re really just staying with people. You’re still dealing with something that nobody likes that we’re going to cancel on each other. But that happens in relationships. And so then maybe later, the first partner comes to the partner who can’t go and says, “I just want to let you know. I get how stressful life is for you. I know things are really stressful. I am disappointed about the dinner. I did want to spend time with you, but I also want to check in with you and make sure you’re feeling ok,” so our emotional world is being tended to. 

When partners get stuck in these negative cycles, they’re bouncing back and forth between each other’s needs, and nobody’s just staying, right? Nobody’s just staying with one person for long enough to really validate that, really be with that experience—because they’re too triggered, right? They’re just triggering each other. It’s interesting that you guys are single parent focused because the attachment work I do in my personal life is more centered around my parenting than it is my partner. And I think it’s just because my partner, we already have it figured out. We just kind of, we’ve been together for 24 years. We’ve worked on our relationship. And so a lot of this stuff doesn’t come up with them, but it does come up with my kids growing. 

They’re teenagers and I have six of them, and I’m stretched then. So there’s plenty of time for ruptures. But yeah, it’s like if my daughter would’ve said to me this morning, “You just ignored me about swimming with Harper.” And I would say,” I was just trying to be silly. Come on. I was just joking around, let’s not be so sensitive.” And then my daughter is like, “I’m not being sensitive.” So we could have gotten into that negative site, but instead, I just really needed to stay with her and stay. If she said, “You just ignored me” my work there is to go, “Okay, tell me more about that, that I can hear that really hurt your feelings that hurt your heart. You brought this up that really bothers you. And here I go and just talk about something else. I apologize for that.”  

And then later I might come back and say, “Honey, I really want to work on sometimes the way you react when things don’t go your way next time. Can you come to me with that instead of going into that protest that might not be good for your relationships later? Can you share that with me in a way that feels a little more talking about your own instead of you?” If I could give one overarching piece of advice to people in all relationships, it’s the bounce back and forth between triggers. It will not get you anywhere. Nobody gets anywhere when we’re bouncing back and forth. 

What are the risks of not addressing attachment issues? What will happen if we don’t? 

Two things will happen. One, it’s going to be really hard to resolve actual logistical life issues because two people don’t collaborate and work well together when they’re feeling misunderstood, unheard, invalidated, unappreciated, characterized in a negative light. They can’t get it right no matter what they do. Nobody thrives in that. And so that shuts down any hope for healthy resolution. And then all those life problems start to build up. There’s all this lack of resolution. What do unresolved problems do? They keep popping up and creating more opportunity to communicate in ways where we are misunderstanding and hearing each other. So it just turns into this big snowball effect. And then the second thing you’re doing is you’re disrupting the bond. You can’t feel bonded with someone. 

You can’t feel close and safe with someone if you know when you bring things up, you’re going to end up feeling invalidated, unheard, unappreciated, and devalued, unwanted, all these things that not all partners are doing, all of those things. But if you’re doing enough of those things, enough of the time, it takes away the emotional bond. So now we have no emotional bond, which makes collaboration harder, and we have poor collaboration, which interferes with emotional bond. And so the next thing you know, worst case scenario, and there’s all sorts of varying degrees of these levels of distress. Some couples are far more distressed than others, but in the worst case scenario, you have two people who have no more emotional connection, don’t feel safe at all with each other, and are constantly fighting because they have to make all these decisions together that are unavoidable. We have to choose a place to live. We have to pick a school for our kids. We have to decide all these things together. So just constant biting, no connection. That’s where it will go in the worst case scenario. 

Listener Question

How do I counteract the effects of my child having a toxic environment with their other parent without overcompensating or not setting boundaries and making them feel overly comfortable? 

There’s only so much we can protect our kids from, period. We are not the only influence in their life. The reality is that some of our children do have other people in their lives, whether it’s people out of school or the co-parent, that are not showing up for them in the way that we would like for them to. So we can only change it to some degree where we can’t change it at that point that we don’t have power. The only thing we can do is provide comfort and support emotionally for what they’re going through, which is “I hear you.” And you can do that in a way that doesn’t throw the other parent under the bus, right? It’s just kind of like, “I know that’s super hard for you. It sounds to me like when you’re there with dad or mom or whatever, a lot of the times you’re feeling kind of worried about messing up again or it’s uncomfortable for you. When they’re saying bad things about me, help me understand, what does that do to you? Tell me about the discomfort, what happens in your body? I’m so sorry. That really sucks that you have to be in that environment.” And then you can say things like, “I know this doesn’t define your relationship with Dad. I know there are a lot of other things that you appreciate about your relationship with Dad, and those are real too. But also these moments where you feel like Dad isn’t really able to understand you in moments. That’s really hard. And I’m sorry that you’re going through that and I’m here to talk to you about that.” Going to “As you grow, you’re going to have to have a relationship with Dad and work it out in your own way. But I’m here to support you through that.” It’s really figuring out the line between what you can control and what you can’t control, and being a supportive presence for them. And that’s not overcompensating at all. There’s a book called The Book You Wish Your Parents Had Read by Phillipa Perry, and she addresses this pretty well. There’s another one that I’m going to be really careful with, and you might want to air this and you might not, but it’s called Disarming the Narcissist by Wendy Behery. I think that word is overused. It is real though. However, there is a chapter in that book about dealing with a co-parent, whether they’re narcissist or not, let’s just say “a difficult co-parent.” And I really love the way she addresses that. 

We love hearing from you. If you want to send in a question, go to our website and you will find instructions on how to email, call, or leave a voice message. You can also head over to Instagram or Facebook and send us a question there as well.